Tech Won't Save Us - The Year in Tech w/ Jathan Sadowski & Brian Merchant

Episode Date: December 24, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Jathan Sadowski and Brian Merchant to reflect on the year in tech, discuss the worst people in Silicon Valley, and share what they’ll be keeping an eye on in 2026. Jathan Sadowski is the author of The Mechanic and the Luddite, co-host of This Machine Kills, and a Senior Lecturer at Monash University. Brian Merchant is the author of Blood in the Machine and writes a newsletter of the same name. Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon. The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Also mentioned in this episode: Visit Francesca Bria’s useful Authoritarian Stack Trump signs an executive order to keep states from implementing their own AI legislation The Trump administration is gutting the Department of Education, climate science programs, and public health Disney and OpenAI have reached a billion dollar deal Bernie Sanders calls for a moratorium on AI data centre construction

Mark Zuckerberg got 1,223 votes. There was only two votes between them. Oh, my God. Voting matters, folks. Voting matters. You could be the deciding vote in a horse race election. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Spirous Marks, and this week we have a little bit of a different episode.

Usually we're doing interviews or occasionally, you know, I might do a commentary on a particular topic. But this week, I'm presenting to you a conversation that I had with Jason Sudowski and Brian Merchant to kind of wrap up the year in tech. So, you know, it's going to be a bit more conversational than the episodes that we usually have on the show. but I'm sure you're still going to enjoy it because we really get into some of the biggest stories that we think happened this year in the tech industry and in society more generally the effects of those things and also the issues that we will be watching going into 2026 if you're interested in what might be on the top of our radars. And of course, if you follow Tech Won't Save Us on social media, you will probably have noticed that we were running

a worst person in tech contest for 2025, something that we do. every single year. And so this live stream happened last week for Patreon supporters, but you will also, you know, hear us discuss who we think the worst person in tech is and who ultimately won that contest. If you follow us on social media, you will already know the winner. And just briefly, of course, if you're not familiar, Jason Sadowski is the author of The Mechanic and the Ludite, co-host of this machine kills and a senior lecturer at Monash University, while Brian Merchant is the author of Blood in the Machine, and writes a newsletter of the same name. You can, of course, us find out more about all of that in the show notes now just as this week is a bit of a

different episode i also wanted to give you a few heads-ups i guess as we go into 2026 you know not any big changes to the show or anything like that but just to let you know as i mentioned in last week's episode i am going to record a mailbag episode so if you do have any questions that you wanted to ask me about tech issues or things like that then you can certainly send a question to Mailbag at Techwontsave.us, or if you're a Patreon supporter, send me a message on Patreon, and your question might be included

in that mailbag episode if you're interested in doing that. So I look forward to your questions and what you want to ask me. And on top of that, this year has been a really busy one, and, you know, there has been not just a lot going on

kind of news-wise, but as you will likely know, I was working on a book, and it was a very busy year on my end as well. So the first two episodes in 2026, which I believe are on January 1st and January 8th, just a heads up that we'll be running either some popular interviews from the past or a recording of the talk I've given or something like that. And then new interviews will resume basically in mid-January, January, January 15th, I believe will be the first fully new episode then. So there will still be content in your feed every Thursday, but maybe it'll be something that you have encountered before. I'm sure that you understand, especially this time of year. that we're all looking to try to take a bit of a break as we prepare for the year ahead. So with that said, I hope that you enjoy this conversation about the year that we've had in

2025. The subject matter is not always the greatest, but it can be good to kind of recap some of these things, I think, and try to take stock of where we are in this moment. And of course, if you do enjoy the podcast, if you do enjoy this conversation, make sure to give the show a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And of course, this show is only possible because of support from listeners like you. And so if you want to become a supporter to make sure I can keep doing this work, keep conducting these interviews to educate people on the tech industry,

what it's up to, to have these critical conversations while getting ad-free episodes and even stickers if you support at a certain level, you can join supporters like Nikita from Oakland, Zoe from Sweden, and Nick in Denver by going to Patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us, where you can become a support. as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this end of year. Tech won't save us live stream. If you're here for the worst person in tech results, you'll need to wait another hour before the

voting closes for that, and we'll get into seeing who actually won between Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. They always seem to get to the end of this. So, you know, we'll see who comes up on top this year and who takes the crown for 2025. The biggest ghoul has always seemed to always seem to get there. But I'm very happy to have you joining me this evening and of course my two guests who I'll introduce in just the minute. Unfortunately, Edong Wazo Jr. couldn't join us. He is under the weather today, but still two fantastic guests to break down the year in tech and all the crazy shit that has happened right from the start of Donald Trump coming back to power, his alliance with the tech industry, and then everything rolling through the year, you know,

right to where we are right now. It's been a wild one. you know, the tech industry and these tech billionaires just seem to be getting worse and worse and worse. But without further ado, let's get to it. Let's bring in our guests. We'll start with our friend from Australia who's joining us from, at least from where I am, the other side of the world, maybe where you are, he's quite a bit closer. But Jathan Sadowski, of course, co-host of the This Machine Kills podcast, but also just a fantastic kind of researcher and very insightful kind of critic of the tech industry and, you know, so many different aspects of this. Of course, he was on Tech Won't Save Us earlier this year to talk about his new book,

which is just fantastic. I highly recommend Jathan. Welcome to the live stream. Great to have you. Absolutely. Happy to be here. Holding it down for TMK. Edson's his regards, but you know, sometimes you eat a bad sandwich and it, uh, it's be the wrong way. It happens to all of us, you know. And of course, your book there right in the background, where you all see it yeah always be plugging of course you know you never leave it out it's fantastic

great to have you join us of course you know you get a pass for not wearing a holiday sweater because the temperatures where you are are quite a bit more than you know my part of the world of course uh maybe i'll unveil it now or no we'll wait till brian comes in and then we can talk about my nice holiday sweater yes i gave uh you know a hint there and of course if you looked at the at the little graphic i made you'll know who else is coming of course the guy who always joins me for these for these end of year live streams and you know who i even had a podcast with for a little while earlier this year brian merchant you know the author of fantastic books like the one device and blood in the machine and now the newsletter blood in the machine now

if he's gone indie and he's a proper content creator brian merchant how dare you I'm an esteemed journalist and author, very prestigious. I do not create content just before this rewind, you know, three minutes ago, and I was frantically trying to figure out how to port this content onto my newsletter. And we were debating how I can best commodify this particular experience for my audience. so yeah i have some content joined uh join the join the races here so good good to see us always that's okay we can't criticize you know we're we're all uh in the content mill to some degree for jathan there with a solid stable academic job you know uh still churning out content

he can't escape can't help it i don't once you get stuck in the content you never get out of it i like your sweater brian you know we could say spacey holiday uh it works whatever it's uh it's it's christmas uh on saturn that's what i'm going to call that's what i'm going to go with today yeah i love that i love that you know they can celebrate up there too especially when we you know fill it with computers filled with post humans or whatever the hell the future in store for us is they'll be celebrating up there too and they're just like there with the elves on the shelf yeah just orbiting a different yeah oh my well my holiday sweater it came in just a

few days ago we've had like mad postage delays here because of course i live on an island and we've had really bad weather and so ferries weren't able to come across and boats so we didn't get deliveries for a long time but it's in it arrived and that's a good one yeah it's my wonderful scooby-do i'm a big scooby-do fan of course for do you get a new sweater every year is that part of your uh not every year i used the i last year in the year before i had a clipy uh Uh-huh. The clip is a classic, but yeah, it was getting played. Exactly. And, you know, I was like, I want something new this year. I love Scooby-Doo. And then I happened to see this one when I was proud- This is something I recently learned about Paris. Like, I honestly didn't know that anybody loved Scooby-Doo. I thought it was like just something that was kind of like omnipresent and was at a certain age in our childhood. So it was just like, I mean, I was aware of Scooby-Doo. I watched Scooby-Doo. Like, I made the Scooby-Doo noises, but I did not know that, like, there were people that loved it.

