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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
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, that 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 I think 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.
Yeah.
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