Elon Musk and America's Tech Oligarchy with Quinn Slobodian

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Weekly Show Podcast. My name is John Stewart, and if you hear in my voice a certain "wearingness". A certain maybe barely contained anger and upset. The New York-Necobockers last night.

They didn't win the game. They didn't play the best game. But man, oh man, the physicality of that game. You cannot make this a rule. You cannot run over Jalen Bronson or throw him to the ground

and just have the referees go, "Ah, that's fine." And you just can't do it. No, I'm not saying it's because it's John Bronson, because it's the next. But there was a point in the game. We're Victor Wembenjama.

Just basically threw him to the ground.

And I don't care if Bronson was hand-checking him or grab him and doing that thing. Whatever. You can't just throw it to the ground.

“And you can't just, I can't remember who the other guy was.”

Maybe it was Castle. Just ran directly into Bronson. Through an elbow out, plowed him over. And you know what? I apologize.

You don't want to hear this. 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.

That's all I'm saying. It was a long night. And damn, and then 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 Muscuson.

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 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 Silabody. 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.

It's even bigger. Global history. It could be world history. Planetary. Co-author of the book, Muscuson and author of High Expastered.

Quinn Silabody and his joining us today. Quinn. Okay. Thank you for being here. It's my pleasure.

Quinn. You know, the book you've written, your sort of, you're looking at the way that governments and technologies are joining together and 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 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. Right. And a new set of languages to describe that. What's unique about the president and 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 and prosperity, means you get a couple of people appointed as like disproportionately important for the ongoing success of that project.

So every day from the, 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 over the world are also subscribing to the software 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 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, that's a moment that they decide what their whims, yeah. No, wait, I don't know, they had a switch. 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 highlights heavily on Starlink.

And they were trying to do a push into Kirston Province and Kremian, 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, 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 or at large, you know, whether it's crony or otherwise, you know,

are those, 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 fortism.

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 are getting more of these cars at the door because they're 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.

“Well, figuratively, but I mean, early modern period, that's how people show discounted.”

Right? Right. When in storm 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 fortism 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 is not just board 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 bread winner 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.

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 forward, but being just about kind of like the era of manufacturing and American life more generally. Right, mass production and mass production, plus mass consumption. Right, hospitable set of laws to allow for the owners to keep growing.

Chuling and converges. Well, I mean, eventually, you know, that got expelled.

But so you have like a cooperative relationship between the law making state and the profit making corporation.

And people somehow were the number of people being brought into that arrangement was growing over. It was growing over time, such that it had a kind of stability and even the welfare state. And it's, you know, in its vestigial way that exists in the United States. Well, you can see as a kind of outcome of the fortest compromise, right? The kind of the Great Society program, Social Security Medicaid, or 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 can say existed at that time. You can exploit us. Yeah.

To a certain degree. Yeah. But by 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 is 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. 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 Ford as I'm stabilized 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 thealism, or you could call it. You know, altmenism, Zuckerbergism. I'm sure it's been attempted. Right. Muskism is easier. It's once syllable.

Muskism does get autocorrected to muslim in an uncomfortable way for me a lot. I'm trying to punch into my phone, but 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 Teele question of fair amount. And just in material terms, musk made five times Peter Teele'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, super computers and 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 Workbacked them 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 governments role in lubricating the rise of these technocrats play a role where didn't enforce them? I think that it's actually helpful to find the closest analog to look at the era of westward expansion.

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, etc, etc. 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 and 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. And 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, someone's wearing out of nowhere and values being created out of the clouds.

“But in fact, it's a 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. Well, what's the quid pro quo from the government? Because you said, you know, they kind of, they grant you the ability to expand westwarder, 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, there's it's a different ethos that's about efficiency and not broader base 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 there'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 in the enemy is us.

It's like the old one. It's top down. It's hide bound. 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. It's democracy, but it's actually silicon valve. Yeah, we 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. It's September 10th. Really? The day before. Yes. Oh dear God. The narrative set up is almost what to perfect? We have met the enemy and the enemy is us. Is us. Yeah, boom. Playing hits the building the next day. But then, you know, in the next year's, 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 street full 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 intricate integration and new ways of sweating my employees and I'm going to out compete them on a competitive tender. And I'm going to sue you to make you give it to me as a more competitive offer.

Wait, this is all 2002 2003. Yep. It's that early. Really. That's when it starts. Folks, it's back. It's bomb bars. You know, I love the bomb bars.

