The Weekly Show: w/ Quinn Slobodian – Elon Musk & America’s Tech Oligarchy (Transcript)

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.

JON STEWART: Quinn, 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 the modern parlance of cyber tech and all those things. So we have kind of two operating systems, I guess, that we go along with.

The political operating system is representative democracy. Constitutional representative democracy is the way that we govern our country, handle our disputes. There’s an accountability to the consent of the governed, and to the people. The other operating system, I guess, would be a kind of — let’s say capitalism writ large, whether it’s crony or otherwise.

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?

Fordism vs. Muskism: A Historical Comparison

QUINN SLOBODIAN: 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. Now that’s actually often called Fordism.

So there you have exactly as you’re saying, the kind of two potentially battling imperatives. One is that of the capitalist, which is just like, “I want to make as much money as possible. I want to sweat my workers as much as possible. I want to boost my sales and my profitability as much as possible.”

JON STEWART: And I’ve invented something that has utility and it’s new and people haven’t seen it before and the market is deciding.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah. And it’s increasing productivity and efficiency. You’re 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. 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?

JON STEWART: Wait, that escalated very quickly, Quinn.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, figuratively. But I mean, early modern period, that’s how people showed discontent. They went and stormed the lord’s manor 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.

JON STEWART: How did Fordism interact with the government in a way that’s maybe different from today, or was it the same?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, exactly. That’s the point with the “ism” on Fordism. The “ism” is not just Ford did what he wanted. The “ism” is a kind of settlement with the working class so that they would willingly and even voluntarily go along with his profit strategy.

So what did that mean? It meant that he met the working class, which was still very powerful and well-organized, halfway. It meant he recognized trade unions, collective bargaining agreements. They’re getting some part of the profits through wage raises over time. They’re getting cradle-to-the-grave employment contracts. Basically, they’re getting social services. You get a kind of breadwinner-headed nuclear family as the stabilizing social unit.

So there’s all kinds of attention to the ways that a social willingness to go along with a business model ends up getting secured, sometimes through violent clashes, sometimes through peaceful negotiation. But that’s how then, through that means, also through redistributive taxation, you get a kind of working model where democracy and capitalism can coexist relatively happily.

JON STEWART: So that’s the arrangement that he makes with the working class. That’s the arrangement that he makes with the populace. What is the arrangement though that he makes with the government? 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?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, I mean, if you think about it not being just about Ford, but being just about the era of manufacturing in American life more generally —

JON STEWART: Mass production.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Mass production. Mass production plus mass consumption. A hospitable set of laws to allow for the owners to keep a growing amount of the wages.

JON STEWART: Right. Children can work.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, I mean, eventually that got expelled. But right. So you have a cooperative relationship between the lawmaking state and the profit-making corporation. And 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 vestigial way that exists in the United States — what you could see as a kind of outcome of the Fordist compromise — the kind of Great Society programs, Social Security, Medicaid, are about saying we need to keep a relatively healthy working class. Because if people dying of typhus are walking in the factory gates at the beginning of the day, the cars aren’t going to get made. So there is a kind of virtuous pragmatic cycle that you could say existed at that time.

JON STEWART: You can exploit us to a certain degree.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, but buy us dinner first.

JON STEWART: But after exploiting us —

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Right, exactly.

JON STEWART: We should be able to have soup.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, fair enough. And a college education and all kinds of things. There are all kinds of material ways that life got better for Americans in the mid-century.

And that’s in sharp contrast with our present moment of digital capitalism, where actually for most people, life is getting worse. Their wages are stagnating. People are living in more and more precarious positions. So that is why we, in this book, called it Muskism — because we wanted to force that comparison. What did Ford do? How did Fordism stabilize society in a time of disruptive change? 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 and his Silicon Valley class brethren are rolling out.

Why Musk? The Keystone Role of Silicon Valley’s Biggest Player

JON STEWART: Now, are we using Musk as a stand-in here for kind of the Silicon Valley class? So I’m assuming that’s — you could call it Thielism, or you could call it Altmanism, Zuckerbergism.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: I’m sure it’s been attempted.

JON STEWART: Right. Muskism is easier. It’s one syllable.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Muskism does get autocorrected to “Muslim” in an uncomfortable way for me a lot when I’m trying to punch into my phone.

JON STEWART: But sure.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: But no, there is something that he does play — a kind of keystone role that actually isn’t comparable to others. Like, we get the Peter Thiel question a fair amount. And just in material terms, Musk made 5 times Peter Thiel’s net worth just last year. So he is, well, far more —

JON STEWART: So he’s done it better.

The Government’s Role in Silicon Valley’s Rise

QUINN SLOBODIAN: He has managed to bring together. And there’s another reason why he’s helpful kind of pedagogically and representatively. 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. He actually did the hard work of assembling rockets, electric vehicles, satellites. Now, supercomputers 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.

JON STEWART: What role did the government have in seeding Fordism? 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— this is the age of the industrialists, so I imagine a lot of it was self-financed. But how does the government’s role in lubricating the rise of these technocrats play a role where it didn’t in Fordism?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: I think it’s actually helpful to find the closest analog, to look at the era of westward expansion. So the railroad barons really kind of set the stage, I think, for what became the successful model of American capitalism, which is the government says, we need a railroad and we will give to you private capitalists the right of access across this country. And you can build it, you can put freight on it, you can build towns next to it, you can charge passengers. And then we, the government, get something out of that. We get access for our troops, we get a growing tax base, et cetera, et cetera.

That model of kind of cooperation and complementarity, you could say, is more like what gets us to the manufacturing moment. And then there’s all kinds of demand from the military, right? Military Keynesianism is built on demand coming from the state for exactly those kind of heavy-duty, high-end manufactured objects like airplanes and jeeps and ammunition. So there’s always been that back and forth.

