The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart - Elon Musk and America's Tech Oligarchy with Quinn Slobodian

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

As Elon Musk stands to become the world's first trillionaire through the SpaceX IPO, Jon is joined by Quinn Slobodian, co-author of the new book "Muskism," to understand how we arrived at this moment of tech oligarchy. Together, they explore how Musk built a trillion-dollar empire on government money and then used that empire to capture the government itself, and discuss how we can renegotiate the balance of power between public interest and private wealth. Plus, Jon answers listener questions about Trump’s amazing and enthusiastic boo-cheers, CNN, and Taco Bell, yet again! This episode is brought to you by: BOMBAS - Head over to https://Bombas.com/WEEKLY and use code WEEKLY for 20% off your first purchase. GROUND NEWS - Go to https://groundnews.com/stewart to see all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off the Vantage Subscription only for a limited time through our link https://groundnews.com/stewart. MINT MOBILE - Shop plans at https://MintMobile.com/TWS. SHOPIFY - Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at https://shopify.com/TWS. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast > TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Producer – Gillian Spear Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello everybody. Welcome to the Weekly Show podcast. My name is John Stewart. And if you hear in my voice a certain weariness, a certain maybe barely, barely contained anger and upset, the New York Knickerbockers last night. They didn't win the game.

They didn't play their best game. But man, oh man, the physicality of that game. You cannot. Can I make this a rule? You cannot run over Jalen Brunson or throw him to the ground and just have the referees go, that's fine. And you just can't do it. No, I'm not saying it's because of Jalen Brunson, because of the Knicks.

But there was a point in the game where Victor Wembeyanama just basically threw him to the ground. And I don't care if Brunson was hand checking him or grabbing and doing the thing, whatever. You can't just throw a dude to the ground. And you can't just, I can't remember who the other guy was. maybe it was a castle, just ran directly into Brunson, threw an elbow out, plowed him over. And the, you know what? I apologize.

You don't want to hear this. That's not what you're doing here. You're here to have some interesting conversation with a person that cares about things that are beyond sports, things that might have some effect on the world that you live in, the world that we all live in, the design, our future, and those things. And I should just get to that. I apologize.

I'm still hurting. I'm hurting people. That's all I'm saying. It was a long night. And damn. And we'll get him back tomorrow night. That's all I can say. But before that, we're going to be talking about this new book called Muskism.

And it's about he's sort of a stand-in for this idea of the technocrats and the technologists like Henry Ford was back in his day that are controlling the inner wiring of. of an operating systems of this country and this world. And it's a fascinating look at what that control looks like and how it could be muted and how you can get out of the more negative effects of it. So I'm just going to jump into that before I lose my mind over a variety of officiating mistakes from last night that you probably don't care about it at all. So let's just get to him. His name is Quinn Slobodian.

Folks, we're delighted to have with us today, a professor of international history, not just regular history, international history. Sometimes it's even global, gets even bigger. Global history. It could be world history. Planetary. Co-author of the book Muskism and author of High Ex-Bastards, Quinn Slobodyan is joining us today. Quinn, thank you for being here. It's my pleasure. Quinn, you know, the book you've written, you're sort of, you're looking at the way that,

governments and technologies are joining together and some kind of morphing into one another. Would that be the correct way to look at this as to who is relying on who? What is the premise of this idea of muskism? Yeah. I mean, in a way, that's how capitalism always works, right? It's a new way of organizing the world through technology that produces a change. Social relationship or new relationship to the government and a new set of languages to describe that. What's unique about the present moment, I think, being in this era of digital capitalism, where a small number of firms kind of carry the whole stock market, become the whole growth story for the economy, for everyone's well-being in prosperity, it means you get a couple of people

appointed as disproportionately important for the ongoing success of that project. And then their products become disproportionately important. So every day from our interaction here on the screen to, you know, making a payment online to putting something into the cloud or listening to something streaming or doing something on a spreadsheet, we're all, we're mediating with the services provided to us by Silicon Valley companies. And that's not even just an American condition. That's a global condition, right? People all over the world are also, subscribing to the softwares of Silicon Valley to just go about everyday life. And that can be okay, actually. That can be a way that we describe in the book that state capacity and social

capacity can be expanded. Like, we can actually do things that we weren't able to do before because of these services. But it also produces a kind of asymmetrical dependency on these small number of people who, in the example of the person we're going to be talking most about today, Elon Musk, can seem like a real vulnerability and a risk because those people, those people, if they have their hand on the switch, can decide to turn off all of that state capacity at the moment that they decide that their whims. Yeah. No, no, wait, I didn't know they had a switch. They, if, I mean, in some cases, they literally do, right? I mean, the most famous example of this with Musk is, of course, the battlefield in Ukraine, which relies heavily on Starlink. And they were

trying to do a push into Kerosan province and Khrman, and he just said, no, I don't think so. I'm worried about the risk. Click. Suddenly, they're offline. So that's a dramatic example, but you can think of a lot of ways that that actually cascades down into everyday life, too. Quinn, let's think of this as, so the way I'm trying to envision it is the kind of operating systems, if we want to think about it in sort of this, the modern parlance of

cyber tech and all those things. So we have kind of two operating systems, I guess, that we go along with. The political operating system is representative democracy. You know, constitutional representative democracy is the way that we govern our country, handle our disputes. There's an accountability to the consent of the government and to the people. The other operating system, I guess, would be a kind of, let's say, capitalism writ large, whether it's crony or otherwise, you know, are those two operating systems,

have always been slightly at odds. Is this a different moment for that that you see? Or are we really playing out kind of an age-old story? Yeah. No, I mean, I think that's a really helpful way to look at it. Because if you think about earlier moments, let's say the moment of industrial capitalism and manufacturing when the economy in the United States

was based on people having long-term employment at, let's say, auto factories putting together cars. That's actually often called Fordism. So there you have exactly, as you're saying, the kind of two potentially battling imperatives. One is that of the capitalist, which is just like, I want to make as much money as possible. I want to sweat my workers as much as possible. I want to boost my sales and my profitability as much as possible. And I've invented something that has utility and it's new and people haven't seen it before,

and the market is deciding. Yeah, and it's increasing productivity and efficiency or getting more of these cars at the door. because of the moving assembly line. So you've got that. But then you've got the kind of social contract on the other side, right? Then you have the question of like, why should society go along with this? Why shouldn't they just go and put your head on a pike? Why don't they burn down the factory?

Wait, wait, that escalated very quickly, Quinn. Well, figuratively, but, I mean, early modern period, that's how people showed discontent. Right, right. I mean, they went and stormed the Lord's manner and just burnt it down and burned up all the receipts. And then that was a tax revolt, and you wouldn't have to worry about it for a few months. How did Fordism interact with the government in a way that's maybe different from today? Or was it the same? Well, exactly, that's the point with the ism on Fordism.

The ism ism is not just Ford did what he wanted. The ism is a kind of settlement with the working class so that they would willingly and even voluntarily go along with his profit strategy. So what did that mean? It meant that he met the working class. which was still very powerful and well organized, halfway. It meant he recognized trade unions, collective bargaining agreements. They're getting some part of the profits through wage raises over time.

They're getting cradle to the grave employment contracts, basically. They're getting social services. You get a kind of breadwinner-headed nuclear family as the stabilizing social unit. So there's all kinds of attention to the ways that a social willingness to go along with a business model ends up getting secured, sometimes through violent clashes, sometimes through peaceful negotiation. Yeah. But that's how then, you know, through that means also through redistributive taxation, you get a kind of working model where democracy and capitalism can coexist relatively happily.

So that's the arrangement that he makes with the working class. That's the arrangement that he makes with the populace. Yeah. What is the arrangement, though, that he makes with the government? Is the government, you know, did he need government subsidy to create this model? Or was this model so unique? And he was able to fund it through his own means and it just took off. How did that work?

Well, I mean, if you think about it not being just about Ford, but being just about kind of like the era of manufacturing in American life more generally. Right. Mass production. Mass production plus mass consumption. Right. hospitable set of laws to allow for the owners to keep, you know, growing amount of the wages.

Well, I mean, eventually, you know, that got expelled. But so you have like a cooperative relationship between the lawmaking state and the profit making corporation. And people somehow were, the number of people being brought into that arrangement was growing over time, such that it had a kind of stability and even the welfare state in its you know, in its vestigial way that exists in the United States, what you can see is a kind of outcome of the Ford is compromise, right? The kind of the great society programs, Social Security Medicaid,

are about saying, we need to keep a relatively healthy working class because if people dying of, you know, typhus are walking in the factory gates at the beginning of the day, the cars are going to get made. So there is a kind of virtuous, pragmatic cycle that you could say existed at that time. You can exploit us to a certain degree. Yeah, but buy us dinner first. But after exploiting us. Right, exactly.

