Disciplining Capital and Future Outlook

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U slash state or text state to five eleven five eleven. teext state to five eleven five eleven, Txt fees may apply Fourth of July savings are happening now at the Home Depot with select appliances starting at three hundred and ninety eight dollars Plus, get free delivery on appliance purases of three hundred and ninety eight dollars or more, no membership required. Upgrade your kitchen with a modern and sleek GE profile refrigerator featuring hands free autofill for the perfect pour every time. And make laundry day easier with two in one washer dryer combo innovation that completes laundry in about ninety minutes shhop topop brand appliances now at Home Depot. offer for about june seventeenth to Julyet ath USC Store online for details. Hello everybody. Welcome to the Weekly showhow podcast. My name is John Stewart and if you hear in my voice a certain weariness, A certain maybe barely, barely uh, contained anger and upset. The New York Kickobbackers last night. they didn't win the game. They didn't play the best game. man o man, the physicality of that. you cannot Is this a ru cannot run over Jalen Brunson or throw him to the ground and just have the referees go. That's fine. you just can't do it Now, I'm not saying it's it's because it's Jhn Bruns because it's the next but There was a point in the game where Viictor Webinyama just basically through him to the ground ofrs it was hand checking him or grabbing, 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 was castle, just ran directly into Brunson, threw an elbow out pled them over and you know what, I apologize. You don't to he That's that's not that's not what we'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 Thats all I'm say it was it was a long night And, uh and we'll get him back 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 an operating systems of this country and this world. and it's a fascinating look 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 Slebodian Folks we'relighted 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 expastards, Quinn Slbodian is joining us today Thank you for being here. It's my pleasure. Quin, I you know, You've written You're sort of you're looking at the way that governments and technologies are joining together in 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 changed social relationship or new relationship to the government Right 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 wellbe and prosperity, it means you get a couple of people appointed as like disproportionately 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 um, you know, making a payment online to putting something into the cloud or listening to something streaming or doing something on a spreadsheet. 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 over the world are also suubbscribing 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. L 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 at a risk because those person 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 their whims. Yeah. 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 a push into Kherson provroince and Krman. 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 Quin, let's think of this as so The way I'm trying to envision it is kind of operating systems, if we want to think about it in sort of this Um the modern parlance of cyber tech and all those things. So we have kind of operating systems, I guess that we go along with The political operating system is representative democracy. constitutional representative democracy is the way that we goovern 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 at large, you know, whether it's crony or otherwise you know, are those that those two operating systems have always been slightly Odds is this differentiffere 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 peopleople having long term employment at, let's say, auto factories putting together cars. Now that's actually often called forordism So there you have exactly as you're saying, the kind of two potentially battling imperatives. One is that of the capitalists, 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 of getting more of these cars out 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, that escalated very quickly, GQuen. Well, figuratively, but mean early modern period, that's how people show discontent, right? went and stormed the Lord's mananor and just burnt it down and burnnt 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 forordism. The ism is not just Bard 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 to 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. 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 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 and American life more generally, mass production and mass production plus mass consumption, Hospitable set of laws to allow for the owners to keep, you know growingren courageous. Well, I mean, eventually, you know, that got expelled. but U 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 in its vestigial way that exists in the United States, well you could see as a kind of outcome of the Ford' 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 baed. So there is a kind of virtuous pragmatic cycle that you could say existed at that time. You can exploit us Yeah to a certain degree. Yeah, but buy us dinner first. But after exploiting us, R, exactly. Exactly, we should be able to have soup Yeah Fair enough. And, you know, and college education, 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. The wages are stagnating, peopleeople 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? R? And what by contrast is Musk failing to do, we think 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 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 theism or you could call it You know, Altmanism, Zucker Bergism. I'm sure it's been attempted. Right. Muskism is easier. It's one syllable. Muskism does get autoc corrected to Muslim in an uncomfortable way for me a lot when I'm trying to punch into my phone. but sure. But now there is something he does play a kind of a keystone role that actually isn't comparable to others. likeike we get the Peter Thial question a fair amount And just in material terms, Musk made five times Peter Theal's net worth just last year. So he is, you know, far more wealthy. So he 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, superc compomputers in Memphis And he plays with that virtual layer of social media, meme creation, hype creation. And 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 ceding 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 