And what’s interesting is you can even bring that quite cleanly up into the era of the launch of the dot-com era in the mid-1990s, because 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. I mean, it was for universities. It wasn’t for commercial applications. So then the whole thing gets handed to Silicon Valley and the tech 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 the internet somehow sprang out of nowhere and value is 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.

JON STEWART: What’s the quid pro quo from the government? Because you said they kind of grant you the ability to expand westward or they give you those things. Is there an explicit quid pro quo with that? Because that doesn’t seem to be the case today. It seems like within those subsidies there is no quid pro quo on— and here’s what you’re going to have to do, whether it means a social safety net for your workers or— a lot of these places are very much against union organizing or any of the kind of things for their— it’s a different ethos that’s about efficiency and not broader base stability.

SpaceX, Tesla, and the War on Terror

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, 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 stealing from the public purse. If you look at 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 working on this book is that SpaceX comes right out of the Global War on Terror. Donald Rumsfeld, September 10th, 2001, stands in front of the brass at the Pentagon and says the Cold War is over, but there’s a new enemy and the enemy is us. It’s top-down, it’s hidebound, it’s too centralized. It can’t think on its feet. We need to now fight ourselves.

JON STEWART: It’s democracy.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: It’s democracy, but it’s actually Silicon Valley. Democracy is ultimately the problem, right? But they need to bring in the tech energy, the move fast and break things energy, the venture capital model.

JON STEWART: This is September 10th, 2001.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: September 10th. Really? The day before.

JON STEWART: Yes.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Oh, dear. The narrative setup is almost—

JON STEWART: All right.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Too perfect.

JON STEWART: “We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.”

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Is us. Yeah. Boom. Plane hits the building the next day. Wow. 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 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 in 2002, first 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 cost-cutting styles and vertical integration and new ways of sweating my employees, and I’m going to outcompete them on a competitive tender. And I’m going to sue you to make you give it to me as a more competitive offer.” And that’s what happens. And the federal government says, “You got us, we suck.” Who uses that exact lawsuit the next year? Palantir. Palantir gets its first contract.

JON STEWART: This is all 2002, 2003. Really?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yep, it’s that early. That’s when it starts.

Obama, Clean Energy, and Tesla’s First Lifeline

JON STEWART: So let’s step back for a moment. 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.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: That’s right. That’s what I wanted to get to. That might look like just cutthroat profiteering. But in fact, they did then lower the cost of putting mass in orbit by over 90% over the next 20 years. A huge expansion of the US control of this new sector of so-called new space or the space economy.

Interestingly enough, just 6 years later, Barack Obama comes into office. He came 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 tech moment, right, 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 and fighting stupid wars on the other side of the world.

JON STEWART: How did that work out for us?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, there was a world historical problem, which was fracking 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. And actually, 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.

JON STEWART: We didn’t know it was in our backyards. We could just go out in the backyard.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah. Barring that discovery of fracking, we might have been on a trajectory more similar to China, because at that point China got on the green path and stayed on it. And now they do have electric autonomy. They are much more resilient in moments of supply shocks and they dominate the global EV and lithium-ion battery market.

But the point is that in both of those cases, EVs, satellite launch, rocket launch, the state actually did get something out of it. What’s missing, and as you point to correctly, is where the worker fits into that.

JON STEWART: Right.

Musk’s Anti-Union Business Model

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Because part of Musk’s business model has always been getting around trade unions. There’s a Gigafactory outside Berlin now. It’s the only auto factory in Germany without a collective bargaining agreement. Sweden is in its longest labor action in history with Tesla because he doesn’t see that as part of the operating system. 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.

JON STEWART: Well, you see the backlash on it in terms of—

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Exactly.

The Ideology of the Great Man

JON STEWART: Once these guys— this is a little bit of a detour, but there is a kind of ideology that also traces back through Fordism of this kind of theory of the great man and a kind of libertarian, authoritarian adjacent— in Ford’s case, explicitly authoritarian. Is there a reason for that? That the strains of that went through Ford and certainly his sympathies towards Mussolini and Hitler and those kinds of individuals. I would imagine for business leaders, especially in a democracy, they’d be loath to attach themselves specifically to an ideology. Yet they do. Why would that be?

The Techno King and the Concentration of Power

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, in the case of Musk, there’s so much important stuff going on there that it’s impossible not to come back to him because this figure of the founder CEO god — and Musk has now officially become the techno king of Tesla since 2021. He’s not the CEO, he’s the techno king.

Is a situation that for me as a historian is a real bitter pill to swallow because I was raised in social history. I was raised in history from below, history from the margins. And we were always taught that a great man theory of history was like the worst way to tell history. That it couldn’t be that it’s just one person strode across the stage of the past and sort of shaped the world as they wished.

But I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that through 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 in his underwear and speak directly to 250 million people and change the value of cryptocurrencies, change the value of stocks, within seconds. In fact, there’s automated bots that follow his tweets and then immediately place investment bids based on that. He has — will have $1 trillion probably by the end of the week. Campaign finance laws —

JON STEWART: By the end of the week?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Oh yeah, by Thursday, Friday. Friday is the SpaceX IPO. There’s a very good chance.

JON STEWART: Did Ford not have — I would imagine he had the ability to move markets, not obviously with tweeting, but certainly there must have been some kind of a symbiotic relationship with the pamphleteers of the day or the yellow journalists or that kind of thing. He must have been able to move markets as well.

Ford, Public Corporations, and the Illusion of Accountability

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, he could. But here’s the interesting thing. Ford never went public, right? Ford was private until the day Henry Ford died.

JON STEWART: Really? Why?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Because he hated the markets. He distrusted them. That overlapped almost completely with his antisemitism. He believed that the coastal manipulators of 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 part of this compromise between capitalism and democracy across the last 100 years has been carried out by the publicly traded corporation. What’s interesting about the publicly traded corporation is that, yes, not everyone can have a share. But if you do, then you also have a vote. And if you have a vote, then you have some influence over the leadership. You can, if the person’s going crazy at the top, vote them out, force a change of leadership.

