True Anon Truth Feed - The Lamest Show on Earth (Part 1)
Aired: 2021-06-18
Duration: 01:39:47


=== Giving Financial Advice (01:58) ===

[00:00:00]  Okay, so before we start, we have to say something.
[00:00:02]  I think I'm pretty sure we have to say this, but I'm not sure, Not sure.
[00:00:09]  Sure, we'll see.
[00:00:11]  This is not financial advice and Neither of us hold any current positions in Tesla stock.
[00:00:20]  I should say I have been both short and long Tesla at different points, but I'm not currently.
[00:00:26]  Why are you looking at me like?
[00:00:27]  This is so okay boring.
[00:00:29]  All right, first of all, this is financial advice.
[00:00:32]  Yes, this is financial advice.
[00:00:34]  I'm a licensed financial advisor Yes, I am not in America, but you can get licensed in other countries for financial advice.
[00:00:45]  It's a worldwide economy.
[00:00:46]  Unitarian financial advice.
[00:00:48]  Yes, it's a globalist kind of thing.
[00:00:50]  Yes, I am a financial advisor in parts of Sri Lanka that I haven't been disbarred from.
[00:00:56]  And I'm not telling you if I have any positions in Tesla.
[00:00:58]  Positions where you hold stock?
[00:01:00]  Yeah.
[00:01:00]  Okay.
[00:01:01]  I definitely don't.
[00:01:02]  I have one share of one stock and it's not in Tesla.
[00:01:06]  I'm not telling you what it's in, but it's not in Tesla.
[00:01:09]  And here's the thing.
[00:01:10]  I am giving you financial advice.
[00:01:12]  Liz is not giving you financial advice.
[00:01:13]  So think of this as a little angel on the shoulder and a little devil on the shoulder.
[00:01:17]  Which one is which?
[00:01:20]  Well, I'm the angel.
[00:01:21]  No.
[00:01:23]  Wait, you're the angel?
[00:01:24]  Oh, brace.
[00:01:56]  Hi, Liz.
[00:01:57]  How you doing?

=== Can't Keep This Up (07:08) ===

[00:01:58]  Dude, you can't keep, we can't keep doing this.
[00:02:00]  So here, here's what's been going on.
[00:02:02]  You don't want to laugh?
[00:02:03]  Well, no, because here's what's been going on.
[00:02:05]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:06]  We've been trying to do this intro.
[00:02:07]  Every time Liz starts it out with high brace, and then I say something back to her, and she gets mad at me.
[00:02:13]  Wait, I just laughed.
[00:02:15]  Because you make me laugh, and now you're saying that it's, I was saying something, that's what's bad when I'm not.
[00:02:19]  I'm not interested in these flirtations.
[00:02:21]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:22]  I'm here to talk about a really serious matter.
[00:02:25]  But first, we're going to introduce ourselves.
[00:02:29]  Hi, everyone.
[00:02:29]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:30]  Hi.
[00:02:31]  My name is Brace.
[00:02:32]  We're joined here, but I'm trying to sound so professional right now.
[00:02:34]  I don't know.
[00:02:35]  Why are you doing that?
[00:02:36]  Because we're in a fucking studio, dude.
[00:02:38]  What do you want me to do?
[00:02:39]  There's like soundproofing here and shit.
[00:02:42]  Yeah.
[00:02:42]  I'm trying to sound professional.
[00:02:44]  There's a machine.
[00:02:45]  There's like five machines over there.
[00:02:47]  That's a serious machine.
[00:02:48]  That's a fucking serious machine, which is being sat in front of by producers.
[00:02:54]  You like this save?
[00:02:55]  This is professional.
[00:02:55]  This is how a pro does it.
[00:02:57]  Which is being sat in front of by fucking young Chomsky and the podcast of which we're all members of is called Truanon.
[00:03:06]  Look at that little baby Rogan.
[00:03:08]  Yeah.
[00:03:09]  Fuck you.
[00:03:11]  Well, Brace just filled the beans and guess what, everyone?
[00:03:13]  We're in the same room.
[00:03:14]  Yeah.
[00:03:15]  Three of us.
[00:03:16]  We are in a, this is bunker-like.
[00:03:20]  I mean, these walls are padded, which I don't know if that's for our safety or for sound sound safety.
[00:03:29]  Yeah, they're made out of fingernails.
[00:03:30]  It's fucking disgusting, but it's like a sort of different, like hippie kind of soundproof thing.
[00:03:36]  No, they're normal.
[00:03:38]  We are gathered here today to talk about something that Liz hasn't been able to shut the fuck up about for the entire time that I've known her and the company has existed.
[00:03:48]  So this is our first episode in our series on Elon Musk and Tesla.
[00:03:53]  The lamest show on earth.
[00:03:59]  The title is an obvious reference, hopefully obvious reference, to P.T. Barnum's famous Three Ring Circus.
[00:04:07]  And if you're asking, are we comparing Elon Musk to one of the most famous fraudster carnival barkers, populist celebrity entrepreneurs, hucksters?
[00:04:21]  The answer is yes.
[00:04:23]  It's quite intentional.
[00:04:26]  This is kind of a passion project for me.
[00:04:29]  I've been really obsessed with Tesla for a long time.
[00:04:35]  I think at least since, I don't know, I think around 2018, which is a pivotal year for the company and one that we get to in the third episode of this series.
[00:04:46]  My dad actually introduced Tesla to me, not for the cars, but for the sort of insanity and very much the three-ring circus that was surrounding this company.
[00:05:02]  He's the one who kind of pointed me towards these guys that I want to give a shout out to before we kind of like even get into this.
[00:05:09]  And these are the guys at the Tesla Q community.
[00:05:12]  Tesla Q standing for kind of when a stock goes all the way to zero and has to be kind of like taken out of the stock market, they put a Q at the end of the ticker for the stock.
[00:05:26]  So Tesla Q, meaning these guys are predicting that the stock will go to zero.
[00:05:32]  These are guys like Montana Skeptic, Machine Planet, Tesla Charts, and they've done a really fantastic job documenting the wide variety of Elon Musk antics and the kind of bizarre machinations of this company.
[00:05:48]  But we're going to get into all that in a little bit.
[00:05:52]  I want to say too that something we've said about Epstein, which is kind of the locus of our show, is that we can kind of use him as a lens through which to understand or kind of view larger networks of power and influence and the way certain things operate around the world.
[00:06:12]  And for me, trying to take a step back and understand the story of Tesla and Musk feels the same.
[00:06:21]  It is one of those instances where it feels like if I can just understand this story, I can get to the heart of something, something about the way that our political economy works and the way that the stock market works and the kind of transformation that's occurred, I think,
[00:06:43]  since 2008 in the kind of corporate landscape and the way that our government funds fuels innovation, the way that marketing works, the way that social media works, Tesla, the story of Tesla touches all of this.
[00:07:00]  And I was going back through the archives, looking at a lot of Tesla footage, early kind of press, and I saw this like 60 minutes bit that they did.
[00:07:13]  It was about the future of the electric car.
[00:07:16]  And it's not a coincidence that that, which was Tesla's first major mainstream news spot, aired on primetime television just two days after Congress passed emergency legislation in response to the financial crisis, collapse of Lehman Brothers was happening.
[00:07:35]  And they were establishing the TARP program, which was granting the Treasury the power to purchase those troubled assets off those big institutional players off their balance sheets.
[00:07:46]  And it's at this very moment that central banks across the globe are moving swiftly to take total control over all of the troubled financial powerhouses and currencies are collapsing and markets are suspending trading and national governments are saying that they'll guarantee deposits because they're anticipating bank runs.
[00:08:06]  And so, you know, the rise of Tesla is in fact intimately intertwined with the story of the quote unquote American recovery.
[00:08:15]  And it's really difficult to tell one without the other.
[00:08:19]  You know, there's the company's near bankruptcy in 2008 and all the tumultuous years into 2010.
[00:08:27]  You've got the social media fueled war and these like digital citizen auditors and then the triumph with their inclusion into the S ⁇ P just last year, which is an achievement itself powered by basically boatloads of laundered regulatory credits.
[00:08:45]  Tesla in little more than a decade has gone from basically the brink of collapse to allegedly the most valuable car company in history, grafting itself onto those very same institutional investors that the government sucked the toxic assets out of just days before Leslie Stahl is driving the roadster in downtown Palo Alto.

=== Tesla's Stock Market Phenomenon (03:18) ===

[00:09:07]  At this point, Tesla, like most American companies, is mostly a stock company that also sometimes allegedly produces things rather than a car company that is publicly traded.
[00:09:19]  And it's this inversion or this transformation that is actually Musk's only real innovation in the market.
[00:09:27]  And it would be wrong to say that it's not a good one.
[00:09:30]  It has made a lot of people very, very, very, very rich, not least of whom is Elon himself, of course.
[00:09:38]  And it means that this company, Tesla, is now basically too big to fail when it never had to succeed.
[00:09:46]  A zombie company that has never even lived.
[00:09:50]  And at the center of all of this is Elon Musk, the Carnival Barker himself, the man keeping the plate spinning, jumping from vine to vine, making sure that the music never stops.
[00:10:02]  And he's such a fascinating figure because I just, I don't think there's anyone who doesn't have an opinion about Elon.
[00:10:09]  I mean, is there?
[00:10:11]  Doubtful.
[00:10:12]  No.
[00:10:12]  I think Elon Musk is unique among his kind of cohort at the top of the financial ladder, right?
[00:10:20]  You know, he's one of the richest guys in the world.
[00:10:22]  But most people, unless they have a general opinion on rich guys, whether they love them or hate them, don't really have an opinion on most of the other ones, right?
[00:10:30]  Like Jeff Bezos is probably the one who people complain about or love the most next to Elon Musk, but it doesn't even compare, right?
[00:10:39]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:10:40]  I mean, Elon Musk is somebody that fascinates, repulses, attracts, and enrages a lot of different people.
[00:10:49]  Yeah, and I mean like staunch defenders and then like staunch like anti and crusaders against.
[00:10:59]  You know what I mean?
[00:10:59]  Like the sort of like vitriol that he inspires and the kind of cult-like devotion at the same time is like completely and totally unique in, I think, the American landscape.
[00:11:13]  I mean, people often compare Tesla to Theranos and Enron, but neither of those companies, I think, inspired the sort of like crowdsourced citizen activist and even beyond like citizen auditor that the Tesla Q community has become.
[00:11:36]  And it's a really just unbelievable phenomenon.
[00:11:39]  And there's so, I mean, that's just one aspect of what makes the rise of Tesla and the place that Elon Musk holds so unique, I think, even in American business history.
[00:11:50]  So what we're trying to do here is, well, we're trying to do a few things here.
[00:11:54]  One, we're trying to ruin the life, reputation, and business of a mentally retarded man from South Africa.
[00:12:02]  But more importantly, we're really going to tell the story, as well as we can tell it, of the electric car, of California environmentalism, meeting California consumerism, and of a company that embodies so many different things about our truly stupid and fucked up country and economic system.

=== The Rise of Tesla's Electric Car (02:52) ===

[00:12:25]  And a guy, in fact, the guy who leads all of that.
[00:12:31]  So we're doing three different episodes here, and we're focusing on, in a somewhat linear way, in fact, I would say admirably linear way, on several parallel but eventually intersecting storylines here.
[00:12:49]  Episode one, which is the episode that you are contractually obligated to finish today, the one that you're listening to, we're going to tell a little story about California environmentalism, about the invention of the electric car, about chiropractors, a lot of chiropractors in there, the lost city of Kalahari, and Elon Musk's emergence from the cocoon that is South Africa.
[00:13:16]  I actually feel really weird calling South Africa a cocoon, and I'm just going to keep talking and hope you listen to something else I say and forget that I just said that.
[00:13:24]  But the cocoon of South Africa that Elon Musk emerges to become a butterfly in California.
[00:13:31]  Episode two, we're telling the rise of, well, the haphazard rise and the backstabbing that occurred in Elon Musk's early career as he clawed his way to the top like the true sinews and muscles tiger that he is to his involvement with Tesla and his really tragic,
[00:13:54]  you know, coming very close to losing it all, some about his love life, the really wonderful story of Solar City.
[00:14:03]  And I mean, it's just a truly incredible company.
[00:14:05]  I mean, RARPA laptops are powered by it right now.
[00:14:10]  And unfortunately, his divorce and the American government's intercessions with all of this.
[00:14:17]  And episode three is where Liz's mental illness really takes over.
[00:14:21]  Because episode one, episode two, you're like, oh, well, this guy is, you know, he's going through life.
[00:14:26]  He's building these companies.
[00:14:28]  He's, you know, blah, blah, blah.
[00:14:30]  What's the point?
[00:14:31]  Well, episode three, sweetheart, is that's where we're going to tell you what it's like to be locked inside of a burning Tesla while your electronic door handles do not open and you're slowly consumed by flames from your poorly made battery.
[00:14:45]  But we're going to talk about the cars and some of the problems with them.
[00:14:48]  We're going to delve pretty deeply into the Tesla Q stuff.
[00:14:52]  And I think by then, we should have the ability to show you that Tesla is not just a car company.
[00:15:01]  It's not a startup modeled as a car company.
[00:15:04]  It is a stock company that sells shitty fucking cars made by any completely insane person that is for some fucked up reason able to hold a gun to the head of the American economy.