Exactly. We should be able to have soup. Yeah. Fair enough. And, you know, and college education and all kinds of things. I mean, there are all kinds of material ways that life got better for Americans in the mid-century. And that's in sharp contrast with our present moment of digital capitalism, where actually, for most people, life is getting worse. Their wages are stagnating.

people are living in more and more precarious positions. So that is why we in this book, we called it Muskism, because we wanted to force that comparison. You know, what did Ford do, how did Fordism stabilize society in a time of disruptive change? Right. And what, by contrast, is Musk failing to do, we think, in this present moment to kind of stabilize

the disruptive effects of the technology that he's and his Silicon Valley class brethren are rolling out. Now, are we using Musk as a stand in here for kind of the Silicon Valley class? So I'm assuming that's, you know, you could call it theelism or you could call it, you know, altmanism, Zuckerbergism? I'm sure it's been attempted. Right. Muskism is easier. It's one syllable.

Muskism does get auto-corrected to Muslim in an uncomfortable way for me a lot when I'm trying to punch into my phone. Sure. But now there is something that he does play a kind of a keystone role. that actually isn't comparable to others. Like, we get the Peter Thiel question a fair amount. And just in material terms, Musk made five times Peter Thiel's net worth just last year. So he is, you know, far more wealthy.

So he's done it better. He has managed to bring together, and there's another reason why he's helpful kind of pedagogically and representatively, to bring together kind of the material side of Silicon Valley actually do make stuff. It's not just vaporware and social media platforms and ad sales. Like he's actually did the hard work of assembling rockets, electric vehicles, satellites,

now, you know, supercomputers in Memphis. And he plays with that virtual layer of social media, meme creation, hype creation. You can't understand him without both sides of that. That's not necessarily true with every member of the Silicon Valley class. So he's helpful to provide a kind of overview of the whole, ensemble of how digital capitalism works in a way that really no one else is. What role did the government have in seeding Fordism? You know, does Ford exist without, and I don't know if they did subsidies or if that's even

how the government worked back then or if it was all, you know, this is the age of the industrialists. So I imagine a lot of it was self-finance, but how does the government's role in lubricating the rise of these technocrats play a role where it didn't in Fordism? I think that it's actually helpful to find the closest analog to look at the era of westward expansion. So the railroad barons really kind of set the stage, I think, for what became the successful model of American capitalism, which is, you know, the government says, you know, we need a railroad, and we will give to you private capitalists the right of access across this country and you can build it, you can put freight on it, you can build towns next to it,

you can charge passengers. And then we, the government, get something out of that. We get access for our troops, we get a growing tax base, et cetera, et cetera. That model of kind of cooperation and complementarity, you could say, is more like what gets us to the manufacturing moment. And then there's all kinds of, of course, demand from the military, right? Military Keynesianism is built on demand coming from the state for exactly those kind of heavy-duty high-end manufactured objects like airplanes and jeeps and ammunition. So there's always been that back and forth. And what's interesting is you can even bring that quite cleanly up into the era of the launch of the dot-com era in the mid-1990s because right, the internet, as we now are all very familiar, is a product of military R&D. It comes straight out of the

military and state application of money to something that was originally a kind of research project, right? I mean, it was for universities. It wasn't for commercial applications. Right. So then the whole thing gets handed to Silicon Valley and the tax sector in 1995, totally privatized. And it's only there that you start to get this mythology, this fairy tale that they sometimes

encourage that, like, the internet is almost wearing out of nowhere and value is being created out of the clouds. But in fact, it's part of a long history of kind of public-private partnership that's often been the way that America gets its advantage in the world, creating a space for competing firms, bailing out when structurally necessary, but not really picking winners in a direct way very often across the 20th century. What's the quid pro quo from the government? Because you said, you know, they kind of, they grant you the ability to expand Westward or they give you those things. Is there an explicit quid pro quo with that? Because that doesn't seem to be the case today. It seems like within those subsidies, there is no quid pro quo on.

And here's what you're going to have to do, whether it means, you know, a social safety net for your workers or, you know, a lot of these places are very much against union organizing or any of the kind of things for the, you know, it's a different ethos that's about efficiency. and not broader-based stability. Yeah, I mean, it's a different kind of social contract for sure. But I think one of the arguments we want to make in the book is to kind of push back a bit at the idea that Musk is just a crony capitalist or just someone who's like, you know, stealing from the public purse. If you look at two of his biggest companies, where it's two biggest companies, SpaceX and Tesla,

they both step in to serve a specific state need at a certain specific moment. So one thing that I didn't know until we started publishing or working on this book is that SpaceX comes right out of the global war on terror. Right. So Donald Rumsfeld, September 10th, 2001, stands in front of the brass at the Pentagon and says the Cold War is over, but there's a new enemy and the enemy is us. It's like the old one. It's top down. It's hidebound. It's too centralized.

It can't. It's not flexible. It can't think on its feet. We need to now fight ourselves. It's democracy. democracy, but it's actually Silicon Valley. Yeah, I mean, democracy is ultimately the problem. Right. But they need to bring now in, like, the tech energy, the move fast and break things energy, the venture capital model. This is September 10th, 2001. September 10th. Really? The day before.

Yes. Oh, dear God. The narrative setup is almost too perfect. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us. Is us. Yeah, boom. Plain hits the building the next day. Wow. But then, you know, in the next year, First, of course, they discover a different enemy, and the enemy is all over the world, and it's mobile, and it's hard to find. And what you're going to need is a new set of technologies to track it down and eliminate it. And enter Rumsfeld's idea of so-called network-centric warfare. So instead of large land armies, you're mostly going to focus on highly mobile special force units that can be deployed all over the world, munitions guided by satellites. And for that, you need a bunch more satellites.

And Musk starts SpaceX 2002, first year of the war on terror, saying, I'm going to be doing that cheaper for you than anyone else has. I'm going to be able to put those satellites into orbit, cheaper than Boeing's been able to do it. And I'm going to bring in all kinds of cuss cutting styles and vertical integration and new ways of sweating my employees. And I'm going to outcompete them on a competitive tender. And I'm going to sue you to make you give it to me as a more competitive offer. And that's what happens. And the federal government says, you got us. And who uses that exact lawsuit the next year?

Palantir. Palantir gets its first contract. Wait, this is all 2002, 2003. Yep. It's that early. Really? That's when it starts. Folks, it's back.

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A huge expansion of the U.S. control of this new sector, of so-called new space or the space economy. Interestingly enough, just six years later, Barack Obama comes into office. This is funny talking to you about this because I was watching you talk about this as it was happening. But Barack Obama comes into office as, of course, the anti-war president. And one of the forgotten things about that moment is he said, One of the ways we're going to be less militaristic is we're going to make ourselves less dependent on fossil fuels. We're going to unplug from Middle Eastern oil.

We're going to use the bailout of the auto sector to actually electrify the auto sector. We're going to go hard into renewables. And this was the whole clean tech moment that actually gave Tesla its first life-saving government loan, nearly $500 million in 2009, from Obama's Department of Energy, to be part of that push, which was basically green industrial policy, create what we call electric autonomy in the United States, so you don't have to be going in fighting stupid wars on the other side of the world. How did that work out for us, Gwen?

Well, there was a world historical problem, which was bracking is discovered just a couple of years after that, and then America just forgets all about renewables for many, many years and decides now we are the petroleum giant. That's right. And actually, then the current debacle is in a roundabout way the product of that because of the feeling like we can do whatever we want in the Middle East because we are our own oil producer. We didn't know it was in our backyards. We could just go out in the backyard. Yeah. I mean,

barring that discovery of fracking, we might have been on a trajectory more similar to China because at that point China got on the green path and stayed on it. And now they do have electric autonomy. They are much more resilient in moments of supply shocks. And they dominate the global EV and lithium ion battery market. But the point is that in both of those cases, EVs, satellite launch, rocket launch, the state actually did get something out of it. What's missing, and as you point to correctly, is where the worker fits into that, because part of Musk's business model has always been getting around trade unions. I mean, there's a gigafactory outside Berlin now. It's the only auto factory in Germany without a collective bargaining agreement. Sweden is in its

longest labor action in history with Tesla because he doesn't see that as part of the operating system. That's the, we think, the vulnerability and characteristic feature of this muskism is it's just forgotten about the worker and forgotten about the need to secure consent with the people who are actually producing your products. And that is an arrangement that actually can't last forever. Well, you see the backlash on it in terms of. Exactly. Once these guys, you know, this is a little bit of a detour. But there is a kind of ideology that also traces back through Fordism of this kind of theory of the great man and a kind of libertarian, you know, authoritarian adjacent, in Ford's case, explicitly authoritarian. Is there a reason for that, you know, that the strains of that

that went through Ford and certainly his sympathies towards, you know, Mussolini and, you know, Mussolini and Hitler and those kinds of individuals. You know, I would imagine for business leaders, especially in a democracy, they'd be loathe to attach themselves specifically to an ideology, yet they do. Yeah. Why would that be? Well, I mean, in the case of Musk, there's so much important stuff going on there that it's impossible not to come back to him because this figure of the founder, CEO, God, and Musk has now

officially become the techno king of Tesla since 2021. He's not the CEO. He's the techno king. Is a situation that, for me, as a historian, is a real bitter pill to swallow because I was raised in social history. I was raised in history from below, history from the margins. And we were always taught that the gray man theory of history was like the worst way to tell history.

