The Bulwark Podcast - Jonathan Taplin: The End of Reality

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

Four billionaires—Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, and Andreessen—are part of an antidemocratic turn in the tech world. This interlocked directorate of Silicon Valley has helped bring us to this time of post-truth reality, online chaos, and mob violence. Jonathan Taplin joins Charlie Sykes. show notes: Jon's "The End of Reality"

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We're going to take a little bit of a detverse, Mars, and crypto by Jonathan Taplin. And I got to say, it is scary. And since it is not necessarily in my wheelhouse, I really wanted to talk with you, Jonathan. So good morning. Welcome to the podcast. Appreciate it very much. Great to be here. Just a little bit of background. I mean, you were a man of many, many careers. I mean, you put the Renaissance in Renaissance, man. You were a tour manager for Bob Dylan and the band. I'm guessing there's a book in there somewhere. Film producer, most notably of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and the Last Waltz. Founder of the pioneering video-on-demand company, Entertainer, and director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC. And this latest book, okay, I'll tell you what got me about your book,

Jonathan, is I keep thinking, I always worry about while we're focusing on the big orange sun in front of us, and while we're fighting that, what's going on in the background? And we're fighting authoritarianism and the guy who's going to be the dictator of the day. And yet you think about all of these other things that are moving ahead, including the rise of an American oligarchy. And I wanted to bounce that word off you because you write about these billionaires and you call them the technocrats. But let's just for a moment, I don't want to sound like, you know, just sort of going through some sort of 1930s rhetoric, but the concentration of wealth in this country, you know, has been a growing concern, but the concentration of wealth, power, and influence feels like we're reaching a

peak moment. Do we have an oligarch problem? So I have a chart I use when I give talks, which shows that the rise of the 1% really started around the time of Google's IPO. And the thing is that the software, you know, technology is an extraordinary business. And it creates profits unlike anything we've ever seen in our life. I mean, if you just take Facebook, which reported record earnings this week, Facebook doesn't have to make its product. The people make its product. It doesn't have to transport its product because the internet, which the government subsidizes, transports its product. All it does is take the majority of the advertising income

for keeping people's attention. So its margins are in the 80% range. And just to give you an example, Google's gross margin is around 52%. Walmart's gross margin is around 30%, and Facebook's is like 80%. Reinhold Nemoer, the famous theologian, said something really smart, I think. He said, and he said this in the late 30s, he said, some form of oligarchy would be inevitable in a technological age because of the inability of the general public to maintain social control over the experts who control the new technologies. And you and I have watched since the beginning of social networks, these people, the barons, the tech barons, basically have free reign to do whatever they want. You can't sue Facebook. For instance, Rupert Murdoch paid $750 million to Dominion for defaming them, for putting out untruth. But there was far more untruth on Facebook and Twitter about Dominion by a factor of 50. Because you know, at its greatest, when he was on Fox, Tucker Carlson

could get 3 million people a night. That was his size of his audience. Elon Musk tweets at least three tweets to 140 million people a day. And he makes sure they get every tweet he puts out unless you actively block him. Because he's tweaked the algorithms to make sure that everybody sees his wisdom. So Elon Musk's power is far greater than Tucker Carlson's was at the height of his power. Someone said, democracy's assassins always need accomplices. And I am worried that these people, specifically Musk and Zuckerberg, but also Antris and Thiel, are the accomplices to the assassination of democracy that we're watching as a kind of slow motion train wreck that's going on. Let's talk about those four guys, because your book,

The End of Reality, is about those four billionaires and how they're selling out our future. And you're right. Four very powerful billionaires, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen, are creating a world where nothing is true and all is spectacle. If we are to inquire how we got to a place of radical income inequality, post-truth reality, and the looming potential for a second American Civil War, we need to look no further than those four, the biggest wallets, to paraphrase historian Timothy Snyder, paying for the most blinding lights. Now, you know, that is a sweeping indictment because, of course, we have hundreds of thousands of pundits and scholars who are, you know, looking for sources of,