=== Strange Politics & Technocracy (13:38) ===

[00:15:18]  And if it falls or, you know, moves or you do one of these badass kung fu things where you try to kick the gun out of its hand and it goes off, then your pension, actually, you don't have a pension.
[00:15:28]  Your dad's pension is fucked.
[00:15:30]  Retirement, bam, out the window and everything falls apart.
[00:15:34]  Because what we're saying here is Tesla is now, unfortunately, like it or not, an integral, a very integral part of the American economy.
[00:15:43]  And you should be very aware of what that means.
[00:15:48]  You know, he comes from this long tradition that, you know, he himself is not American, but there's something about him that is very American, which is that he is this immigrant who becomes this kind of like evangelizing carnival barker.
[00:16:04]  Yeah.
[00:16:05]  And it's unbelievable what he's built.
[00:16:08]  You know, it is.
[00:16:09]  It's an incredible show.
[00:16:23]  So something people won't shut the fuck up about, or haven't been able to shut the fuck up about, rather, for the past five years is populism, right?
[00:16:30]  I mean, it's like everywhere.
[00:16:31]  Yeah.
[00:16:32]  And, you know, oh, Bernie's a populist.
[00:16:35]  Oh, is Hillary Clinton anti-populist?
[00:16:37]  Donald Trump is a populist.
[00:16:40]  From what I gather, being a populist, according to a lot of these people, is if you're kind of like wrinkly, old, you yell a lot, you know, your coworkers like it.
[00:16:50]  And I would have to say, Donald Trump, okay, just another porcine fucking moron in a history of porcine fucking morons in this country, in a country of porcine fucking morons.
[00:17:01]  Elon Musk, I think, this is something I've really been digging.
[00:17:07]  Elon Musk, to me, is much more of a populist than any of these guys.
[00:17:12]  Because the thing is, is a lot of people don't want to admit, is Liz, you hit the nail on the head earlier.
[00:17:16]  He's Reddit.
[00:17:17]  And in 2021, populism is fucking Reddit.
[00:17:21]  And he's here to impress you, to get you fucking on his side.
[00:17:26]  He's like supposedly, allegedly the richest man in the world.
[00:17:29]  Yeah, citation needed.
[00:17:32]  Exactly.
[00:17:32]  But he's going to make you rich too.
[00:17:34]  And he's standing up for the little guy and all this kind of bullshit.
[00:17:38]  And so I would have to say, and this has been a long-held position on this podcast.
[00:17:42]  Populism?
[00:17:43]  No, I don't care for it.
[00:17:46]  If he was a Maoist, a billionaire, okay, maybe we'll talk in a different tune here.
[00:17:52]  But Elon Musk, absolutely 100%, is a populist.
[00:17:56]  And to be a populist, you've got to be a little bit of a clown.
[00:17:59]  Part of his populist mythos, too, is the kind of the image that he's built for himself.
[00:18:05]  And this is like something key that I think both of us really want to drive home.
[00:18:09]  Like people really want it to be true that like Elon, we're going to reveal some kind of secret CIA background.
[00:18:18]  And oh, he's from South Africa.
[00:18:19]  So that means that his family is tied up in the apartheid state.
[00:18:24]  And oh, he's going to coup Bolivia.
[00:18:27]  And he's this super serious, crazy.
[00:18:30]  No, that's what Elon wants you to believe.
[00:18:33]  Elon would love nothing more for you to think that he's some evil genius nightmare billionaire, that he's Lex Luthor, that he's the Iron Man.
[00:18:42]  In fact, that's like a big part of his fucking brand.
[00:18:45]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:18:46]  He's not.
[00:18:47]  No, In fact, his background, I will say, is so much better than that.
[00:18:54]  If Elon Musk's dad was like a colonel in the apartheid army and was fucking going around, killing people, enslaving people, and his whole family was like this, these diamond miners, et cetera.
[00:19:06]  I think that would be very pat for people.
[00:19:09]  But they're sexy.
[00:19:10]  They're very sexy.
[00:19:11]  His actual family background is, well, there's a few kinks in the back of it.
[00:19:20]  I want to be clear here that if you are a practitioner or a follower or a devotee of the black magic and anti-scientific doctrine of chiropractice, chiropracty, chiropractics, freaking trigger warning, bitch.
[00:19:46]  I'm about to blow your fucking mind.
[00:19:47]  You're going to blow their back out.
[00:19:50]  So I want to be clear here.
[00:19:51]  I want to be totally upfront with you, Liz.
[00:19:54]  Elon Musk's grandmother or great-grandmother was the first chiropractor in Canada.
[00:20:00]  Yeah, you told me, yeah, I know this.
[00:20:02]  I know, but I want to be like really, really upfront with you.
[00:20:05]  If you Google her, if you Google first chiropractor in Canada, you get this bitch's name.
[00:20:09]  Okay.
[00:20:10]  Yeah.
[00:20:11]  I don't mean to call you a bitch.
[00:20:12]  Well, no, you're a chiropractor.
[00:20:14]  Elon Musk isn't South African in the way that I think a lot of people think he's South African.
[00:20:19]  No, he's Canadian.
[00:20:20]  He's fucking Canadian.
[00:20:21]  He's fucking Canadian, man.
[00:20:23]  I mean, he's not, but he's like half Canadian.
[00:20:26]  Basically, exactly.
[00:20:27]  His mom's from Canada, you know, and it's like just like Judaism, if your mom's Canadian, you're also Canadian.
[00:20:33]  Yeah.
[00:20:33]  So Elon Musk is named after his great-grandfather, John Elon Headleman, which makes a lot of sense.
[00:20:38]  I feel like Elon is the kind of thing you'd be named in, you know, like the 1800s.
[00:20:42]  It's not really a modern day name.
[00:20:45]  I think people just literally assumed it was some weird South African name.
[00:20:48]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:48]  It's not.
[00:20:49]  It's the middle name of a Canadian chiropractor.
[00:20:52]  Yes.
[00:20:52]  Yes.
[00:20:53]  He was married to Almeda Headelman, and they gave birth to a guy named Joshua Norman Headlman.
[00:21:01]  This is sort of the connecting link between the origins of Canadian chiropractor.
[00:21:06]  It's necromancy, essentially.
[00:21:08]  It's a black art.
[00:21:09]  I mean, it should be banned.
[00:21:11]  This guy, Joshua Norman Headlman, who was, as he tells it, a farmer who lost everything to the banks and had to turn to the old family tradition of becoming a chiropractor in Canada.
[00:21:26]  He was also, like many people, you know, these days and those days, interested in politics.
[00:21:35]  His interests in politics were maybe a little stranger than some people's, but no different than many of these polyamorous DSA types.
[00:21:44]  Well, wait, so this is like the 1920s, 1930s?
[00:21:48]  It is indeed.
[00:21:49]  Well, we're talking strange politics.
[00:21:52]  Yes.
[00:21:53]  What are we talking about?
[00:21:54]  Well, you and I were talking earlier today when we were basking in the sun like little lizards that the 60s and the 30s have a lot in common in this sort of these explosions of political expression, you could say.
[00:22:08]  But whereas the 60s, I don't know, I'm just taking credit for what you said earlier.
[00:22:12]  That the 60s were kind of this like very sort of diffused, decentralized, kind of the beginning of what we would call like network politics.
[00:22:21]  Whereas the 30s, you really see the kind of the last grasp or last stand of the kind of like great man, like authority kind of politics.
[00:22:31]  Yeah.
[00:22:32]  Obviously the expression in fascism, but this guy, this guy, he was into something called the like technocracy movement.
[00:22:40]  It's actually, well, there's a technocracy movement, but the actual organization, I'm doing my technocrat voice here.
[00:22:46]  The actual organization is called Technocracy Incorporated.
[00:22:50]  So, okay, yes.
[00:22:52]  This sounds fake.
[00:22:53]  It does sound fake that Elon Musk's grandfather was the research director for the Canadian branch of Technocracy Incorporated, which made all of its members wear gray suits, drive gray cars, give talks in front of gray banners.
[00:23:08]  And there's some really fantastic pictures of their youth movement who look like they're in craft work.
[00:23:16]  What was up with the 30s and everyone?
[00:23:18]  Like everyone's political clubs made like everyone had to wear like a everyone had a color shirt.
[00:23:24]  Well, we'll get to that in just a couple of seconds because he actually was in the green shirts as well, too.
[00:23:30]  Well, the green shirts, okay, I want to so Liz is right.
[00:23:33]  In the 30s, everyone's like, we need a shirt, right?
[00:23:36]  We got the black shirts.
[00:23:38]  Yeah.
[00:23:38]  We got the blue shirts.
[00:23:40]  I think that was the Irish one.
[00:23:42]  Okay.
[00:23:42]  I think they had a couple of different color shirts.
[00:23:44]  We got the brown shirts.
[00:23:45]  Oh, famous.
[00:23:46]  Oh, yeah.
[00:23:46]  Most famous shirts.
[00:23:48]  Absolutely.
[00:23:49]  A lot of South American countries.
[00:23:51]  I think we covered this in one of the Spider Network episodes.
[00:23:54]  There were shirts down there, too.
[00:23:55]  Everyone's got their own little shirt.
[00:23:56]  There's only so many fucking colors.
[00:23:58]  And this is before everyone became like an art school Nazi.
[00:24:01]  Like I'm like an esoteric, you know, posting showing.
[00:24:04]  No, they were all Nazis.
[00:24:06]  They were real Nazis.
[00:24:07]  I'm like, you losers.
[00:24:11]  But there was a movement called the Green Shirts.
[00:24:12]  And I listen, for those who are familiar with the Kibbo Kift, I don't have enough time to get into that right now.
[00:24:20]  Okay.
[00:24:20]  Liz has forbidden it as a practice of dark magic.
[00:24:26]  But we can get to the social credit movement maybe in another episode give it the respect it deserves.
[00:24:33]  But from Technocracy Incorporated, Heidelman goes into the Green Shirts, aka, which became the Social Credit Party in Canada.
[00:24:43]  It is modeled along the lines of Xi Jinping thought.
[00:24:49]  No, I'm just kidding.
[00:24:50]  The social credit movement is basically nerds armed.
[00:24:54]  Well, not literally armed, but armed as nerds, militant nerds.
[00:24:59]  They have a strange system of beliefs that I really am too stupid to get into.
[00:25:06]  So you're telling me that Elon Musk comes from a long line of militant nerds who are also chiropractors?
[00:25:12]  Correct.
[00:25:13]  Yes.
[00:25:14]  Okay.
[00:25:15]  And you know, in fact, his grandfather, Hegelman, goes to jail over being a nerd because at the beginning of World War II, the Technocracy Incorporated was banned because of the vociferous anti-communism.
[00:25:25]  Like, don't join the war on this out of the wherever.
[00:25:28]  And he actually was one of the few members to go to jail for it.
[00:25:31]  When he gets out, he becomes national chairman for the Social Credit Party or the SoCreds, as they were sometimes called.
[00:25:38]  I mean, they really deserve, again, an episode unto themselves, but it's basically like a sort of conservative MMT UBI with way more complicated than that.
[00:25:50]  But, you know, something I found really fascinating about them, and I would actually compare it to a lot of people that have been rude to me in my life, is that they were anti-Semitic.
[00:25:59]  Yeah, he had a weird obsession with something called the Elders of Zion.
[00:26:03]  Oh, yeah, Can you explain to Liz?
[00:26:08]  Is there anyone who doesn't know what that is?
[00:26:10]  Dude, all right.
[00:26:11]  So if you don't know what the protocols are the Elders of Zion, everything you've been told about it is a lie.
[00:26:16]  It fucking really happened and trying to suppress the truth.
[00:26:18]  No, the Protocols of Elders of Zion was a forgery made by the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, in the early 20th century.
[00:26:25]  It was based on, I think, something by Machiavelli.
[00:26:29]  And it was like Conversations with the Devil or something.
[00:26:32]  It's based on a work by Machiavelli.
[00:26:34]  And it takes place in a graveyard in Vienna.
[00:26:38]  And it is essentially a group of elders of Zion, Jews, Jewish leaders, who are describing their plan to take over society from behind the scenes.
[00:26:49]  The forgery is a huge hit.
[00:26:51]  Everybody, for some reason, believes it, which like, I got to say, okay, I get it's like 1910.
[00:26:56]  You don't have like a lot of fucking like content.
[00:26:59]  But it's like, if I'm reading this thing, I'm like, what, this guy's just in the bushes the whole time and listening to this?
[00:27:04]  I mean, this is crazy.
[00:27:06]  But it was widely exposed as a forgery.
[00:27:07]  There's a famous court case in Switzerland that basically proved it as such.
[00:27:12]  Well, Hegelman, he acknowledged that it was fake, but this is what he said.
[00:27:18]  He said, it doesn't matter that it's fake if it's true.
[00:27:21]  That's literally what he argued and used that as an argument to read it into the parliamentary record, I believe.
[00:27:28]  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:27:31]  We actually, we found quite a few quotes from him sort of defending his anti-Semitism in Liz, what was the paper you found?
[00:27:39]  It was like anti-Semitism in the Social Credit Party.
[00:27:42]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:27:43]  It's like, he said, the point is that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation.
[00:27:50]  Yes.
[00:27:51]  And he says the socialists in Canada have been putting too many Jews into high positions.
[00:27:55]  And so obviously they're the real anti-Semites because they're making the protocols of Elders of Zion real, which, okay, fair enough.
[00:28:02]  So he runs for office a couple of times on the Social Credit Party line.
[00:28:07]  He fails to get elected, unfortunately.
[00:28:11]  And he takes up a, well, he's still involved heavily.
[00:28:15]  And by the way, the man, I didn't mention this earlier, but I'd be remiss if I didn't.
[00:28:22]  He spent all of World War II trying to get chiropractors recognized as doctors by the Canadian Army.
[00:28:29]  I want to be clear here.
[00:28:31]  During World War II, the Allies, of which Canada was a very small and insignificant part who took part in zero battles and the D-Day thing is fake.
[00:28:39]  That's post-war Canadian propaganda.
[00:28:42]  He was trying to injure their soldiers in the fight against fascism by giving them one chiropractor thing that feels really good and then three weeks later for free and then two weeks later like, oh, my back's all fucked up from being in like Normandy or whatever.