What’s happened, and this is often misunderstood in Silicon Valley, is that as companies have gone public, starting with Zuckerberg’s Facebook, they’ve totally redesigned the way corporate governance works so that their votes are worth usually 10x or even 20x more than people who are coming in after it goes public, meaning they can’t actually 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.

JON STEWART: So it’s the benefit of capitalization without the negative — exactly — any kind of accountability through shareholders.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: 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 — 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’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.

Why Do the Tech Elite Still Want to Flee?

JON STEWART: So in this moment, are they able to consolidate power? And in that case — this is a real swerve — why does Peter Thiel flee to Argentina? 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?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, first thing to say there is it’s a pied-à-terre, right? I mean, he’s got one in New Zealand, he’s got one in Argentina, he’s got one in Miami.

JON STEWART: It’s just a little one-bedroom in Buenos Aires that he goes to over the weekends?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: 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, right? 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 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? It was kind of a disaster, right? He didn’t deliver on any of the fiscal promises. Yes, he cleared the ground and consolidated the government to plug in a bunch of AI tools from Palantir, Anthropic, and Groq, but there was huge public backlash. As soon as they tried to actually bring the figure down, people 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 to Argentina — even if they’re not — the reason why they might be worried is because their thin view of human nature and politics is actually incorrect. And actually, you do need to respond to people’s everyday lives, their needs. You do need to meet them halfway. And they haven’t been.

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?

Doge: Technocracy or Ideology?

JON STEWART: So you have these tech titans that are slowly insinuating themselves into the operating systems. And the thing I would say about Doge 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. They just decided, “This is waste. What is this for? AIDS medicine? In Nigeria?”

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Screwworm containment? What’s that?

JON STEWART: Right, exactly. That’s gone. I think if they had — there are very few people in the United States who believe that this representative democracy is in an agile way responsive to the needs of the people, or that the bureaucracy functions in a manner that is appropriate for the distribution of whatever it is that the government seems to be distributing. I think people would be desperate for help in that regard.

But what came out of Doge was not that. It was an ideological exercise in what the right deems wasteful. DEI. What does that have in the name of it? Woman? Cut it. So it didn’t do the thing that they purported it to be doing. It, A, didn’t save any money, and B, had nothing to do with actual efficiency.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, yes and no. 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.

JON STEWART: Well, that — I was going to say that that wasn’t for efficiency. That was for control. I saw it as a way for them to consolidate control.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Sure. 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 trundled along in a way that has actually not returned gains to most people. Most people’s wages have been flat. They’ve seen life get worse.

And you could see the mega Silicon Valley tie-up in 2025 as a kind of wager that they could take advantage of that frictionlessness and go even harder, right? That in fact, there were no levers of feedback. There were no levers of the need to secure legitimacy, which is why David Sachs, 3 different times, tried to get laws passed that made it impossible for states to do any AI regulation for a decade because he figured, “We have an open runway, we can do whatever we want.”

So they did have free rein because people were slow to pick up on it. There was a general 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 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 — it’s been actually kind of a rude awakening for some of these people. And 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.

Revolution Insurance and the Social Contract

JON STEWART: Right. It’s what they’re looking for is revolution insurance.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Absolutely. Well, that’s what Fordism has always been about, too. I mean, that’s what Ford wanted, too. And there are worse ways to organize a society than revolution insurance, right? Social democracy is arguably that.

JON STEWART: 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 their vision of their role in our society so antithetical to that?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, I think it’s helpful then to think about what came after Fordism. So we talk about Fordism as a period in the 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.

JON STEWART: Oil shocks.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Sure. The oil shocks. Things that manufacturing happened here becomes more expensive, relocates to poorer locations. People don’t have the job security they used to. So you can’t secure the social contract that way. Cradle to grave social protection and employment. How do you do it instead?

Well, you do it through the stock market. That’s also when retirement accounts go to 401s. They become — and so now the new way of securing social consent is, “Don’t worry, the stock market’s got you. Watch the line go up and know that that is basically the barometer of your future well-being and your future health.”

And when Silicon Valley steps in in the late 1990s and uninterrupted really to the present and says, “We are the kind of safeguards of the line going up” — 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.

The AI Economy and the Future of Labor

JON STEWART: Poison our minds, manipulate us with algorithms. It’s the back door of privatization. The New Deal says it’s an unraveling of the— the government says capitalism, if that’s our operating system, has collateral damage, and that collateral damage may come in the form of losers or poverty or those kinds of things. The government will set a floor, whether it be for food or for retirement or those things. And these industrialists come in again, and I say that writ large, and say, okay, we’ll find back doors to privatize that bargain that government has with its people so that we can still control it. Is that their desire?

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

JON STEWART: I’ll beat your Social Security account. And by the way, if I don’t, oh well.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, then you don’t have anywhere to go anyways. But I think that’s really one of the remarkable things about the last 25 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 the American economy is on the digital tech sector. 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. Every last bit of investment needs to go behind this, such that SanDisk chips — those little things you would put in a digital camera or something — the value of that, the stock of those things has gone up like 1,000% in the last year because people are like, every little bit of storage for the AI boom is necessary. So everything’s being funneled into that such that people now are being overwhelmed.

The Risk of Capture and the American Model

JON STEWART: Isn’t that vulnerable to the same capture that 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 basically corner the market on it? I mean, Musk is diversified. He’s got our satellites in space, but he also has batteries and everything else. 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—

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Absolutely. No, and 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. The China model is quite different. You basically get goals set at the top for the next 5 years or 10 years — an industrial policy. They’re yes and no because then they sort of say, let the companies fight it out at the state level and we’ll see who wins, and then we’ll take the winners out and kind of guide them upwards. Whereas the US model, and this is true under Biden too, has always been about de-risking — saying, 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—

JON STEWART: Privatize profits and socialize losses.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, that’s the American dream, right?