And Paris is one of them, which is good. There are hidden Scooby-Doo fans among us, you know? I think you might be shocked for how many there are. I was in Edinburgh one time. This was, like, probably like a decade ago. And I saw, like, I guess I was walking around somewhere or whatnot. And I saw a Scooby-Doo Cafe. And I was like, oh, my God, like, what is this?

I can't believe it. And I was, like, so excited, right? I was like, oh, my God, a Scooby-Doo theme cafe. Like, this is going to be amazing. And then I went in, and, like, it was the most underwhelming experience in my life. Like, the most basic thing, like, maybe a couple Scooby-Doo, like, decorations here and there. I was like... Just nothing.

Yeah. It's so sad. I mean, here's some lore. A few years ago, my wife and I went as Velma and Daphne for Halloween. So, but really, it was just, it was just an excuse for her to dress up as Velma. I was Daphne. And it was a really excuse for her to dress up as Velma. And I was like, all right, I'll play along.

I had a beautiful red wig. We had the outfit. Like, we, you know, we went thrift shopping and came out with all of the stuff we needed. It was, it was great. It was great. But, you know, Scooby dude still lives. You could have pulled like a shaggy or a Fred, but you went full Daphne. Yeah, exactly. You went a full, like that's, that's the move. I guess because like,

my head is made for wigs. Also, nobody would recognize for it. Because Fred and Daphne were like an item or were they insinuated to be an item. They were. Okay. They were an item and then like Scooby and Velma or Shaggy and Velma was kind of like, are they sort of, you know. Will they won't they? Exactly. Sam and Diane. Yeah. I feel like in the, in the Scooby merch now though, I know we're talking about Scooby to a lot of The Scooby merch. That's way too much. But listen, I feel like, I feel like they're really, like, playing up the, like, stoner element of Scooby and Shaggy, like, a lot more in the merch.

Maybe it was always there, but, and I'm just, like, at an age where I'm really paying attention. But I feel like, you know. No, it was always there. It was, okay. You're in a van. It's hippie-ish. I feel like it's so much more overt now, but I don't know. But, yeah.

No, it always was. You're like I'm being broadsided, and this is actually the thought launch of Paris and Brian's new Scooby do podcast. The Scooby Crash. Rewatch podcast of the Scooby-Doo series. This is the soft launch of Zoinks. Yeah. This is not what I came on the show for.

We can have you as a special guest, Jay then, you know? Oh, my God. Oh, man. Yeah. Or it's either Zoinks or we would have, I would have gotten away with it, too. That's too long, though, for it. Too long. Yeah.

Soings. It's always works. I'm excited to plan this for you for the new year. We know how our success rate on new podcasts. Give it a few months. Yeah. And I'm happy this is really working out as well. You know, I wasn't sure setting up an AI of myself was going to work to be the co-participant here. Yeah, it's really, technology is really advanced. Yeah. Thank you, Brian, GPT. I appreciate it. Yeah. It's, of course, an inside joke based on

my Discord that thinks that Brian is just me using AI to mask my voice. Or a wig again, or yeah. Anyway, maybe we need to do a hard pivot from Scooby-Doo into the tech industry. Yeah. Yeah, hard fork. We need to do a hard for. So I think we start with the big things, right? Okay.

So obviously there's a lot that happened this year. There's always a lot that happens. But you guys look at like particular aspects of the tech You know, you're interested in certain things. And so I wonder, like, for you, what you think is the most important tech story of the year doesn't need to be the biggest thing that got the most attention, but, you know, something that you think is really important, you know, maybe got a lot of attention, maybe it was underplayed, whatever. What really stood out for you this year is like the top thing open to who goes first on that? I mean, since it just happened and it's kind of fresh of mind, I think I'll be happy to go first. And I don't know if it's the biggest, but I think there was a day last week, I think.

I think it was Thursday where two things happened, two things one day that reflect a lot of the broader trends of things coming together last year or over the course of this year, which is not not quite done yet. And the biggest of which, I think, so Trump finally signs this executive order that is known as preemption, where he's going to try to use the executive branch to sort of deter states from passing AI laws. And the reason that, like, you know, functionally, this isn't even really, I think, that big of a deal. Like, it's, like, legally, it's like, some detainable. He's promising to sick the Department of Justice on states that become, in his estimation, overzealous in their passage of AI law. So it's basically if you pass laws regulating AI, we're going to litigate you and then maybe withhold some federal funding for broadband and things like that. But the reason that I think it's like it puts kind of like a cherry on top of this year is because it just like formalizes. this sort of allegiance between Silicon Valley and the Trump White House in particular.

It was something that they had been, they've been trying to do all year through legislation going back over the summer when they were trying to get this measure jammed into a big budget bill. And it was very close. It kind of, it blew up in their faces at the last minute because it's even on a Republican vote because it was just a bridge too far. And then they tried to get it into legislation again on a defense bill. And again, it was kind of rejected as being too far, you know, against the federalist principles that Republicans are always talking about. And it made a big sort of segments. You know, they're never hypocritical in their principles, right?

Well, yeah. But beyond that, it legitimately makes a, like, core contingent of MAGA angry. Like the Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Green, and even Ron DeSantis sort of corner of Maga does not want anything to do with this. And it really speaks to the success that Silicon Valley has had in infiltrating the White House, infiltrating the ranks of the Trump government, and specifically through David Sacks. As, you know, Mark Andreessen also and some of these other guys, you know, Peter Thiel led the way. But David Sacks, being this AI and Cryptozar, direct advice, to Trump didn't really get rid of any of his his investments in a meaningful way we've learned

thanks to some New York Times reporting. He's still benefiting directly from all this to the point to the extent where like it turns out he was like selling access to Trump or he wanted to at like an all in event at the White House, $1 million a pop. Just like the most shameless stuff imaginable. I found it really funny when like all of this was happening with David Sacks. And I think it was after the New York Times story and like all the tech people came out. like defending sacks and there was this like headline in the verge and i'm probably going to like butcher it but it was something like the tech industry is sticking up for like a guy who sucks or something like that i was like yeah he sucks so much he does suck and and the fact that this like

came together at the end of the year they finally just kind of said fuck it we're going to do it even though there's a sort of a certain percentage of maga sort of uh players and and certainly observers that don't like it this really signals clearly that sort of the vance sacks andresen teal and uh arguably now kind of you know russ vaught who has seen the utility of this through what like doge was able to do you know there is now this sort of durable core and this durable kind of alliance between between the state and silicon valley that you know this is more symbolic but there's all these things happening that have happened this year, like Trump taking a 10% stake in Intel and like sort of turning around on this invidio order where it's like, you know, for a long time they have

professed like, honestly, like I don't really care about the geopolitics of selling, you know, Nvidia chips to China. But for the long time, the Republican line had been, if we sell them these chips, their AI game is going to get so good and we are going to be in trouble. And it turns out all it took was Jensen Wong saying like, you know, like we'll, we'll like basically sort of we'll give you credit for this and we'll give you some kickbacks and then he's like oh yeah great go like that's all it's all it took and now it's like it's like pure it's like the pure capitalist interest has sort of like emblazoned itself into the core of what the trump project has become and we see the way that trump is using ai in his propaganda on you know on the white house feed or his staff is at

least he has a real affinity for AI slop it has really sort of become a core sort of part of of of the state into in 2025 and increasingly all the rumblings that i mean listeners are surely aware of about you know open ai saying like we might need a bail out if this goes belly up we might need a backstop and like you know like they get they get criticized for this stuff but they also it's also like kind of like there was like kind of a trial balloon in a lot of ways and now like you know Through this executive order, through these different, through the NVIDIA deal, we see that, you know, where Trump's allegiances are breaking. So it could very well, you know, like it's, you know, it started the year or started two years ago. It would have been probably pretty unthinkable to imagine like a state-owned or a partially state-owned open AI.