=== Coca-Cola and Chiropractic Claims (02:50) ===

[00:28:56]  And then being like, oh, actually, it's like $100 now and you have to go forever because I promise you.
[00:28:59]  So are you suggesting that this is some kind of Ponzi scheme?
[00:29:02]  Chiropractic is the biggest Ponzi scheme.
[00:29:05]  It's a physical Ponzi scheme with your back.
[00:29:07]  Am I right?
[00:29:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:09]  Okay.
[00:29:09]  I got the fucking, I mean, he, you know, he's like a guy who always has to go to the doctor and stuff.
[00:29:14]  It is, it is for small, for a small dick.
[00:29:18]  So you can't get any of this because I'm saying something really important here.
[00:29:24]  You know, this guy is a chiropractic freak, right?
[00:29:27]  He's always, he's like the head of the chiropractic boards.
[00:29:29]  Literally, I found out most of this information.
[00:29:31]  You know where I found it out?
[00:29:33]  From two different chiropractic websites.
[00:29:35]  Chiropracty?
[00:29:36]  That's not even how you say it.
[00:29:37]  I'm going insane.
[00:29:38]  Here's the thing.
[00:29:40]  The guy gets obsessed with the fact that Coca-Cola drove his friend insane.
[00:29:45]  Yeah.
[00:29:46]  He said, you know what he said?
[00:29:47]  What?
[00:29:47]  He said, hey, that Coca-Cola company hates me, but I'll still keep drinking that garbage.
[00:29:52]  Exactly.
[00:29:53]  Yes.
[00:29:53]  Yeah.
[00:29:53]  Hegelman's friend, because back then they still had cocaine in Coca-Cola.
[00:29:58]  Now it's only an RC coke.
[00:30:00]  He literally was addicted to Coca-Cola.
[00:30:01]  Yes.
[00:30:02]  So his friend drank 20 Cokes a day and as is described, went insane because he's fucking drinking Coke.
[00:30:08]  That rocks.
[00:30:09]  Unfortunately, Heidelman, while he may technically be a doctor, he's actually not a doctor of medicine because he's a chiropractor, which is really fucked up that they can call themselves doctors and lie to people like that.
[00:30:21]  But he like saw his friend going insane.
[00:30:23]  He's like, actually, there's nothing I can do to help you because the only thing I can actually do that's related to my medicine is actually hurt you.
[00:30:29]  And so I'm sorry, you're insane.
[00:30:31]  But he wages a war with a few other people trying to get Coca-Cola basically banned or to get people to stop drinking Coke.
[00:30:37]  One of the people he's waging this war alongside, one of his cohort, falls out of a window, founder of the White Helmet style, and dies and in a suicide, maybe.
[00:30:48]  I don't know.
[00:30:49]  But Heidelman's like, oh, the agents of Coca-Cola are after me.
[00:30:52]  I have to flee the country.
[00:30:54]  And he leaves with his family to South Africa.
[00:31:13]  Wait, Brace, can you do a South African accent?
[00:31:16]  Sith- All right, I'm trying to, because South Africans sound like, and no disrespect, because South African chicks are insanely fine.
[00:31:24]  So if you're listening to this, don't listen to this next part.
[00:31:26]  Like, do the, on the Apple podcast thing hit like 15 seconds ahead.
[00:31:30]  South African people sound like, let's say an Australian couple had a baby at like age 60 and the baby came out.
[00:31:40]  And the accent that that baby would have is the South African accent.