economic discontent and sociological changes. But it really does come back to these four incredibly powerful oligarchs. And also it explains why the transformation has been so rapid. I mean, this is the thing is you look at things, trends and changes that used to take 100 years, then took 50 years, then took 20 years, then took, and now we're measuring it in virtually a news cycle. So let's talk about this. You call these four billionaires the technocrats, and you describe them as essentially an interlocking directorate of Silicon Valley. I mean, it's not like four separate guys. There is a, you know, for all the conspiracy theories out there, if you're looking for the Illuminati or the Secret Cabal, this is the interlocking director of Silicon Valley. How does it work? Well, first off, they all invest in each other's companies. So when Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter, he looked to both Marc Andreessen, who put $400 million into the deal. He looked to Peter Thiel, who has always been an investor with him

since the first days of PayPal. They owned PayPal together, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Mark Andreessen is a board member of Facebook and one of the earliest investors. Peter Thiel was the original investor in Facebook and was a board member until very recently. Thiel invested in SpaceX and Dreesen invested in SpaceX. I mean, you can see how it works. When I call it an interlocking directorate, they all invest in each other's deals. And so they're all deeply embedded in the same thing. And in a sense, they all want the same thing, which is why they're all supporting Donald Trump. What do they all want? You write that these oligarchs appear to be more interested in replacing our current reality and our economic system with something far more opaque, concentrated, and unaccountable, which if it comes to pass, they will control.

It's not enough for them to be richer than hell or cool or named Time Man of the Year. What do they really want here, Jonathan? Well, their ideal world is the kind of libertarian anarcho-fantasy, which is a world in which the currency is Bitcoin. So it's untraceable and nobody knows who owns what and nobody can find out. The world that people inhabit is a virtual world, the metaverse, in which because you're out of work, you're going to spend hours and hours in some fantasy world that Mark Zuckerberg will essentially rent to you. You know, in other words, let's say you're a Tony Stark fan in the Avengers, you can rent Tony Stark's house, and he will give you Tony Stark's magic suit that he wears, and he will

even rent you the avatar of Gwyneth Paltrow to date for a night because you're lonely and you have nothing else to do. And for Andreessen, the world takes a little darker turn, which is, of course, Andreessen's company is the largest vendor to the Pentagon of autonomous weapons. And autonomous weapons is a new thing in which AI makes the decision as to when to pull the trigger. It's not some guy in a trailer in Las Vegas directing a drone and pulling the trigger from Las Vegas. It's completely independent. That assumes the AI will know the difference between a man with a gun and a man with a broom at 150 yards. And it hasn't worked out that well in the early test. What a surprise.

But that isn't to say that Andreessen doesn't think that that's the future. And of course, all this notion of libertarian fantasies, if you really look at them, they're all crony capitalists. SpaceX is totally financed by the U.S. government, by NASA. Musk's satellite company is totally funded by governments. Peter Thiel's Palantir is totally funded by government grants and government things and was originally founded with CIA money. So much for being libertarians. Yeah. So, I mean, this notion that they're really libertarians is actually a joke. They're just really good crony capitalists. Yeah. I mean, that's a joke or I think the technical term is bullshit. Okay. so let's go through the lies because this is kind of at the heart of your book, which is the end of reality.

Let's talk about currency. Let's talk about AI. Let's talk about metaverse Mars. But I want to start on currency and how this plays that these guys are obsessed with the end of centralized banking. Wall Street Journal just had a piece that crypto is being marketed to baby boomers following this SEC approval, and BlackRock is in on it. And people are out there trying to buy Bitcoin. So how does this fit in? What is the role of this selling the fantasy future? Where does crypto fit in?

Bitcoin is basically controlled by what in the trade is called the whales. And the whales are the people, they're about 3% of the holders of Bitcoin, and they control about 82% of all the Bitcoin. And so if you were just an average person like you or I and watching a football game, an NFL game in the winter of 2021. So say late November leading up to the Super Bowl of 2022. Most of the commercials were for crypto. There was Larry David telling you to buy crypto. There was Matt Damon telling you that fortune belongs to the bold. There was LeBron James and Tom Brady and everybody. And so what happened at that point, crypto was at $60,000 a coin.