JON STEWART: Moral hazard for everybody.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah. And that’s really what I mean. That’s really the move of SpaceX, which goes public on Friday at an expected valuation of $1.75 trillion — the biggest IPO in history by quite some measure. Why is he doing it? He’s trying to become too big to fail, such that that inevitable bailout somewhere in the future becomes structurally necessary. They already are.

JON STEWART: 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?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: There’s no way. They’re certainly already betting on that internally. But what’s amazing is that that’s also seemingly the kind of public conversation. It’s just like, cross our fingers and hope that the rocket keeps rising instead of — frankly, places like the EU are looking at this differently. They’re like, why are we so dependent on these erratic maniacs out in California? Let’s slowly and painstakingly try to build out alternatives. Let’s switch from Microsoft to Linux, even though it’s a pain to learn and it doesn’t actually work as well as Microsoft. Let’s try to add to our few hundred low-Earth orbit satellites to catch Musk’s 10,000 because we 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 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 hatred lives in their hearts, rather than trying to pick apart the structural power and say, okay, where are the vulnerabilities? How could we nationalize part of that, bring more of that in-house, take advantage of the good things that they’ve contributed as far as engineering breakthroughs and optimization, and shed the extremely toxic things that they’ve added to this model? I just think it needs to be a lot more clean cut.

Public Ownership and the Sovereign Wealth Fund Debate

JON STEWART: Well, it’s like we’re creating our own monopolies. By putting this much government funding underneath it, de-risking it and allowing that, we’re creating these monopolies. Now, there seems to be a subtle shift even on the right about this sudden realization that these AI companies are exploiting our data and our accomplishments to create these products that have no transparency. And that it is a utility, because it is going to be a part of our operating system. And the people — I’ve even heard the Trump administration talking about, and Bernie Sanders has certainly suggested this, that the American people have a share at least in these companies or profit from them in some way. Is that a bulwark against that, or is that just us becoming complicit in their investment story? Does that really de-risk them?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: I think it’s a bit of both. I give a lot of credit to Bernie Sanders and his team for starting and continuing this public conversation that goes beyond just either surrender or demolition. 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 Temasek in Singapore. So, 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 to talk him out of it.

But we get to the second part of your point, which is, what’s the downside of something like that? Well, then it bolts the American future onto this one technology in a way that everyone is quite literally now invested in 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. Do people want to be their little AI barons, or do they want to say, 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. It’s the unsettling effect on reality — people just losing a sense of a shared terrain for doing anything. Or purpose.

JON STEWART: There is a certain 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, just pay us a royalty then? I think societies have to understand: people need to be needed.

Labor, Dignity, and the AI Machine

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah. And the crudeness with which people’s productivity now is being described is kind of mind-blowing. For example, Muskism came out on Harper, which is part of HarperCollins, which is part of News Corp. And recently the CEO of News Corp said that News Corp is an AI company and they cherish their publishing sector because they’re always going to need new material to basically be fed into the AI models. Holy sh. So you’re sitting there as an author—

JON STEWART: That is now our purpose.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Right? Doing your level best to criticize the whole apparatus and you say, oh my gosh, this is just feedstock so that the LLM can spit out a critical perspective on its own industry.

JON STEWART: 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 — and I can’t remember the name of one of the AI oligarch dudes — but he said, “What AI will offer us is productivity without the tax of labor,” referring to human capital, referring to your employees as the tax that we have to abide by to get our productivity.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: And you compare that to previous versions of revolution insurance, as you say, or reformism, which were based on the dignity of labor. It was about protecting the dignity of labor, not just seeing labor as a payroll.

JON STEWART: 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 czars overthrown. And it goes back to our earlier point. Do they understand this because they’re human, or are they dragged to it because of fear?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: I think it’s best to see them as being pressured to it from the forces that encircle them. And it is another way that the past era is so strikingly different from the present. I mean, we live in the United States — walk into the middle of cities, you see museums, you see universities, you see 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, the Musk Foundation is one of the best capitalized philanthropies in the United States, and yet it’s sued every year by the IRS because it doesn’t pay the minimum out to anything to count as a charity. It’s really that bad.

Effective Altruism, Long-Termism, and the Delinking from Humanity

JON STEWART: Haven’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 Sam Bankman-Fried of — the only point of this kind of pursuit is to get so much money that you can give it all away.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: I actually think that effective altruism is kind of underplayed as being still really significant in this story, because another correlated philosophy is long-termism. 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 millennia into the future. So to think in the short timeframe 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 Dyson spheres around all of them, and have sextillions of digital lives unloaded onto these mainframes that now become interplanetary? If you take on that way of thinking — and Musk and Altman were at the center of that discussion in 2015 when they started OpenAI — then you basically delinked yourself from all the normal impulses of humanitarianism and charity that would lead even someone like Bill Gates to say, hey, let’s make lives a little longer for people in the third world.

The Computational Worldview and Its Consequences

JON STEWART: You let me have a monopoly on software and I will buy you malaria nets. Yes.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Right. I mean, that’s inadequate, but it’s at least in line with most people’s sense of responsibility for their common man. Whereas what’s so striking about Musk is when you take that long-termism leap and you say that short-term thinking is actually damaging, then you end up where Musk is now and you start describing empathy itself as a flaw, right?

JON STEWART: Oh, that’s exactly where they’re at.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Right. So he talks constantly about “suicidal empathy,” a term he borrows from this Lebanese-Canadian psychologist Gad Saad, who’s very big in the Joe Rogan circuit. And the argument there is that all of 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.