=== Errol's Fakester Dad (15:01) ===

[00:31:47]  Oh my God.
[00:31:48]  So I can't do that because I already said the R word earlier and I don't want to get in trouble more because it'll look like I didn't just do it by mistake.
[00:31:55]  Now that Schumer said it, all bets are off.
[00:31:57]  bets are fucking off um so yeah he moves so okay so we're in south africa we We've made it to South Africa.
[00:32:05]  We are not in South Africa.
[00:32:06]  I want to be clear here.
[00:32:08]  But yeah, we've story-wise, we've made it in South Africa.
[00:32:11]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:32:13]  And of course, the man immediately takes up his crime career of chiropract.
[00:32:20]  Practicing being a chiropractor.
[00:32:24]  We're going to have to really phrase these.
[00:32:25]  Well, he takes up his criminal career of being a chiropractor.
[00:32:30]  There we go.
[00:32:31]  Okay.
[00:32:32]  But he takes up another little hobby, too.
[00:32:36]  Flying.
[00:32:38]  And not just flying, Liz.
[00:32:40]  Flying in search of the lost city of Kalahari.
[00:32:46]  Now, you might be like, Brace, why the fuck is your pod, like, why, why is your part of the podcast, like, dumb and Liz's part is smart?
[00:32:56]  Here's the thing.
[00:32:57]  I'm doing a history thing right here about a real lost city, so please don't fucking be a dick to me.
[00:33:04]  This is kind of ancient alien style, I gotta say.
[00:33:06]  It's real, though.
[00:33:07]  I mean, okay, it's not real.
[00:33:09]  No, but this did really happen.
[00:33:10]  This really did happen.
[00:33:12]  And this was actually a huge part.
[00:33:14]  I mean, we looked at those pictures of the Musk.
[00:33:16]  Yeah, yeah, great pictures.
[00:33:18]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:19]  We'll talk about that later.
[00:33:20]  But this is real.
[00:33:21]  I mean, Hegelman was obsessed with finding something called the Lost City of Kalahari in the Kalahari Desert.
[00:33:28]  Okay, what is this thing?
[00:33:29]  Okay, so, well, all right.
[00:33:31]  Spoiler alert, the lost city of Kalahari appears to be some just like strange-looking rocks in the desert.
[00:33:37]  So there's no city.
[00:33:38]  There is, well, it's lost, but no, not.
[00:33:43]  Okay, he didn't find a city.
[00:33:44]  Technically, is there a city?
[00:33:46]  No.
[00:33:47]  But could there be?
[00:33:48]  We don't know.
[00:33:49]  I mean, there's a lot of things.
[00:33:51]  No, okay, it's fake.
[00:33:54]  But for a while, people did think it was real before, again, people were really stupid back then, and this was not even that long ago.
[00:34:03]  The lost city of Kalahari, a lost city of the Kalahari Desert, I should say, was first discovered by a man named the Great Farini.
[00:34:12]  Not his real name.
[00:34:14]  He was a, in different parts of his life, a union spy, a tightrope performer, including, I believe, across Niagara Falls, a circus explorer, come, excuse me, circus performer, come explorer, who had a somewhat interesting family.
[00:34:32]  At one point, he adopted an orphan.
[00:34:35]  He kept doing this, and I think he actually basically engaged in kidnapping at certain points in his career.
[00:34:41]  But he adopted a young boy who he may dress up as a girl.
[00:34:45]  I can see where you all think this is going, but it was just to exploit him as a circus slave and engage in like a high, like an acrobatic duo with him, boy and a girl.
[00:34:57]  He also taught that boy to do photography and then took him eventually when he became an explorer on these expeditions.
[00:35:07]  They were in the Kalahari Desert.
[00:35:08]  They take some pictures of some rocks.
[00:35:10]  They go back, display them at the Royal Geographic Society, I believe the Royal Geographic Society, and in a subsequent book, The Myth of the Lost City of the Kalahari Desert was born.
[00:35:21]  Those photos are available online.
[00:35:23]  They're pretty cool to look at.
[00:35:24]  They're very beautiful.
[00:35:25]  Yeah, very beautiful photos.
[00:35:26]  He's a very talented photographer.
[00:35:28]  Talented photographer, because he was an acrobat.
[00:35:30]  And so he could climb to all these different places that people usually.
[00:35:32]  Oh, and you get the angles.
[00:35:34]  Exactly.
[00:35:35]  He also adopted, and by adopted, I mean he had kidnapped from the country of Laos a young girl with hypertrichosis.
[00:35:44]  That's also how celebrities define adoption.
[00:35:47]  Exactly, exactly.
[00:35:48]  Although they wouldn't adopt a bearded lady child like he did and then display her as like the missing link.
[00:35:54]  Well, Mio Pharaoh did.
[00:35:57]  And he also invented the human cannonball, which is where you put a person in a can.
[00:36:01]  I found that detail very, very cool.
[00:36:03]  I do think that's a real invention.
[00:36:06]  That's fucked up that he invented that.
[00:36:08]  But you know what else is strange?
[00:36:11]  Kind of invented late.
[00:36:13]  Yeah.
[00:36:13]  Yeah.
[00:36:14]  Because I would have done that like the week after cannons were invented.
[00:36:18]  Yeah, I mean, maybe they tried.
[00:36:21]  Well, anyways, this grab bag of this, basically, this fabulous, right?
[00:36:26]  Because obviously he probably wasn't a union spy.
[00:36:30]  He definitely was a tightrope performer, but clearly he was a promoter.
[00:36:33]  And that's really what he was, right?
[00:36:35]  The man's name, I believe, was something like William.
[00:36:37]  It was definitely not the great Farini.
[00:36:39]  He moved to Germany and then wrote a 30-volume set of books about Germany's perspective during World War I, none of my business.
[00:36:47]  But again, the man is like a circus guy, right?
[00:36:50]  Yeah.
[00:36:51]  And this is what Musk's grandfather becomes obsessed with finding.
[00:36:53]  He takes 12 expeditions with his fucked up family and never finds it.
[00:36:59]  Month-long expeditions.
[00:37:00]  I also believe kills a lion.
[00:37:01]  Now, how big is his family at this point?
[00:37:04]  He's got five.
[00:37:04]  He's got Scott.
[00:37:06]  He's got Lynn.
[00:37:07]  He's got Kay.
[00:37:08]  He's got May, Elon's mother, and he's got Angkor Lee.
[00:37:12]  I'm sorry.
[00:37:12]  Wait, what's the last one?
[00:37:15]  Angkor.
[00:37:17]  So my guess here is that the mom got to name the four normal kids, and then the dad is like, well, can I name one?
[00:37:25]  And so he names his kid Angkor Lee.
[00:37:27]  And Angkor Lee, yeah.
[00:37:29]  Okay, wait, but it sounds that sounds a little familiar.
[00:37:31]  Why would that sound familiar to me, Bryce?
[00:37:33]  Well, I mean, I'm assuming because of his lust for the lost city, he probably was interested in other ancient ruined kind of places and clearly named his kid after Angkor Watt.
[00:37:44]  However, if you look at his, at Angkor's, because he's still alive, his website, he's like some kind of consultant in, I believe, Toronto.
[00:37:54]  He makes it very clear that he's named after Angkor Watt and not for the first two years of the Communist Party at Campuchia after they took over Cambodia.
[00:38:04]  They only refer to themselves as Angkor.
[00:38:06]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:38:06]  And he makes it very clear over it.
[00:38:09]  Not about the Khmer Rouge.
[00:38:10]  Like 10 paragraphs that he has no connection to Khmer Rouge.
[00:38:14]  Imagine like that, starting off every professional interaction.
[00:38:19]  Yeah.
[00:38:19]  With no, I have nothing to do with the Khmer Rouge.
[00:38:22]  Exactly.
[00:38:22]  Yeah.
[00:38:22]  Yeah.
[00:38:23]  I actually, honestly, due to my political beliefs, I find I have to do that quite often.
[00:38:43]  Okay, so now we are finally Adi almost dead.
[00:38:50]  Yes.
[00:38:51]  So Errol Musk has a little less sexy of a background.
[00:38:54]  In fact, it's pretty difficult to find out much about it.
[00:38:58]  I mean, I find him very interesting.
[00:39:00]  Yes, yeah.
[00:39:02]  Whatever his parents did, I think his dad was like a sergeant.
[00:39:05]  It pales in comparison to Errol himself, who, by the way, has killed three people.
[00:39:12]  Just figured I should mention that kind of up front, you know.
[00:39:15]  Just get it out of the way first.
[00:39:16]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:39:17]  It's like sorry, like, I know I told you I was like 6'2, but like, I'm actually 6'4, which is Brace's real height.
[00:39:24]  Like, you know, that kind of thing.
[00:39:26]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:39:27]  Yeah.
[00:39:27]  Errol is a swashbuckling figure, not to compare him to the only other famous Errol Flint.
[00:39:38]  And in fact, you know, that whole like history we just gave you of the mom's side of the family, Errol actually tells that in interviews as his family's history.
[00:39:47]  This is very weird.
[00:39:49]  Yeah.
[00:39:49]  So Errol is married to May.
[00:39:51]  We mentioned May, Heidelman's daughter.
[00:39:54]  Yes.
[00:39:55]  Not the one affiliated with the Khmer Rouge.
[00:39:57]  And actually, I'll be real with you.
[00:39:58]  He did a pretty baller move to get her to marry him.
[00:40:00]  He went and asked her to marry him.
[00:40:03]  She said no.
[00:40:04]  She was away at college.
[00:40:06]  Long distance lines in South Africa were not great at that point, so you'd have to tend a telegram.
[00:40:10]  He goes back to the town where they grew up together, and he tells her parents that she agreed to it.
[00:40:17]  By the way, don't do that.
[00:40:20]  No, I want to tell you fucking listeners a little something.
[00:40:23]  I read fucking May's biography about being a silver-haired mature model.
[00:40:29]  So fuck you.
[00:40:31]  I learned that anecdote.
[00:40:32]  I don't even, I think from there.
[00:40:35]  But yeah, they marry and he immediately starts beating her up.
[00:40:38]  He's a bad fucking guy.
[00:40:40]  Oh, dude.
[00:40:40]  I like that.
[00:40:41]  Day one is like abusive and insane to her.
[00:40:46]  I mean, he is a piece of shit.
[00:40:47]  And it's unclear, too, what Errol's job is.
[00:40:52]  He's wealthy and he sort of describes himself as an engineer.
[00:40:57]  His LinkedIn has a picture of himself clearly from 25 years ago.
[00:41:01]  Yeah, he is like his own kind of huckster.
[00:41:04]  I mean, you just mentioned at the start of this that he took his wife's backstory and said it as his own.
[00:41:11]  But we mean literally.
[00:41:13]  Yeah.
[00:41:13]  He literally said that his grandmother was Canada's first chiropractor, which is not true.
[00:41:20]  Absolutely not.
[00:41:20]  It was his wife's grandmother.
[00:41:22]  That's weird.
[00:41:22]  His ex-wife's grandmother.
[00:41:25]  Like from a long, he's been married four times, dude.
[00:41:28]  I mean, it's insane.
[00:41:29]  And so, so this is, this is the so-called co-owner of the diamond mine.
[00:41:33]  And to be clear, this dude have fucking money, right?
[00:41:36]  Like, these kids were raised with a lot of money.
[00:41:39]  No, wait, when you say co-own, so co-owner of the diamond mine, what do you, you know?
[00:41:43]  What do you mean?
[00:41:44]  Okay, so the famous story that Elon Musk got all his riches from a diamond mine that his father co-owned in, well, the way people say it, they always say it's South Africa, actually in Zambia, which, by the way, I believe had a socialist government at the time that he supposedly owned it.
[00:42:02]  But he did have some interest in a diamond mine, right?
[00:42:06]  But let me ask you this, Liz.
[00:42:08]  I own a diamond mine.
[00:42:10]  Okay.
[00:42:10]  Am I the guy selling the diamonds?
[00:42:13]  Like door-to-door salesman?
[00:42:14]  Well, not door-to-door, but, you know, to a guy, you know, the guy who buys diamonds, the uncut gems guy.
[00:42:20]  I'm so sad.
[00:42:21]  I'm so fucked up.
[00:42:23]  No, probably not.
[00:42:24]  Probably not, right?
[00:42:25]  And so all of his stories about owning it involve some hijinks of him actually having to sell bags of diamonds, including a clearly fake story about Elon and Kimball selling a diamond to, I believe, Tiffany's for $2,000 and then seeing it at $85,000, which is supposed to illustrate how they learned about price bullshit.
[00:42:45]  Oh, my God.
[00:42:45]  Fake.
[00:42:46]  Yes.
[00:42:47]  Fake.
[00:42:47]  everything's fake i mean the guy is this is a long lineage of fakesters hucksters and chiropractors i I mean, that's the thing, is the dad is clearly, I mean, you get this just from looking at the fucking guy, but he's a McAfee type, right?
[00:43:00]  He's a huckster who's got some money and who's probably lost a lot of money and again, shot three people who he says were invading his house, although South Africa.
[00:43:11]  So I mean, actually, it could be true, but he probably just shot the people and got away with it.
[00:43:16]  And, you know, he's a sketchy fucking guy.
[00:43:19]  Elon, to his credit, hates his father.
[00:43:22]  Yeah, they have a really bad relationship.
[00:43:24]  Really bad relationship.
[00:43:28]  There is a great quote that his father emailed to a Rolling Stone during a profile of Elon.
[00:43:37]  I think you should read it.
[00:43:38]  Okay, I was going to make you do it, but okay, now do not clip this.
[00:43:44]  I've been accused of being a gay.
[00:43:47]  Let me start that again, but keep that in.
[00:43:50]  I've been accused of being a gay, a misogynist.
[00:43:54]  This is actually, okay, this is true for me so far.
[00:43:56]  A pedophile, a traitor, a rat, a shit quite often, a bastard by many women whose attentions I did not return, and much more.
[00:44:06]  My own wonderful mother told me I am ruthless and should learn to be more humane.
[00:44:12]  I love my children and would readily do whatever for them.
[00:44:15]  I guess that all rings true for me.
[00:44:19]  I mean, okay, so you call him a pedophile, and, you know, there is some something about his father.
[00:44:26]  You know, he is, he does have Woody Allenson's disease.
[00:44:30]  Yeah, this is really, this is really gross.
[00:44:33]  He recently fathered a child with his stepdaughter?
[00:44:37]  Yes.
[00:44:37]  From his second wife.
[00:44:39]  Yes.
[00:44:40]  At 72.
[00:44:41]  Yes.
[00:44:42]  And the stepdaughter is 30.
[00:44:44]  Yes.
[00:44:46]  All correct.
[00:44:46]  Yes.
[00:44:47]  Yes.
[00:44:48]  that is, that is, that is true.
[00:44:50]  And so Elon Musk, unfortunately, has, I don't know what that makes Is that a brother?
[00:44:55]  That is a brother.
[00:45:01]  Daughter?
[00:45:02]  So Elon Musk does have a new sibling, I guess.
[00:45:06]  I'm not really sure what you would call that.
[00:45:09]  But yeah, Errol is a piece of shit.
[00:45:26]  So, I don't need to tell you that everyone thought Elon Musk was, like, fucked up when he was a baby, right?
[00:45:31]  I know.
[00:45:32]  That kind of makes me feel bad for him.
[00:45:33]  And then I remember who he is.
[00:45:34]  Yeah, honestly, me too.
[00:45:36]  Yeah.
[00:45:36]  His parents thought he was deaf.
[00:45:37]  I know.
[00:45:38]  Yeah, he would like not respond to them when they called him.
[00:45:41]  Yeah.
[00:45:41]  Yeah.
[00:45:42]  Which I didn't either.
[00:45:44]  What?
[00:45:45]  I didn't.
[00:45:45]  I mean, yeah.
[00:45:46]  Your parents call you?
[00:45:47]  Fuck you.
[00:45:47]  I'm smoking a sick.
[00:45:48]  Oh, my God.
[00:45:50]  I guess he was younger than that.
[00:45:51]  Everyone thought he was, quote, rude or really weird.
[00:45:54]  I don't know where I put that quote from, but I think it's from the biography, the Vance biography of him.
[00:46:00]  But there are so – so I did read – I read a biography of Elon Musk that is – The Vance one, right?
[00:46:07]  The Vance.
[00:46:07]  Yeah, Vance biography of Elon Musk.
[00:46:09]  It's very friendly to Elon.
[00:46:10]  Very friendly to Elon Musk.
[00:46:11]  He's got a lot of access.
[00:46:12]  yes absolutely and but it is a font of quotes that make him see he is he i mean he was reddit before reddit Yeah.
[00:46:23]  He says that his mind is the equivalent of a graphic chip, graphics chip in a computer.
[00:46:29]  So you're looking for your damn graphics card shortage.
[00:46:33]  Don't blame the Bitcoin miners.
[00:46:34]  Blame Elon Musk's gigantic fucking head.
[00:46:38]  He says for him.
[00:46:39]  But he has a big head.
[00:46:40]  He's got a whole big body now.
[00:46:43]  Yeah, he's...
[00:46:44]  He's not looking good.
[00:46:45]  Well, I think he's stressed.
[00:46:47]  Well, he's stress-eaten?

=== Pauses and Incest (04:12) ===

[00:46:48]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:46:49]  He said he doesn't eat much, though.
[00:46:50]  Well, did you see him at the latest show?
[00:46:54]  About Donald Trump's body type.
[00:46:56]  It actually does look, I thought it was, I showed you a photo of him and he said, oh, is that Trump?
[00:47:00]  literally thought it was trump when liz showed me a photo i mean the man he does not look good So he's obsessed with like science.
[00:47:06]  You all know this if you're listening.
[00:47:07]  You know about Elon Musk.
[00:47:08]  You know that he's obsessed with science fiction.
[00:47:10]  I want to be clear.
[00:47:11]  One of the books, he always also always says he's a reader, but then he says the same books that he was into as a child.
[00:47:17]  Classic CEO moves.
[00:47:19]  Yes, yes.
[00:47:19]  Because they're not reading.
[00:47:20]  And if they are reading, they're just reading like, you know, how to make more money by, you know, Burt Asshole Esquire.
[00:47:29]  Well, you know what else they do is this is, because remember that fucking guy who did the commercial, like the YouTube commercials, like, I read like four books a day, but he just reads the first two lines of like every chapter.
[00:47:38]  That's what CEOs do.
[00:47:41]  Yeah.
[00:47:42]  By the way, I am selling a course on how to become a genius by doing that.
[00:47:47]  One of his favorite books is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
[00:47:51]  I have read that book and every Robert Heinlein book except for like the incest ones.
[00:47:56]  Robert Heinlein was much like Did you read the incest ones?
[00:47:59]  Uh, I read one of the incest ones, but I mean, they're all, this one's an incest one a little bit too, but not like, it's like incest like his dad does incest.
[00:48:06]  Like it's not actually blood relations.
[00:48:10]  Yeah.
[00:48:10]  Well, that's, I mean, I'm sorry.
[00:48:11]  That's just, I mean, that's true.
[00:48:12]  It is incest, but it's not like blood incest.
[00:48:16]  It's porn incest.
[00:48:17]  So yeah, Moon is a Harsh Mistress is about a colony on the moon that breaks away from Earth and hurls large rocks at it in the hopes of constructing an explicitly libertarian society.
[00:48:30]  So that is one of Musk's favorite books.
[00:48:33]  That's The Colonization Guy.
[00:48:35]  Yeah, so he, I mean, he is, again, I have a lot of notes here about how annoying and nerdy Elon Musk is, but I'm going to cut a lot of that out and just tell you this.
[00:48:46]  Imagine the biggest pedant and nerd.
[00:48:51]  Pedant?
[00:48:51]  Pedent.
[00:48:52]  Okay, well, don't be so pedantic.
[00:48:55]  Like that.
[00:48:55]  That was a test to see if Liz was a little bit like Elon Musk herself.
[00:48:59]  But he was a nerd.
[00:49:00]  He was into Commodore 64.
[00:49:01]  He was into programming stuff.
[00:49:03]  He blah, He was a fucking nerd.
[00:49:07]  He this is a quote I do have to include because this is the most annoying shit ever.
[00:49:14]  When his siblings were scared of the dark, he told them not to be afraid because darkness is just the absence of light.
[00:49:22]  Oh my God.
[00:49:24]  That is like the Reddit man.
[00:49:27]  Exactly.
[00:49:27]  Like he is Reddit.
[00:49:29]  Anyways, he does, in his defense, leave South Africa at 17 because he doesn't want to serve in their quote fucking fascist army, which, you know, again, I think a lot of people would like it if he had, but he didn't.
[00:49:41]  It doesn't appear that Elon Musk really was a big fan of apartheid.
[00:49:45]  And he goes to Canada where he chooses a college, Queen's University, which he explicitly chooses because there's a lot of hot women there.
[00:49:52]  Not knocking him for that.
[00:49:54]  I don't know about Canadian party school kind of things, but you know, that is clear that he did that.
[00:50:00]  Meets one of his first romances there, Justine Wilson.
[00:50:04]  And he eventually gets a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania.
[00:50:08]  And after a while there, heads west, out here to California.
[00:50:33]  So I'm going to say a line here that I say on the podcast a lot, which is I want to pause here for a second.
[00:50:38]  Motherfucker.
[00:50:39]  You fucking.
[00:50:40]  I'm putting a quarter in the jar.
[00:50:43]  We should have a little like pause a pause.
[00:50:45]  That doesn't sound right.
[00:50:46]  Pause jar.
[00:50:47]  Pause jar?
[00:50:48]  No.
[00:50:48]  Yeah, Absolutely.
[00:50:50]  We should have a pause jar.
[00:50:52]  Yeah.
[00:50:53]  And so every time you say we should pause, we drop a pause load in it.
[00:51:00]  This is terrible.