finced. but does government's role in lubricating the rise of these technocrats play a role where it didn't in forordism. I think that it's actually helpful to find the closest analog to look at the a 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 No, this 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 etcetera, etcetera Um, that model of kind of preparation 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 Kynesianism is built on demand coming from the state for exactly those kind of heavy duty, high end manufactured objects like aerirplanes and jeeps and ammunition So that 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 nineteen nineties because right the internet, as we now are all very familiar, is a product of military R and D. It comes straight out of the military and state application of money to somethingomet that was originally a kind of research project, right? I mean, it was for universities. It wasn't for commercial applications. Right. Th then the whole thing gets handed to Silicon Valley and the tech sector in nineteen ninety five, 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 somem was goinging 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 twentieth century. What's the quid pro quo for the government? Be 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 T U 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 uh union organizing or any of the kind of things for the, you know, there's 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 arrguments 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 were his 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 tenth two thousand one 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 hide bound, it's too centralized. It can it's not flexible. It can't think on its feet. We need to now fight ourselves. It's democracy It's democracy, but it's actually silicon Valley. Yeah I mean, democracy is ultimately the problem.ight 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 tenth. two thousand one. september tenth. Really? The day before. Yes. Oh dear God. The narrative setup is almost what? T perfect. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us. Is us. Yeah, boom plane hits the building the next day But then in the next years, 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 spepecial 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 start SpaceX two thousand two first full year of the warar 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 cut cutting styles and vertical integration and new ways of sweating my employees And I'm going to out compompete 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 that who uses that exact lawsuit the next year? Palanter Valenter gets its first contract. Wait, this is all two thousand two, two thousand three. Yep It's that early. Really That's when it starts. Folks Back It's bombbars. You know I love the Bobz I can't even tell you. Sometimes they put the ads in front of my face and I look at the company and I go like, okay. You knowre how I read tell them about this Then other times I see the bombas and I go, Bombas My old friend, it's like when you're you know, overseas and you run into somebody that you know from back home and you're like, what doing here can't even Oh, Bombus Bomba sock and especially the sports sock manan, this bad boy cushioned exactly where you want it to be cushioned. It is and it's sucking up your sweat and you're I don't even know if, I think when I wear bombas My feet smell like delightful potoury, like a candle that smells like the beach or something. It doesn't I don't know what it is. I think it's You know what they say? happappy feet, happy life. No, happy feet B. with some rhyme for feet Head over to bumpers d. com slash weekly code weekly twenty percent off your first purchase. That's BOM BAS dot com slash weekly. Code week at checkout. Okay, so let's step back for a moment. So that's the more kind of exploitative version of it, the story they might lean more into is They were right They did do it cheaper, they did do it more efficiently So that's right, That's what I wanted to get to is that right, you know, that might look like just Cathroow you know, whatever profeteering. but in fact, they did then lower the cost of putting mass in orbit by over ninety percent over the next twenty years 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 are 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 tack moment that actually gave Tesla its first lifeif saving government loan, nearly five hundred million dollars in two thousand nine from Obama's Department of Energy to be part of that push, which is 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. How did that work out for us, Gwinne? Well, there was, you know, 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. actually Then the current debacle is in a roundabout way the product of that because the feeling that 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 in both of those cases, EVs, satellite launch, rocket launch U 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 giga factactory 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 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 us back through Fordism of this kind of theory of the great man and and a kind of libertarian You know, authoritarian adjacent. In Ford's case, explicitly authoritarian Is there a reason before that, you know, the strains of that that went through Ford And certainly his sympathies towards 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 figure of the founder CEO God, and Musk has now officially become the techno King of Tesla since twenty twenty one. 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 a Gaym 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 of the past and sort of shape the world as they wished But I've had to come to terms with the fact that collollectively through our own decision making as societies, we produce a situation where there is 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 the night in his underwear and speak directly to two hundred fifty million people and change the value of cryptocurrencies, change the value of stocks within seconds. In fact, there's 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 finanance la. By the end of the week. Oh yeah. Bay Thursday Friday. Friday is the SpaceX IPO. Yeah, yeah, know there's a very good chance. Now did Ford did Ford not have I would imagine he had the ability to move markets, not obviously with tweeting, but certainly, you know, there there must have been some kind of a symbiotic relationship with the pamphletteers 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 board was private until the day Henry F died. Really? Why? Because he hated the markets. He distrusted them, it overlapped almost completely with his antisemitism Right? He believes that these 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 corporations 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 mis undernderstood 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 ten X or even twenty X more than people who are coming in after it goes public. Meaning theyt actually can't be held accountable. They can't be dislodged. Musk holds eighty five will hold eighty five percent 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 wouldn't 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' 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. 