JON STEWART: Why would you know? Because that again is a strain that certainly didn’t originate with Musk. And as we’re talking about Fordism, why does that strain of— why is there such antipathy to diversity or multiculturalism or those kinds of things when you would think if you’re an industrialist, wouldn’t you think of everything as an emerging market? Wouldn’t you look at everything? Why do these industrial technocrats or whatever all seem to flow into that ideology of “diversity will destroy us”?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, Musk is kind of a unique one in that case, right? Because I would say that previous eras of industrialists often welcomed incoming immigrants as long as they met a kind of physical standard that could be useful people, 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.

JON STEWART: Oh, dear God.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: And if you look closely at what we do in our chapter of the book, which we call State X, 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, hopefully, pretty foreign to most of us, but you need to kind of make that turn to understand the way Musk sees things.

The X Platform as a Closed Ecosystem

QUINN SLOBODIAN: 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 propagated at scale. And 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 a feature called “Today’s News,” and it tells you what apparently today’s news is.

Yesterday, you know what today’s news was? There were two items. One is “Musk questions whether colonialism made Africa poorer.” That was the first headline. The second headline was “Argentine President Javier Milei praises Musk’s battle on the woke mind virus.”

JON STEWART: Oh my.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: That was today’s news. And that’s what Musk is going for. He wants to create a communications ecosystem in which only those most dogmatic, Pravda-like talking points can be repeated back to him.

JON STEWART: Well, not to torture the analogy too badly, but is that because — 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 — maybe we start to throw in the kind of Ayn Rand strain of makers and takers and The Fountainhead — and that there are those now, the technocrats that are the programmers. And if you just let us be, we will create for you this top-down society.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: And if you’re interfering, you’re somehow debris or dross in the system. Does that lead, though, to eliminationist rhetoric?

JON STEWART: I mean, is that where we ultimately end up here?

Simulation Theory and the Dehumanization of Opponents

QUINN SLOBODIAN: No, I mean, 100%. We walk you through that argument in the end chapters of the book because one of the more outré 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, full humans, and the rest of the people will be so-called shadow people or NPCs.

JON STEWART: NPCs. And if you’re NPCs, then there is no value to culling.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Or can I just give you the most dramatic version of that?

JON STEWART: Yes.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Is the fact that Musk, while he’s doing DOGE, has in his office set up a huge curved Samsung gaming monitor — he posts an image of himself with a portrait of Pepe the Frog in this gladiatorial attire, which is his online avatar, Kekus Maximus — with which he plays two games, Path of Exile 2 and Diablo 4, both of which are dungeon crawling games, which means you just enter spaces and try to murder your opponents as quickly as possible in a kind of a swirl of activity.

And he was literally toggling between that and then doing DOGE. 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 non-humanizing the opponents at the other end.

JON STEWART: If Africa is filled with NPCs, what difference does it make if USAID is cut off or not cut off? But it seems more cognizant than that because they understand that they have to sell it as inefficiency of your tax dollars. They don’t actually stand on what they’re really trying to do. There’s a great deal of manipulation in all of this.

From Neoliberalism to Technocratic Command

QUINN SLOBODIAN: 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 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 the role of the government was to basically reproduce that.

JON STEWART: No picking winners and losers, right?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah. Reproduce that illusion. Just say we just do what we have to do. The market says so, da da da. And so Musk takes advantage of that, obviously. I mean, he’s able to get in as a private contractor with the state by playing the neoliberal austerity logic. “I’m going to save you money.” He gets into DOGE by saying the same thing. “I’m going to fulfill a longstanding dream from Clinton onwards. You know, shave this state back to something much more reasonable.” He posts a bunch of Milton Friedman memes to show you how serious he is, and Thomas Sowell 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, and that is to figure out your place in the command structure and do your part.

JON STEWART: And always existentialist, by the way — that if we don’t allow it, it’s this or extinction, we are done and we’ll have to go to Mars. Or if Donald Trump isn’t elected, we’re done. And it’s all trolling. It’s all purposeful manipulation.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: I mean, I guess. I don’t know. It seems to be working.

JON STEWART: No, I’m saying it’s working. But I just don’t know if they believe it more than they’re just trying to clear the space to get it done. Which puts us into the next place — which we talked about earlier — there are checks on this, and society works this way through. And that’s why, within the system, you’re seeing there are limits to all of this that we are able to— The question is, though, right now it’s not coming from our political system. It’s coming from the ground up. It’s a grassroots resistance. Rather than a political resistance.

The Need for Grassroots Resistance

QUINN SLOBODIAN: And it has to be because there’s no political constituency for resistance. Right? I mean, that’s the problem — 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.

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 Doerr at one of the main VC funds and was helping push the clean tech boom that we talked about in the 2000s.

So right now, if there’s a governor or president Rahm Emanuel, or a president Gavin Newsom, you can easily imagine how he makes nice with this whole class very quickly, because right now there’s no other game in town, right? It does need to be grassroots because it’s going to take the whole population to be like, “We don’t agree with this, we don’t consent to this, we need something different.”

Designing Alternatives to Oligarchic Power

JON STEWART: So what are the design constraints on this? You know, if we are a democratic system and that’s the governmental operating system, but how do you— 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 JPMorgan? I mean, the Federal Reserve doesn’t exist until the government realizes, “Oh s*, 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, designing an alternative to that, what does a more resilient system look like?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, it depends on how radical you want to dream, but I would say—

JON STEWART: Dream, baby, dream.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, I mean, I think that the more incremental already feels like a dream at this point. But the Bidenomics interlude was actually a very good faith effort to do just that. It was an economic policy shop that was filled with Bernie Sanders people and Elizabeth Warren people who had studied their neoliberalism and were like, “We need to switch this up. We need return to better workers’ rights. We need a care economy. We need to diversify. We need to figure out where the cutting-edge 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 social democratic redistributionist policy inside the United States. But what happened there— and I was on a panel with someone who was part of that administration at a high level in the trade policy— and I mentioned something about Roosevelt, FDR, and she pointed out that Roosevelt had 3 terms, that this stuff just takes time. I mean, if you’re trying to shift the ship of—

JON STEWART: Come on, you’re not buying that.

The Failure to Govern Effectively

JON STEWART: Is that really what they are? See, that’s what I would point out is the attempt to create that more resilient model that is not so reliant on, you know, 7 tech 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 4 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.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, well, I think this is a good direction for the conversation to go. It’s actually about the willingness to govern and discipline capital, which has been quite lacking in that. And this is, I think, very relevant. It’s maybe a good place to kind of land in the conversation because so much of this is happening in the shadow of Chinese competition, right? And so much of Silicon Valley ideology is emerging in the shadow of a kind of China envy. For the last 10 years, right? This feeling like that’s a place where people can get things done.

JON STEWART: “Move fast, break things.” Boom. Enormous projects.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, exactly. Things are streamlined, they just clear the way, regulations are reshaped according to what the goal is. And that’s led to a kind of narrative that was propagated in two of the big books of last year. One, Abundance, the other Breakneck by Dan Wang. And the idea in both was kind of that Americans are too lawyerly, they’re too obsessed with veto points and regulations and environmental review and so on. And the implication really is like, we need to kind of backpedal on the democracy a bit to make sure we can get big projects done better, or at least reform regulations and bureaucracy.

So the problem gets kind of pointed out at that very grassroots level that we were just saying is now acting as a kind of helpful resistance. Our re-understanding of that is that the Silicon Valley people and Musk himself kind of have got China wrong. So China doesn’t work because they clear the way of democratic veto points at the bottom level. China works because they discipline capital, because they take control of the investment function and they say, “This is where we want you to invest.” And they don’t let actually the financial class do all of the wasteful, short-termist things that they do in this country.

The problem with American capitalism is not NIMBYist people concerned about the spotted owl. It’s a problem with share buybacks, chasing dividends. The fact that you have a whole retail investor class— this was classic on the WallStreetBets Reddit. Someone said, “Is SpaceX really going to make money?” And the top most favorited comment was, “I don’t care if the company makes money. I care if I make money.”

So if you have that at the core and that’s what’s driving the whole SpaceX IPO, then you’re never going to get China-like outcomes. So that is, I think, the big message that we want people to take away from the book too, is this balance of private and public needs to be recalibrated to put the public back in the driver’s seat. And if that means less profits for the capitalist class, then that is going to have to be part of the settlement that they agree to.

The Free Rider Problem of Corporate Capitalism

JON STEWART: And by the way, that’s the narrative that they like to opine on is the free rider aspect of capitalism is what’s actually dragging us down— that you have people there who don’t put anything into the system, but they’re free riders on the system. And we provide them food and, you know, a blanket. And that’s what’s dragging us down.

But what they never talk about is the free rider aspect of our system, of these corporations. They rely on our infrastructure that’s paid by tax dollars. They rely on subsidies. They rely on a government that makes it so that capital is not in any way treated as badly as labor. It’s always been exalted. And we make no demands— like in the 2008 financial crisis, we give them all capital and we make no demands on that capital. And that has to change.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah. Well, and the amazing thing is when there are rumblings of that changing— when there was discussion of antitrust lawsuits under Lina Khan at the FTC, for example— that was the point that the Silicon Valley class just set their hair on fire and said, “We don’t care how much we lose by tying ourselves up with this fascist who’s coming back into office. It’s worth it because the worst thing that could happen would be capital gains getting taxed differently or any kind of antitrust happening.”

So, you’re right that you mentioned earlier that we’re rebuilding monopolies. It’s one of the least observed things about the 21st century that’s very strange— 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, they acquire them, they buy out all of this.

JON STEWART: They do it in AI. They just buy them and put them behind a wall.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Exactly. So what they fear is any erosion of their increasingly concentrated ability to direct all investment power in the country. And there needs to be a kind of filter put back there, whether it’s through electing more left-leaning people in charge 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, right? And get away from any kinds of that bottom-up avenues.

Rebuilding a Transformative Economic Program

JON STEWART: So even speaking in those very conventional terms of making capitalism work better, it seems like there must be some common ground to cobble together a transformative economic program and also make it so that, you know, the downside of globalization— which is the race to the bottom for corporations to go for what they can pay for labor— can’t be repeated in the United States. You can’t allow Texas to be— you know, as the country resents China, well, isn’t Texas doing the same thing to New York?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah. I mean, that’s the end result of, of course, decades of kind of right-to-work legislation too. So there’s that— we now have it compounded. We have all of the problems of neoliberalism and all the problems of Muskism now thrown on top of that.

JON STEWART: 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.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: And there’s actually new frontiers of this being developed every day. Javier Milei, as aforementioned— yes, fanboy of Musk— has just pushed through new legislation in Argentina for corporate rights for non-human-led corporations.

JON STEWART: What is that? What is that?

AI Corporations and Cyborg Conservatism

QUINN SLOBODIAN: The idea is there can be AI agents which could theoretically form their own companies, could then be recognized as corporations. So you could have there a business model where not only is the corporation sort of cosplaying as a person, but the corporation doesn’t even involve any people in its leadership or direction. I mean, it’s still science fiction-y.

JON STEWART: We are in a simulation. But the thing that I always return to is the optimism of that which has been rendered can be torn asunder. 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 gives me hope that there will be, you know, the backlash to the backlash to the backlash. It feels like it’s coming.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah. And it’s cyclical. I mean, this is one of the things we really want to push in the book too— the history of technology has not just been one-way oppression. Actually, you can only explain the rightward shift of Silicon Valley people by the fact that people were using network technologies for emancipatory ways in 2020, in 2021, right? Biggest street protests in American history. You don’t get those without people being able to film things on Periscope, organize 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 MeToo.

These are 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 horizontal communication makes possible— that people like Musk freaked out and were like, “No, we need to buy that technology now.”

JON STEWART: And the Supreme Court has to say, “We can’t allow that to be what has primacy in our system.” So corporations have to be able to dominate.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, right, exactly. So we have this callback to Donna Haraway, the communications scholar— this wonderful essay called The Cyborg Manifesto in the 1980s where she said 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— 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, it’s kind of the liberatory side of “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” If you think about that, it’s like an actual 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— “We want all the technology, but none of the emancipation. We want to hold on to these hidebound hierarchies.”

Closing Thoughts & Audience Q&A

JON STEWART: It’s control. It’s all about ultimately who is the programmer, who is the user, and who is the NPC. Quinn Slobodian, I can’t thank you enough. What a fascinating conversation, man. I really appreciate you. Professor of International History, Boston University, co-author of Muskism and also High Expastards. Thanks very much, man. Was a pleasure.

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Folks, I went to the Knicks game last night. And because there was a gentleman that went there apparently who had a lot of requirements in terms of security and these types of things, when the game ended, I didn’t get out of there till like 2:30 in the morning. 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 f*ing talk to anybody. I don’t want to do a podcast. I don’t want to line up. I don’t want to do anything. And then 5 minutes into the conversation with Quinn Slobodian, and I’m like, this dude’s fascinating. And suddenly all the synapses are refiring, and I’m no longer thinking about that Wemby threw Brunson down to the ground and nobody called anything.

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

JON STEWART: Yes. Our environment. And the more they get to the grip of the wiring, it’s like they’re the ones in the wiring.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, these fing dorks. We gave them way too much power. When he was talking about how he’s in DOGE and he’s playing these games, I was like, these fing dorks.

JON STEWART: Can I tell you something? That was the one area where I had some sympathy. 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 LAN technology. We had little interoffice hubs. And during the day when, you know, shit would get loose, we would play Quake, Arena Quake on these little hubs. And so when that was going on, I was like, you know, we’re not so different after all. I know someone like him.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Let’s not throw stones.

JON STEWART: That’s right. Listen, 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 described it as, “Oh, those are bugs in a system that are designed a certain way.”

QUINN SLOBODIAN: It’s so uncanny hearing that word because even before this computer infrastructure existed, what did the Nazis refer to the Jews as? They’re bugs. 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.

JON STEWART: And listen, I’m always like, I hate going down the Godwin’s Law road. You know, it’s the bugs. But I do think there’s a sense of, “We are the designers of this system, 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. 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.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: None of this is inevitable. 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 Elon shitposting. And how actually it’s him testing the markets and if he can still move them. And that was fascinating to me because I was kind of like, I thought he was just an idiot, a nerd basically on Twitter being like, “Look how goofy and funny I am.”

JON STEWART: He’s an edgelord, right?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: But actually he’s stress testing responsiveness. And I was like, so there is the thoughtfulness behind all of this, right?

JON STEWART: So there’s a method to his meanness.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: And he really needs this cult following that he has. I mean, you look at the SpaceX IPO this Friday — they’re giving 30% to retail investors, which is really rare, but for him it’s how he raises capital because he has all of these people hanging on his every word that will believe his hype. And armies. Because a lot of traditional investors, they don’t believe his hype. But he has this cult that says, “To the moon. And this IPO, if anything, is undervalued.”

JON STEWART: Right, right. And to Mars. But fascinating, man. Really fascinating. Get the book. I think you will enjoy it. Muskism. Brittany, what do the people want to know this week?

Audience Questions

QUINN SLOBODIAN: All right, the first one might hurt a little. Well, let’s see. Oh boy, Jon, some people said Trump received a mixed reaction last night when he appeared on the Jumbotron. What do you think?

JON STEWART: Mixed? I mean, mixed in the sense that it was 90% booing and 10% confusion. I mean, it wasn’t mixed in any — like, I’ve been in Madison Square Garden. It was no more mixed than what the Spurs received. I’m sure there were like 15 people in Madison Square Garden who were like, “Wemby!” But overwhelmingly people were like, “F* them.”

QUINN SLOBODIAN: And they did it during the anthem for that reason.

JON STEWART: They thought, “We got them. I know how to safeguard this.”

QUINN SLOBODIAN: This is a safe space.

JON STEWART: “We’ll do it in the anthem. What are you going to do, sir? I’ll stand at attention with a salute and the people will — it’s America, they’ll have to end immediately.” Were like, “F* yeah!” Like, it was crazy. Mixed? No.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Was it even crazier in the room than it was on screen?

JON STEWART: Oh, well, because it was in the middle of a guy with a beautiful voice singing the national anthem. A lot of times when people boo, it’s coming out of, you know, the music playing is “San Antonio Spurs.” Boo! This was, “And the land of the —” and then it cuts away and everybody’s like, “Boo!” And you’re immediately just like, “Are we being attacked by the Russ—” So it was more — I think the juxtaposition of it made it so much more shocking and clear.

And I’ve heard people say, “Oh, actually —” and it’s also an insight into the window of his power of reality distortion. “What’d you think of the response?” “Amazing, actually. I thought it was great. I thought it was really — it was wonderful.” And you’re like, that was — I don’t know what he filters through, whatever ear holes he’s filtering through, but I do think he genuinely heard that as cheers.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: It’s the power of positive thinking. I really don’t know.

JON STEWART: Oh my God, Norman Vincent Peale, baby. He is an acolyte of Norman Vincent Peale, by the way. Really? Power of positive thinking. Yeah. Oh, it’s good. Working out for him. Yeah, that’s his church.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: But wait, do you want him to go to Game 4?

JON STEWART: I don’t want him anywhere near. And it just shows — we were on the craziest high vibed. We were on a run like no basketball team has ever been on. We hadn’t lost in over a month, and he shows up. Listen, I’m superstitious. I’m wearing the same clothes every time I’m going. He put the maloik on us. That’s the hex.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: It’s done. Bad juju. The juju was off. There was a dark, dark cloud in that building.

JON STEWART: You know what it felt like with him in the building? Like in Ghostbusters when the city opens up and the ghouls are coming out of the thing. That’s what we needed — Bill Murray to come in and him and Dan Aykroyd to zap whatever cytoplasm was getting on the court. It was not good. What else do they want to know?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Jon, given your experience running The Daily Show, do you think you could run CNN or CBS News?

JON STEWART: Oh, sure. Look how they’re run. I mean, honestly, certainly couldn’t do any worse. Listen, you don’t think I could reduce their viewership to under 4 million people a night? I could f*ing do that easy, no problem. You have me in there, I’ll have them down to 3. I think that’s what they’re going for there.

This is a euthanasia that’s being done to CBS News. It is. They brought in Bari Weiss with a giant pillow to just be like, “I think I can smother this f*ing thing. Let me get it down to its smallest and then we can get it small enough to throw out the window.” CNN, I would think, is it because it’s 24 hours right on there? It’s probably a little bit — CBS News was 22 minutes and half of it’s just whatever viral video they found on YouTube about a crime. Is that really what we’re talking about here?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, you would have to work more than one day a week, so that —

JON STEWART: No, I don’t think so.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, that’s true. Does anybody have eyes on Bari?

JON STEWART: Not to get it to where it is now.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: And probably could be from home. No question. One day a week will do the job. If you —

JON STEWART: Obviously, if you want to improve it, that’s going to be at least two days a week.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: But who would want that? Certainly its ownership doesn’t want that. So you’re applying. This is your official application. Get it done. Submit it.

JON STEWART: Put it right on Monster.com or Indeed, whatever it is.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Hey, might be open soon, right?

JON STEWART: For sure. All right. Last one.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Crunchy or soft tacos? Oh, can I tell you something?

Knicks Game, Courtside Stories & Signing Off

JON STEWART: Both. And the— if I may, and I hate to keep going to this well— the Crunchwrap Supreme is— yes, I mean, we’re talking about Masters of the Universe designing a society where people can flourish. Wow, it’s both at once. The crunchy taco is delicious, the soft taco, it’s more of a grab-and-go, 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 yeah, 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— yeah, where we’re not talking about the like the Ortega box that you get where you season it up and do that. Because those things, that is a design flaw. Like the hard taco shell, there’s not a place you can bite into that. No, where the whole thing doesn’t just f*ing explode.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: That’s where the Crunchwrap Supreme comes in. Have you had the, like, was it the Gordita Crunch from Taco Bell?

JON STEWART: Have I had the Gordita Crunch?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Brittany, what, who do you think you’re dealing with? That was—

JON STEWART: I was raised on a Gordita Crunch farm.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: I lived, I lived on 3 miles to and from my Gordita Crunch.

JON STEWART: We would, we would. I remember when we were in the Gordita Crunch factory. This is years ago before you guys, before they had really made it an assembly line.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Do they have tacos at Madison Square Garden? Like, do you eat that at the Knicks game? What do you eat courtside?

JON STEWART: I don’t eat courtside. I don’t, I don’t like to because you never want to be in a position where a 6-foot-8-inch man is going to fly into your lap. And you cover him with nacho cheese.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, last night, was it Bloomberg spilled his drink when he got crashed into?

JON STEWART: Can I tell you something? I legitimately thought he was dead.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: I was so scared.

JON STEWART: I think he looked like— he looks scared. Scared. Yeah, I think because that’s when you’re that age, and no disrespect, my age too, and that’s small, like that’s one of those like the cartoons where the guy gets up and you’re two-dimensional just, and they have to come and like peel you off the floor and then shake a couple times and then you pop back into a whole person. No, that was— I legitimately thought when the player got up, he was going to have a Bloomberg stain on his shorts where Michael Bloomberg used to be.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Did Chappelle help him? Chappelle was next to him.

JON STEWART: Chappelle absolutely helped him. Yeah, absolutely. By the way, they came together. No, they didn’t come together. I’m just kidding. No, Dave came with his wife, Elaine. But it was so nice. It’s funny, it really is like a fun little comedy reunion up there. Chris Rock was there, and Dave, and Colin Joe. Sam Morrill’s always there, and DeStefano. Like, it’s always— it’s a really fun, like, comedy vibe up there.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Oh yeah, courtside was wild last night. Jeter and Eli sitting next to each other.

JON STEWART: It was like— Champions, man. Yeah, it was nuts. And Mariska Hargitay had— might have been the prize piece of attire of any— because everybody tries to, you know, really show out in there. She was wearing a Jalen Brunson jersey that he had given to her and had signed and said, “I love you.” Oh, their friendship is so inspiring. I was just like, I don’t know how to process this. Like, it’s one thing for a, like, a ball player to be like, oh man, I’ve seen your work, I like it. It’s another thing for them to be like, no, I’m your biggest fan, I love you.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: 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?

JON STEWART: Well, I was going to say it was probably when we came all the way back from 12 down. Yeah, and Nate was next to me and they hit, and he and I are hugging each other and jumping up and down and just like the glee coming out of your face.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: It was. And relief.

JON STEWART: And then it all went to shit. So I’m hoping tomorrow night, I’m hoping we can recover and get going. But all right, thank you guys as always. Brittany, how do they stay in touch with us?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Twitter, we are @weeklyshoppod. Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Bluesky. We are Weekly Show Podcast, and you can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart. Fine, fine, fine.

JON STEWART: Thank you as always, producer Brittany Mamedovic, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer Rob Vitolo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, and our executive producers Chris McShane and Katie Gray. And we shall see you guys next week. Bye-bye. The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It’s produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Boy Productions.

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