=== Pause Jar Moment (05:33) ===

[00:51:01]  Well, hey, we are in California.
[00:51:04]  Yeah.
[00:51:04]  Okay, so I do want to pause here for a second.
[00:51:06]  Yeah.
[00:51:07]  We are in California.
[00:51:08]  Now, Brace, you and I are actually raised in California.
[00:51:13]  And I was thinking about this morning, that this morning, because we said earlier, you know, we're out in LA.
[00:51:20]  We're all here together.
[00:51:21]  I lived in LA for like seven years.
[00:51:24]  You've been down here for a little bit.
[00:51:25]  It's a weird place.
[00:51:26]  It is fucked up.
[00:51:28]  Yeah.
[00:51:29]  And it's like, and LA is very weird.
[00:51:31]  California in general is like occupies a very strange space in the kind of like American landscape.
[00:51:40]  It's weird because it's like in Washington and Oregon, you don't get this same impression because you only get the impression of misery.
[00:51:47]  But in California, it really does feel like you just hit the end of the country, right?
[00:51:51]  Well, you literally, I mean, yeah.
[00:51:53]  You literally have, but it's always been that.
[00:51:55]  Like, I think there's like, I think it was Teddy Roosevelt.
[00:51:59]  He called it like the West of the West.
[00:52:01]  Yeah.
[00:52:01]  Like it's always been this kind of like final frontier.
[00:52:06]  And so many of the kind of vanguard at the front of America's sort of insatiable quest for freedom, like have been in California.
[00:52:17]  There's a reason why I think the state acts as a kind of incubator.
[00:52:23]  Yeah.
[00:52:24]  Or kind of like what we've called like in the past on the podcast as like a proving ground.
[00:52:30]  Yeah.
[00:52:31]  Like I think that it's kind of acted in that way for the rest of the country.
[00:52:35]  We talk about that a little bit sometimes, the Californication of the country.
[00:52:42]  Silicon Valley obviously, you know, plays a role in that.
[00:52:45]  But in the past, it's been, you know, obviously companies like, you know, Rand, all the Rand guys out here, or Hughes Aircraft or JPL.
[00:52:59]  Absolutely.
[00:53:01]  Hollywood.
[00:53:02]  Yeah, I've said it before.
[00:53:04]  I think I've said this before, but it's not a coincidence that America's two biggest exports, the culture industry and death weaponry, come of age within a 25 mile radius of each other, right?
[00:53:19]  And all of that happens here in California.
[00:53:23]  And it's a very weird place.
[00:53:25]  Yeah, yes.
[00:53:26]  Because of that.
[00:53:28]  I mean, the whole country is fucking weird, but I'm telling you, LA is just like, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's the most lunatic zone I've ever been in in my entire life.
[00:53:39]  And I've been in a lot of weird places in this country.
[00:53:41]  Yeah.
[00:53:42]  And it has a way, like I said, it's always at the front of things, you know, whether it's the 60s counterculture moving into the suburbs eventually or, you know, suddenly there's an iPhone in your grandma's pocket.
[00:53:56]  It's always happening here first.
[00:54:00]  The vast open landscape of this state has always been kind of a blank slate on which developers and technologists and movie makers and all those kind of visionaries like continue to project new, like new designs, or you know where one.
[00:54:22]  You feel this kind of like fervent compulsion to just continually remake the future yeah, almost in a cyclical, like psychotic way, and in that sense, like it's also not strange that this is where so many like of cults are.
[00:54:41]  You know yeah yeah, that's, you know that also plays a part in the Tesla story right, and you know we'll get into more of that in episode three.
[00:54:49]  But all of that feels so part of the kind of California mythology.
[00:54:56]  Um, I don't, I mean, I think this is, this is so cheesy and I feel so cheesy for doing this, but Joan Didon does have this really good quote.
[00:55:05]  I kind of hate myself for doing that.
[00:55:07]  Well listen, i'll be real with you.
[00:55:09]  Uh, me and Joan have like a kind of weird history.
[00:55:12]  No dude, I just feel it's so corny, But it is a really good quote.
[00:55:17]  And she says that California is a place in which the mind is troubled by some buried and iradicable suspicion that things had better work here because here beneath that immense bleached sky is where we run out of continent.
[00:55:33]  And it does feel that way.
[00:55:34]  There's that kind of like, we have to make it.
[00:55:37]  We have to make it like no matter what, no matter what, no matter what.
[00:55:40]  And that kind of energy propels what we for whatever reason call innovation in this country.
[00:55:48]  I don't think it's good or healthy.
[00:55:50]  No, I would say on a whole, the ideas and the people and the movements that have come out of California have been, for the vast majority, very harmful to the rest of the world.
[00:56:04]  Well, yeah, because it's also, you know, if you believe that, you know, you are changing the world and that you are one of these visionaries that, you know, you have a kind of like, I mean, at some point, it's like messianic drive to write the future and that you're doing this under the bleach sky of California.
[00:56:24]  And if it's not going to work here, it's not going to work anywhere.
[00:56:27]  Then you fucking don't believe there are rules.
[00:56:29]  Yeah.
[00:56:30]  Because if you're writing the future, then there are what rules could constrain you?

=== Tesla's Unexpected Origin (08:15) ===

[00:56:34]  None.
[00:56:35]  I mean, I've always thought of it as like Charles Manson was just California letting the skirt up a little too high.
[00:56:41]  Absolutely.
[00:56:43]  And, you know, again, to drive that home, I mean, this is central to the Tesla story.
[00:56:49]  Absolutely.
[00:56:50]  You know, something to we, this really does start in Los Angeles, which is odd because Tesla starts in Palo Alto, but we got to start in Los Angeles.
[00:57:00]  And something to understand about Los Angeles is that it's basically like a weird cradle, like topographically, is how you said topographically.
[00:57:09]  It's this weird little like basket.
[00:57:12]  Yeah.
[00:57:13]  Geologically, where it's like, it's like a little bowl, like a cereal bowl like you had this morning.
[00:57:19]  Don't tell them that I eat cereal.
[00:57:21]  Am I wrong?
[00:57:22]  Because I think babies eat cereal.
[00:57:23]  And so I get embarrassed when I'm.
[00:57:24]  You're a big baby Belden.
[00:57:25]  Yeah.
[00:57:27]  Well, that's do not.
[00:57:28]  Okay.
[00:57:29]  That is not okay to say.
[00:57:31]  I'm not big baby Belden.
[00:57:32]  No citation for that one.
[00:57:34]  Please put that up.
[00:57:35]  No citation for that.
[00:57:36]  Okay.
[00:57:37]  So it's this like bowl, right?
[00:57:39]  And on three sides of it are mountains.
[00:57:42]  And on the other side is the ocean.
[00:57:45]  Yes.
[00:57:45]  Okay.
[00:57:47]  And what's weird about it is because of the bowl nature.
[00:57:51]  Oh, the bowl type nature of this city.
[00:57:53]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:57:54]  Like the air just like sits.
[00:57:56]  Yes.
[00:57:56]  Yeah.
[00:57:57]  And you don't really, even though it's, it's strange for a coastal city because it's on the coast, but it doesn't actually get like crazy sea breeze to clean out the air.
[00:58:05]  And so the air just like fucking sits.
[00:58:07]  And this is a huge phenomenon.
[00:58:09]  I mean, it has been a phenomenon.
[00:58:11]  Like Native Americans like remarked on it, I guess.
[00:58:14]  Yeah.
[00:58:15]  But this was a big phenomenon.
[00:58:16]  I mean, even at the, you know, beginning of the century, the advent of the car just totally exacerbated this.
[00:58:23]  Yeah.
[00:58:23]  In 1943, there was a day that the smog got so bad that it got nicknamed Black Wednesday.
[00:58:30]  And it was because it was literally blinding drivers and the paint was blistering off of cars.
[00:58:37]  Like people's lungs burned.
[00:58:39]  Like it was like really fucking serious.
[00:58:41]  And if you know, Los Angeles, 1943, like this is five years, I think about five or six years prior to the LA Freeway Master Plan, which is what built the LA freeway system.
[00:58:53]  Yeah.
[00:58:53]  Like, so this hadn't even been built yet, right?
[00:58:56]  This is literally like dirt roads and buggy cars and, you know, I mean, not buggy cars, but you know what I mean.
[00:59:01]  Yeah.
[00:59:01]  Yeah.
[00:59:01]  But you know, it's the 40s in LA too.
[00:59:03]  It's like a million fucking people in town, people moving here because of the war.
[00:59:06]  Well, a lot of people moving in, yeah.
[00:59:08]  And so a lot of development beginning.
[00:59:10]  But there wasn't the huge highway system that people associate with smog in Los Angeles.
[00:59:17]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:59:18]  So at this point, a lot of people weren't actually sure where the smog was coming from.
[00:59:22]  And they started regulating the power plants and the oil refinery to kind of like curb the emissions.
[00:59:28]  Okay, fair enough.
[00:59:29]  didn't do anything but they couldn't figure out the i'm telling you dude people were stupid until like 2009 or something This is a new thing we figured out.
[00:59:37]  Everyone used to be very stupid.
[00:59:38]  I'm just like, your car is belching black smoke.
[00:59:43]  Well, the thing that got people really concerned was like business leaders, like business leaders, developers.
[00:59:49]  Everyone was like, dude, what the fuck?
[00:59:51]  Like, people are going to leave.
[00:59:52]  And if you know anything about Los Angeles, you know that development is right at the heart of this city story.
[01:00:00]  So all these guys got together, including, I think it was like the publisher of the LA Times or something.
[01:00:05]  And these are the guys that actually passed the Air Pollution Control Act.
[01:00:10]  This is basically the first type of any kind of government regulation on pollution in the nation.
[01:00:16]  And this is kind of like sounds boring history or whatever, but what's really fascinating about this is I think people have a kind of idea about environmental regulations and environmentalists having kind of like a liberal progressive cause or whatever.
[01:00:33]  No, there's industry makes strange bedfellows.
[01:00:37]  And nothing tells us that story more than kind of the California regulators and the history here.
[01:00:45]  Because while California like led the way, it was a very odd coalition.
[01:00:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:00:52]  One of many odd coalitions, it looks like.
[01:00:55]  The problem is, however, that the United States has many states.
[01:01:00]  Listen, that's the way it should remain.
[01:01:04]  So there are business leaders in other parts of the country.
[01:01:08]  Yeah.
[01:01:08]  Right.
[01:01:08]  Yeah.
[01:01:09]  Specifically Detroit.
[01:01:11]  Oh, automakers, right?
[01:01:13]  Yeah.
[01:01:13]  I'm a walking guy, so not, I don't really mess with those guys, but yeah.
[01:01:17]  Now, California was petitioning the federal government to pass federal regulations, but there are like basically no other state in the country at this point had the kind of air pollution problem that California did.
[01:01:34]  Yeah, yeah, because there was like four people in every city and they like ate dirt.
[01:01:38]  Well, okay, but also because of the serious exactly.
[01:01:43]  Yeah, yeah, most of the country is, I will say, stupefyingly flat, especially the parts of the country where cars are made.
[01:01:53]  Because no one was facing the kind of air quality issues that Californians were, federal regulations were always going to be so much less than what California needed, right?
[01:02:05]  Because you got other business leaders, you got other people petitioning the federal government not to be as strong as California.
[01:02:12]  And so what happened was a bunch of California leaders got together to fix that.
[01:02:19]  Leaders like dun-da-da, then Governor Ronald Reagan.
[01:02:29]  Okay, so don't let anybody ever tell you that Gipper didn't do nothing to help you.
[01:02:34]  So at some point, Congress was debating a bunch of federal regulation standards, and Reagan could see that if the federal government adopted lax emission standards, that the California stronger ones would go out the window, right?
[01:02:46]  Because federal regulations always trump state regulations.
[01:02:50]  Yeah.
[01:02:51]  This would be a big problem for continued development in California, continued the probably, you know, more highways being built, I mean, the suburban explosion that was happening, all of that, right?
[01:03:05]  If no one can live in the shitty air, smog, burning lunches.
[01:03:09]  L.A. Every Wednesday, Black Wednesday.
[01:03:12]  Not going to happen.
[01:03:14]  So what is California going to do?
[01:03:16]  How are they going to end up petitioning the government to get higher standards?
[01:03:19]  Oh, they can't.
[01:03:21]  But what they do figure out that they can do is create a very odd coalition to get an exemption so that California can kind of have its own.
[01:03:31]  Now, what do they do to get that?
[01:03:33]  They team up with southern leaders and make a state's rights claim.
[01:03:40]  Yes, we rise again.
[01:03:42]  Yeah.
[01:03:42]  So it's like this strange regional fight where you've got like Midwestern Democrats battling it out with California Republicans.
[01:03:50]  California got like 500,000 people to write angry letters to, which is a lot, by the way.
[01:03:54]  It's a lot, yeah.
[01:03:56]  To write angry letters to Congress demanding that they like allow this exemption to happen.
[01:04:03]  And this is in the 60s too, right?
[01:04:05]  Like when like the civil rights movement, all that stuff is happening in the South.
[01:04:09]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:04:10]  So it might come to, like, that's what I think is probably really surprising to people is that, you know, you think of this kind of like liberal California environmentalism as this like progressive baby, but here California lawmakers literally rallied against the auto giants and the politicians invoking classic states' rights language.
[01:04:27]  Like, are we now to tell California that we don't quite trust our own programs, that big government should do, you know, do it instead?
[01:04:33]  Like, they totally leaned on that.
[01:04:37]  You know.
[01:04:38]  They got a bunch of Southern Democrats to basically team up with them for obvious reasons.
[01:04:44]  Oh, yeah.
[01:04:45]  Something Ronald Reagan would use again later to his advantage.
[01:04:49]  Yeah, totally.

=== California's Electric Car Mandate (15:38) ===

[01:04:50]  And it worked.
[01:04:52]  And so the federal emissions bill included a waiver for California, meaning that California could basically grandfather in its own emissions standards.
[01:05:03]  It had its own little carved out exemption.
[01:05:06]  Yeah.
[01:05:07]  And this is literally the reason why Tesla exists.
[01:05:22]  So, right, you got Los Angeles.
[01:05:24]  You got these decadent little piggies driving around in their big cars with their big tailpipes rolling cold.
[01:05:31]  Well, they weren't actually rolling coal, but rolling coal is badass.
[01:05:34]  Rolling coal around Los Angeles, polluting it up.
[01:05:39]  And you might think to yourself, what is the last solution to the smog problem?
[01:05:48]  Electric cars, right?
[01:05:50]  They run clean.
[01:05:52]  Here's my thing.
[01:05:53]  Okay, wait.
[01:05:54]  Oh, you got your thing.
[01:05:55]  Yeah.
[01:05:56]  How come everyone just says, oh, it's electric.
[01:05:58]  It's fine.
[01:05:59]  Do people know about the electric grid?
[01:06:02]  Yeah, you plug it in.
[01:06:05]  But do people know about coal and how much it contributes to the electric grid?
[01:06:10]  I never understood this.
[01:06:11]  Yeah, it's a little unclear to me because it seems like a lot of the kind of people who like love electric stuff also don't like nuclear power, which like that kind of stuff.
[01:06:19]  And so it's like, I think it's, I mean, it's America, baby.
[01:06:23]  You know, who cares?
[01:06:24]  I can't see it doesn't exist.
[01:06:25]  I mean, look, I'm not making, I'm not passing a judgment.
[01:06:27]  I just never understood the, it just seems like they haven't, you know, like thought about that stuff.
[01:06:33]  Well, you just got to take it another level.
[01:06:34]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:06:35]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:06:35]  Anyway, here's what we need, electric power plants.
[01:06:39]  Yeah, just plug in the power plant.
[01:06:41]  Exactly.
[01:06:41]  To a different power plant.
[01:06:42]  Yeah.
[01:06:43]  Like one of those strips you got.
[01:06:44]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:06:45]  Like we need a Russian nesting doll of power plants so large that we don't even know what powers it.
[01:06:50]  Exactly.
[01:06:51]  And then we can just move on with our lives.
[01:06:53]  Not my fucking problem.
[01:06:55]  Well, so you might be like, we got to fucking invent electric cars, which is a thought that many people had.
[01:07:01]  But you'd be surprised to know, and I'm not going to go really into the history here because I don't know how to drive.
[01:07:07]  And so sometimes you get bored reading about cars.
[01:07:09]  But electric cars have been around basically since cars have been around.
[01:07:13]  1800s, like until about the 20s, there was actually quite a lot of electric cars cruising around American and, of course, German streets.
[01:07:26]  It was like, at some point, there was like actually some pretty big competition for gas-powered cars with electric.
[01:07:34]  But again, that's a problem for another podcast, not mine.
[01:07:40]  We're starting our story with a little guy named Alan Coccone.
[01:07:44]  This guy's cool.
[01:07:46]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:07:47]  I'm a coccone guy.
[01:07:48]  Yeah, Cocconi 2012.
[01:07:49]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:07:50]  You know what's the thing?
[01:07:52]  Liz and I spent a little while trying to figure out how he pronounced his name or like how other people pronounced it.
[01:07:57]  Okay, so I don't know if that's, I think that's how you do it only because I listened to an audiobook and that's how they said his name.
[01:08:02]  But it's Ciccioni.
[01:08:04]  Yeah, but we're not Italian companies.
[01:08:05]  I know, and I would sound stupid.
[01:08:08]  I feel like you get away with it, but I would sound stupid saying that.
[01:08:11]  Can we get a clip from Michael Judge saying it?
[01:08:13]  Alan Coccone.
[01:08:15]  So Coccone is the son of two Italian nuclear physicists who came to America after the Second World War.
[01:08:23]  I know what you're thinking.
[01:08:24]  I tried to find that out.
[01:08:26]  I don't think they are.
[01:08:27]  They're fine.
[01:08:28]  Yeah.
[01:08:28]  I mean, his dad, like, worked on some anti-radar thing, which I'll be real, the Italians did not have the most up-to-date military technology during World War II.
[01:08:36]  That wasn't really their thing.
[01:08:38]  They're passionate about the family.
[01:08:38]  They are focusing on the inside.
[01:08:40]  Exactly.
[01:08:41]  It was a war of the heart, not of the mind for them.
[01:08:45]  Really the body.
[01:08:47]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:08:48]  What a bodies they had.
[01:08:51]  They come to America.
[01:08:52]  They actually do pretty well.
[01:08:53]  You know, I believe the father becomes a professor at Columbia.
[01:08:57]  They experiment with cosmic rays, a bunch of other science stuff that I don't understand and spent too long trying to figure out.
[01:09:05]  I believe the father was actually helped set up SETI, which is, yeah.
[01:09:10]  You know what's interesting with that?
[01:09:11]  Wait, so I don't know if people know what SETI is.
[01:09:14]  It's the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
[01:09:17]  Honestly, though, they should keep searching for terrestrial intelligence because I haven't found anything.
[01:09:21]  No, but what I was going to say is, you know who else was fascinated by this and said and claimed that he could communicate with aliens?
[01:09:29]  Lead home, baby doll.
[01:09:31]  Nikola Tesla.
[01:09:32]  Of course.
[01:09:33]  Nikola Tesla, too.
[01:09:34]  We talked about this earlier.
[01:09:36]  There actually was a big electric car hoax about Nikola Tesla from, I think, the starting of the 60s.
[01:09:42]  But there are a lot of people out there.
[01:09:44]  There are a lot of deranged blogs that I've read that claim Nikola Tesla invented an electric car in like 1920.
[01:09:51]  There's a lot of fun little kisses throughout this story, I have to say.
[01:09:54]  Little cosmic, strange coincidences.
[01:10:00]  So the Cocconis moved to Nerd Central, Switzerland to work at CERN.
[01:10:05]  And again, they did a lot of shit that I'll be real with you, I don't have the like if they were making shake and bake meth in Switzerland, I could explain to you what's going on with it.
[01:10:17]  But they're working on parts for the, on proton-proton scattering and inventing parts now used in the Large Hadron Collider, which is, by the way, because they're trying to summon a demon.
[01:10:28]  But they shun the press.
[01:10:32]  They are definitely not showboats.
[01:10:33]  They're kind of lunch pail scientists working at CERN.
[01:10:37]  And they have a kid named Alan.
[01:10:41]  So Alan grows up in Switzerland.
[01:10:43]  He's also, he got the genetic nerd shit in him.
[01:10:47]  He moves to the U.S. for college, a fantastic student and a little bit of an inventor.
[01:10:52]  And eventually he gets a job at a place called Arrow Environment because of a pterodactyl.
[01:11:01]  What?
[01:11:02]  Well, you know, a pterodactyl.
[01:11:04]  Like the big-ass bird?
[01:11:05]  You know, like a...
[01:11:06]  It's not a bird!
[01:11:08]  For the...
[01:11:08]  Oh!
[01:11:09]  It's a dinosaur.
[01:11:10]  Whoa.
[01:11:12]  I'm sorry.
[01:11:13]  The way I was taught is that if it flies but isn't like doesn't have a person in it, it's a bird.
[01:11:21]  Well, dinosaurs technically, you know.
[01:11:24]  Are all birds.
[01:11:24]  Yeah.
[01:11:25]  Exactly.
[01:11:25]  Which is very weird.
[01:11:26]  I don't like that.
[01:11:27]  Imagine if they went back and redid Jurassic Park, but they all had feathers.
[01:11:30]  Yeah.
[01:11:31]  It's very silly.
[01:11:32]  Stupid.
[01:11:32]  Can you imagine?
[01:11:33]  You got a big bird walking around.
[01:11:34]  Velociraptor comes at me covered in feathers.
[01:11:36]  You want to go to a theme park with just a bunch of big birds.
[01:11:40]  Well, there's a lot of bird heads out there.
[01:11:43]  But birds body birds.
[01:11:44]  It becomes so easy because you're like, well, I don't even need the binoculars.
[01:11:46]  No, but you love a, you like a small, you know, because you, you know, you look through the.
[01:11:50]  Yeah, those are called binoculars.
[01:11:52]  Thank you.
[01:11:52]  He's just doing the thing instead of saying it for the pump.
[01:11:56]  Think of the word.
[01:11:56]  Binoculars.
[01:11:58]  You know, you look through the binoculars for the small bird.
[01:12:00]  Small bird.
[01:12:01]  You're not going bird watching and it's fucking, you know, 300 tons.
[01:12:07]  Yeah.
[01:12:07]  Oh, I see the bird.
[01:12:08]  I woke up.
[01:12:09]  It's in front of me.
[01:12:09]  Yeah, it's a fucking bird.
[01:12:10]  You can't miss it.
[01:12:11]  It's the size of a mouth.
[01:12:12]  Also, can you...
[01:12:15]  No one's going to the bird theme park.
[01:12:17]  No, I'm not going to the bird theme park.
[01:12:18]  I'll tell you what, some days living in LA, the whole thing's like a little bit of a bird thing park.
[01:12:25]  What is that?
[01:12:26]  That's like a horny British guy who moves here to like, you know, I don't like that.
[01:12:30]  Well, I'm just, that's a guy.
[01:12:33]  Anyways, Alan Kokone gets a job at Aerodynamic, which is a defense manufacturer that also makes some other civilian bullshit.
[01:12:40]  But of course, it's LA, so they fucking do everything.
[01:12:42]  And they are making a pterodactyl.
[01:12:45]  He doesn't want to work on weapons, he says.
[01:12:47]  He wants to work on pterodactyl.
[01:12:50]  And so he gets a fucking job there making a big-ass pterodactyl for the National Air and Space Museum IMAX movie.
[01:12:58]  They're impressed by this.
[01:13:00]  They give him a permanent job and assign him the task of making the only car that Liz has ever driven, the Sunracer.
[01:13:08]  Now, this thing is cool.
[01:13:11]  It's fucking baller.
[01:13:12]  It's weird looking.
[01:13:14]  Yes.
[01:13:16]  Yeah, it's it's like it's like it looks like a cartoon alien car Yeah, yeah.
[01:13:22]  You know, and it doesn't look like a car a human should be in.
[01:13:25]  Yeah, it's very weird.
[01:13:27]  But it's very cool.
[01:13:29]  It worked.
[01:13:30]  It's a solar-powered race car.
[01:13:32]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:13:33]  At the time, I think they're actually still doing this, but at the time, I mean, this is a little less impressive now.
[01:13:40]  They were these contests held around the world, and I believe this one was held in the Australian Outback, where different companies, including the Hughes Aircraft Company, which is who built the Sunracer, owned, I believe, by GM at this point, and Aero Environment work together to build a car that is entirely powered by solar panels, essentially.
[01:14:02]  Like it can be just powered by going.
[01:14:06]  And Kokoni is like crucial in inventing some of the technology that goes into this fucking thing.
[01:14:10]  He builds it, I mean, along, of course, the team, in like eight months, and this fucking thing smokes it.
[01:14:16]  Fucking wins like a motherfucker.
[01:14:18]  Yeah, he comes up with this thing called the inverter, which converts direct current to alternating current.
[01:14:24]  Now, I want to be clear.
[01:14:26]  This is still used in Tesla today.
[01:14:28]  Yeah.
[01:14:29]  Because spoiler alert, Kokoni is crucial in this company called Tesla.
[01:14:35]  Yeah, and that is a little inversion too on the classic Australian combination of AC DC.
[01:14:41]  It's actually DC AC.
[01:14:43]  He flips it on his head.
[01:14:46]  So he's also crucial in inventing a type of regenerative braking that's still used in Teslas today.
[01:14:52]  It's not, of course, the first instance of regenerative braking at all, but his application of it in the Sunracer is still an application that's essentially being built upon by Tesla today.
[01:15:04]  So this thing was the Sunracer was a fucking hit.
[01:15:08]  Yeah.
[01:15:08]  Like a huge hit.
[01:15:10]  Fucking massive.
[01:15:11]  People love the Sunracer.
[01:15:14]  I mean, they toured the goddamn thing around the country.
[01:15:16]  They made a movie about the fucking thing.
[01:15:19]  I mean, it was every, and I'll be real with you.
[01:15:22]  1989, I was still in my dad's balls.
[01:15:25]  But if I was a fucking school child at this point, my first apartment, if I was a school child at that fucking age and I saw this motherfucking car, I'd be like, what the fuck is this goddamn thing?
[01:15:38]  I love this.
[01:15:38]  Yeah, it looks like a cartoon.
[01:15:40]  Exactly.
[01:15:41]  It looks exactly like a cartoon.
[01:15:43]  And it is a goddamn hit.
[01:15:45]  So GM is so impressed by his work on this fucking thing, they hire this guy to work on their electric car.
[01:15:54]  So thanks to the kind of Sunracer being this huge publicity stunt for GM, they like continue to do more and more of these kind of big electric events.
[01:16:03]  They debut a new car at the LA Auto Show in 1990 called the Impact, which is another electric vehicle.
[01:16:11]  And like people go nuts.
[01:16:13]  Yeah.
[01:16:14]  They go nuts for it.
[01:16:16]  GM did such a good job with the hype of this car and the response was so positive that the chairman of GM at the time, Robert B. Smith, Robert Smith.
[01:16:28]  He announces, by the way, against the advice of his closest advisors, which never goes on.
[01:16:35]  Never listen to your advisors.
[01:16:36]  Well, he showed up because he announces that GM would mass produce the car by the mid-90s.
[01:16:43]  And California regulators, who are so like, you know, dry mouth heaving from all the smog in LA, desperate for an electric car, are like, fantastic.
[01:16:55]  This is amazing.
[01:16:56]  We're going to make it so that everyone has to make electric cars.
[01:17:01]  And here's the problem.
[01:17:04]  No one could make electric cars.
[01:17:06]  Yeah.
[01:17:07]  Yeah, that is slightly the problem.
[01:17:09]  What they pass is what is called the ZEV mandate, which is the zero emissions vehicle mandate.
[01:17:17]  Now, remember how I mentioned that California has a waiver program?
[01:17:23]  Yeah.
[01:17:23]  So they were able to pass this even though there's no federal regulations.
[01:17:29]  California was able to, through the waiver program, pass a mandate that all auto manufacturers would have to sell certain percentages of electric vehicles at certain times in order to, in their mind, slowly transition or quickly transition the state to like all-electric fleet.
[01:17:52]  California has this weight to throw around because California is one of the biggest states and it is filled with psycho regulators, including the kind of people that make it so that you have to have a fucking fin or some bullshit goddamn handle on your fucking gun, which you can take off in two seconds if you're going to do a mass shooting and you can only have 10 round magazines, even though you can just drill out the little thing at the bottom and order a new spring and make it a 30 round magazine.
[01:18:16]  It's fucking stupid.
[01:18:19]  Which is like their electric car mandate.
[01:18:22]  Well, the other weird twist about this thing is that other states are allowed to opt in to California's regulations if they so choose.
[01:18:30]  Okay.
[01:18:31]  I just want to, we're going to leave that out there because it is true now that I think it's like 13 states have joined in the ZEV mandate, which by the way still exists.
[01:18:40]  But okay, so like I said, the goal of this mandate was to reduce all the local air pollution, which we've talked about.
[01:18:48]  And because GM did such a great job with their fancy Schmancy auto show, they're just like, fuck it, we'll do it.
[01:18:55]  Now, the ZEV is kind of a novel idea.
[01:19:00]  Many podcasts have posed the question, what is neoliberalism?
[01:19:07]  Yeah.
[01:19:09]  Many have tried.
[01:19:10]  What I will say is the ZEV is a great example because what it does is says, ah, what if we incentivize the market to sort all of this out by requiring the sale of vehicles with entirely different technology than the gasoline vehicles on the road currently that are smogging everything up, right?
[01:19:29]  The idea is slowly increase the percentage required to just gradually transition everything to electric.
[01:19:38]  Yeah.
[01:19:39]  Well, this obviously worked.
[01:19:40]  I mean, I drove here in a Tesla today.
[01:19:42]  It did not work.
[01:19:44]  I want to highlight one line in the ZEV that we will return to several times over the next some odd hours, which is, quote, small volume manufacturers shall not be required to meet the percentage ZEV requirements.
[01:19:58]  However, small volume manufacturers may earn and market credits for ZEVs they produce.
[01:20:06]  Huh.
[01:20:07]  Okay.
[01:20:08]  Right.
[01:20:09]  That seems like it might be important later.
[01:20:12]  So does this make sense?
[01:20:13]  So the idea is that all the auto manufacturers are required to not just produce, but sell a certain amount of electric vehicles in the state of their total sales, right?