Now it's not really all that unthinkable anymore if as we sort of look towards the prospect of a crash or a deflation, you know, if that happens in 2020. I did find it funny when they kind of let Chinese companies start buying the invidio ships again and China was immediately like, no, we're shutting that down, like, we're not letting that happen. But Jathan, it looked like you wanted to jump in there. Yeah, no, I mean, I think

just building directly on what Brian said, thinking about like what are the big stories of the year, I think there's a lot of big stories we could talk about but to me they all kind of fall under the big theme of the year, right? Which is this exactly what Brian was saying around the

the merging, the, you know, the fusion between an emergent fascist right in the U.S. with the fascist right in Silicon Valley, right? Like, you know, this year is not like all of a sudden people woke up and decided they wanted to be right wing or whatever, right? Like, you know, Silicon Valley has always had these extremist right wing tendencies, regardless of the fact that, you know, a lot of the people that work in Silicon Valley, maybe up until this latest election, you know, would see themselves as like, you know, I vote Democrat or I, you know, donate to my Democratic candidate or whatever it might be. But we know that there's always been this real libertarian wing in the, in Silicon Valley

and some of the more kind of esoteric right wingism that, you know, people like Peter Till were really on the fringe of. But I think what we really see this year is the fringe becoming the center, right? Like, you know, Peter Till and that kind of esoteric right wing, you know, it's beyond libertarianism in the sense of like, hey, like hands off my liberties or whatever, right? It's much more of a, there is, the state is subordinate to capital, right? That's the kind of libertarianism that we're talking about here. The market dominates everything. And the purpose of the state is to support the needs of capital. to support the expansion of markets.

And that has always been the role of the state in a capitalist political economy. But I think what we're seeing right now is a lot of the kind of quiet parts or a lot of the more kind of fringy parts becoming very loud and very mainstream in Silicon Valley in the state and in the wider public, right?

And I think it's also why we see such this, you know, real growing backlash against Silicon Valley and the use of technologies and these tech companies as arms of a fascist state, arms of fascist law enforcement, kind of reshaping the state as well. I think we're seeing a lot of the kind of the heightening of the contradictions where before people could kind of get along a little bit more or just kind of, you know, say, oh, you know, we've got some disagreements, but hey, you know, the tech sector provides us with some really useful things. You know, it's not all bad.

But I think that that kind of the, it's not all bad or it's a land of contrast. I think that position is now untenable, right? The center cannot hold. And it really is becoming a much more, the contradictions are heightening. It's more of a Mancheon kind of politics of, you know, as we say on Team K, hello friends and enemies, right? And I think a lot of people are deciding who are my friends and who are my enemies. And they really see, you know, when you've got the ice agents in the streets, but you also have, you know, Alex Karp doing cartwheels on stage, you know, talking about patriotism. And you've got, you know, A16Z talking about American dynamism. And you've got, you know, all of these different people, right? And I think about this great project that Francesca Brea has put together called the authoritarian stack. You can just search that and it'll come up, authoritarian.

and dash stack. Info, but it's a really great website they've put together that's kind of visualizing how all of these tech billionaires have become integrated deeply into the halls of power, you know, not just capital, but now state power, really doing so in a way that's pushing the U.S. more and more towards a, you know, what they call in the project a post-democratic America, but we should understand, I think, as a form of techno-fascism, right? As a, it's not post-democratic, it's anti-democratic. And it's not contained to the U.S., right? Like the Francesca's project is, the subtitle there is, and why Europe is next, right?

These things are moving across the U.S. or out of the U.S. into Europe, into places like Australia, right? Kind of pooling people into this real, you know, another. kind of global bipolar world of are you with you know the the patriotic tech stack in America or are you with the you know the communist tech stack in China and I think that geo-politics of tech you know it's something we've talked about a lot on TMK is that like you know tech has been the first and main front of this kind of new Cold War with China for a long time we saw this all throughout Biden's administration

We saw this throughout Trump's first administration. Nothing that we're seeing is new in a sense, but it's just heightening. It really feels like it's boiling over this year. I agree with all that fullheartedly. I think it's also worth looking at, like, you know, looking as if we're looking back at the year and what some of the fallout was or what some of this new formation was put in service of and what it was able to accomplish,

You know, it's also worth looking at some of the dimensions there. I mean, we've now gotten just like story after another about how sort of the new tech companies have gotten contracts with the government have gotten sort of either with the defense or with ICE or there's, you know, there's, every day it seems like there's a new sort of AI initiative that ICE is, ICE is debuting. And there's also, you know, it seems a million years ago now, but if we look back at Doge, what you know what what happened with doge and i maintain that i think we also have to think about the effects on on labor of of this new sort of you know techno-fascist state that's arisen and i you know it was something that i thought about a lot as it was happening when elin musk was in the white house and they're talking about uh this a i first strategy and getting these doge you know wounderkins in there to sort of you know to the you and i just i just i

still to this day remember this little clip of speaker mike johnson like talking about elon musk and like sort of hushed reverence just like oh and nelon's in there he's got these algorithms that are just they're scanning the files and seeing who's needed or not but which you know we know now was just like they were just completely the the technology was garbage they didn't do anything really they sort of took some chat bots that they had been experimenting with already kind souped them up gave them new names and and and and let them loose and then but they use this logic right to uh fire a bunch of people it became part of the project sort of those like technocratic project where oh well we're using the algorithms and a i and we're going to simultaneously sort of like

bring the state into the future uh while purging it of uh all of this heavy weight which also just happens to be you know people that we think might be our political enemies or or or might some friction in the state that we're trying to build that can be used like in the state as it was in doge where there we saw mass layoffs that it's a story that still has far from resolved and it's one that i just has kind of been put on the the back burner and i just you know i don't i don't know you know how to try to advance this story for people or to help the can't get but people just i mean we it's it's brutal just like tens of thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people just lost their jobs and hollowed out core state capacity at the same

time you know he's still going after it's less doge affiliated now but now he's going after you know climate science departments the trump administration is they already hollowed out the department of education they took a wrecking ball to a bunch of government service bureaus just core things that are just important for just making sure the government functions and and so you know we have like the multiple sort of levels of nastiness here where on one there's just people have lost their jobs and people have been fired under the auspices of this totally sort of fictional construct that you know like doge is going to facilitate government efficiency through technology or no it was just the wrecking ball part there was nothing that's replaced it and then you know now we have like

a government that's going to you know need to be repaired or reestablished and that's going to be another political project. Maybe there's some opportunity there, too, but it right now, it has been sort of purely fit under the authoritarian thrust of the state thus far. And AI has been this important logic. And we can, I've already gone on a little bit with that too, but I do think another piece of that is more broad

the way that AI as a logic has been used to impact the labor market, to justify firings at Amazon, at Duolingo, at tech companies, and arguably in entry-level jobs where we have a bunch of managers who have been sold this bill of goods from AI companies, that AI can replace entry-level workers. So there's like varying data on it, but it, you know, one, it's been a big topic of discussion whether or not, you know, firms are not hiring right now because they think whether correctly or not that the AI can do these jobs. And then finally,

Like, it's, you know, I think that we're already in the midst of a lot of suffering in the creative industries, which is not like, you know, a huge piece of the macroeconomic picture. But I think there's a lot of, you know, broader implications here that are worth thinking about just over the course of the year. A lot of illustrators, artists, graphic designers, copywriters, folks who do jobs that, you know, that maybe aren't, you know, that can. be sort of done to a manager's shitty satisfaction with an AI system have already seen sort of material conditions worsened to a considerable degree. So that's why the other story that I bring up was this deal that Disney went and cut with OpenAI, where they were like, oh, you know, like we're going to, we're entering, we're going to invest a billion dollars in Open AI and sort of seed this, our intellectual property to open AI to let them, you know, let users generate Sora or whatever. And again, like, that particular deal isn't the biggest, like, it's not, you know, it's, it's a fraction of what SoftBank is pumping into Open AI. But it's so symbolic to me. It's like there was a lot of questions.