And the suckers flooded into the market. Of course, the whales were happy to sell their coins at $60,000. And by April, Bitcoin was down to $19,500. So the pyramid scheme guys got out and the suckers bought in, just like every pyramid scheme. And it's never gotten back to the $60,000. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that Bitcoin has no actual inherent value, at least with gold, which was the previous prepper thing of choice. You can meld it down and

make jewelry or something, right? But Bitcoin has no value other than what some person ascribes to it. So it's a pure casino economy. You know, at some point, the game ends. It has no value other than what it is. Okay, but what's their motivation? If I was a multimillionaire, if I was a billionaire, the one thing that I would not want to mess around with is the integrity of the currency. I would not want to have my billions of dollars suddenly evaporate in value or be questioned. So why are they interested in this? How does this fit into their agenda, what they want? These are ideologists. Peter Thiel has been railing against the Federal Reserve before Ron Paul. I mean, these people have essentially tried to

convince you that the U.S. currency is a total scam and it's just all kept afloat by talking points and things and the fact that we're the reserve currency. They don't even understand how critical the fact that we're the basic currency for the world is to the power of our economy. So they're coming at everything from an ideological point of view. They want complete freedom. That's why, for instance, they hate the current regime. Alina Khan, who is the head of the Federal Trade Commission, is the person that they throw darts at every day in their private time, you know, because she's sued Google, she's sued Amazon, she's sued Facebook, she's sued all these. And so their feeling is, look, if we can get Biden out of there and Trump back in, it'll be a free ride again and we won't have to worry about government regulation, which is the old Koch brothers scheme that the government is bad because it tries to regulate my business. Let's spend a little time on AI because you have some really good stuff in this book about AI and where it's going.

And you've been pointing to these comments from Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, that copywriters and ad agencies won't have jobs in 10 years because they're all going to be replaced by chat GPT. So we're talking about millions of workers, white-coll, millions of others, like radiologists reading x-rays. They're going to be out of work. How disruptive is AI going to be? And I'm going to get to the impact on democracy in a moment, but just give me your thoughts about what's coming our way with AI in terms of just the economy, life. Here's the thing that scares me the most. So Sam Altman has said, and Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI and is really probably the biggest thinker in the business. So Sam Altman has said that the marginal cost of intelligence because of AI will drop to near zero in 10 years. That means

the cost to get any job that requires a brain will be near zero because of these machines. I can see some problems with that. So I have a friend in L.A. who ran the largest public relations firm in Los Angeles, in Hollywood. And he had at the height of his business, he had about 100 employees. And about 70% of those people were content creators. In other words, they spent the day writing press releases, thinking up stunts that Madonna could do, you know, just creating content. So he said to me the other day, he said, well, if I had started that agency now, I would have four salesmen to get us business. And I'd have a big chat GPT and two or three editors just to tweak what the output of that was. So these are people who are making one hundred and fifty,000 a year. I mean, the old thought was, oh, the robots will put out of work

the people who used to flip hamburgers for McDonald's. But these are middle class jobs. So can you imagine millions of middle class people being replaced by AI? And perhaps a lot of them are young and took out a good deal of debt at college to go to USC's Annenberg School of Communication. And now they got their first job at a PR or an ad agency. And then they're told, hey, sorry, the AI is going to do your work. You're out of work. For the next 40, 50 years. To me, that is a potentially revolutionary situation. You know, the pitchfork brigades comes out. So, Altman says, we'll need universal basic income. In other words, the government will have to step in and just pay everybody a basic thing to stay home in their pajamas every day. You and I can debate what the role of work is

in what me giving you meaning. I think it's pretty strong. I think work is a lot of what gives us meaning. And if we didn't have work, what would we have meaning? Now, maybe you would say, well, that advertising copywriter really wanted to write a novel his whole life. And so now he's got some basic stipend and he can write his novel or form a band and become an artist. Or it seems like everybody wants to be an actor or be a director.