=== Electric Vehicle Mandates (03:03) ===

[01:20:29]  And if they do not, you know, if they exceed those, if they're small manufacturers and they exceed those percentages, then they can kind of print credits that, as they've carved out in this mandate, that they may then sell or market to other manufacturers.
[01:20:48]  So say I'm a small manufacturer and I build, you know, my entire fleet, let's say, is electric cars.
[01:20:56]  And so I vastly overshoot the mandate percentage and I have all these vouchers.
[01:21:01]  I can then sell them to you, who is a big gas guzlin who makes the, you know, a Hummer H2 in yellow with a bunch of fucking bikini babes in it, car manufacturer.
[01:21:15]  I can sell you my extra credits and you don't actually have to, you can use those instead of building electric cars.
[01:21:22]  Yes.
[01:21:23]  That is and meet the regulatory requirements.
[01:21:26]  Absolutely.
[01:21:27]  I've already exceeded my regulatory requirements for using ableist language on this show, but I'd like to say again, that is fucking retarded.
[01:21:35]  Well, the worst part is that from like, so from 1990 to 2003, the thing that governs this thing is called the California Air Resources Board, which is called CARB.
[01:21:46]  Oh, okay.
[01:21:46]  I get it.
[01:21:47]  Works on a couple of levels.
[01:21:48]  Actually, I thought that was very cute because I thought those were illegal in California.
[01:21:53]  Uh, they're the ones who set the stringency of the mandate.
[01:21:56]  Um, the main idea is that 10 of all new car sales in the state were to be electric by 2003.
[01:22:06]  The problem is the technology literally was not advanced enough.
[01:22:10]  It it?
[01:22:10]  It wasn't like whatever the impact prior to that.
[01:22:14]  The Sunracer these are all show cars.
[01:22:16]  Yeah, I mean, the Sunracer was a goddamn solar panel race car.
[01:22:19]  Yeah, it's so for consumers exactly, and and the impact was, was pretty impressive.
[01:22:25]  But the technology, I mean, here's the thing is, at these auto shows, car manufacturers show off all kinds of shit and this guy just got a little too juiced up from the accolades and was like this thing's ready to fucking roll out.
[01:22:36]  Uh, I mean, the technology was coming along, but it certainly was nowhere near enough to to mandate these percentages at the time.
[01:22:44]  Yeah, and so basically, you know, regardless of what these agencies said, like this mandate is what you would call technology forcing.
[01:22:50]  Yeah, because it's attempting to force technology into being produced, regardless of maybe what's possible, what's available.
[01:23:01]  Yeah um because again, because this did not exist and the technology was not there yet.
[01:23:09]  CARB CARB.
[01:23:11]  I'm sorry, i'm just gonna keep calling CARB Manufacturers CARB Subway.
[01:23:15]  Jimmy Jones, THE Resource Board okay okay, I thought you were about to say CAR Manufacturers, NO CARB.
[01:23:21]  The THE Regulatory Board, they had to backtrack a bunch on the regulations, like multiple times over the years.
[01:23:27]  Classico um, there was a ton of court orders to put the Z Evs on hold.

=== Regulators and the EV1 Saga (02:36) ===

[01:23:32]  Uh, c a regulators like they also really latched on to Gm's Ev1, which is a subject of the very bizarre and does not hold up well documentary.
[01:23:43]  Who Killed The Electric Car?
[01:23:45]  I want to, I want to be clear if anyone has seen that, because I think, like a lot of people have seen, that it's sort of like loose change for people who uh, smoke like a, this indica instead of sativa.
[01:23:57]  I don't really know the difference between those two.
[01:23:58]  So, but it's, it's a, it's a.
[01:24:01]  It's a documentary that a certain kind of person likes dude Martin Sheen is the is the voice, the narrator, to give you, to give the listeners at home an idea of kind of the vibe the, the lesbians, in that they're very cute well they're, but they're, so they seem like actors, central cast, totally uh, but they were, they were truly, I mean uh, incredible to watch?
[01:24:25]  Yeah it's.
[01:24:27]  It's a very weird documentary.
[01:24:28]  Though I think we both did re-watch some of it, I have to say it.
[01:24:32]  Yeah, it doesn't hold up.
[01:24:33]  I watched the whole motherfucker.
[01:24:34]  But there is a kind of you did yeah, The kind of like late 90s, early 2000s vibe of celebrity environmentalism mixed with the Martin Sheen narration and the kind of like, you know, electric Rav 4.
[01:24:50]  That, that kind of culture and like, um, that kind of politics, it's funny.
[01:24:56]  They keep, they always, they, they, I kept hearing the classic line, we have to reduce our dependency on foreign oil.
[01:25:04]  I was like, damn, I haven't heard that in a long time.
[01:25:06]  Now we're energy independent baby America.
[01:25:09]  That's MAGA now.
[01:25:09]  You can't say that.
[01:25:10]  Well, I am fucking MAGA now.
[01:25:13]  But, but yeah, that, that is, it's very much of its time.
[01:25:17]  And, you know, it's interesting too, because it's like that, I think a lot of people sort of think of that time period of like the late 90s, early 2000s, kind of up until the exceeding the Iraq war as this like politics was on like for like the left liberal whatever was like consumerism meeting environmentalism, right?
[01:25:40]  Like everything is ad busters or like a whole earth catalog combination of the two.
[01:25:49]  And like that was, it's, that, that makes it so of its time.
[01:25:52]  Yeah.
[01:25:52]  And I mean, this is the culture that Tesla literally emerges out of.
[01:25:56]  Yeah.
[01:25:57]  I mean, that movie is like pretty mad corny, but it basically posits that GM killed the EV1.
[01:26:04]  Yeah.
[01:26:04]  Spoiler alert.
[01:26:05]  Well, they do kill the motherfucker.
[01:26:07]  They kill the shit out of the EV1.