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That's b-o-m-b-a-s.com/weekly. Code weekly. Check out. Okay, so let's step back for a moment. So that's the, the more kind of exploitative version of it.

The, the, 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, cut through, you know, whatever, after hearing, but in fact, they did then lower the cost of putting mass an orbit by over 90% over the next 20 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 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, Queen? Well, there was a world historical problem, which was breaking 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 the feeling that we can do whatever we want in the Middle East because we are on oil producer. We didn't know it was in our backyards. We could just go out 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, the state actually did get something out of it. What's missing is 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 factory 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 fortism of this kind of theory of the great man.

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 Hitler, and those kind of individuals. You know, I would imagine for business leaders, especially in a democracy, they'd be loath to attach themselves specifically to an ideology,

yet they do. Yeah, why would that be? Well, I mean, in the case of Muss,

“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 Muss, because 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 great man theory of history

was like the worst way to tell history. That couldn't be that it's just one person who wrote 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 a 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, but he's under where and speak directly to 250 million people and change the value of cryptocurrency,

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. Can't keep up on that slide. Can't keep up on that slide. By the end of the week.

Oh, yeah. By the first day. Right there. By the end of the week. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I know. 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 journalist 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, 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, both 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 can't 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, 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 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 amount of history then comes back in through the back door, because you can't deny the concentration of agency.

“So in this moment, are they able to consolidate power?”

And in that case, this is a real swirl. Then why does Peter feel fleet of Argentina?

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 pietta terror, right?”

I mean, he's got one in New Zealand. He's got one in Argentina, he's got one in Miami. There's just a little one bedroom in Buenos Aires, that it goes to ever the weekend. The man doesn't really live anywhere, right?

I mean, he lives where his private jet takes him. So one doesn't really want to 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 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, 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 andthropic and. 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. Infringeed on.

So the reason why they're fleeing to Argentina even if they're not.

The reason why they might be worried is because they're 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?”

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Don't forget to get 40% off groundnews at groundnews.com/stuart. So you have these these tech titans that are slowly, you know, insinuating of themselves into the operating systems. And that would say about dojas. 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? You know, Nigeria. Okay, it's Guru worm containment.

What's that? Right, exactly. That's gone. I think if they had, there were very few people in the United States who believe, that this representative democracy is an ideal 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. GEI. What is that having the name of it?

Woman. Cut it.

It didn't save any money.

“And be 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. Cap 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.

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”

Refed back or responsiveness. And it has done so for many decades, right? I mean, it's drawn to the long and away 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 ran 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 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, hence the discussion of a public wealth fund constitution some attempt to kind of backpattle into a social contract that they actually had 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 to 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? So analytical 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. I created a 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 in your future health.

And when Silicon Valley steps in in the late 1990s and uninterrupted 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 Americans 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. Backdoor of privatization the new deal says it's an unraveling of the government says capitalism if that's our operating system has collateral damage in that collateral damage may come in the form of losers or poverty or those kinds of things the government will set a floor.

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 as 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 to people get when they put x amount of dollars into the stock market when they start to 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 you don't have anywhere to go anyways, but I think that you know if you this really were the remarkable things about the last 25 years.”

It's 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 but 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 the such that you know sandisk chips like those little things you have put in a digital camera or something to 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 for the AI boom is nest so 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 and.”

So 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.

It just because we think it may be a more helpful technology for the planet doesn't mean it's not still vulnerable to capture by these libertarian absolutely you know gods. I mean it's 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. First you know the next five years or ten years right in industrial policy there yes and no because then they sort of say let the companies fight it out in this 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 by and 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 privatized private profit socialized losses socialized risk that's what we 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 it 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. 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 another 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 you are looking at this differently they're like why are we so dependent on these erratic maniacs out in California. 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 lower the orbit satellites to catch mosques 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.

You know nationalized part of that bring more 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 clink up.

Well it's like we're creating our own monopolies absolutely you know by putting this much government funding underneath it.

D risking it and allowing that work we're creating these monopolies now there seems to be a subtle shift even in the 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 bull work against that or is that just us becoming complicit in their investment storm you know 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. Okay, here's a concrete proposal we take a big equity stake in AI companies and we turned into a sovereign wealth fund like the Norwegian oil fund like 10 a second Singapore exact 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.

I don't know 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 gas thing the kind of accountability. I said 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 the unsettling effect on reality.