Where are we going to, where are the media companies going to fight AI? Were they going to fight the, like, the extractive companies that are hoping to sort of like automate and degrade their entire, the foundations of their industry? Or were they going to use their incredibly, like, valuable intellectual property? property to sort of push back and say, no, we're going to try to preserve this value and try to preserve copyrights and the intellectual property that we have. And they, you know, again, it's a theme of this year with media companies rolling over every which way to where they think the locus of power is. And, you know, that's been the answer time and again, you know, and that's what it wound

up being Disney's, you know, not going to sue Open AI as it is suing Mid-Journey because I think I think it thinks that that's, or, you know, there's a lot of reasons that Disney wants to with Open AI from labor automation to cheap content production, but I think it's a symbolic one nonetheless. Yeah, I think there are a couple things I want to pick up on there, right? And I think I want to pivot back to the AI story in just a second, but I think to pick up on what you were both saying before that, right? You know, Brian, I feel like you were talking a lot about the U.S. and what we were seeing there

and Jathan, I feel like you kind of laid out this broader picture of us for us looking at the U.S., but also beyond that as well. And I feel like for me, one of the things that really stood out was kind of, yeah, you know, we were paying a lot of attention to the story in the United States, the Trump administration, the relationship between it and Silicon Valley and these tech billionaires. And for me, it was very much like what is happening beyond the United States and what we're really seeing play out in those arenas. And for me, it was kind of like, it was really disappointing, right? You know, I feel like early on we had this discussion about digital sovereignty and what it would look like to kind of retake power from these American

tech companies and to take them on because of the way that the Trump administration is allied with them and, you know, the way that they're kind of like pushing their expectations onto different parts of the world as a result of that. And I feel like as we get closer to the end of the year, you know, kind of the story is how much any effort to do that has failed in many, in many instances, right? Like, I feel like in Canada, where I am, obviously, We saw the government fold on the digital services tax and, you know, on a number of other places. And, you know, in the coming year, we're heading into the renegotiations of what was once NAFTA is now USMCA or Kuzma up here in Canada. And the United States has put out its kind of expectations for that.

And among them is the gutting of our online streaming bill and our online news act, which kind of puts content quotas on streaming services and expects, you know, Google and Facebook is not. participated in the law to pay news publishers. And then, of course, we look across to Europe, and it's like, it seems that they have just really not met the moment at all. Like, we hear some rhetoric, but largely the European Union is like gutting its tech regulations that may have been imperfect, but we're still seen as like a model around the world. It seems like the European Union itself is like being called into question in the face

of like the way that the United States is using and leveraging its. power in this moment. And, you know, meanwhile, you see like Elon Musk and various other kind of tech billionaires increasingly, you know, kind of like, I guess, interfering in European politics to try to, you know, push things to the right to get their own interests served. Like, it has really been wild to see how the rest of the world has really, or how many parts of the world, not, you know, not everywhere, but has felt like it has really been unable to challenge what has been happening there. You know, of course, we see the social media age limit happening in Australia. We see some things happening in, you know, different other countries. But in general, it's been like, you know,

if the United States decides to flex its muscle, it can kind of roll over almost everybody except maybe China. You know, so many people are just going to get hit by that, right? And I don't know, it's been wild and a bit disheartening to watch that kind of play out this year, I think. Has free speech vanished in Australia, do you think? Are you? Because, Are you going to get arrested? No, it's because I'm over a 16. You might not know this, but I'm over 16. So I'm actually allowed to be on this website.

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Because when dinner tastes this good, nothing hits like home cooking. I recently tried HelloFresh for the first time. I got the doll I mentioned and a mushroom linguine. The meals were not only tasty, but it made me feel a lot more confident in my ability to cook, which felt great. Go to Hellofresh.com slash Tech10 FM to get 10 free meals plus a freeze-willing knife and $144.99 value on your third box. Offer valid while supplies last, free meals applied as discount on first box, new subscribers only, varies by plan. That's hellofresh.com slash tech 10fm. I think a lot of this, though, is a story of capacity building and also a story of

of capacity elimination, right? Like, Doge was also on my mind. So I was glad you brought that up, Brian, because it is a story that was the only thing we were talking about for the last first, like, six months of the year or whatever. Then it just disappeared, right? Because it's like, you know,

the news cycle keeps going, our attention, you know, gets directed to something else. But just because we stopped talking about it or focusing on it, doesn't mean the effects go away. And I think, yes, there's absolutely this immediate impact of untold number of, people's losing their jobs. But I think there's a long-tail impact of this. And this is something that we were talking a lot about on Team K very early on at the beginning of the year. And actually

last year, because this was a plan the whole time, you know, where if you really listen to the people from the right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and, you know, the people behind like Project 2025. And, you know, one of the things that they talked a lot about was the administrative state. This was their their boogeyman. This is the behemoth they wanted to slay, was the administrative state. And what they meant by that was the kind of people that were doing like day-to-day jobs in these agencies, right? Like rulemaking, rule enforcement, kind of oversight of regulations, pencil pushers, bureaucrats, you know, but also kind of lower level judges. You know, these people that kind of keep the administrative state running, right, a state that does

things beyond just like maybe pass a big policy bill or not, right? But like the day-to-day activities of the state. And I think they were really, you know, from their point of view, it was actually a really wise strategy to focus on the administrative state because it's a lot, there's not a lot of defenders of the administrative state out there, right? And it becomes a lot easier at if you hold the executive to abolish or hollow out the administrative state because you can do it through executive order. You don't have to do it through policymaking. But the immediate impacts of that are obvious. I don't think what we're paying enough attention to and something that we've been trying to talk a lot about very early on, me and Ed, is the long tail

impact of those, right? Because it's really easy to eliminate capacity. We've saw it happen. It happens very fast. It happens very easy. It's what's really difficult is to build capacity. Building the capacity of the U.S. state, and not just talking like the capacity to like enforce regulations or whatever, like the capacity of the state for things that we depend on, like as knowledge institutions, right, like the national institutes of health, you know, the national oceanic and atmospheric administration, right? Like, These kinds of institutions that we also depend very heavily on as like places of ground truth, of knowledge building, places that expand the horizons of humanity in really important ways,

building the capacity of those places back up to where they were pre-20205, that is a project that would take real concerted and focused effort for years by, a president who is devoted to that, right? Like, it just takes time. And so I think there's a, there's that story of, of capacity elimination in the, in the US, right? Kind of hamstringing the US. And even if Trump does his administration,

Trump gets impeached tomorrow, right? And we, I don't know what, we throw AOC in there, you know, or Zoron in there or whatever, right? Like, okay, great, you now have a, immense job that's going to take the entire four years at least of your administration to build us back up to pre-2020 levels of like state capacity. So that's really tough. Then the other thing is like a lack of capacity. So, you know, that other, how this is happening in other places around the world, Europe has a huge administrative state, right? Like this is what Europe does when it,

how it thinks about regulation, regulating tech is it thinks about it as in terms of European style regulation, risk management, risk assessment, you know, rights-based regulation like the GDPR, risk-based regulation like the, you know, the AI bill. Europe does this through regulation. But that means that I think that Europe has found itself unprepared to deal with an average that has no, is not interested or willing to meet them on the grounds of let's be good civil servants about this. Let's talk about this in terms of like regulation and administration and stuff. And so when you have people like Elon Musk, when you have people like the ascendant right wing in Europe and the UK who are taking their cues from the U.S., they're like, oh,

if we just abolish all this or just ignore it or crash thrift. it, then, you know, Europe finds itself, well, what do we do, right? How do we, how do we, how do we combat something like that? And I think as well, it's, it's the problem of having regulatory, like the political will to enact regulation, like what we see in Australia, right? Like, Australia does a lot of really experimental policies, the News Code Bargaining Act, right? this new age restriction for social media. Australia identifies a problem. Platforms are taking away funding from news organizations that we need to support.

Or young children and teens on social media are facing a mental health crisis, a bullying crisis. Such as yourself. Teen, such as yourself. Exactly. I'd be right. But they identify a problem, but then they don't have the right capacity to, identify the problem in the right way and solve the problem, right? And so I think what we're seeing here is a problem of a elimination of capacity, but also

a problem of not having the right kinds of capacities needed to identify what's actually the problem here. Like with the age restriction, the social media ban, the problem is not that teenagers are using social media. The problem is that the social media companies design the platforms in ways that are intentionally, like, toxic and corrosive to society because it's the most profitable way to do that, right? Like, got to maximize shareholder value, man. Exactly. So you identify a problem, but then you mistake the problem as a user problem, not a platform

problem. And the same thing with, like, the News Code Act and the News Code bargaining policy in Australia that sought to have like Facebook pay, you know, news organizations, kind of dividends, right? But what they ended up doing was just, you know, they had too many people from like News Corp speaking in their ear about this. What they identified was a real problem, how the corrosive effect of digital platforms on the news, on news media. But their solution was that means we need to re-entrench, you know, the toxic news. media monopolies that exist. And so it's a problem of capacity.

And that's a problem that's not solved quickly. It's a problem that requires a lot of time to build that capacity in the right ways. And I will say that it's no coincidence that what AI does is attack those capacity. And tell you you don't need to build them because AI will do it for you. Yeah. AI will do it for you. AI is it sort of simulates being able to provide institutional knowledge without actually, you know, drawing from it in a, in a reliable or robust way, while eliminating the people that can do that.

And so it's what, I mean, both in the private and the public sector, I think that, like, it's going to be, I mean, it's easy, you know, if you've got a company to just sort of, you know, it's easier to lay people off if you don't have, even if, like, the doge construct. working in your favor or people with like you know more public sector union contracts and not to knock stuff down but so i think we're going to see this kind of all over the place as a i is used to sort of you know as a as a promised shortcut then we already know that it doesn't work in a lot of in a lot of capacity you know it turns out there are some things that it has been good for and that you know certain software engineers like it in certain use cases but again when

institutions get a hold of it when it's pushed top down when you have these like mandates for using it it's it's tearing things up it's creating more work you know there's work slop you know became a term that was passed around a lot and you know sometimes you know it's not an accident right like sometimes i think this is part of the project there are people who do want to blow things up including you know those those those operators who are trying to attack the administrative state in the government and that you know that was the plan from the beginning they said that out loud like that was written on the project 20 another thing that we don't really hear about much anymore like yeah how did you know project 2025 go in 2025 you know it like it yeah it seems like that

russ vaught who you know was was running the the office of the budget and you know had had a lot of these aims wasn't anticipating you know having doge be as successful as it was but he was glad that it was and he was able to harness some of that momentum towards his aims of you know of gutting a lot of these these departments but so how did how did how did that how did that wind up like how did where are we now with project 2025 you know like what i think it's a really it's a really good question to drill into capacity you know state capacity for one yes but you know also just you know just in general we already have this super precarious super unequal labor market here in the states especially where there's so many people reliant on gig work and contract jobs

and that's the stuff that's also being sort of, you know, attacked by AI. So we have this really sort of brittle economy. We're losing state capacity and sort of the, you know, the executive class. People talk about the disconnect between the executive class and sort of everybody else on AI and their bullishness towards it. And well, there's a reason. It's effectuating. They're their goals in doing this hollowing out, in doing this project of transferring more wealth upstream. And it is, you know, I think that it's, it is, it's no, it hasn't always been exactly in tandem between the state and Silicon Valley. But I think the aims are quite similar. And it remains why there is really only one, well, two technologies that the Trump administration is interested in,

and that is AI and crypto. It's because they, you know, they abet its aims in very specific ways. One makes bribery really easy, and the other gives you the justification to eliminate your enemies. Exactly, exactly. Dude, I heard that, you know, the U.S. is in a golden age right now, so I don't know what you're talking about economically. But I'm looking forward to the CBS News.

Yeah, golden toilet age. I'm looking forward to the CBS News roundup, of how Project 2025 did in 2025. But I'm sure that'll be coming soon from Barry White. I can't wait to watch Barry Weiss. A town hall. Yeah, with Russ Klaas. Before we get to the results from the worst person in tech contest that I've been running

this week, I have to ask you, because we've talked about AI a bit, you know, in relation to these broader issues, but obviously you can't ignore how big of a story generative AI remained this year, you know, in the continued questions. about whether the business model makes sense, whether this is all a big bubble. So I wonder rather quickly from both of you, where do you think we stand on the question of the AI bubble right now

as we go into the end of this year? Well, I have a message from Ed. He did ask me that we do have to talk about how Open AI took all year to raise $40 billion, and now they are insisting they will raise $100 billion next year. somehow. They're also going to spend like a few trillion on data centers. So I'm sure that's going to work out too. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that's that that is the story of this like

asset bubble that we've got the AI bubble I think is this with any bubble. It has to keep growing because if it stops growing, then if the music stops playing and everyone has to take a seat, well, then all of a sudden you realize there's not enough seats for everyone, right? And the whole thing falls apart. And so you have to keep making these promises of, you know, we raised 40 billion this year and next year we're going to raise 100 billion and then 200 billion, you know. But it's, that is also because I think they are really confronting the fact that the AI bubble is built on massive overinvestment in capital infrastructure, you know, like data centers. But, but it's also a bubble that is built on an asset. Those assets are GPUs. And

GPUs are terrible stores of value. They depreciate so fast and they become obsolete so fast. And it requires if you want to stay ahead of the game, if you want to stay on the cutting edge, you have to do these constant like three to five years cycles of total renewal of your capital investment into your GPUs. So fucking expensive. Great business for Nvidia to be in, right?

Which is also why they keep talking about digital sovereignty. The biggest proponent of digital sovereignty right now is NVIDIA, is Jensen Wong. Because what they mean by that is every country in the world needs to be a market for NVIDIA's GPUs. Hey, you shouldn't just be relying on, you know, the U.S. tech stack. You need to have your own tech stack, which means you need to buy our GPUs to power it. Every country needs a tech stack dependent on this American company's tech. That's right. But it's because the assets at the center of this GPUs are so expensive, so restrictive, right?

There's only a couple companies that can make them, right? And they are such terrible stores of value. It means that you have to keep pumping more capital into the system as a way to outpace the depreciation of the asset. I was talking to somebody that works in hardware at a major tech company. won't be any more specific than that. You know, they're talking about one of the strategies right now is around like, well, let's take all these obsolete or like, you know, GPUs or these GPUs

that are, you know, two or three generations behind the whatever the latest thing in videos, you know, putting forth. Well, you know, a lot of those GPUs, they still work. They're still good, you know. They can be used for other things. So what we do is we'll trunch these GPUs, these obsolete GPUs together and tether them. and then kind of sell them as, you know, a kind of tethered system, right?

And, you know, like a tranche of GPUs. Almost like a subprime. Yeah, so you can kind of make subprime GPUs and then sell them as triple A investment grade tronches of GPUs. And it'll be great. So I've literally heard someone from a tech company re-explaining to me how the subprime mortgage bubble worked, but using GPUs instead of mortgages as the asset backing the security. Oh, my God. I mean, they're just revisiting old rhythms here.

Yeah, I mean, I look, I don't have any great sort of insight to add into this, into like sort of the bubble discussion. Obviously, everything that Jathan just said is correct. Everybody's probably seen by now those graphs of sort of the circularity of the AI economy make the rounds a couple dozen times by now how you know in invidia's an investor in open AI who's an investor in core weave who's an investor in and then on and on they're all renting you know chips from each other and and entering into partnerships and deals and it is remarkably circular and if you get into dealings with the with the mortgage stuff which you know i love how it's

always like people will like the defenders of all this will say like well yeah but what you really need to worry about is if there's any exposure on on like the publicly traded markets and then people will say like well yeah like this is going into into sort of larger funds like pensions are now and they're like well what you really have to worry about it keep kicking the can on down the road it seems like we are at a point now where there's plenty of exposure where you know the these sort of mortgage packaging it's happening like in data centers by like the leases for the data centers themselves are being traded as financial instruments. In some cases, I've read the GPUs that expire are, of course, worrying.