It couldn't be that it's just one person strode across the stage of the past and sort of shaped the world as they wished. But I've had to come to terms with the fact that collectively, through our own decision-making as societies, we've produced a situation where there is an historically unprecedented concentration of power in individuals, far, far, far more than there was with Henry Ford. So Elon Musk can wake up in the middle of night in his underwear and speak directly to 250 million people and change the value of cryptocurrencies, change the value of stocks within seconds. In fact, there's a lot of the money. automated bots that follow his tweets and then immediately place investment bids based on that.

He has, we'll have a trillion dollars probably by the end of the week. Campaign finance laws. By the end of the week? Oh, yeah. By Thursday? Friday. Friday is the SpaceX IPO. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. No, so there's a very good chance. Now, did Ford not have, I would imagine he had the ability to move markets, not obviously with tweeting, but certainly, you know, there must have been some kind of a symbiotic relationship with the pamphleteers of the day or the yellow journalists or that kind of thing. He must have been able to move markets as well. Well, he could, but here's the interesting thing. Ford never went public, right? Ford was private until the day Henry Ford died. Really?

Why? Because he hated the markets. He distrusted them that overlapped almost completely with his anti-Semitism, right? He believed that the coastal manipulators of, you know, fake value were trying to undermine people like him, the workshop of the Midwest, that were making things, hard things with their hands. So what's interesting is that, you know, part of this compromise between capitalism and democracy across the last hundred years has been carried out by the publicly traded corporation. What's interesting about the publicly traded corporation is that, yes, not everyone can have a share.

But if you do, then you also have a vote. And if you have a vote, then you have some influence over the leadership. You can, if the person's going crazy at the top, vote them out, force a change of leadership. What's happened, and this is often misunderstood in Silicon Valley, is that as companies have gone public, starting with Zuckerberg's Facebook, they've totally redesigned the way corporate governance works so that their votes are worth usually 10x or even 20x more than people who are coming in after it goes public, meaning they actually can't be held accountable. They can't be dislodged.

Musk holds 85, will hold 85% of the votes needed to dislodge him as the head of SpaceX after it goes public on Friday. So it's the benefit of capitalization without the negative of any kind of accountability through shareholders. Exactly. So you're having your cake and eating it too. You have the full control nascent in the family firm or the private corporation. And yet you're tapping global capital markets, like you're getting all kinds of liquidity that you would and otherwise because you're printing new shares and selling them off as little slivers of ownership, which don't amount to any kind of control. So it's actually hacked the public corporation, which was supposed to separate ownership and control and put them back together so that you get this techno king like figure who can

also, because of campaign finance laws in this country, then give unlimited amounts of money to any candidate that they want. Right. And the great man of history then kind of comes back in through the back door because you can't deny then the concentration of agency. So in this moment, are they able to consolidate power? And in that case, this is a real swerve, then why does Peter Thiel flee to Argentina? Like in this moment where you are consolidating not just the financial benefit for yourself, but the political power, the lack of accountability, you are. are these great men, why leave? Well, I mean, the first thing to say there is he's, it's a Pietitare, right?

I mean, he's got one in New Zealand. He's got one in Argentina. He's got one in Miami. It's just a little one bedroom in Buenos Aires that he goes to over the weekends? The man doesn't really live, he doesn't really live anywhere, right? I mean, he lives where his private jed takes him. So one doesn't really want to, like, give too much weight to that, I think. But the other answer is it goes back to your point about the opposite.

operating system. So someone like Musk does think that society is governed by an operating system. That's what Doge was, right? That was him entering the government and saying, I'm going to reprogram this thing. This thing is full of bugs. It's full of like old antiquated hardware and software. And I'm going to make it work the way that I think a government should work. I'm going to be tech support in the most radical interventionist way possible. What happened? I mean, it was kind of a disaster, right? I mean, no, he didn't deliver on any of the fiscal promises. Yes, he cleared the ground and consolidated the government to plug in a bunch of AI tools from Palantir Anthropic and Grok, but huge public backlash. As soon as they tried to actually

bring the figure down, people are filling town halls. People actually were angry about the social contract of Social Security and Medicaid being infringed on. So the reason why they're fleeing to Argentina, even if they're not, the reason why they might be worried is because their thin view of human nature and politics is actually incorrect. And actually you do need to respond to people's everyday lives, their needs. You do need to meet them halfway. And they haven't been. I mean, the AI push has been insane. For the last year, they've been given a full runway and all they've done is say, we need to build Manhattan-sized data centers in your backyard so we can build the machine god that will put you and your grandchildren out of work permanently. What kind of a way

to communicate with people is that? Hey, folks, you know, I ask you this question a lot of times. Where do you get your news from? But most of your news, you don't know where it's coming from. You don't know the biases involved with these people. That's for ground news. Do you know ground news? It's a source you can trust, and not because they tell you you can trust them.

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Don't forget to get 40% off ground news at groundnews.com slash steward. So you have these tech titans that are slowly, you know, insinuating of themselves into the operating systems. And the thing I would say about doses, the way you described it in theory is so different than the way that it was implemented. It was not implemented technocratically. It was implemented ideologically. they just decided this is waste. What is this for? AIDS medicine in Nigeria. Okay.

Screw worm containment? What's that? Right, exactly. That's gone. I think if they had, there are very few people in the United States who believe that this representative democracy is in an agile way,

responsive to the needs of the people, or that the bureaucracy functions in a manner that is appropriate for the distribution of whatever it is that the government seems to be distributing. I think people would be desperate for help in that regard. But what came out of Doge was not that. It was an ideological exercise in what the right deems wasteful. Yeah.

DEI. What does that have in the name of it? Woman. Cut it. So it didn't do the thing that they purported it to be doing. It, A, didn't save any money. and B, had nothing to do with actual efficiency? Well, yes and no.

I mean, I agree with most of that, but I would say that they did also integrate databases and personal files across agencies that had been deliberately kept separate to more efficiently locate, target, and then deport populations of people. I was going to say, that wasn't for efficiency, that was for control.

I saw it as a way for them to consolidate control, Sure. Yeah, but I think that, you know, your basic point I completely agree with, which is that in general, there is a feeling that business operates in a kind of stratum that's insulated from feedback or responsiveness. And it has done so for many decades, right? I mean, it's trundled along in a way that has actually not returned gains to most people. Most people's wages have been flat. They've seen life get worse. And you could see the mega Silicon Valley tie up in 2025 as a kind of wager that they could take advantage of that frictionlessness and go even harder, right?

In fact, there were no levers of feedback. There were no levers of the need to secure legitimacy, which is why David Sachs, three different times, tried to get laws passed that made it impossible for states to do any AI regulation for a decade. Right. They tried to put that in. Because he figured, we have an open runway. We can do whatever we want.

Right. And they did have free reign because people. People were slow to pick up on it. There was a general kind of, you know, a sense of powerlessness around this very issue. And it's only now with, I think, the war, rising energy costs, a sense of the actual investments starting to bear fruit in the sense that you can start to see strange constructions on the edge of town. That people like Bernie Sanders are getting some traction now with pushback. And the numbers, the poll numbers on AI data centers now are just insane, right? I mean, Americans don't agree on anything like this, and yet they're agreeing on the fact that they don't want this to be imposed on them.

So by, I think, getting over their skis by actually overestimating how much of a supine population that they were dealing with, that they weren't just dealing with programming to be reformatted, you know, it's been actually kind of a rude awakening for some of these people. And they do are, they're scrambling to make up for lost time, right? enhance the discussion of a public wealth fund, constitution, some attempt to kind of backpedal into a social contract that they actually hadn't really thought about before. Right. It's, what they're looking for is revolution insurance. Absolutely. Well, that's what Fordism has always been about, too.