The manipulation very 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 we'll just pay us a royalty then like I think I think societies have to understand people need to be needed.”

Yeah and the crudeness with in which people's productivity now is being described is kind of mind blowing like for example muskism came out on Harper are 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 in 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 so you're sitting there as an author that is now our purpose right doing your level best to criticize the whole apparatus and you see oh my gosh this is just feed stock.

So that I suppose the LLM can spit out a critical perspective on their on on its own industry.

Well you see it even in the meetings when the the tech guys are talking to each other and their shareholders versus when their 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 the oligarch to is but he said what 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 what's 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 Zars overthrown is is he and goes back to our earlier point.

I mean I think it's best to see them as being pressured to it from you know the forces that's encircled them right I mean. Right and and it is another way that the past era so strikingly different from the present right I mean we live in the United States walk into the middle of Middle of cities you see museums you see universities you see all of these things libraries that were in doubt 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 and 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 most the musk foundation is one of the best capitalized philanthropies in the United States and yet it 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 that's definitely. Haven't they though there's sort of that strain of it called effective altruism which they you know would report that was kind of the sand bankman freed of you know the only 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 under played as being still really significant in the story.

Yeah. Because another correlate philosophy is long termism 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 planet set up you know dyson spheres around all of them and have you know sex tillions of digital lives on loaded on loaded onto these mainframes that now become interplanetary.”

If you take on that way of thinking and musk and altmen were at the center of that discussion in 2015 when they started open AI then you basically delink 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 in the third world. And they have a monopoly on software and I will buy you malaria nets yes right I mean you know that 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 with so striking about musk is when you take that long term is 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 that that's exactly where they're at right so he talks constantly about suicidal empathy.

At term he borrows from this Lebanese Canadian psychologist god sod who's very big in the Joe Rogan circuit and the argument there is that all the 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 what 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 errors of industrialists often welcomed in coming immigrants as long as they met a kind of physical standard that could be you know useful.

I'm in 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 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.

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.”

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“And it actually then helps explain why the x dot 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 things looking on that website through the burner account I have that only follows Elon Musk is that it has this little feature called.

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 poor that was the first headline.

Second headline was Argentine president have your military praises musks battle on the woke mind 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 provved a like talking points can be repeated back to him well not to torture the analogy to badly but. Yeah 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 tend to report in the same way and maybe this is the you know maybe we start to throw in the kind of iron Rand strain of makers and takers and the fountain head 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 and if you're interfering or somehow debris or draws in the system does that lead though to elimination is dread or I mean is that absolutely it does is that where we ultimately end up here.

I mean 100% I mean that's we we walk you through that argument in the end and chapter the book because. One of the more who tray parts of that effect of altruism long term as a moment was this thing called assimilation theory which is proposed by Nick Bostrum who someone who musk blurb his book.

And what what if things Bostrum 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 said 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 offsuits of Bostrum'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 and PCs and if you're NPCs then there is no value to.

“Well in the exact kind of just like give you the most dramatic version of that yeah please please is the fact that musk while he's doing doesh has in his office set up a huge curve Samsung gaming monitor with.”

He posts an image of himself with a portrait of peppy the frog in this gladiatoria tire which is his online avatar kekis max emiss 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 and a kind of a swirl of activity. And he was literally toggling between that and then doing doesh and the ways that the two were informing each other are that extremely strong.

There's a leaderboard for doesh right you're 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 nonhumanizing the opponents at the other end. If if Africa has filled with NPCs what difference does it make if you say ideas cut off or not cut off or but but it 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.

“Then 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 have 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 doing we have to do the market says so that it and so musk takes advantage of that obviously I mean he 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 long standing 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 soul memes.

Right, but then what he's doing is actually quite different because it no longer rests on this very tail 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 distinction 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 true. 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 that we've 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.

In 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 that on gender to the eye 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 right he worked for John Durr at the one of the main VC funds and was helping push the clean tech boom that we talked about and in the 2000s.”

So right now if there's a governor or president at Rama manual 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 grass roots 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. The system and that's the 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 Vanderbilt's or through the forwards 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 is a more resilient system look like.

Yeah, I mean it depends on how. Radical you want to dream but I would say. Dream. Dream. Dream.

“Well I mean I think that the more incremental already feels like a dream at this point but like the by dynamic interlude was actually a very.”

good faith effort to do just that right it was it was an economic policy shop that was filled with Bernie Sanders people and Elizabeth Warren people who had studied their neoliberalism.

