Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Reality Check!

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Earlier this year I read a book called The End of Reality  by the writer Jonathan Taplin. The book is a meditation on the outsize power and influence of four billionaires: Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, and Elon Musk. After the election I rang Jonathan up for a special post election conversation about his book and our new Oligarchy.  Also, Radiotopia is running its annual fundraiser right now, we only do this once a year. If you can donate please do! Support this show and indy podcasts. 

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. The morning after the election, I saw this post online. It was a picture of Donald Trump in the White House from the first time around. And he's standing there with his arms outstretched, gesturing to these tables that are overflowing with hamburgers and packages of french fries. And the caption for this post read, all the authors this morning promoting their books on fascism. Now, I will admit this post did make me laugh. But at the same time, there are actually a number of books out there that can help us make sense of this moment. And they're not even all about fascism. I actually have a pretty formidable stack of books. I can send you the whole list if you want to reach out. But one of these books that came out earlier this year is called The End of

Reality. And it's by a guy named Jonathan Taplin. This book is a meditation on four billionaires, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. Four billionaires who have a lot of outsized power and influence right now. I think this book has a lot to offer us as we try to figure out where we are and where we're going next in this country. And so it is a great pleasure to welcome Jonathan to the podcast. Good to be here. So how are you feeling post-election? Well, I had kind of seen it coming, you know.

If you think about the shift from, say, 2018, where young men from 18 to 29 were almost 22 points Democratic, and they ended up in this election to be almost 15% Republican. That's a huge shift, 35, 36 points. I don't see how you can not think that Elon had something to do with that. Absolutely, especially on the time scale. But so the book itself is, in a way, a group biography, which is a form I really love. You know, it's a close look at Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen. And we're going to dig deep into, you deep into each of them a little bit as individuals. But I kind of wanted to start with you, because what excited me about the book is your POV. You're not a technologist. You kind of come from the world of music and movies. In

fact, your memoir, The Magic Years, is filled with all these great stories. You were there when Bob Dylan went electric. You produced some of Martin Scorsese's early movies. Recently, Scorsese's had some pretty profound things to say about the state of our movie industry. There are many musicians who are articulate about how their economic livelihoods have been eviscerated by technology. And so you jump into this debate in this book sort of from a, you know, with a tone that's almost emperor has no clothes. And I'm really curious, did you always feel this way about the technocrats and technology? Is this something, you know, you've sort of had constant for you or something that developed, you know, I mean, initially when the iPod came out, I thought it was a cool device, right? I mean, but what had happened at the end of the 1990s was, well, it was actually the turn of the millennium. This thing called Napster showed up. And, you know, basically what Napster did was take every tune that ever existed and put it on the web for free. And I saw that

distinctly affect musicians, you know, so my friend Levon Helm, who had been the drummer and the singer in the band, happened to have contracted throat cancer in 2000. And Levon had been making a very good living off the band's work. And that may sound strange since the band stopped recording in 1976. But in the 80s, the CD was introduced. And so basically, everybody who had a record collection completely reordered their whole

record collection on CD form. And so there was a huge amount of royalties that flowed into the catalog of groups like the band. And those royalties, you know, gave Levon a, you know, $100,000 to $150,000 a year income without having to do anything. And so when Napster came, that just literally came to a halt. It was like shocking. And so that was my first sense of, okay, this is not working right for artists. And then it just got worse. You know, Bill Clinton and Al Gore made the

huge mistake of giving these people a safe harbor liability shield. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating that, you know, we think about this in terms of, you know, artist royalties, but the safe harbor is exactly the same thing that enabled, you know, the disinformation to flow. So there really is a link for someone thinking like, wow, why are we talking about artist royalties when we're just witnessing disinformation destroy everything? This thing you brought up with Safe Harbor, that is sort of the key that connects both of them. Yeah, look, there's a really good example of that. So Rupert Murdoch paid a $800 million fine to Dominion for having defamed them by saying on Fox News a few times that Dominion had shifted votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. And, you know, that was a lie.

And he had to pay a fine. But there was far more of that nonsense on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And they never got sued at all. Yeah, there were no consequences. But you quote President Obama at a lecture he gave at Stanford in 2022, and he's kind of looking back at his cozy relationship with Silicon Valley with a little regret. And he said,

you know, what still nags at me is my failure to appreciate at the time just how susceptible we'd become to lies and conspiracy theories. One of the biggest reasons for the weakening of democracy is the profound change that's taken place in how we communicate and consume information. I get it that it's easy for him to say that in 2022, but it's not like there weren't voices out there sort of saying this from early on. And I guess my question is, did you see yourself as one of them? Well, you know, I guess I was an early techno skeptic. Bothered me most of all was this notion of what I call techno determinism, which is that legislatures are clueless. And so what you need to do is let us, the tech overlords, boards, determine government policy or lack of such for the future of communications. Look what's happening today, this morning. Trump goes to see the House of Representatives and who's next to his, who walks in with him

is Elon Musk. Yeah. You know, it's fascinating to kind of look at what Elon did as sort of an iteration of what Peter Thiel did in 2016. You know, Peter invested in Trump and was one of the first tech barons to sort of do that the first time around. And he got, you know, some dividends out of doing that, you know, for his businesses

and for his personal wealth. And one way of looking at what Elon just did is sort of a maximizing of that, times a million of what his frenemy did back in 2016. But it also seems that looking at Trump going looking at, you know, Trump going with, sorry, looking at Elon going with Trump today to D.C. to meet with, you know, the GOP and Biden, you know, we're watching oligarchy kind of come onto the stage. And this is a word that a lot of Americans are uncomfortable with. And, you know, it seems like maybe important to look at these four as oligarchs. Well, why are people uncomfortable with? I mean, you know, quite frankly, it's the definition of oligarch. We've essentially said, okay, the people who run the largest communications and largest capitalization firms in America have not only direct access to the president, but can actually tell the president what to do.