=== Ac Propulsion's Electric Revolution (13:38) ===

[01:26:09]  Well, yeah, but the movie says that they, that GM did it because they just wanted to produce more Hummers.
[01:26:15]  Yeah.
[01:26:16]  But that's, and like the Gus Guzzler.
[01:26:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:26:19]  Gas Guzzler.
[01:26:20]  I do remember the rollout of those Hummer H2s.
[01:26:22]  I was like, yeah, I've still never ridden in one.
[01:26:24]  Yeah.
[01:26:24]  They're probably cheap now, right?
[01:26:26]  Well, they're making electric ones now.
[01:26:27]  How lame.
[01:26:30]  But they basically say that like it's like this idea that like the that Detroit just did not want to make electric cars because they just wanted to shove like oil down everyone's throat.
[01:26:42]  But the automakers were frustrated that the tech wasn't there.
[01:26:46]  And it's specifically the battery tech that wasn't there.
[01:26:49]  California had justified this aggressive mandate because of this huge song and dance that GM did with the Impact and the EB1.
[01:26:58]  And they just assumed that if GM could do it at this show, then it was totally fine.
[01:27:03]  No, it was fake.
[01:27:04]  It was for show.
[01:27:07]  And the reality is like it was such a niche market that ironically, it may have been successful if only GM like pursued the electric and they were able to carve out a niche thing and kind of like segment off their own production capabilities so they could justify the kind of capital requirements that went into the R ⁇ D to push this in better because they had this like small little thing and it was just them doing it.
[01:27:35]  But ironically, like because California and these fucking like self-satisfied regulators and little politicos mandated that all the companies compete with each other on this new tech to force it into existence, the tiny market could never be viable.
[01:27:55]  It could never make any sense.
[01:27:57]  And so it ended up being this huge money suck.
[01:28:01]  It ruined GM's strategy.
[01:28:02]  It handcuffed all of the companies together.
[01:28:05]  And so the whole thing, because of the mandate, like the whole thing had to be scrapped.
[01:28:11]  But the one thing that ZEV did do is really help keep like little tiny guys in business.
[01:28:18]  And one of those companies, notably, was AC Propulsion.
[01:28:35]  So remember Caconi?
[01:28:36]  Alan Cocone?
[01:28:38]  Alan Coccone.
[01:28:41]  My little Italian friend here.
[01:28:43]  So he worked, of course, on the Impact that EV1.
[01:28:46]  He split GM.
[01:28:47]  I mean, he was actually the guy that brought, he was brought in to build the electric drivetrain on that motherfucker.
[01:28:53]  But after a year after the 1990 auto show, he's out.
[01:28:57]  He doesn't want to work there anymore.
[01:28:58]  I think they're changing too much of his shit.
[01:29:01]  He doesn't, and that's a common theme with people from now on in this story.
[01:29:06]  We're going to see a lot of people who invent something that's pretty simple, and then an insane person comes in and changes a lot of things about it to make it work worse.
[01:29:15]  So he clashes with GM over a bunch of different shit.
[01:29:19]  He takes off and he starts a company called AC Propulsion, like Liz said, with a couple of other battery freaks.
[01:29:24]  That's kind of how I think of these guys.
[01:29:27]  So he hooks up with this former Chrysler employee called Tom Gage, and they spend quite a while working on various like basically electric projects.
[01:29:35]  And the two main things they come up with, and this takes them quite a while to do that, are a box that converts your Scion into an electric Scion and a little funky car called TaZero.
[01:29:52]  The T-Zero.
[01:29:53]  No, the Ta-Zero.
[01:29:55]  It's Italian.
[01:29:55]  It's the Tazero.
[01:29:57]  I don't know why I don't know why these motherfuckers do me a favor right now listener Google on your little cell phone there, it's T-Z-E-R-O.
[01:30:13]  Yeah, the T-Zero.
[01:30:15]  It's a fun little car.
[01:30:16]  It's this Zero.
[01:30:17]  It's supposed to be Zero.
[01:30:18]  It's a divorced guy's sports car.
[01:30:21]  Okay, don't do a spoiler right then.
[01:30:23]  Yes, it's a divorce guy.
[01:30:24]  It literally does become a divorced guy's sports car.
[01:30:27]  Yes, invent this fucking electric car.
[01:30:29]  And this is, I mean, listen, like Liz was saying, they pulled all these other goddamn EVs.
[01:30:34]  You know, GM pulled all the electric vehicles.
[01:30:37]  They pulled the EV-1.
[01:30:38]  That shit's off the street.
[01:30:40]  Big Blamo smash'ems.
[01:30:42]  Bye-bye.
[01:30:44]  This thing is...
[01:30:45]  First of all, why are people driving yellow sports cars in the 90s?
[01:30:49]  That was like a huge thing then.
[01:30:50]  The T-Zero is always yellow.
[01:30:53]  Why yellow?
[01:30:54]  I don't know.
[01:30:55]  It's not a great color.
[01:30:56]  It's the color of urine.
[01:30:57]  It's an odd...
[01:30:58]  Maybe it was like...
[01:30:59]  That's like a Lamborghini kind of throwback.
[01:31:02]  I know, but still, I don't get it.
[01:31:04]  I might think.
[01:31:04]  No way.
[01:31:05]  No one would confuse it with the Lamborghini.
[01:31:07]  Certainly not.
[01:31:08]  It is a sports car, though.
[01:31:10]  And these guys are producing them in very, very limited quantities.
[01:31:14]  I mean, at this point, AC Propulsion is not, and it's still around, I believe.
[01:31:19]  AC Propulsion is not a car company.
[01:31:21]  They are a company that kind of makes a few cars in very, very, very limited, basically handmade numbers, and then does, I mean, the bulk of their work is this like electric box conversion for other normal cars.
[01:31:37]  But at this time, you know, we're talking, we're up to the early 2000s here.
[01:31:41]  What's happened in the early 2000s in a little place called Silicon Valley, Liz?
[01:31:47]  Tech Companies.com.
[01:31:49]  Dot-com boom.
[01:31:50]  Oh, yeah.
[01:31:51]  Boom and bust.
[01:31:52]  Tets.com.
[01:31:53]  Oh, everywhere.
[01:31:54]  Yeah.
[01:31:54]  And a little fucking freak named Martin Eberhardt.
[01:31:58]  Actually, my bad, Martin.
[01:32:00]  You kind of got the short end of a lot of sticks.
[01:32:02]  So I'm not going to call you a photo freak.
[01:32:04]  He's still weird as fuck, though.
[01:32:06]  Like, no disrespect, but you are weird as hell if you are listening to this.
[01:32:10]  He gets divorced from his wife.
[01:32:12]  Okay.
[01:32:13]  Classic Martin Eberhard move.
[01:32:16]  And he's driving around.
[01:32:18]  Actually, he gets divorced from his wife, and then he does, he spends the next eight months researching the best way to power an electric vehicle.
[01:32:27]  He had sold a e-reader company for $128 million.
[01:32:32]  Oh, yeah.
[01:32:33]  Which is insane.
[01:32:35]  Yeah.
[01:32:35]  Nouveau Reader, which is a leash shit.
[01:32:39]  Yeah, it doesn't sound.
[01:32:40]  No, I don't believe anyone is reading off a Nouveau Reader today.
[01:32:46]  But he's driving around.
[01:32:47]  He sees all these Scions, or excuse me, these Priuses, which he calls dorkmobiles, which cocaine buddy.
[01:32:54]  Parked in people's cars next to like parking people's drivers, next to like Porsche's.
[01:32:58]  And his brain is like, what if I could combine these?
[01:33:01]  Like, I'm at the Prius, I'm at the Porsche, I'm at the combination Prius Porsche.
[01:33:05]  Exactly.
[01:33:05]  Yes.
[01:33:06]  The man decides that he needs something that's sporty.
[01:33:12]  That's a little sexy.
[01:33:14]  That can maybe help him meet a new woman to divorce several years later.
[01:33:18]  He needs a sports car that's electric.
[01:33:22]  He sees one of these yellow sports cars buzzing around with a very limited range.
[01:33:28]  And he goes down and he fucking talks to these motherfuckers at AC Propulsion and says, listen, fellas, I will give you $150,000 if you use a lithium-ion battery.
[01:33:38]  All right, that's not exactly how it went down.
[01:33:40]  But he agrees to invest $150K in AC propulsion if they'll try out powering their cars with lithium-ion batteries.
[01:33:48]  Now, I just want to, okay.
[01:33:50]  It's not just the idea of using lithium-ion batteries.
[01:33:53]  It's literally taking a bunch of old e-book reader batteries, piling them together, and then powering a car.
[01:34:01]  Sounds fine to me.
[01:34:03]  People have done crazier stuff in the past.
[01:34:05]  But Kokone is like, dude, I don't want to build a fucking car company.
[01:34:09]  He's like, I'm a nerd.
[01:34:11]  Yeah, he's like, no, he's just Mr. Brainiac.
[01:34:14]  He's like, I would like to tinker, sir.
[01:34:16]  Please don't disrupt that.
[01:34:19]  But Everhard like literally does because he's Silicon Valley guy.
[01:34:22]  Fuck yeah.
[01:34:22]  He's freshly divorced.
[01:34:24]  Yeah.
[01:34:24]  He needs a new company.
[01:34:25]  We've said this motherfucker's divorce like 10 times.
[01:34:28]  If you are marketing central to the story, look, there's a lot of divorces in this story.
[01:34:33]  A lot of divorces happen.
[01:34:34]  This is actually the least acrimonious divorce I could find in this whole many pages of notes about it.
[01:34:40]  But Everhard hooks up with this guy, Mark Tarpenning, who's his buddy.
[01:34:44]  This guy worked for a little company called Textron.
[01:34:48]  Oh, it sounds good.
[01:34:49]  Well, they make just armored cars in Saudi Arabia.
[01:34:55]  Okay.
[01:34:57]  Sounds good.
[01:34:58]  I have this in the notes.
[01:35:01]  It has no bearing on the story, but they played Magic Gathering together many times.
[01:35:05]  There's a lot of gaming that goes on throughout the history of Tesla.
[01:35:09]  And this is the first instance of gaming that I can find.
[01:35:14]  But they are super fucking juiced on this.
[01:35:17]  They're like, we're going to build a car company.
[01:35:18]  They'd work together, I think, at Nouveau Reader at some point.
[01:35:22]  And so they go to the 2003 auto show in Los Angeles with Tom Gage in tow.
[01:35:29]  And they meet the Lotus car manufacturer.
[01:35:32]  So Lotus is like a British, like fancy car.
[01:35:34]  I mean, it's like where you're like, well, I need to go with my mate who works at BBC and go to the fucking hospital.
[01:35:41]  And then, well, you know what happens next.
[01:35:44]  And no one catches me for a long time, even though I'm friends with everybody and everybody knows about it.
[01:35:51]  That's what you do in your Lotus.
[01:35:52]  You feel me on that?
[01:35:54]  Yeah, it's a very niche, rich guy car.
[01:35:56]  Exactly.
[01:35:57]  And so they're like, listen, Lotus, give us the body of the Lotus Elise.
[01:36:02]  We'll make an electric car with it.
[01:36:04]  And we need, because they can't manufacture their own cars.
[01:36:06]  They don't have a factory here.
[01:36:08]  So they basically employ Lotus or contract to Lotus to build this electric car on the body of an Elise.
[01:36:14]  I mean, it's literally the body of an Elise that they just put an electric battery in.
[01:36:19]  So, okay, they're going to license this electric drivetrain from AC Propulsion, right?
[01:36:24]  They're basically going to To two different places.
[01:36:30]  They're going to get the fucking electric shit from goddamn AC Propulsion, and they're going to get the car itself and the manufacturing of the car from Lotus.
[01:36:37]  And so, with this in tow, Mark and Martin start their little company called Tesla.
[01:36:44]  But wait, I thought Elon started Tesla.
[01:36:47]  Well, he's not exactly in the picture yet.
[01:36:49]  Mark and Martin are rolling around Silicon Valley looking for some money bags.
[01:36:53]  They run into two close friends of the podcast, the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who are like, listen, we're a little illiquid right now.
[01:37:03]  But our friend Elon has a lot of money.
[01:37:07]  Why don't you hit his ass up?
[01:37:09]  So over email, because these guys are fucking, who's using email in 2004, by the way?
[01:37:13]  Over email, JB Strobel, a friend of Elon's, makes the introduction to Mark and Martin.
[01:37:20]  And the rest is history.
[01:37:22]  Well, technically, it's also going to happen literally later in the podcast series we're doing on this, but it's from our vantage point right now in the future of 2021, it is history.
[01:37:34]  and elon musk with that fateful email founds tesla next time on true non presents the lamest show on earth autonomous cross-country trips from new york to los angeles and
[01:38:03]  And then poof, no one's like, hey, wait, what happened to that?
[01:38:06]  The only supercharged network across this land is when you're on heroin.
[01:38:09]  You're like, hey, can I use like the charger, like the power station in here at a Starbucks?
[01:38:14]  But the crucial point is like if people really wanted that to exist, it would have to come from the government.
[01:38:20]  We don't have enough time to get into the Hyperloop because I'm going to get a little too hyper loopy myself.
[01:38:24]  What I think he should have done is just purchase the rights to the shitty men in media list.
[01:38:28]  Hey, here's a rating.
[01:38:29]  Rongo.
[01:38:30]  I mean, we got the robot taxis.
[01:38:32]  We got the fucking SpaceX making the ventilators.
[01:38:35]  I mean, yeah, his little submarine.
[01:38:37]  The man's a moron.
[01:38:38]  Yeah, it's an incredible, incredible skill.
[01:38:41]  Fact check is stop being a bitch about it.
[01:38:43]  Okay, ha ha ha.
[01:38:45]  Who's the pedant now?
[01:38:47]  I know your CPU.
[01:38:48]  I know about your house parties.
[01:38:50]  I know about the cakes.
[01:38:52]  I know your secrets.
[01:38:53]  I talked to a couple of people.
[01:38:55]  My man loves to fake a presentation.
[01:38:57]  And what he would do here is he would actually just build these fake supercomputers.
[01:39:02]  There's a quote here that I'd like you to read in your least racist accent.
[01:39:06]  My mentality is that of a samurai.
[01:39:09]  He does have the psychopaths' work mentality.
[01:39:12]  He is a brand freak.
[01:39:14]  And his brand ideas fucking suck dick and balls.
[01:39:18]  Who names the kid Kimball?
[01:39:19]  Is that a name?
[01:39:20]  I don't drive.
[01:39:21]  I don't know how to drive.
[01:39:22]  No, me either.
[01:39:23]  So I want to be clear here.
[01:39:25]  Thickhead of hair up here, right?
[01:39:26]  But then something strange happened in this next venture.
[01:39:31]  XCOM.
[01:39:33]  No, X.com.
[01:39:34]  Okay.
[01:39:35]  Which stupidest thing I've ever heard.
[01:39:38]  Exactly.
[01:39:38]  I'm sorry.
[01:39:39]  This dude rules.
[01:39:41]  This is the greatest scam I've ever fucking heard.
[01:39:44]  You can just say you made a car and people will give you Money