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 God swerve, then why does Peter Theel 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 These great men Why leave? Well, I mean, first thing to say there is' it's a piet aire, right? I mean, he's got one in New Zealand He's got one in Argentina. He's got one in Miami. Is just one bedroom in Buenos Aires that he goes to over the weekend. The man doesn't really live, he doesn't really live anywhere, right? I mean he lives He lives whereas 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 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 reprogram this thing. thing is It's 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 interventionous way possible. What happened? I mean, it was kind of a disaster Right? I mean, 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 Palanteranthropic Brock But huge public backlash. As soon as they tried to actually bring the figure down, peopleeople were 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 Argenta 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 Folks You know, I ask you this question a lot of times. whereere do you get your news from But most of your news, don't know where it's come from. don you don't know the biases involved with these people. That's for ground news.. Do you know ground news It's the source you can trust and not because they tell you you can trust them because they show you what what is it's an app It's a website. And it helps users see beyond whatever single narrative they're getting. suubscriber funded, by the way This isn't like, you know, some multinational AI Dvious sociopath created I'm not naming names, I'm just telling you, this is subscriber fund corporate incentives that are influenceding what you're going to see They' even got this new Pind Spot feature. It surfaces stories that are under repported By either side of the political spectrum, either side, any side Differe sides. p sides It shows you things that you're not seeing, that you should be saying The Nobel Peace Center which is like the FIFA. peace center, except actually associated with the Nobel peace They called it an excellent way to stay informed and expand worldview So to get unlimited access to the vantage subscription, go to groundneews d. com slash Stewart subscribe to get forty percent off. the discounts available only for a limited time. That's groundews. com sllash Stewart, or you can just scan the QR code on screen. Don't forget to get forty percent off ground news. groundneews. com slash Stewart So you have these these tech titans that are slowly, you know, insinuating themselves into the operating systems. And the thing I would say about Do is, 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 u, they just decided This is waste. What is this for AIDS medicine in Nigeria? Okay. Screwworm containment. what's that? Right, exactly. That's gone. I think if if they had there are very few people in the United States who believe 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. peopleeople would be desperate for help in that regard came out of Dojge was not that. it was an ideological exercise in what the right Dems wasteful. Yeah. DEI. What does that happen in the name of it? Woman didn't do the thing ported it to be doing, it they 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 mean, 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 Yeah, no but I think that,, 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 strundled 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 MGa Silicon Valley tie up in twenty twenty five 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. R. And they did have free reign because 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 W I think the war, rising energy costs, a sense of Um, 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 Um 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? Hence 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,'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 so antithetical to that. Well, I think it's helpful then to think about what came after forordism. So we talk about forordism as a period in United States and Western Europe from let's say around the Second World War to the nineteen seventies What changes in the nineteen seventies? Well, globalization, deregulation, attack on trade unions? Oil shocks. The oil shocks, you know, things that manufacturing happened here becomes more expensive, relocates to poooreor locations. People don't have the job security they used to So you can't secure the social contract that way Cradle de 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 four hundred one Ks. 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 wellbeing and your future health And when Silicon Valley steps in in the late nineteen nineties and un interrupted really to the present and says, we are the kind of safeguards of the line going up, then they become kind of the 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. pooison 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 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,' will find backdors to privatize that bargain that government has with its people so that we can still control it. Is that 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 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 be your social seecurity account And by the way, if I don't, o well. Yeah, then you have you don't have anywhere to go anyways. But I think that, you know, if this's really one of the remarkable things about the last twenty five years ' 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 bet 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 disisk chips, like those little things you would put in a in a digital camera or something to Yeah yeah. The value of 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 where the AI boom is necessary you know, everything's being funneled into that such that people now are being