I mean, that's what Ford wanted, too. And, you know, there's, there are worse ways to organize a society than revolution insurance. Right. Social democracy is arguably that. Why is it having to be done so reluctantly? Why is the social capital part of this equation always done with them kicking and screaming? That's the part. Why is what their vision of their role in our society is so antithetical to that?

Well, I think it's helpful then to think about what came after Fordism. So we talk about Fordism as a period in United States and Western Europe from, let's say, around the second world, war to the 1970s. What changes in the 1970s? Well, globalization, deregulation, attack on trade unions. Oil shocks. The oil shocks, you know, things that manufacturing happened here becomes more expensive, relocates to poor location. People don't have the job security they used to. So you can't secure the social contract that way, cradle to grave, social protection and employment. How do you do it instead? Well, you do it through the stock market, right? That's also when retirement accounts go to 401k's, they become.

And so now the new way of securing social consent is like, don't worry, the stock market's got you, watch the line go up, and know that that is basically the barometer of your future well-being and your future health. And when Silicon Valley steps in in the late 1990s and uninterrupted really to the president and says, we are the kind of safeguards of the line going up, then they become kind of of this central social infrastructure that the American social contract relies on. And so in that sense, they can do no wrong. As long as you're making the line go up, do whatever you want. Poison our minds, manipulate us with algorithms. It's the backdoor of privatization.

Yeah. The New Deal says it's an unraveling of the government says capitalism, if that's our operating system, has collateral damage. And that collateral damage may come in the form of losers or poverty or those kinds of things. The government will set a floor. whether it be for food or for retirement or those things. And these industrialists come in again, and I say that writ large, and say, okay, we'll find backdoors to privatize that bargain that government has with its people so that we can still control it. Is that their desire?

I think so. I mean, I think it's just the fact that, you know, well-being started to be defined. through stock market performance and returns on investment rather than any other way, right? So you wouldn't say, like, people's lives are getting better because, you know, they have more social protections, or there's a sense of community or whatever, it just became strictly quantifiable, like how much, how much money do people get when they put X amount of dollars into the stock market when they start their working lives? Right.

I'll beat your social security account. And by the way, if I don't, oh, well. Yeah, then you don't have to be. have anywhere to go anyways. But I think that, you know, if you, that's really one of the remarkable things about the last 25 years is the reason why we wrote the book is that I don't think we really have a good narrative yet for just how reliant American economy is on the digital tech sector, right? It is really the whole story. And in the last year, it's become even more the whole story. Under Biden, there was an attempt, you could say, to kind of diversify a bit to move into green

manufacturing, put an emphasis back on higher ed, biotech. But this one-way bat on generative AI technology, it's a race. We need to put everything behind it. You know, every last bit of investment needs to go behind this, such that, you know, sand disk chips, like those little things you would put in a digital camera or something to... Oh, yeah, yeah. The value of that, the stock of those things has gone up like a thousand percent in the last year because people are like every little bit of storage for the AI boom is necessary. So, you know, everything's being full. funneled into that such that people now are being overwhelmed. But isn't that vulnerable to the same capture that, you know, fossil fuel or AI or any of these

other things, isn't green technology just another avenue by which these industrialists could gain access to our operating systems and, and, you know, basically corner the market on it? I mean, you see Musk is diversified. He's got, he's got our satellites in space, but he also has batteries and everything else. You know, just because we think it may be a more healthful technology for the planet, doesn't mean it's not still vulnerable to capture by these libertarian, you know, gods. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's just a question of how you see that balance between private and public power operating.

So we have a menu of options in the world, right? The China model is quite different. You basically get goals set at the top. for the next five years or 10 years. Right. An industrial policy. Yes and no, because then they sort of say, let the companies fight it out at the state level and we'll see who wins and then we'll take the winners out and kind of guide them upwards.

Whereas the U.S. model, and this is true under Biden too, has always been about derisking, right? Saying like, don't worry, the state will take care of all of the downside and you'll only keep the upside. And that is obviously a recipe for, right? I mean, privatize profits and socialized losses. Socialized risk. That's what they do.

That's the American model. That's the American dream. Right. Moral hazard for everybody. Yeah. And that's really what, I mean, I'm sure we're going to be talking about that in a second, but that's really the move of SpaceX, right? Which goes public on Friday at an expected valuation of $1.75 trillion dollars, the biggest IPO in history,

by quite some measure. Why is he doing it? I mean, he's trying to become too big to fail, such. that that inevitable bailout somewhere in the future becomes structurally necessary, right? But they already are. I mean, do we really believe, if you think about it through the financial system, if we have something that is this crucial to the operating system of everything that we do, informationally and otherwise, do they really believe that if the AI bubble pops, the government doesn't come in in the same way and use our tax money to bail these guys out? There's no way.

Yeah, no, there's certainly already betting on that internally. But what's amazing is that that's also seemingly the kind of public conversation, right? It's just like, cross our fingers and hope that the rocket keeps rising. Instead of, frankly, places like the EU are looking at this differently. They're like, why are we so dependent on these erratic maniacs out in California? Let's slowly and painstakingly try to build out alternatives. Let's switch from Microsoft to Linux, even though it's a, pain to learn, and it doesn't actually work as well as Microsoft. Let's try to add to our few hundred

low-earth orbit satellites to catch Musk's 10,000, because we don't want, we want sovereignty, and we don't want dependency to go on forever. In America, that conversation sort of doesn't happen. It just seems to be, like, put in much more moralistic terms. So if you're a critic, like you or I, then it's just about how evil these people are and how much, you know, hatred lives in their parts, rather than trying to pick apart the structural power and saying, like, okay, where's the vulnerabilities? How could we, you know, nationalize part of that, bring more of that in-house, take advantage of the good things that they've contributed as far as engineering breakthroughs and optimization and shed the extremely toxic things that they've added to this model? I just think it

needs to be a lot more clean-cut. Well, it's like we're creating our own monopolies. Absolutely. You know, by putting this much government funding underneath it, de-risking it and allowing that, We're creating these monopolies. Now, there seems to be a subtle shift, even on the right, about this sudden realization that these AI companies are exploiting our data and our accomplishments to create these products that have no transparency and that it is a utility because it is going to be a part of our operating system and that the people, you know, I've even heard the Trump administration talking about,

and Bernie Sanders has certainly suggested this, that the American people have a share at least in these companies or profit from them in some way. Is that a bulwark against that? Or is that just us becoming complicit in their investment story? Does that really de-risk them? Yeah. Right, exactly. Yeah, I think it's a bit of both.

So, I mean, I give a lot of credit to Bernie Sanders and his team for starting and continuing now this public conversation that goes beyond. just either, you know, surrender or demolition. You know, they called for the moratorium and now they're like, okay, here's a concrete proposal. We take a big equity stake in AI companies and we turn it into a sovereign wealth fund like the Norwegian oil fund, like Temasek in Singapore. Exactly. Like they do in Alaska.

Like public investment fund. Exactly. And as you said, Trump himself has actually expressed some sympathy for that. Altman sat down with Senator Sanders last week to talk about this. I actually went and visited him. To talk them out of it. Well, no, but we get to the second part of your point, right? Which is, you know, what's the downside of something like that?

Well, then it bolts the American, you know, future onto this one technology in a way that everyone is quite literally now invested on success. And you actually don't get any further into the diversification, the second guessing, the kind of accountability. Instead, as in Alaska, as in Norway, everyone just becomes their little oil barons. I mean, do people want to be their little AI barons? Or do they want to say, like, wait, what is this technology for? When you look at the polls, it's very interesting.

People actually mostly aren't worried about it taking their jobs. They mostly don't like that it lies to them, right? I mean, it's the unsettling effect on reality. Right, the manipulation. Very convincing, generative. Yes, and people are just losing a sense of a shared terrain for doing anything. Or purpose. Absolutely.

I mean, there is a certain, you know, we have an understanding of what our role is in the world, and there's a certain feeling of, we are needed. We are needed here for certain things. And if we are not needed here, is it enough for us to just go, all right, we'll just pay us a royalty then? I think societies have to understand people need to be needed. Yeah. And the crudeness in which people's productivity now is being described

is kind of mind-blowing. Like, for example, muskism came out on Harper, which is part of Harper-Collins, which is part of News Corp. And recently the CEO of News Corp said that we NewsCorp are an AI company, and we cherish our publishing sector because we're always going to need new material to basically be fed into the AI models. Holy shit. Right. So, you know, you're sitting there as an author. That is now our purpose.

Right, doing your level best to criticize the whole apparatus. And you say, oh, my gosh, this is just feedstock so that I suppose the LLM can spit out a critical perspective on its own industry. Well, you see it even in the meetings when the tech guys are talking to each other and their shareholders versus when they're public facing. There was a quote that I remember from, and I can't remember the name of the, you know, one of the AI oligarch dudes, but he said, what AI will offer us is productivity without the tax of labor. Right. Referring to human capital, referring to your employees as that is the tax that we have to abide. by to get our productivity. Right.

And you compare that to previous versions of revolution insurance, as you say, or reformism, which were based on the dignity of labor. Right. It was about protecting the dignity of labor, not just seeing labor as like a payroll. Now, was Ford, did he recognize that or was he dragged to that? Was it the fear of, because this is, when Ford is making his bones, you are seeing the Bolshevik revolution, you're seeing the czar's overthrown. is he, and goes back to our earlier point,

do they understand this because they're human or are they dragged to it because of fear? I mean, I think it's best to see them as being pressured to it from the forces that encircled them, right? I mean, and it is another way that the past era is so strikingly different from the present, right? I mean, we live in the United States, walk into the middle, middle of cities,

you see museums, you see universities, you see all of these things, libraries that were endowed by that previous generation of oligarchs because of a recognition that they needed to meet the population halfway and find some kind of way of giving back, however symbolically, and partially part of the wages that are being taken from them every day in the workplace. And what's still to this day amazing to me is how the Silicon Valley class feels no need to do anything even comparable. In fact, the Musk Foundation is one of the best capitalized philanthropies in the United States. And yet it's sued every year by the IRS because it doesn't pay the minimum out to anything to count as a charity. I mean, it's really not bad. Haven't they, though, there's sort of that strain of it called effective altruism, which they would purport.

That was kind of the Sam Bankman-Fried. of, you know, the only point of this kind of pursuit is to get so much money that you can give it all away. Mm-hmm. Right. Well, I actually think that effective altruism is kind of underplayed as being still really significant in this story. Because another correlated philosophy is long-termism, right?

Right. Which is that you actually need to do the things that will create the breakthrough technologies, which will allow for the future propagation of human lives. you know, millennia into the future. So to think in the short time frame of how can I make life better for the present number of people on Earth or even the next few generations is actually way too narrow-minded. And you need to say, how are we going to be able to colonize the planets, set up, you know, Dyson spheres around all of them and have, you know, sextillions of digital lives

unloaded onto these mainframes that now become interplanetary. If you take on that way of thinking and Musk and Altman were at the center of that discussion, in 2015 when they started OpenAI. Then you've basically delinked yourself from all the normal impulses of humanitarianism and charity that would lead even someone like Bill Gates to say like, hey, let's make lives a little longer for people in the third world. You let me have a monopoly on software and I will buy you malaria nets. Yes, right.

I mean, you know, it's inadequate, but it's at least in line with like most people's sense of, you know, responsibility for their common man. Whereas what's so striking about Musk is when you take that long term as in leap and you say like, you know, that's short-term thinking is actually damaging. Then you end up where Musk is now and you start describing empathy itself as a flaw, right? He talks about... That's exactly where they're at. Right. So he talks constantly about suicidal empathy, a term he borrows from this Lebanese Canadian psychologist God Sade, who's very big in the Joe Rogan circuit. And the argument, there is that all this stuff to do with welcoming immigrants, refugees, multiculturalism,

the idea of anti-racism is all based on an exploit that we have in our software, that we need to override for the sake of the greater optimization of the totality. Why would, you know, because that, again, is a strain that it certainly didn't originate with Musk, and as we're talking about Fordism, why does that strain of, why is there such antipathy to diversity or multiculturalism or those kinds of things when you would think if you're an industrialist, wouldn't you think of everything as an emerging market? Wouldn't you look at everything? Why does, do these industrial technocrats or whatever all seem to flow into that ideology

of diversity will destroy us? Well, I mean, Musk is kind of a unique one in that case, right? Because I would say that previous eras of industrious often welcomed incoming immigrants as long as they met a kind of physical standard that could be, you know, useful human capital inside of their factories. But Musk comes to his way of thinking about those populations through his kind of computational lens. So you mentioned operating system earlier. It's very much the way Musk sees the world. The world is a space that works from computers outward. He first got a programmable Commodore when he was a teenager, then he connected to the internet before he left South Africa, and ever since then, he's been seeing

computers as a kind of control unit for reality. If you see society that way, then when things happen that are against your material interests, you assume them to be either bugs or viruses or failed programming in the system that needs to be fixed. And if you look closely as what we do in our chapter of the book, which we call state acts, if you look at the way he talked about what he was doing at Doge, he said not only that he was reprogramming the Matrix, but that he was in there to get rid of the bugs, the viruses, the bots, and the vampires

and the non-player characters, the NPCs, right? So illegal immigrants, people who we perceive to be somehow in a great replacement theory kind of way, acting as the permanent voting base for the Democratic Party, are kind of offline computer viruses who need to be identified and removed. So that way of kind of shifting constantly between online and offline thinking is, you know,

hopefully pretty foreign to most of us, but you need to kind of make that turn to understand the way Musk sees things. I don't even know why I'm doing this next one, truthfully. Ryan Reynolds already does it. You're not going to listen to Ron Reynolds. What are you going to listen to me for? What am I, I'm the Ryan Reynolds of podcasting? Is that what I'm hearing? Or perhaps I'm the Deadpool.

A podcast. Could I be the Deadpool? No, probably, although I do have the outfit, which is not, if I may say, and I mean no disrespect to the franchise, a breathable fabric. It's a sweat machine. Pools right in the crack above the old Tudaloo. You know what I'm talking. talking about. The point is I could talk about this forever when what really you should do is just switch to Mint Mobile already. God, how many times do I have to nag you people about this? Look, Mint Mobile took everything that's wrong with the wireless industry and they made it right. They offer premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. Nobody does that except Mint Mobile. Get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month. Go to mintmobile.com slash TW.O. That's mintmobile.com slash TWS.

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See Mint Mobile for details. Do it now, unless you're a sales. scared. And it actually then helps explain why the X.com platform is so important to him because it is a kind of closed ecosystem in which his way of thinking can be kind of propagated at scale. Right. And where this is one of my favorite things looking on that website through the burner account

I have that only follows Elon Musk is that it has this little feature called, it has a feature called Today's News. And it tells you what apparently today's news is. Yesterday, you know what today's news was? There were two items. One is Musk questions whether colonialism made Africa poorer. That was

the first headline. The second headline was Argentine President Javier Malay praises Musk's battle on the woke mine virus. Oh my. That was today's news. And that's, you know, that's what Musk is going for. He wants to create

a communications ecosystem in which only those most dogmatic kind of provdha-like talking points can be repeated back to him. Well, not to torture the analogy too badly, but is that because, you know, you talked about viruses and, you know, betas and demos, is the idea of this that there are programmers and there are users? And he's a programmer. and these guys think of it as, and Henry Ford in the same way,

and maybe this is the, you know, maybe we start to throw in the kind of Ein Rand strain of makers and takers and the fountainhead, and that there are those, now the technocrats, that are the programmers, and if you just let us be, we will create for you this top-down society. Yeah.

if you're interfering, you're somehow debris or dross in the system. Does that lead, though, to eliminationist rhetoric? I mean, is that... Absolutely, it does. Is that where we ultimately end up here? No, I mean, 100%. I mean, that's, we walk you through that argument in the end, and chapter with the book. Because one of the more Utre parts of that effective altruism, long-termism moment, was this thing called the simulation theory, which was proposed by Nick Bostrom, who's someone who Musk blurbed his book, very important in that community kind of spawn the whole field of AI safety or AI alignment. And one of things Bostrom said was, hey, if we take for granted that computers have gotten as good as they've gotten up till now and will continue to get better as they go forward, then it's almost inevitable that there will be capacity

in some deep future where they could recreate a world so convincing that people wouldn't know they were in a simulated reality. Furthermore, they might create that engineered simulation, so they could do kind of experiments on it to test different theories. Actually, William Gibson wrote a whole book, The Peripheral that was sort of based on this premise, and that there's no way for us as participants in said simulation to disprove that that's actually the position that we're in. So Musk has said many times over the years that he is almost certain that this is true. And it's helpful to know that one of the offshoots of Bostrom's argument is that there maybe a variation of this where a small number of participants in the simulation will be conscious,

you know, full humans, and the rest of the people will be so-called shadow people or NPCs. And if you're NPCs, then there is no value to pulling or... Well, and that's kind of just like give you the most dramatic version of that. Yeah, please, please. Is the fact that Musk, while he's doing Doge, has in his office set up a huge curved Samsung gaming monitor. with, he posts an image of himself with a portrait of Pepe the Frog in this gladiatory attire, which is his online avatar, Keckis Maximus, with which he plays two games, Path of Exile 2 and Diablo 4,

both of which are dungeon crawling games, which means you just enter spaces and try to murder your opponents as quickly as possible in a kind of a swirl of activity. And he was literally toggling between that and then doing doche. And the ways that the two were informing each other are extremely strong. There's a leaderboard for Doge, right? You were basically trying to take out as many people and as many positions in dollars as possible. You were trying to move with speed. You were just completely dehumanizing or non-humanizing the opponents at the other end.