And who are 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 it's trying to shift the the ship of come on.

“You know by now is that really what their artsy 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.”

The tech companies fails because we trip over our own dex bureaucratically 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 him 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 is been by lacking in that and this is I think very relevant it's maybe a good place to kind of land in the conversation because yes. So much of this is happening in the shadow of Chinese competition right and so much as it happened of Silicon Valley ideology is emerging in the shadow of a kind of China envy for the last ten years right this feeling like that's a place where people can get things done.

Norma's projects move fast break things yeah exactly like 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 propagate into the big books of last year one abundance the the other breakneck by Dan Wang and the idea in both was kind of that Americans are too loyerly their to obsessed with.

Backpedal on the democracy a bit to make sure we can get big projects on better or at least you 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 and must 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 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 termist things that they do in this country right the problem with American capitalism is not.

It is a problem with share buy backs chasing dividends sure that you have a whole retail investor class that this was classic on the Wall Street bats read it someone said is space actually 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.

“At the core and that's what's driving the whole space that you know then you're never going to get China like how come 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 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 open 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 you rely on our infrastructure that's paid by tax dollars they rely on subsidies they rely on.

“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.”

Well in the amazing thing is when there are rumblings of that changing when there was discussion of anti trust lawsuits under leaner con 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. Pying ourselves up with this fascist who's coming back into office it's worth it because the worst in it could happen would be capital gains getting tax differently or any kind of antitrust happening so that's you know you're you're right that you mentioned early that we're rebuilding monopolies it's one of the least observed things about the 21st century it'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 sure. So what they fear is yes any erosion of their increasingly concentrated ability to direct all investment power and their needs to be a kind of filter put back there whether it's through electing more left leading people and charges of state pension funds or the return to the kind of basic shareholder democracy.

Providence that they 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 sure 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 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 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 for 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.

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 their business model where not only is the corporations sort of cost playing as a person but the corporation doesn't even involve. I mean it's still science fiction 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 and I do think there is an ebb and flow here and the fact that your book is coming out and people are beginning to discuss this in a clear eyed way.

“Yeah it gives me hope that there will be you know the backlash to the backlash to the backlash you know that it 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 and 2021 right. Biggest street protests in American history you don't get those without people being able to like film things on periscope get 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. There are like hashtag activism movements but they had real life political effects and then 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. If 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.

You know this call back to Donna hairway the communication scholar this wonderful lesson 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 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 it's like an actual like.

So I think it's kind of like you know a lot of people are you know I think it's kind of like a 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 highbound hierarchies.”

It's control it is control it's it's all about ultimately who is the programmer who is the user and and who is the NPC.

I can't thank you enough what a fascinating conversation man really appreciate you. Thank you professor of international history policy university co author muskism and also high expastered. Thanks very much man with a pleasure. Folks, we've all got great ideas right on around our heads about businesses but 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. 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 easier to get on the 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 them Mr. Wonderful Mr. not so wonderful.”

I saw it the knuckle sandwich when he tells me my things a loser no don't even worry about that Shopify is the thing that will help you elevate your business idea and make it a success you don't need him stupid Kevin O'Leary.

Why is he always on television in movies I don't want him around don't like him.

Sorry, that was the aggression but the important thing is this Shopify you don't even need that dude.

We Shopify today sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at Shopify dot com slash TWS go to Shopify dot com slash t w s.

“I went to the nickname last night yeah and and because of those are gentlemen that went there apparently who had.”

A lot of requirements in terms of security and these types of things so because of that green the game and I I didn't get out of there to like two thirty and the more like I didn't 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 I don't want to line up I don't want to do anything.

“And then five minutes into the conversation with going subloading 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 when be through”

the run center of the ground and nobody called anything I got I play grant flagrant. And we just keep increasing 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 his his in dos and he's playing these games I was like these fucking dorks. Can I tell you something 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. And during the day when you know shit would get loose we would play quake on these little hubs and and we're so that when that was going on I was like you know we're not so different after all.

We're not throw stones. 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 Evan flow but also I I didn't think of why these guys all seem 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 for to the Jews as their 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 godwins law bro yeah 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 I never there's I 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 you on 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'm kind of like. I thought he was just an idiot you know like a nerd basically on Twitter being like what go goofy and he I am he's an edge lord right but actually he stressed testing responsiveness and I was like so there is like the the thoughtfulness behind all of this is.