overwhelmed. But wouldn't 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 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 Absolutely. You know. gos Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. And 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 you know, the next five years or ten years R an industrial policy. There Yes and no because then they sort of say let the companies fight it out in 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 US model and this is true under Biden too, has always been about de risking, right? sayaying like, don't worry the state will take care of all of the downownside and you'll only keep the upside. And that is obviously a recipe for right I mean, privatiz privatized profits and socialized losses. Socialized risk. That's what 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 one point seven five 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 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, they're 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 frrankly, 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 orrbit satellites to catch Musk's ten thousand because we don' 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 hearts Rather than trying to pick apart the structural power and saying like, okay, where's the vulnerabilities? How could we nationalize part of that, brring more of that in house, takeake 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 clan 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 the on the right about 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 store. You know, does that really disk 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 the AI companies and we turn it into a sovereign wealth fund, like the Norwegian oil fund, like Temisec, 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, actually went and visited him to talk him 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 its 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 Right 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. R. The manipulation Vy convincing, generative. Yes and people 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, well'll just pay us a royalty then? Like 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 News Corp 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 uh, you know, one of the AI Oligard does, 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 Tsarars overthrown is he It goes back to our earlier point Do they understand this because they're human they are they dragged to it because of fear I mean, I think it's best to see them as being pressured to it from, you the forces that encircled them, right? I mean, and it' 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 so still to this day amazing to me is how The Silicon Valley class feels no need to do anything even comparable. In fact, Mus, 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 minimumount to anything to count as a charity I mean, it's really simly. haaven't they, though there's sort of that strain of it called effective altruism, which they you know, would purport. that was kind of the sambankment freed of, you know, the only point of this kind of pursuit is to get so much money that you can give it all away U Well, I actually think that effective altruism is kind of under played as being still really significant in the story. because another cororrelated philophy is long termism, right?? whichich 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 frrame 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 oned onloaded onto these main frrames that now become interterplanetary If you take on that way of thinking and Musk and Altman were at the center of that discussion in twenty fifteen when they started Open AI Then you' 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 worldorld. You let me have a monopoly on software and I will buy you malaria nets. Yes, R. I mean, you know, that's it's it's 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 asm 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. He tal 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 Sad, 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 becausecause 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 wouldouldn't you think of everything as an emerging market? Wouldn't you look at everything? Why does to 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 industrialist often welcomed incoming immigrants as long as they met a kind of physical standard that could be, 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 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 Ryan Reynoldserry doesn't You' not going to listen to Reynolds, are you going len me for Icasting is that what I'm here Perhaps I'm the deadpool Could I be the deadfool No, that probably Although I do have the outf which is not, if I may say And I mean, no disrespect to the franchise breathable fabric It's a sweat machine. tools right in the crack of the old to do, you know what I'm talking The point is I could talk about this forever when what really you should do is just switch T Mint mobile Already God times do I have to nag you people about this? Mint Mobile thing that's wrong with the wireless industry And they made it right They offer premium wireless for fifteen bucks a month. Nobody does that except Mint moobile et your new wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month. G go to mint moobile. com slash tWS. That's mint mobile d. com slash tWS your wireless bill of fifteen bucks a month at mintMobile d. com slash tws That's it. There's no catch forty five dollars upfont payment required. It's equivalent to fifteen dollars a month. New customers on the first three month plan only spepeed slow above forty gigabytes on unlimited planant. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply C mint mobile etails Do it now unless you're 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. And where this is one of my favorite thingsings looking on that website through the Burner account to have that only follows Elon Musk is that it has this little feature called It has a feature called todayod'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 That was the first headline. The second headline was, Argentine President Javier Millet praises Musk's battle on the woke Mine virus. Oh my. That was today's news. And you, that's what Musk is going for. He wants to create a communications ecosystem in which only those most dogmatic kind of Pravda like talking points can be repeated back to him. Well, not to torture the analogy too badly, butah Is that because You know, you talked about viruses and 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 Iine Rnd strain of makers and takers and the fountain head 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. And if you're interfering or somehow debris or dras in the system. Do that lead though to eliminationist dread or? I mean, is that Absolutely it does. Is that where we ultimately end up here No I mean, one hundred percent. I mean, that's we walk you through that argument and the end chapter of the book because One of the more uree 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 spawned the whole field of AI safety or AI alignment And one of the 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 may be 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. NPC's. And if your're NPCs then there is no value to calling or Well, in next can I 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 Peppy the Frog in this gladiatory attire, which is his onnline avatar, Kecus Maxiimus with which he plays two games, Path of Exile two and Diablo four. 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 dosche 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 and dollars as possible You were trying to move with speed. You were just completely dehumanizing or nonhanizing the opponents at the other end. If Africa is filled with NPCs, what difference does it make if A Absolutely USA ID is cut off or not cut off or But 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 markarket. 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. justust say, we just doing we have to do. The market says so, d da And so Musk takes advantage of that obviously. I mean, able 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 in Thomas Soul 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 existentialists, 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 no, I'm saying it's working, but yeah, I just don't know if they believe it. more than they're just trying to clear the space that get done, whichich 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 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 ground up. It's a grassroots resistance Gassroots 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 bet on generative AI, very much including the Democratic Party, which of course, was the natural partner of Silicon Valley for decades and decades. rememember 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. right? He worked for John Dh at one of the main VC funds and was helping push the clean tech boom that we talked about in the two thousands So right now, if there's a governor a president at Ram Emanuel or a president Um, 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. We need something different. So what are the what are the design constraints on this? you know, if we are a Democratic system and that's the governmental operating system. But yeah, 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 one banker. when the country is in debt. Like we've got to create more resilient systems so so desesigning an alternative to that. What is a more resilient system Yeah, I mean, it depends on how radical you want to dream, but I would say dream dream. Well, I mean, I think that the more incremental already feels like a dream at this point. But like the Bidenomic interlude was actually a very good faith effort to do just that, right? It It was an economic policy shop that was filled with Bernie Sanders P peopleople 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 care economy, we need to diversify. We need to figure out where the cutting edge technologies 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 about Roosevelt FDR, and she pointed out that Roosevelt had three terms that this stuff just takes time, right? I mean, if you're trying to the ship of comeome on. Okay. You know, buying that Is that really what their' aret see That's what I would point out is attempt to create that more resilient model that is not so reliant on you know, seven companies fails because we trip over our own dicks bureaucratically. 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 M. Democrats have to learn Govern 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 becausees. So much of this is happening in the shadow of Chinese competition, right? And so much as it it of Silicon Valley ideology is emerging in the shadow of a kind of China envy but the last ten years This feeling like that's a place where people can get things done, enormous projects, move fast break things. Yeah, exactly. thingsings are streamlined, they just clear the way. reggulations 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 Bakneck by Dan Wang. And the idea in both was kind of that Americans are too lowyerly, 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 pedal on the democracy a bit to make sure we can get big projects done better or at least know 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 in Musk himself kind of have got China wrong China doesn't work because they clear the way of democratic veto points at the bottom level. China works because they discipline capital becausecause they take and 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 term things that they do in this country. right? The problem with American capitalism is not u Nimbiest you know, people concerned about the spotted Owl, it's a problem with Sare buybacks, chasing dividends. Sure fact that You have a whole retail investor class that this was classic on the Wall Street Bs 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 space, yo then you're never going to get China like outcomes. So that is, I think, the big message that I think We want to 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 agreree 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 in 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 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 two thousand eight financial crisis, we give them all capital and we make no demands on that That has to change 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 different or any kind of antitrust happening. So that's, you, you're right that you mentioned earlier that we're rebuilding monopolies. It's one of the least observed things about the twenty first 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' been more companies, but now you're getting these new conglomerates. They buy up the competition, a new rival appears require them. They buy out all They do it in AI. They just buy them and put them behind Exactly So what they fear is, yes, any erosion of their increasingly concentrated ability to direct all investment power in their 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 is because he can get away from shareholder lawsuits. He can get away from any kinds of that bottom up. S