If Africa is filled with NPCs, what difference does it make if USAID is cut off or not cut off? But it seems more cognizant than that because they understand that they have to sell it as inefficiency of your tax dollars. You know, they don't actually stand on than what they're really trying to do. There's a great deal of manipulation in all of this. Well, that's where I think it's really interesting to think about how Musk relates to the kind of neoliberal era that we have just emerged. from because the magic, and I've spent a lot of time and wrote several other books on this topic of neoliberalism and the magic of neoliberalism was that it downloaded and offloaded everything onto the individual, right? If you failed, it's because of you. If you succeeded,

it's because of you. And the thing that through which that was all mediated was this anonymous, agentless thing called the market. And the market was the thing that told the truth. And then the role of the government was to basically... No picking winners and losers, right? Yeah, reproduce that illusion. Just say, we just do and we have to do. The market says so, da-da-da. And so Musk takes advantage of that, obviously. I mean, he's able to get in as a private contractor with the state by playing the neoliberal austerity logic. I'm going to save you money. He gets into Doge by saying the same thing. I'm going to fulfill a longstanding dream from Clinton onwards, you know, shave this state back to something much more reasonable. I'm going to post a bunch of Milton Friedman memes to show you how serious I am and Thomas Soll memes. Right. But then what he's doing is actually quite different because it no longer rests on this fairy tale, really, about the individual being able to freely choose their own fate. He actually never speaks like that. He speaks about the need to do colossal civilization-level missions, which he is the head of, in which you have only one role in which is to figure out your place in the command structure and do your part.

And always existentialist, by the way, that if we don't allow this, we are done. Yeah, it's this or extinction. And we'll have to go to Mars. Or if Donald Trump isn't elected, we're done. Or if, and it's, but it's all, it's all trolling. It's all purposeful manipulation. I mean, I guess. I don't know. It seems to be working. I mean, it is troll. Oh, no. I'm saying it's working, but I just don't know if they believe it more than they're just trying to clear the space to get it done, which puts us into the next place, which is, which we talked about earlier, there are checks on this. And society. works this way through. And that's why, you know, within the system, you're seeing there are limits to all of this. Absolutely. That we are able to, the question is though, right now, it's not coming from our political system. It's coming from the ground up. It's a grassroots resistance. Grassroots,

rather than a political resistance. Absolutely. And it has to be because there's no political constituency for resistance, right? I mean, that's the problem, is that because the whole American economy has joined this one-way bat on generative AI, very much including the Democratic Party, which of course was the natural partner of Silicon Valley for decades and decades. Remember people sort of needling Barack Obama about saying he might go to Silicon Valley and become a venture capital investor after his presidency. Well, that's what Al Gore literally did. He worked for John Durer at one of the main VC funds and was helping push the clean tech boom

that we talked about in the 2000s. So right now, if there's a governor or president at Rahm Emanuel or president Gavin Newsom, you can easily imagine how he makes nice with this whole class very quickly because right now there's no other game in town.

Right? It does need to be grassroots because it's going to take the whole population to be like, we don't agree with this, we don't consent to this, something different. So what are the design constraints on this, you know, if we are a democratic system, and that's the governmental operating system, but how do you institutionally design then a viable alternative to muskism if throughout our history, it's always run this way, whether it's

through the Vanderbilts or through the Fords or through JP Morgan? I mean, the Federal Reserve doesn't exist until the government realizes, oh, shit, we can't just be going to one banker when the country is in debt. Like, we've got to create more resilient systems. So, so designing an alternative to that, what does a more resilient system look like? Yeah, I mean, it depends on how radical you want to dream, but I would say that the Baby, dream. Well, I mean, I think that more incremental already feels like a dream at this point. But like the Bidonomic interlude was actually a very good faith effort to do just that, right?

It was an economic policy shop that was filled with Bernie Sanders people and Elizabeth Warren people who had studied their neoliberalism and who were like, we need to switch this up. We need return to better workers' rights. We need a care economy. We need to diversify. We need to figure out where the cutting edge technology. are going and make sure that we're not being completely outpaced. And that ended up being a kind of devil's bargain with a quite hawkish anti-Chinese economic policy as it ended up being rolled out with a more expansive like social democratic redistribution as policy inside the United States.

But what happened there, and I was on a panel with someone who was part of that administration at a high level in the trade policy, and I mentioned something about Roosevelt, FDR, and she, She pointed out that Roosevelt had three terms, that this stuff just takes time, right? I mean, if you're trying to shift the ship of... Come on. You're not buying that. Is that really what there are... See, that's what I would point out is the attempt to create that more resilient model

that is not so reliant on, you know, seven tech companies fails because we trip over our own dick's bureaucratic that and that lack of ability to, you know, when you say we're going to get rural broadband out there, and Musk has Starlink, and he can just throw them out there and do it, and you've got four years, and you don't lay any cable or get any of it done, Democrats have to learn how to govern.

It just, you can't just govern on paper. You can't just let the elites design a program and put it down and not realize when it's not, being effectively implemented. Yeah, well, I think this is a good direction for the conversation to go. It's actually about the willingness to govern and discipline capital, which has been quite lacking in that. And this is, I think, very relevant.

It's maybe a good place to kind of land in the conversation because so much of this is happening in the shadow of Chinese competition, right? And so much of Silicon Valley ideology is emerging in the shadow of a kind of China envy for the last 10 years, right? this feeling like that's a place where people can get things done, enormous projects. Move, fast, break things. Yeah, exactly. Things are streamlined.

They just clear the way. Regulations are reshaped according to what the goal is. And that's led to a kind of narrative that was propagated in two of the big books of last year, one abundance, the other breakneck by Dan Wang. And the idea in both was kind of that Americans are too lawyerly. They're too obsessed with veto points and. regulations and environmental review and so on. And the implication really is like we need to kind of backpedal on the democracy a bit to make sure we can get big projects done better or at least reform regulations and bureaucracy. So the problem gets kind of pointed out at that very grassroots

level that we were just saying is now acting as a kind of helpful resistance. Our re-understanding of that is that the Silicon Valley people and Musk himself kind of have got China wrong. So China doesn't work because they clear the way of Democratic veto points at the bottom level. China works because they discipline capital because they take control of the investment function and they say, this is where we want you to invest. And they don't let actually the financial class do all of the wasteful short-termist things that they do in this country. The problem with American capitalism is not nimbist, you know, people concerned about the spotted owl. It's a problem with share buybacks, chasing dividends,

the fact that you have a whole retail investor class that this was classic on the Wall Street Bats Reddit, someone said, is SpaceX really going to make money? And the top most favorite comment was, I don't care if the company makes money. I care if I make money. Right. So if you have that at the core,

and that's what's driving the whole SpaceX. Right. Then you're never going to get China-like outcome. So that is, I think, the big message that I think we want people to take away from the book too is this balance of private and public needs to be recalibrated to put the public back in the driver's seat. And if that means less profits for the capitalist class, then that is going to have to be part of the settlement that they agree to. Right. And by the way, and that's the narrative that they like to, you know, opine on is the free rider

aspect of capitalism is what's actually dragging us down. Is you have people there who don't put anything into the system, but they're free riders on the system. And we provide them food and, you know, a blanket. And that's what's dragging us down. But what they never talk about is the free rider aspect of our system of these corporations. They rely on our infrastructure that's paid by tax dollars. They rely on subsidies. They rely on a government that makes it so that capital is not in any way treated as badly as labor. It's always been exalted. And we make no demands, like in the 2008 financial crisis, we give them all. capital, and we make no demands on that capital. And that has to change. Yeah. Well, and the amazing

thing is when there are rumblings of that changing, when there was discussion of antitrust lawsuits under Lena Khan at the FTC, for example, that was the point that the Silicon Valley class just, like, set their hair on fire and said, like, we don't care how much we lose by tying ourselves up with this fascist who's coming back into office. It's worth it because the worst thing that could happen would be capital gains getting taxed differently or any kind of antitrust happening. So that's, you know, you're right that you mentioned earlier that we're rebuilding monopolies. It's one of the least observed things about the 21st century that's very strange is the number of companies in the United States is getting fewer over time instead of more.

For decades, there'd be more companies. But now you're getting these new conglomerates that buy up the competition. A new rival appears to acquire them. They buy out all of their stuff. They do it in AI. They just buy them and put them behind a wall. So what they fear is, yes, any erosion of their increasingly concentrated ability to direct all investment power in the country. And there needs to be a kind of filter put back there,

whether it's through electing more left-leaning people and charges of state pension funds or the return to the kind of basic shareholder democracy provisions that existed until recently even in something like the NASDAQ. Part of the reason Musk moves from Delaware to Texas because he can get away from shareholder lawsuits, he can get away from any kinds of that bottom-up avenues. So even speaking in those very conventional terms of making capitalism work better, it seems like there must be some common ground

to cobble together a transformative economic program. And also make it so that, you know, the downside of globalization, which is the race to the bottom for corporations to go for what they can pay for labor, can't be repeated in the United States. You can't allow Texas to be, you know, as the country resents China, well, isn't Texas doing the same thing to New York?

Yeah, I mean, that's the end result of, of course, decades of kind of right-to-work legislation, too. So there's that, you know, we now have it compounded. We have all the problems of neoliberalism and all the problems of muskism now thrown on top of that. Because it seems like we've designed our political system to favor those who have access to it, which are the corporations. So much of the laws that have been created over these past 50 years have been to the positive for corporations and to the negative for people. And there's actually new frontiers of this being developed every day. Javier Millet, as aforementioned, Dan Boy of Musk, has just pushed through a new legislation in Argentina for corporate rights for non-human-led corporations.

What is that? What is that Sims? Well, I don't even know what that is. So the idea is there can be AI agents, which could theoretically form their own companies. Oh, my God. Could then be recognized as corporations. So you could have there a business model where not only is the corporation sort of cosplaying as a person, but the corporation doesn't even involve any people in its

leadership or direction. I mean, it's still science fiction. We are in a simulation. But the thing that I always return to is the optimism of that. which has been, you know, rendered can be torn asunder. And I do think there is an ebb and flow here. Yeah. And the fact that your book is coming out and people are beginning to discuss this in a clear-eyed way. Yeah. Gives me hope that there will be, you know, the backlash to the backlash, to the backlash. You know, that it feels like it's coming.

Yeah. And it's cyclical. I mean, this is one of the things we really want to push in the book, too, is like, the history of technology has not just been one-way oppression. Actually, you can only explain the right-word shift of Silicon Valley people by the fact that people were using network technologies for emancipatory ways in 2020, in 2021, right? Biggest street protest in American history, you don't get those without people being able to, like, film things on Periscope, get organized things on Twitter. You don't get the trans rights movement. You don't get the rebirth of kind of anti-racism, attacks on workplace harassment,

like Me Too. These are like hashtag activism movements, but they had real life political effects and they'd change the mood in the country. And it was because of that, the kind of scrambling of affiliations, new kinds of solidarity that actually horizontal communication makes possible that people like Musk freaked out. We're like, no, we need to buy that technology now. Right. And the Supreme Court has to say, let's, we can't allow that to be what is prime, have primacy in our system. So corporations have to be. able to dominate. Right, exactly. So we have this callback to Donna Haraway, the communication scholar, this wonderful essay called The Cyborg Manifesto in the 1980s where she said, you know,

the cyborg is kind of a product of the military industrial complex. It tends towards informatics, right? The computer is developed by the military to fulfill its own needs, you know, servo mechanisms, anti-aircraft guns, and all the way through. But it also has a potential to do interesting and new things to human identity, right? If we are able to connect to each other in that way, we can dissolve traditional gender binaries, traditional racial hierarchies theoretically. Like, it's kind of the liberatory side of on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Like, if you think about that as like an actual like, like rousing political slogan for a moment, then what Musk is trying to do is to squeeze that all back in a box and do what we call cyborg conservatism and say like,

we want all the technology, but none of the emancipation. We want to hold on to these high bound hierarchies. It's control. It is control. It's all about ultimately who is the programmer, who is the user, and who is the NPC. That's right. Quinn Sibodian, I can't thank you enough. What a fascinating conversation, man. I really appreciate you. Thank you. Professor of International History, Posse University, co-author of Muskeism, and also High Ex-Bastards. Thanks very much, man. Was it a pleasure. Folks, we've all got great ideas rattling around our heads about businesses. But if you got a business idea and you want to make some dollars, there is a company that can help you make that pipe dream a reality. And that Shopify,

all the dumb ideas that I have rattling around in my head, I can use Shopify to make a reality. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. It's actually 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. Shopify is the commerce platform behind that. So you can't, you can't go wrong. And it's a lot. And it's actually 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. Shopify is the commerce platform behind that. So you can't, and it's easier to get on than Shark Tank. What are you doing? You're waiting for Shark Tank, aren't you? I know what you're doing.

You're sitting at home and you're thinking, I'll tell that Kevin O'Leary off. I'll tell him what I really think of him, Mr. Wonderful, Mr. Not So Wonderful, give him a nice solid knuckle sandwich when he tells me my thing's a loser. No, don't even worry about that. Shopify is the thing that will help you elevate

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slash TWS. I went to the Knit game last night. Yeah. And because of, there was a gentleman that went there apparently who had a lot of requirements in terms of security and these types of things.

So because of that, when the game ended, I didn't get out of there to like 2.30 in the morning. Like I didn't get home to like 2.30. I was exhausted. And the game was shitty

and we lost. And I got caught in the freeze, even trying to get into the arena and the whole thing. And there are certain mornings where you get up and you go, I don't want to fucking talk to anybody. I don't want to do my guess. I don't want to line up. I don't want to do anything.

And then five minutes into the conversation with Quinn subloating it. And I'm like, this dude's fascinating. And I can't. And suddenly, like, all the synapses are refiring. And I'm no longer thinking about that Wembe threw Brunson down to the ground. and nobody called anything. My God. Flagrant.

Flagrant. But it is such an interesting theory of the case of how we, in many ways, hand the operating systems of our country over to a handful of individuals. And we've done it for decades. And we just keep greasing the wheels for them, no matter how problematic they are, no matter how much they fail to deliver on their promises, no matter how toxic they are. Like, we just keep making it easier and easier for them to access our financial system, our pension funds, our government dollars. Yes.

Our environment. And the more they get to the grip of the wiring, it's like they're the ones in the wiring. Yeah. These fucking dorks. We gave them way too much power. When he was talking about he's in Doge and he's playing these games, I was like, these fucking dorks. Can I tell you so, so here's, that was the one area where I had some sympathy where I have been in those. I can remember in the early days of the Daily Show, we used to have a little, they were set up, they were at that time, cutting edge land technology.

We had little inter-office hubs. Oh. And during the day when, you know, shit would get loose, we would play. Quake, arena quake on these little hubs. And so when that was going on, I was like, you know, we're not so different after all. Let's not throw stones. Someone like him. Listen, there's nothing.

We all are NPCs at one point or another, are we not? But it was fascinating to hear him describe. And it is, it's the ebb and flow. But also, I didn't think of why these guys all seem to. to lean towards this anti-diversity, anti-culture. And the way he described it as, oh, those are bugs in a system that are designed a certain way. It's so, like, uncanny hearing that word, because even before this, like, computer infrastructure existed, what did the Nazi refer to the Jews as?

They're bugs there. It's like, it's this something about that language. It's just so strange that it's persisted over time to mean these different things. And listen, I'm always like, I hate going down the Godwin's Law Road and, you know, it's the bug. But it is, I do think there's a sense of we are the designers of this system and do not get, and nothing in this system that is going to get in the way of the efficiency of our design is allowed. Whatever that leads to, it's not going to lead to something positive. I never, for me, there's never an inevitability of that kind of.

I think we talked a lot about also the forces that can push back on that. And that does give me some semblance of optimism. None of this is inevitable. Yeah. I thought the purposeful manipulation part that you guys were talking about, there was also a part in the book where Quinn kind of talks about like Elon's shit posting. Yes. And how actually it's him testing the markets.

and if he can still move them. And that was fascinating to me because I was kind of like, I thought he was just an idiot, you know, like a nerd, basically on Twitter being like, what go goofy and funny I am. He's an edge lord, right? But actually he's stress testing responsiveness. And I was like, so there is like the thoughtfulness behind all of this. Right.