I mean, Musk is in every meeting to select cabinet members. They're giving him his own department to go supposedly clean up the waste in government. I mean, we've always seen this before. There's always someone going to get rid of the waste. But he says he's going to cut the budget by $2 trillion of waste. And who is watching him? You know, obviously, he's going to say Lockheed and, you know, some of the other defense contractors are wasteful. And you just let me do it.

And it'll be much cheaper. I mean, it's really kind of astonishing to me that it has come to this point. I don't recall in history ever, I mean, there was never a situation where, you know, McKinley said, well, I'm going to let John D. Rockefeller decide where's the worst spending. You know, it just didn't happen. No, it hasn't happened. But it's also, what hasn't happened is a sense of the legal realities. And this is something I think you highlight in like what this power means in your book as well. So we talked about the safe harbor law that's sort of given this part of the media ecosystem more power than, say, Fox News. Fox News had to pay fines, as you pointed out.

Facebook and YouTube and Twitter have never had to do that. In other words, there's a different sense of the law. There's a character in Musk world and Trump world that's a minor character that I've been kind of fascinated these past you know, the legal argument that Spiro made was that, you know, the same laws just don't apply to Elon Musk when he says things. Interestingly enough, Spiro's now the lawyer that Eric Adams has deployed in fighting his new case. He's also the lawyer that got Alec Baldwin off, believe it or not. But these arguments that he's making, I also feel would just not have been, they wouldn't have gotten as far as they, yeah, they wouldn't have worked, but they really seem to be working right now. And

in other words, there's a legal aspect to this. We are starting to barrel down a path that says the laws don't apply the same way to everyone. Yeah, I think that's certainly true. I think one of the things we have to worry about most of all is, though, is that if Musk is given the power to make budget decisions and determination of what departments should be cut or something like that. Then we're reverting to a different system of government, you know, and that's what oligarchy really means to me, a government in which the rich have much more control. And look, let's be clear.

Marc Andreessen makes most of the drones for his company. Anderle is a huge provider of military. I mean, you think that he's just a venture capitalist, but that's not true. I mean, his companies are deeply embedded in the Defense Department. And so is, you know, Peter Thiel. I mean, obviously, the government has paid Palantir quite a bit of money. Yeah. And this gets us to, you us to the core of the matter here. Your book went to press before the election, as did one of my favorite books about the story of Elon's purchase of Twitter, which was Character Limit, Ryan Max and Katie Congler's book.

And I feel that both of you say similar things and that, you know, from a business perspective, this just might have been one of the biggest exercises in folly ever committed. But now, you know, after the successful election of Donald Trump, it's, we have to revisit that. And I'm curious how that calculus works out for you. I mean, in terms of just dollars, all of those billions just might be an easy write-off in terms of what's going to happen next. Well, it certainly makes the acquisition worthwhile from his political perspective. And I assume that if you have 200 plus billions in your bank account, that the loss of the 33 billion he personally put into Twitter doesn't really matter that much. No, and he's going to make it back.

I mean, of course, if his if he's able to keep his position as buddy in chief, he's going to make it back. Of course he is. And, you know, all it takes is one more deal from NASA or the Pentagon in his pocket and he's made it all up. So it doesn't really matter to him. And he made that calculation, obviously, when he made the initial investment. You know, the cast of characters that you assemble, Andreessen, Thiel, Musk, and Zuckerberg, you know, you've assembled them to maybe help us meditate on what kind of world they want to build. For example, you talk about how all four of them, with their immense wealth and power, have no interest in fixing the world's problems. In fact, they've made it clear they don't care. They see, they have, you know, if you think of like

Mars and Elon, like instead of, you know, thinking about what we could do to safeguard our world now, there's almost like a joke, a way of thinking like, well, let's just go somewhere is very clear that he thinks that, you know, the system has to be brought to its knees. And then people will wake up and understand that he and his buds know what to do next. In other words, out of some kind of sense of complete loss, you get to this new world where either you go to Mars and start all over again, or you live in a cyber reality like the metaverse, where only the people you want are allowed into your sphere of influence, into your little world that you've created. Yeah. So two of the main characters in your book, Musk and Thiel, have a shared experience, a connection to South Africa apartheid. And you don't say this explicitly, but I definitely had this thought reading your book that because of this connection, they both have this lived experience with the idea that you can have a quote unquote functioning society where everyone is not equal absolutely i mean they both grew up in a system in which only white people had power

and they exist in that system and it strikes me, that this is really the thing that unites all four of your billionaires. Zuckerberg was okay with advancing the argument that, you know, Trump didn't have to follow the rules everyone else had to follow on Facebook. And Andreessen is, well, I mean, he's just advocating for a world that is designed for the elite. And us normies, well, we just need to get out of their way. Let's be clear. All are very left brain people. A very little sense of empathy.

They could care less what people think of them. They want to just do what they want to do. Jonathan Taplin is the author of The End of Reality, a meditation on the outsized power and influence of four billionaires. It's a great read for this particular moment in time. And if you want the other books on my list, just drop me a line at bwalker at gmail, or you can find me online

at the new place, benjaminwalker at bluesky. The Theory of Everything is a proud and founding member of Radiotopia from PRX, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.