But again, like, what changes? Like, what will change this trajectory at this point? And that's, I think that was a question for much of 2025. And, like, I personally kept waiting. It seemed like there was a couple times where this sort of, like, delusional engine would sputter when there was, like, a news that was, like, bad enough to, like, puncture through, it was like, oh, there's an MIT study that says 95% of firms and their pilot projects aren't getting any returns from this. And there's like three days where it was

like, and then just like the line went back up. Same with like deep seek. It's like, oh, it's a open sourced model that was trained for a fraction of. Oh yeah, that was this year. That was this year. It's like the beginning of the year, right? Yeah, that was in spring or something. And it was just like, they were like, wait a minute, does this undermine our entire project? Like, no, no. There's too much at stake. There's too much capital. The line cannot go down. I think DeepSeek was in February. I remember this because I was in Berkeley and Ed and I did an episode like in person about Deepseek. And I put my flag down in that episode from nearly 12 months ago saying this Deep Seek story is not going to go anywhere. Right. Like this is not going to be a

change to the industry because the political economy of the industry is fundamentally based on over accumulation, right? They had made up their mind. They'd already made up their mind. That's their, they, this is, it was going to be, I mean, I remember I thought as soon as Sam Altman weighed in, like, that, that it was clear what was going to happen because, you know, he was still setting the, setting the pace. I do, like, there are some interesting things that I do think could happen.

And this most sort of recent, well, again, every time I get caught saying this, I'm like, well, two weeks later, it literally didn't matter at all. But the launch of GPT5 has been, it was a wobble. That was a system crash, if I've ever seen one. You know, the expectations were not met. They haven't really sort of righted that ship.

They issued this code red that they issued was interesting, Because this is a company that's been kind of like delusionally self-confident for and that feeds into its ethos like they're building God, right? They're building AGI. And so like how would you doubt that? Why would the company that is confident that it's building God issue an internal code red because they're losing users? Like it shouldn't matter, right? But the fact that they're using that language, the fact that they have like that Google has peeled off users in a substantial way, I think, I think Gemini, Google's Gemini, was durably retaining more users than GPT5 was,

which of all the things that are an actual problem for Open AI, like the only real, the one that I think investors like really might notice is, is their lunch being eaten by Google, by an established tech giant that's not, that that doesn't have the attendant risk that that Open AI has to keep raising money. It's not making any problem. And that's more of a threat to Open AI. itself than like the generative AI moment I guess right exactly exactly so the money can just say like oh well if Google can do this and be popular and set the pace and you know then like why are we betting on open AI which could which is doing all these goofy things and you know could could go belly up so like I you know I think there's a world in which that's a crack in the facade I don't you know again I don't know I don't like it comes back to this the relationship between the AI companies in the state and open AI's relationship to the state in particular,

which is something that I would like personally like to see more reporting on. Because even when Elon Musk was in office and it was like he and Trump were buddy, we're like legitimately buddies. They were hanging out like before he got tired of him. The state, it was still like it was still engaging with open AI. Like Sam Altman was still there. There were people, you know, there were overtures being made to Sam Altman specifically. they were doing that science fictional Stargate project that also is, you know, kind of stranded

in a weird place. But like there with this relationship, like, would there be substantial political will enough to like support open AI or, you know, what, what does that calculus look like? So I'd love to see more about like the personal relationships between Greg Brockman, you know, and David Sacks or whoever, whoever is over there, because I think that's also an interesting. element of all of this. Someone should tell an intrepid tech journalist who is not a content creator to dig into this event. Yeah, sorry, my hands are tied. I have to go on podcasts all the time generate content. I'm kidding, of course. You know, it was shocking to me to see like the stat just a couple months ago that like AI spending contributed more to GDP growth in the States than

like consumer spending. Like that to me was like eyeballs popping out of my head kind of moment, right? Oh, there's a recession in the U.S. It's just not being seen in the numbers because AI spending is propping it up. But there's absolutely a hidden recession in the U.S. right now. I feel like less and less hidden as well, right? I mean, just hidden in terms of the macroeconomic numbers, but not hidden in terms of like people's everyday lives. The lived experience.

Yeah, I look, I go to hidden by AI spending. yeah on the on the balance sheets yeah my boys love subway sandwiches so we go to the same subway franchise every thursday we know the owner of the of the store a great great guy uh shout out to raj and he and it's in this this shopping center in l.a like l.a is like a city of of weird little strip malls and this is one that's kind of on the border of Santa Monica and And since I've been going there, probably for the last, you know, five years, you know, through COVID, post-COVID, the place has just been drying up. It's one of those sort of like planet money economic indicators kind of stories where like every other month or two, there's like a store will, we'll close down. And to the point where now I think out of like maybe a dozen or more storefronts, there's only three left.

There's like, you know, there used to be a frozen yogurt place. It's gone. There used to be a Starbucks, and the Starbucks is gone. Like, there's a restaurant that's shifted only to lunch. There used to be a hair salon. It's gone. And it's, like, very visible. And it has been, you know, underway through this whole time that supposedly our economy

hasn't been doing so bad. And yet we have a real rent crisis. We have a real cost of living crisis. And it just, it is hard not to. feel that these things are being papered over in an economy where, you know, like, yeah, some of it's AI, some of it's the data center expansion, some of it is just consumer spending being dominated more and more by the rich, which was a story that just kind of came out too and sort of this re-ignition of the inequality engine. It's always been a real problem with

income equality is that the wealthy can only consume so much. And so if you have a economy that is built on consumption in this way of, like, you know, consumer spending is a massive part of GDP and it's a really big part of like what makes money circulate in the economy. When all of that money gets funneled upwards, like this is a truism of economics 101, right? Is that like the wealthy can only consume so much, right? They only eat so many meals a day. They only buy so many clothes. And while that stuff might.

They only buy so many luxury mega yachts, you know. Yeah. And while that stuff might be more. expensive stuff, it does not equate to more consumption in an economically meaningful way. I was just reading a story about how I think it was Delta or one of the airlines was like next year, I think they were saying that they project that their first class seating will be more valuable than all of these other seats that they sell combined. You see that across so many airlines as well.

always been the economics of airlines is that like airlines make their money off of business class seats the other economy seats just basically pay the like fuel cost of flying the plane and and like since the pandemic those premium seats have become like much more valuable more people are moving it like yeah it's really interesting anyway i want to put a pin in our conversation here you know i've been running this contest all week i do it every year where we talk about who the worst person in tech is, of course, this year, everyone voted Brian to be the worst person in tech, so I don't really understand why that was. A lot of ride-in ballots for Brian Murphy. Yeah, it was weird. He wasn't even on the practice. You know what? You know what?

I take that as a compliment, the worst I'm in the inside, bringing it down. Yeah. So we had this contest. We had 32 names, some of the worst people in tech. I got some nominations and obviously, you know, some people who just kind of had to be in there over over this week, you know, people have been voting. to, because we believe in democracy, unlike Peter Thiel, to slowly... How many years have you done it?

Four years now? Yeah, I think four or five years. Has Elon won every time? Nope. Peter Thiel won. I don't know if it was once or twice. I think once. And maybe other than that, it was Elon Musk.

You know, this time... The system is rigged. Yeah. You can really tell that profile also matters. So for me, I thought Larry Ellison was like a shoe in to get to at least the final four. Not enough people know who he is. He was knocked out by Zuckerberg, who is very, people know who he is. Let's be honest, it's a toss-up.

He's, Zuckerberg is such a slug. They're both evil, right? Yeah, but I really thought Ellison was, especially, you know, there's been a lot more attention on Ellison this year. I really thought he needed a matchup against somebody else, maybe. Put him against Sundar Pichai. He'll make it all right. Well, you know, so.