Well, there's a method to his meanness. Yeah. And he really needs this like cult following that he has. I mean, you look at the SpaceX IPO this Friday. they're giving 30% to retail investors, which is really rare. But for him, it's how he raises capital because he has all of these people hanging on his every word that will believe his hype. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because a lot of traditional investors, they don't believe his hype, but he has this cult that says, you know, to the moon and this IPO, if anything, is undervalued.

Right, right. And to Mars. But fascinating, man, really fascinating. Get the book. I think you will enjoy it. muskism. Brittany, what do the people want to know this week? All right. The first one might hurt a little. Oh, boy. It's about the Knicks. Well, let's see. Oh, boy. John. Some people said Trump received a mixed reaction last night when he appeared on the Jumbo John. What do you think? Mixed? I mean,

mixed in the sense that it was 90% booing and 10% confusion. Like, first of all, I mean, it wasn't mixed in any, like, have you, I mean, I've been in Madison Square Garden. Like, it was no more mixed than what the Spurs received. Like, I'm sure there were like 15 people in Madison Square Garden who were like, Wembe! But like, overwhelmingly, people were like, fuck them. And they did it during the anthem for that reason. They thought, they thought we got them. This is a safe space. I know how to safeguard this. We'll do it in the anthem. What are you going to do, sir? I'll stand at attention with a salute. And the people will, it's America, they'll have to. And people immediately were like, fuck you!

Like, it was crazy. Mixed. Was it even crazier in the room than it was on screen? Oh, it was. Well, because it was in the middle of a guy with a beautiful voice singing the national anthem. Like, the disparity, a lot of times when people boo, it's coming out of like, you know, the music playing is like, der, dar, dar, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Your, you know, San Antonio Spurs, boo!

This was... And the hand of the, and then it cuts away. And everybody's like, and you immediately just like, are we being attacked by the, like. So it was more, I think, the juxtaposition of it made it so much more shocking and clear.

And it's also an insight into the window of his power of reality distortion. What did you think of the response? Amazing, actually. I thought it was great. I thought it was really, it was wonderful. Tense of cheers. And you're like, that was like, I don't know what he filters through whatever ear holes he's filtering through.

But I do think he genuinely heard that as cheers. It's the power of positive thinking. I really don't know. Norman Vincent Peel, baby. He is an acolyte of Norman Vincent Peel, by the way. Really? Power of positive thinking. Yeah.

Oh, it's clearly working out for him. Yeah. That's his church. But wait, do you want him to go to game four? I don't want him anywhere near and it just shows how we were on the craziest high-vibed

we were on a run like no basketball team has ever been on we hadn't lost in over a month and he shows up and I am, listen, I'm superstitious like I'm wearing the same clothes every time I'm going he put the molyke on us that's the hex it's done. The Jiu

was off there's a dark dark cloud in that building. You know what it felt like with him in the building? Like in Ghostbust when the city opens up and like the ghouls are coming out of the thing. That's what we needed Bill Murray to come in and him and Dan Aykroyd to zap whatever cytoplasm was getting on the court. It's not, not good. What else do they want to know?

What else are the people? John, given your experience running the Daily Show, do you think you could run CNN or CBS News? Oh, sure. Look, look how they're run. I mean, honestly. Certainly couldn't do any worse. I'm going to say, listen, you don't think I could reduce their viewership to under four million people a night? I could fucking do that easy.

No problem. You have me in there. I'll have them down to three. I think that's what they're going for. This is a euthanasia that's being done to CBS News. They brought in Barry Weiss with a giant pillow to just be like, I think I can smother this fucking thing. Let me get it down to a smallest and then we can get it small enough to throw out the window. Those would be, I mean, listen, CNN I would think is it because it's 24 hours right on there.

It's probably a little bit. CBS News, 22 minutes. And half of it's just what the fucking whatever, whatever viral video they found on YouTube about a crime. Like, you know, is that really, is that really what we're talking about here? Well, you would have to work more than one day a week. So that. No, I don't think so. Yeah, that's true.

Does anybody have eyes on baring? Not to get it. Not to get it to where it is now. That's true, yeah. And probably could be from home. No question. Yeah, one day a week will do the job. Obviously, if you want to improve it, that's going to be at least two days a week.

Who would want that? Certainly its ownership doesn't want that. So you're applying. This is your official application. Done. Submit it. Put it right on Monster.com or indeed, whatever it is. Hey, might be open soon.

Right, for sure. All right. Last one. All right. Crunchy or Soft tacos? Oh, can I tell you something? Both. And if I may, and I hate to keep going to this well,

the CrunchRap Supreme is... Yes. I mean, we're talking about Masters of the Universe designing a society where people can flourish. Wow. It's both at once. The crunchy taco is delicious.

The soft taco, it's more of a grab and go. So, you know, oh my God, I got to run to work. Let me grab a soft one because the crunchy one, let's face facts, you got to be in a proper position. It's messy. Incredibly messy. And it's very rare that now there is a bit of a hybrid when you're dealing with a corn tortilla where if they crisp it a little bit and it will give you where we're not talking about the like the Ortega box that you get where you season it up and do that.

Because those things, that is a design flaw. like the hard taco shell, there's not a place you can bite into that. No. Where the whole thing doesn't just fucking explode. Absolutely. That's where the crunch Supreme comes in. Have you had the like, was it the gordita crunch from Taco Bell? Have I had the gordita crunch?

Brittany, what do you think you're dealing with it? I was raised on a gordita crunch farm. I lived. I used to walk three miles to and from my gordita crunch. We would, we would, I remember when we were in the Gordita Crunch factory, this is years ago before you guys, before they had really made it an assembly line. Do they have tacos at Mass and Square Garden? Like, do you eat that at the next game? What are you eating courtside? I don't eat courtside. I don't, I don't like to, because you never want to be in a position where a six foot eight inch man is going to fly into your lap and you cover him with nacho cheese. Well, last night was it, Bloomberg spilled his drink when he got crashed in?

too. Can I tell you something? I legitimately thought he was dead. I was so scared. He looked pissed. I think he looked like scared. Yeah. I think because that's when you're that age and no disrespect, my age too. Like that's one of those like the cartoons where the guy gets up and you're two dimensional just and they have to come and like peel you off the floor and then shake a couple times and then you pop back into a whole person. No, that. That was, I legitimately thought when the player got up, he was going to have a Bloomberg stain on his shorts where Michael Bloomberg used to be. Did Chappelle help him?

Chappelle was next to him, I think, right? Chappelle absolutely helped him. A good guy. Absolutely. By the way, they came together. No, they didn't come together. I'm just kidding. No.

Dave came with his wife, Phelaine. But it was so nice. It's funny. It really is like a fun little comedy reunion up there. Chris Rock was there and Dave and Colin Joe. Sam Morrill's always there and DeStefano. Like it's a really fun like comedy vibe up there. Oh yeah.

Courtside was wild last night. Jeter and Eli is sitting next to your set there. Everyone. Champions, man. Yeah. It was it was nuts. And Mariska Hargitay had might have been the prize piece of attire of any. because everybody tries to, you know, really show out in their,

she was wearing a jail in Brunson jersey that he had given to her and had signed and said, I love you. Oh, their friendship is so inspiring. I was just like, I don't know how to process this. Like, it's one thing for like a ball player to be like, oh, man, I've seen your work. I like it. it's another thing for them to be like, no, I'm your biggest fan.

I love you. That is so sweet. Yeah. There is a picture of you I saw on Twitter. It is the happiest I've ever seen you. So at what point in the game was it? Well, I was going to say it was probably when we came all the way back from 12 down and Nate was next to me and they hit it.

And he and I are hugging each other and jumping up and down. And just like. The glee coming out of your feet. phase. It was and relief and then it all went to shit. So I'm hoping we can recover and get going. But all right. Thank you guys. As always, Brittany, how do they stay in touch with us? Twitter. We are weekly show pod, Instagram threads, TikTok, Blue Sky. We are weekly show podcast. And you can like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, the weekly show with John Stewart. Fine, fine, fine. Thank you. As always, producer, Brittany Mehmedevic, producer, Jillian Spear. Video,

editor and engineer Rob Vitolo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce and our executive producer, Chris McShane and Katie Gray, and we shall see you guys and next week. The weekly show with John Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast is produced by Paramount Audio

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