Avenues. So even speaking in those veryy 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 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 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 So there's that you know, we now have it compounded. We have all the problems of neoliberalism and all of 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 fifty years have been to positive for corporations and to the negative, And there's actually new frontiers of this being developed every day. Javiir Milee, as aforemententioned Danboy of Musk has just pushed through new legislation, Argentina 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 could then be recognized as corporations. So you could have there a business model where not only is the corporation sort of costplaying as a person, but the corporation doesn't even involve any people in its leadership or direction. I mean, it's still science fiction a. We are 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 clear eyed way. Yeah, gives me hope 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 worward shift of Silicon Valley people by the fact that people were using network technologies for emancipatory ways in twenty twenty in twenty twenty one biggestre protest in American history. you don't get those without people being able to like film things on periscope you know, 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 changed 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 were like, no, we need to buy that technology now. Right. And the Supreme Court has to say, let's we can't allow that be what is have prriimacy in our system, so corporations have to be able to dominate. Right, exactly. We have this callback to Donna Harraway, the communication scholar, this wonderful essay called The Cyborg Manifesto in the nineteen eighties 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, 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 liaboratory side of on the internet.obbodyody 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 hide bound hierarchies. It's control. It is control. It's all about ultimately who is the programmer whoo is the user And who is the NPC? That's right Quinn Salode, I can't thank you enough. what a fascinating conversation, man I really appreciate you. Thank you. Professor of International History Boss University, co author Muskism and also HX Bastards. Thanks very much, Mt It was a pleasure Mh We've all got great ideas, rattling around our heads about businesses If you 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 commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world That's actually ten percent. of all e commerce in the United States Shopify is a commerce platform So you can't you can't go wrong. And it's easier to get on than shhark tank. What are you doing? You're waiting for shark T 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. G him a nice solid knuckle sandwich tells me my thing's a loser No Don't even worry about that But fine. is the thing that will help you elevate business idea and make it a success. You don't need him. Leary. I see always on television in movies I don't want him A gression but the important thing is this Shopify, you don't even need that dude takes care of all of it. helpels you become a success It's time to turn those what ifs into shhopify today Sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at shhopify d. com slash tWS. Go to shopify d. com slash Tws I went to the knick game last night. Yeah. And I 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 cameame in, I didn't get out of there to like two thirty in the morning. Like I didn' get home to like, two thirty. 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 again. I don't want to line up. I don't want to do anything And then five minutes into the conversation subloing it and I'm like, this dude's fascinating and I cant Yeah. And' and suddenly like all the synapses are re firing and I'm no longer thinking about that Wemby threw Brunson down to the ground and nobody called anything. my God. I Fgrant. Flagrant Uh, but but It is such interestnteresting 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. 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 they the more they 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 he's in Doge and he's playing these game. I was like these fucking dorks Can I tell you, I'm so hereious? 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 time cutting edge land technology. We had little inter office hubs. and during the day when you know, shit would get loose, we would play quQake Oh a quake on these little hubs and and so when that was going on, I was like You know, we're not so different after all. Let's not to throw Stones. someonelike 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 lean towards this anti diversity, anti culture. And the way he describes it as, oh, those are buugs 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? their bugs there. It's like it's 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 Godwins Law road Yeah you know, withs the bug. It is, I do think there's a sense of We are the designers of this system do not 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 There's for me, there's never 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 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 shit posting and how actually it's him testing the markets and if he can still move them and That was fascinating to me because I'm just kind of like I thought he was just an idiot, you know like a nerd basically on Twitter being like, like how goofy funny I am. He's an edgelord, right? But actually he's stress testing responsiveness. and I was like, so there is thoughtfulness behind all of this is There's a method to his meanness. Yeah, he really needs this like cult following that he has. I mean, you look at the SaceX IPO this Friday, they're giving thirty percent 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 ar his hype. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Be a lot of traditional investors They don't believe his hype, but he has this cult that says, you, to the moon and this IPO, if anything is undervalued. Right, right to Mars, but fascinating, man, reallyally fascinating. G get the book. Yeah. I think you will enjoy it. Mus give them. Brittney, what do are the people want to know this week? All right, the first one might hurt a littleoy. It's about the Kicks. S Oh boys. Joh. Some people said Trump received a mixed reaction last night when he appeared on the Jumbo Don What do you think Mixed I mean, mixed in the sense that it was ninety percent booing and ten percent confusion Like first of all, I mean, they it wasn't mixed in any like have you ever I mean, I've been in Madison Square Garden, Like it was no more mixed than what the Spurs received. I'm sure there were like people in Madison Square Garden who are like, Wemy. But like overwhelmingly people are like, fuck them. And they did it during the anthem for that reason. They thought Yeah They thought we got them. This is a safe space. I know how to safeguard this. We'll do it in the anthem. and what are you gonna 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. 