Quinn Slobodian

speaker

708 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 10 Jun

Quinn Slobodian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart · Elon Musk and America's Tech Oligarchy with Quinn Slobodian · 10 Jun 2026 podcast

Well, you do it through the stock market.

That's also when retirement accounts go to 401ks.

And so now the new way of securing social consent is like, don't worry, the stock market's got you.

Watch the line go up and know that that is basically the barometer of your future well-being and your future health.

And when Silicon Valley steps in in the late 1990s and uninterrupted really to the present and says, we are the kind of safeguards of the line going up, then they become kind of the central social infrastructure that the American social contract relies on.

And so in that sense, they can do no wrong.

As long as you're making the line go up, do whatever you want.

Poison our minds, manipulate us with algorithms.

I think so.

I mean, I think it's just the fact that

You know, well-being started to be defined through stock market performance and returns on investment rather than any other way.

Right.

So you wouldn't you wouldn't say like people's lives are getting better because, you know, they have more social protections or there's a sense of community or whatever.

It just became strictly quantifiable.

Like how much how much money do people get when they put X amount of dollars into the stock market when they start their working lives?

Yeah, then you don't have you don't have anywhere to go anyways.

But I think that, you know, if you that's really one of the remarkable things about the last 25 years is the reason why we wrote the book is that I don't think we really have a good narrative yet for just how reliant American economy is on inflation.

the digital tech sector, right?

It is really the whole story.

And in the last year, it's become even more the whole story.

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