I want to set up the journey we're going to take today.
And to do that, I actually want to play this exchange I had on the show not too long ago.
This was at the beginning of February.
It was a couple of weeks into the Trump presidency and Elon Musk's project to radically alter the federal government.
And I was speaking with Post reporter Fez Siddiqui about what Musk was doing with his new power through the US Doge Service.
Thinking about what all this means.
What is Musk's goal here?
You said that he wants to extremely curtail the amount of spending in the federal government,
that he wants the number of people in the federal government to be smaller,
that he wants to weed out Democrats or loyalists to anyone other than Trump from working in the federal government.
But to what end?
What is he trying to achieve here?
So I'll start with to what end?
Mars.
Really?
I am not joking.
I mean,
he has said very plainly
that he believes this sort of strangulation by regulation is limiting the potential scope of humanity's achievements and preventing us from ever getting to Mars.
And that can be seen as sort of like the high level goal.