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 d there there there there there there there there there. Yours says, you know, San Antonio Spurs Boo This was And the of the and then it cuts away and everybody's like And you're immediately just like, are we being attacked by the like Uh So it was more, I think, the juxtaposition of it made it so much more shocking. And ear It's also an insight into the window of his power of reality distortion. What dod you think of the response? amazing actually. I thought it was great. I thought it was really It was wonderful. Tons 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 I heard that as cheers. like It's the power of positive thinking. I really Vincent Peel,ab He is an accolyte of Norman Vincent Peel, by the way. Really? Power positive thinking. Well it's clear I working out for him. Yeah,s 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 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. Yes every time I'm going That's he put the maloic on us. That's the hex. It's done. was off There was a dark, dark cloud on That's. You know what it felt like with him in the building? like in ghostbusters when the city opens up and like Gous are coming out of the thing. That's that's what we needed Bill Murray to come in and him and Dan Acloyd to zap whatever cytoplasm was getting on the court not good. What else do they want? John, given your experience running the Daily showhow, do you think you could run CNN or CBS News? uh, I Sure, but look look look look how they're run I mean don't think it can do any worse. I'm gonna say, listen, you don't think I could reduce their viewership to under four million people at night. I could fucking do that easy. No problem. You have me in there. I'll have them down to three. I think I think that's what they're going for. There This is a youth in Asia that's being done to CBS news. It is 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 Uh, those those would be I mean, listen I CNN, I would think is a because it's twenty four hours probably on there. It's probably a little bit CBS News twenty two minutes And half 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, I don't think so. Yeah, that's true. Does anybody have eyes on barring? Not to what is she? Not to get it to where it is now. That's true, yeah. and probably could be from home No question. Yeah, O one day a week' do the job. Now obviously if you want to improve it, that's going to be atast two days a week Who would want that? Certainly it's ownership doesn't want that. So you're applying. This is your official application. D Submit it. putut it right on monster. com or Deed whatever it is. Hey, might be open soon. Right, for sure. All right, last one, last one All right Crunchy or soft tacos Oh tell you something. both And if I may, and I hate to keep going to this well Trump Rrap Supreme is Yes. I mean, we're talking about Masters of the universe designing a society where people can flourish Wow B at once. The crunchy taco is delicious. The soft taco it's more of a grab and go You know, oh my God, I got to run to work, Let me grab a softone 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'll 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, Wh the whole thing doesn't just fuck and explode. Absolutely. That's where the Crch Rrap Supreme comes in. Have you had the like, what was it the Gordita Crunch from Taco Bell I had to have I had the Gordida crrunch, Brittany, What do you think you're dealing with was I was raised on a Gordida Crunch farm. I lived. I used to walk three miles to and from my Gordida Crunch. We would would I remember when we were in the Gordida Crunch factory. this is years ago, before you guys. before they had really made it an assembly line Do they have tacos at Madisonssburg Garden? Like do you eat that at the N game? What do you eat in courarttide? I don'tat courartt side. 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 into. 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 agge and no just my age too. 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 was I legitimately thought when when the player got up, he was going to have a Bloomberg st on his shorts. where Michael Bloomberg used to be. Chiffel helped him? Chiffel was next to him, I think, right? Chhiffel absolutely helped him. A good guy. Absolutely. By the way, they came together No, they didn't come I just kding No, Dave came with his wife, Eain. It was so nice. It's funny. It really is like a fun little comedy reunion up there. Chris Rock was there Dave and uh Collin Joe Sam moral is always there D Stfano, like it's always's it's a really fun like H that vibe up there Oh yeah. Courtside was wild last night. Jeter and Eli sitting next to each other. Champions, man. Yeah. It was it was nuts and Mariskca Hargite had might have been the prize a piece of attire any because everybody tries to, you know really show out She was wearing a jail in Brunson jersey that he had given to her signed said I love you. Oh, their friendship is so inspiring I was I was just like I don't know process this Like it's one thing for like a ball player to be like, Ohh 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's a picture of you I saw on Twitter It is the happiest I've ever seen you. So at what point in the game I was going to say, it was probably when we came all the way back from twelve 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 The glee coming out of your face. It was and relief and then it all went to shit. So I'm hopingight. I'm hoping we can recover going, but all right. Thank you guys, as always, Brittany, how do they stay in touch with us? Twitter, we are Wekly show pod Instram threads TikTok Blue skky. We are our weekly show podcast, and you can like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, the We weekly showhow with Johonn Stewart. Fine, fine, fine. Thank you, as always, producer Brittney Medvic, producer Jilliian Ppeer V video, editor and engineer Rberto audio editor and engineer exxecutive producers, Chris M Shain and Katie Gray. and we shall see you guys next week ly showow with Jhn Start is a comedy central podcast that's produced by Paramount Audio and Bust Boy Productions