Rare but for him it's how he raises capital because he has all of these people hanging on his every word that will be. And on his hype 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 to get the book I think you will enjoy it muskism pretty what are the people want to know this week all right the first one might hurt a little so it's about the next.”

John some people said Trump received a mixed reaction last night when he appeared on the jumper drawn what do you think. 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 I have you I mean I've been in Madison's work on like it was no more mixed than what the spurs received like.

I'm sure there were like 15 people in Madison's work garden who were like Wambi but like overwhelmingly people were like fuck them. I mean did it during the anthem for that reason they thought yeah we got them this is a safe space. I know how to safeguard this what do you do to 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 yeah. 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 Darren Air and air and air and air and air and air and air and air and air and air and air and air and air and air and air and air and air and air. Your or says you know San Antonio spurs boo this was. And the and of the and then it cuts away everybody's like. And he really just like are we being attacked by the rut 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 of the amazing actually I thought it was great I thought it was really it was wonderful to choose.

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. He heard that as cheers like it's the power of positive thinking I really don't know. He is an acolyte of Norman Vincent Peel by the way really power positive thing yeah. But wait do you want him to go to game for I don't want him anywhere near and it just shows that we were on the craziest high vibe. And we were on a run like no basketball team has ever been on we had lost an 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 maloic on us that's the hex it's done. Did you do a dark dark cloud.

“That's right he doesn't know what it felt like with him in the building like in Ghostbusters when the city opens up and like the ghouls are coming out of the thing that's that's what we needed bill Murray to come in.”

And him and Dan Acroy to zap whatever cytoplasm was getting on the court. It's not not good what else do they want to know what else the people. John given your experience running the daily show. Do you think you could run CNN or CBS news? Oh I sure look look look look how they're run.

I mean I'm just going to 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 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 was with a giant pillow to just be like I think I can smaller this fucking thing. Let me get it down or small us and then we can get it small enough to throw out the window. So those those those would be I mean let's I see an end I would think is it because it's 24 hours around there it's probably a little bit CBS news twenty 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 no I don't think so.

No question yeah one day we go through the job obviously if you want to improve it that's going to be at least two 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.”

Submit it but it right on monster dot com or indeed whatever it is hey my feet open soon right for sure all right last one last one. All right crunchy or soft tacos. Oh can I tell you something. Uh both. And the if I may and I hate to keep going to this well.

The crunch rap 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 tacos 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 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 would give you. Where we're not talking about the like the or take a box that you get where you're seasoned 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 rap supreme comes in.

“Have you had the like was it the gordita crunch from Taco Bell?”

I had the if I had the gordita crunch briny what what do you think you're dealing with it? I was I was raised on a gordita crunch form. I lived I used to walk three miles two 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 in assembly line. Do they have tacos at Massonsburg garden like do you eat that at the next game?

What do you eat in court side? I don't eat court side.

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 in your lap.

And you cover him with nacho cheese. Well last night was it Bloomberg spilled his drink when he got crushed into it. Can I tell you something? I legitimately thought he was dead. I was so scared.

He looked pissed. I think he looked scared. 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 too 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 stay on his shorts where Michael Bloomberg used to be. He felt help him. She felt was next time I think right.

You're probably absolutely helped him. Good guy. Absolutely. By the way, they came together. No, they didn't.

I'm just kidding. No, Dave came with his wife. 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 morals always there and the Stefano.

Like it's always it's it's a really fun like coming back vibe up there. Oh, yeah. Court type is wild last night. Geater and Eli sitting next to each other. It's like champions man.

Yeah. It was it was nuts. Mariska Hargate had might have been the prize piece of a tire of any because everybody tries to, you know, really show out in there. She was wearing a jail in Bronson jersey that he had given to her and had signed and said,

I love you. Oh, their friendship is so inspiring. I was 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. Oh. I love you. That is so sweet. Yeah.

There's a picture of you. I saw in Twitter. It is the happiest I've ever seen you. So at one point in the game. 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 face. It was and relief.

And then it all went to to shit.

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 shop hot in Scrim Threads.

Take off loose guy. We are with the show podcast.

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The weekly show at Don Stewart.

Fine, fine, fine. Thank you as always. Produce a Brittanyman.

“MetaVick Produce your Jillian's beer video.”

Editor an engineer Rob Bittolo. Audio editor an engineer Nicole Boyce. And our executive producer is Chris McShane. And Katie Gray. And we shall see you guys.

And next week. The weekly show at Don Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions.