Ben Wikler
speaker
485 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Ben Wikler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
fell over and a couple of companies became worth multi-trillions of dollars, Meta did the same thing.
Artificial intelligence has the possibility of doing the same thing for all kinds of work.
Suddenly, there's one place that you can go to do this one thing more efficiently.
And that threatens a more rapid and total wealth accumulation and could turn into a power accumulation than anything else that we've ever seen.
So I do think there's something different about that time in this sense.
But we have also seen versions of this movie before.
Exactly as you say, in the first progressive era, we saw the American economy totally transformed, mass dislocation of
most people's jobs.
People move from like 90% agrarian to moving into cities to work in these factories.
And it took the labor movement and it took the progressive movement, it took trust busting, it took creating workers' health and safety administration, all these different things to be able to get to a point where the explosion of growth actually led to an improvement in living standards for regular people.
And that took the reassertion of democratic control of how the rules of the American political and economic game are set.
So the first thing to move yourself mentally back to the spring of 2025 is
is to remember that not only had Musk been the biggest donor for Donald Trump, and not only was he effectively running the federal government and dismembering it from the inside, including defunding aid programs that keep millions of people alive, he was also threatening to fund primary challenges against anyone who got in his or Donald Trump's way.
And so people in both parties were falling over themselves to find ways to not get the eye of Sauron upon them.
There was this real sense that if he had figured out how to turn money into power, into votes, and win whatever elections he wanted, there was no stopping him and Trump from carrying out every one of their plans.
And the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, I think, was supposed to be the ultimate demonstration of that.
This wasn't the presidential race.
This had been, until that point, a fairly sleepy local election in one state.
And
Here he came with an amount of money that nobody had ever seen spent in this kind of context with tactics no one had ever seen.
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