Well, he beat Jeff Azas. He did. You know, Jeff has been kind of flying under the radar now that he stepped down from Amazon and you know and you know he he's he's got his new life new wife you know he's he's living the dream flying him into space flying katie perry into space hey yeah the girlfriend of my former prime minister uh at this point which is weird as hell man but yeah so you know we had these names you know over the past few days we've narrowed it down our final four peter teal sam altman and Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, of course, going to the final two, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg ducking it out for third place. So, you know, obviously we have these two incredibly evil people. Like, there's, you know, no other way to put it who really come down to this final matchup once again. You know, it feels like it's always these two. And it's like, you know, are you going to go with the guy

who undersaw the dismantling of USAID? how many hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of that? We didn't even talk about that. Yeah, Rubio was just in like a hearing, and they were like, do you feel, do you stand by your fact that nobody died as a result of this? And he's like, I'm proud of what we did at USAID. Jesus. It's like, and, you know, there's obviously the left criticism of USAID.

Sure. You know, it's used to help the US. As a staunch left this, I'm like, it is a real situation where the only thing worse than the USAID is abolishing the USAID with no pulling the rug 100% right there's no like ramp down or anything yeah like there's no way like from a left perspective to be like no it was good they did this like no like absolutely not it's it's terrible and you know so you have this guy and there's everything else with Elon Musk you know we can go through a very long list of all the crap he's been doing for a long time and then you have Peter Thiel who like you can say is like one of basically the architects

of the kind of tech industry that we're seeing today, you know, like really helped to be a mentor for all of these ghouls who have like arisen and reached this moment. Speaking of ghoul, just incredible photo of Peter Till. He's like so sweaty these days. He looks like that guy that got toxic ooze thrown on him in Robocop where he like...

Absolutely. He looks like the wax sculpture of Peter Till that's been left under a heat lamp. like i don't know what's going but he looks like honestly that's fair he like looks like that now and you see him in these interviews where he's just like yeah he's not getting enough young blood i guess or yeah something or the young blood did something to him i don't know but yeah so you know so comes down to these two right so people have been voting voting closed uh 16 minutes ago and so we need to see all right enough suspense who won all right let me see if i can play a little

sound here but let's see and the winner is elin musk it was close it was close 52 to 48 i'm kind of surprised because peter teal also has been i mean he's been like doing his weird like mysterious lecture thing where people have you know what the hell is he talking about the antichrist democracy in action here winning by two points you know it's here's next year you got to they go into the hall of fame all-time evil people and so you have to people have to they go choose a new one yeah choose new ones like they get to go like like 25 you know 2020 through 25 he Musk won he's been retired easy we get he's the worst so who's the new uh ascendant yeah it's interesting though because i think the profile does matter obviously right like Elon no one is more high profile

than Elon Musk and no no one is more high profile as a as a hated person than Elon Musk either right I very much remember in the early part of the year, I was talking to my mom who lives in Ohio and has like, does not, has never, you know, never been to college, doesn't pay any attention to any of this stuff, right? And, you know, we were just chatting and out of nowhere. She was like, have you seen what this Elon Musk guy is doing, you know? My mom's a Republican as well, right? And so, you know, it was, but it was like that kind of, it was this real moment where I was like, damn, My mom has really strong and hateful opinions about Elon Musk, a person she has, I am sure she has never heard of before and certainly has never had strong opinions about. But I think it just speaks to this fact that like Elon Musk is very much the sin either for a lot of this, you know? I think it's really an open question how much Elon actually is doing, you know, is do, you know, pulling any strings or doing any machinations behind the scenes or anything. From all reports, he's a, he's a real moron and a real, you know, he's a real idiot and a tweaker and like, you know. But Jathan, he's the most brilliant genius man who's creating the future. But I think what he is really good at, and you can see it in the change of his body composition, is a sin-eating.

I think that was one of the things that Trump actually played Elon really well. Like Trump played him like a fiddle in a lot of regards where you bring Trump. out there as the sin-eater for for Doge, for AI, for all of this stuff, right? And then as soon as he lost his utility, Trump, you know, they had their breakup. But that was always kind of the, I think that was always the role Elon has played all the time. And he's just the most highly paid sin-eater that has ever existed. But it makes him really high profile as well, right? he is like he will absorb the sins and he will absorb the hatred and he will you know and and that's his role and he's paid very handsomely for that i like this but it he there like there was

a pivoted at some point he pivoted to sin eater because for a while his whole thing was what was modern day iron man beloved like so he almost like did a 180 turn like where that's where he drew his energy that he was like almost like you know sociopathically willing to like sink all of his money into something stupid and just like and then stick with it and people are going like oh it's for electric cars and even if it's all self-aggrandizing and goofy he was like willing to sort of play that role and it is funny that now he has turned into sort of like a full-time shit eater like he just like really like there's not really anything left that's inspiring about him it's like he's he's just like, he's got nothing new to bring to the, it's like the same like three or four

beats about going to Mars. All he does is like spend all day posting about right wing politics and like getting aroused at his groc chat bot now. Like, that's his whole thing. Whereas Peter Till, Peter Till does actually have a little bit of a like strategist of Silicon Valley thing going on, right? Where, you know, he's also a real insane and weird guy, you know, writing like we did a whole episode of TMK on the not just the antichrist lectures but we read and talked about the essay he wrote in that Christian magazine about one piece and so he's got a whole thing going on around like esotericism and and religion and Christianity but he thinks he's very brilliant but he has long been an actual like kind of puppet master and strategist

in Silicon Valley in a way where Elon Musk has followers, Peter Till has acolytes. And I think there's a real difference there between having fans of you and having acolytes. You know, like Peter Till, like, we must not forget that J.D. Vance is a Peter Till acolyte. We must not forget that a lot of what we see and what we talked about early in this live in this stream around the kind of clash of the, you know, tech fascism. and this emergent kind of MAGA fascism, like, all of that is Peter Till. So Elon Musk is higher profile, so it makes sense that he would win the worst person in tech.

But I think Peter Till, if we're talking about, like, a long-jill attacks. I do think for this year, like, I completely agree, like, 100%. But I do think for this year, like, there is a strong argument to be made, like, especially with USAID and like Doge and like all that shit that like I think Elon Musk even maybe like rises above Peter Thiel this year but like in terms of damage yeah and yeah being the exactly but as the result show like you can you can easily argue either way right yeah I think you know teal which I quick shout to the contrarian which is which I reread this year in light of all this stuff going on and yeah chaffkin's book about his and you know going through his early days at

Stanford and, you know, founding, I mean, it is, it is wild how much, you know, like, his sort of profile now corresponds to what, you know, sort of the garden variety, sort of online maga freak is now. It's like the, like, he was on campus at Stanford, like screaming about campus liberals, publishing, you know, like the compact mag of his day, the Stanford review, arguing against diversity, like all these, in this very specific way that it now creates this through line. All of his like these behaviors and practices that he, you know, he basically just like scammed his way to success with PayPal, just like real shady practices, but just like hitting the pedal down, just like, you know, just getting new users regardless of the cost and

echoes of sort of the growth strategies that all these modern day Silicon Valley companies would, you know, emulate. So yeah, I agree. He's like, and he has more discipline. And even when something's unpopular, he kind of sticks with it and he has his weird-ass beliefs. He's just like also lost a ton of money doing his weird shit. And like it's just he there is like a political project there. No, well, like even Sam Altman at Open AI, you know, his quest for growth is inspired by his mentorship from Peter Thiel. Directly. Absolutely. In pursuit of monopoly. That's what he, I mean, he was, Peter Thiel was one of his mentors, and Altman has talked about the model for growth is you don't, like, try to compete in a market, you try to dominate it. You try to, and that's obviously what Open AI is trying to do.

And I'll just take an opportunity to say that, like, Altman, I think, has been successful in conveying his own profile as this kind of like, do-eyed, you know, Savant, who's just kind of like, oh, the future could be, oh. But like, AI is, but like, I'm a little surprised he didn't, he didn't make it to the final round. Yeah. Because I think like, get this. We did run a poll for third place between Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg. And, you know, we don't really have time to dig into both of them as well. It was very close, much closer than Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Sam Altman got 1,225 votes.

Mark Zuckerberg got 1,223 votes. There was only two votes between them. Oh, my God. voting matters folks voting matters you could be the deciding vote in a in a horse race election that that's that that makes sense though as well like i think it's again it's a profile thing like sam altman is now high profile right i've i've Zuckerberg has benefited from having like multiple personality disorder where he kind of revamps himself every every couple years according to the the tides i think this is a real elon musk zuckabber thing where they are very much just creatures of the public discourse. Like, they blow whatever way the wind is changing, right? And so, like, Elon Musk does this, Zuckerberg does this, to, I mean, to his credit, right? I think he is consistent.

He has had a consistent project since the early 90s at Stanford, right? And has, like, really kept going on. My dark horse is always in these brackets and always has long been near the top, if not at times at the top of my own personal worst person in tech hit list is Alex Karp, but also a Tiel acolyteal, right? And so it is like it all kind of goes back to the deal. There is no Alex Karp without Teal. Like Teal like kind of handpicked him. There's no world that, like the world does not exist the way it does today without Peter Till. I think in a really meaningful way absolutely i think it's really well said and you know i think that pivots us on to

our to our last little thing we wanted to discuss before we wrap up we have a few minutes left but you know we talked about biggest most impactful stories in your view of 2025 i'm wondering you know what's the key thing that you'll be watching for in 2026 as we go into next year given all that we've uh you know that we've seen this year the thing that i'm watching now is kind of the the structure of the political battleground over AI that is it's i think it's kind of up for grabs as a political issue at least in terms of like one that's understood between sort of traditional sort of conservative and left polls but even just in terms of sort of party politics in the u.s between republicans and and democrats there is you know just uh just days before we're recording this uh maybe even

And yesterday, Bernie Sanders kind of went as hard as he's ever gone against data center expansion and sort of called for a moratorium. Moratorium on all data center. I love to see that. Yeah, which is great. And it's kind of like building on the work of like some activist groups and food and water watch and some environmental groups who are saying, who are calling for that a month ago or so.

And clearly also recognizing the popular sentiment and sort of, you know, yeah, it's a It's a NIMBY issue on a lot of fronts, but it's also an environmental issue. It's also a quality of life issue and a standard of living issue. They're jacking up electricity prices, and it's a very easy line to say that, like, why are we paying for AI systems that benefit big tech? And now you very materially are if you live in Virginia or somewhere like that. And so the left is coming at it from your ways that we're listeners of the show are all probably very familiar. with. And yet the right is also, you know, adding to its discontent over sort of the censorship

and, you know, discrimination of conservatives that it's been harping on for however many years. And now adding a more sort of universal reactionary element, I think, to where you see a lot of even sort of, you know, right spaces are now sort of going against chatbots, for instance. There's Josh Hawley, the very right-wing, the Republican senator, has teamed up with Blumenthal, who's like kind of your standard-issue Democrat to stake out a bill that would ban chatbots for minors. When, you know, and we talked up top about the preemption and this moratorium on state-level AI lawmaking. Well, DeSantis, you know, who was in the primaries ring against Trump, like, was, emboldened enough to say no like Florida is going to have its own AI laws like you

can't stop me and that like that's risking a you know political division with with Trump to stake out this issue so to me looking at the political composition of of AI opposition who is going to go after this this issue like you know who is actually going to sort of try to build up political capital by mounting a sustained and meaningful opposition to big tech, to Silicon Valley, to, you know, unfettered AI development and production, you know, I think is going to be a really interesting question because, you know, there's all these technocratic Democrats like Gavin Newsom, who's probably going to be the next, you know, heavyweight in the presidential candidacy for Democrats. He's, you know, he's very Silicon Valley friendly. There's plenty of them that are.

And yet there are, there's like the populist left and the reactionary right that is now sort of kind of entering into this domain and contesting sort of AI. And it'll be really interesting to see how that plays out in 2026. Absolutely. Jethan, what's yours? What are you watching for? Yeah, I agree 100% with Brian around the politics of AI. I also think that there's, with that is a story about the economics of AI or the financial aspect of AI. because as we talked about, I mean, really right now, we're at this, it's continuing a pace

because the music is still playing, right? Once the music stops, I think it will really, things will fall in a way where everyone knows it's a bubble, right? I mean, everyone, people in tech, people in Wall Street, they all acknowledge it's a bubble, like pretty openly, right? So there's not even that, like, cynical denial of it anymore. And so now it's a question of like, can these companies get their ducks in a row in a way to secure themselves against the fallout of the bubble? So this goes to like DeSantis, right? In Florida, was being very vocal around being like no bell out for data centers, you know, no bell out for AI companies. But at the same time, you have open AI, you know, flirting with an IPO.

My view is that Sam Altman will not take Open Eye public until they can secure a trillion dollar valuation, until they can get whatever bank, whatever stock exchange, whatever investors, all in a line singing the same tune that Open AI will go public at a trillion dollars. I think anything less than that, Sam Altman will see as a failure. It's a hubris thing, but I think it's also a self-preservation thing. I mean, he's close. They're close. Wall Street Journal was saying it's like $8.50 billion.

But Open AI is hemorrhaging money as well. Yeah, exactly. It feels like that's the kind of stock that like, okay, they price it at that level. It like goes public and boom, it drives. I think that's what matters, though. I don't think it matters if Open AI stays a trillion dollar company. I think it matters if they can get there and create a massive liquidity event for all of the investors and early employees at Open AI. And then they don't give a shit what happens after that, right? And so I think that is also

what we're going to see is a lot of a lot of organizational kind of jockeying around who can secure their own bag before the music stops. And that might be through bell, you know, securing promises of bellouts from the state. That might be securing massive IPOs and other kinds of liquidity events so that you can kind of draw down and get what you need. But I think that's what we're going to see is a lot of like ramping up towards, okay, we've been inflating this bubble for as much as we can. We need to now do what we can to ensure when the bubble burst. We don't have to, we're not the ones left carrying, you know, holding the bag. Yeah, that's a really good one. Open AI, the meme coin or meme stock of next year. Yeah, I think for me, I would really echo what both of you

are saying, you know, obviously as Brian was talking about the data centers, the politics around data centers, I'm watching that very closely, of course, because I'm writing a book on that very subject. And I think it's going to be, I'm hoping it's going to be pretty important later this year coming up into the midterms when you're thinking about electricity prices and things like that, right? And it was fascinating for me to see Bernie Sanders actually come out and call for a moratorium. Like, it shows how much this has advanced just in the past few months to see the growing, like, political activation around data centers. And of course, since Brian brought that up, I'll say the other thing I'll be watching for is obviously how this kind of digital sovereignty push

continues, whether there's any more momentum on this front, or whether it really, you know, is kind of defeated or falls away because of the power of the Trump administration and Silicon Valley and the influence that they have in these other countries. So yeah, I think that there's going to be so much more than that to be watching for next year. Who knows what kind of twists and turns this will take. Jason, Brian, thank you so much for joining me on this end of year live stream. I appreciate your thoughts and insights that I'm sure the listeners do as well. And of course, a big thanks to anyone who joined a live stream, but especially to all

those who listen to this later as a podcast episode, you know, when this gets released. Thanks for listening to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for supporting us. And, you know, have a great holidays and New Year. Thanks, everyone. See ya. Happy holidays. Bye-bye.

Jayathan Suddowski is author of The Mechanic and the Luddite and co-host of This Machine Brian Merchant is the author of Blood in the Machine and writes a newsletter of the same name. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Husson. Tech Won't Save Us are lies in the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to Patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.

Thank you.