And maybe that's because I live in Hollywood. Hundreds of millions of people separated from the workforce. I mean, if you want to talk about potentially revolutionary, upsides and downsides, obviously. Well, you know, there's two visions of what the future is. One looks kind of like Blade Runner, right? Where there's police hovering in the air in their things and, you know, the world is kind of broken and the millionaires live behind walls. Love the movie, not sure that I want it for my future. We don't want Blade Runner.

Now, Sam Altman, who's been pushing universal basic income, thinks that it'll be great. It'll allow everybody to be what they really wanted to be because they didn't really want to be writing ad copy. They really wanted to write a novel. So that would release mountains of bad novels, bad music. I mean, you know, there was an article in The New Yorker this week about Lucian Grange, the head of Universal Music. And he said, the biggest problem is there's too much junk out there.

No kidding. There's stuff on Spotify that's just nonsense. Has Sam Altman met Republicans? Has he met the political class? Does he honestly believe that, you know, with the advent of AI and all of this displacement, that we're going to have a Republican Congress and a Republican president who are going to go, you know, let's put everybody on the universal dole. I'm a little skeptical. That's what I say. I say it's a fantasy.

I say it's a fantasy. But the problem is, Charlie, that nobody is, from a political point of view, is really talking about the reality of what AI is going to do to the workforce. Nobody is doing it. How fast does this happen? I mean, what is our timeline here? Is this something? Okay, so he says in 10 years, it'll be everywhere. 10 years.

You know, Allman says in 10 years, there will be 30 to 40 million people unemployed for sure. And you have talked about deaths of despair and stuff like that. And, you know, needless to say, Trump was elected president partially because of, you know, outsourcing of jobs to China. But this is a different kind of thing. This is outsourcing jobs to robots and AI. It is inconceivable that you could not have a disruption of that size, 30, 40 million unemployed without it having absolutely cataclysmic, catastrophic political consequences. This would be a real black swan event just on the economics without even getting into how AI can change our politics and what it will mean for disinformation and lies. That's a critical point. Yeah. We're going to see that in the next nine months. Yeah.

I mean, if you don't think that the AI use of disinformation is going to be astonishing. I mean, already we had a robocall from Joe Biden giving people the wrong date to go vote and stuff like that. You know, I mean, it's like a raindrop in advance of a tsunami, though. Right? Right. There was an extraordinary thing that happened about four days ago in Hong Kong.

The chief controller of a very large Hong Kong company is asked to get on a conference call with four people, like a Zoom call. So there are four faces and there was the chief financial officer, which he knew very well, and three other executives of the company on this call. And they say, okay, Charlie, we want you to transfer 200 million Hong Kong dollars to these five accounts. And that was the guy, because he knows his voice, he knows his face. He says, okay. And he goes and does it, right? $200 million. They were all built by AI. They weren't the real people at all. It was a bunch of hackers who had recorded their voice, had recorded their pictures and some video of them and created these avatars that were totally realistic and convinced the guy, the controller, to transfer $200 million out of their accounts. I mean, so people, we're going to get to a part where people are not going to know what's true

and what is not true. I mean, every politician is going to be the victim of a fake audio or a fake video. The evidence of our eyes is no longer necessarily going to be dispositive because you don't know whether something you're seeing is true or not true. So you could have something that's fake that's being pushed, but then you could have something that is absolutely true that is debunked by all of this. And this wave is about to hit us, not in 10 years, but as you pointed out, over the next nine months. So people like Hannah Arendt have been writing for years about that the point of propaganda was not to convince you of one policy or another policy. It's to get you to doubt your critical

sensibilities altogether. It is the annihilation of truth. You just don't know what's truth. So you basically just pick a side. This has been coming with a world we understand, we live in. How bad is it going to get, Jonathan? On the outside, you could imagine a video in late October of Biden having a total freeze-up moment like Mitch McConnell. And, you know, completely created by AI. Right. And that would go viral. And even if it was debunked almost immediately, it wouldn't matter.

Yeah. Because once it's out there on X, it's everywhere. I mean, because Musk has no desire to put forth the truth. Last week, he wrote on X, I just learned that all these illegal aliens will be allowed to vote. They're coming over the thing. Now, this is a completely untrue thing. And he said, I find this rather disturbing. So this tweet went out to about 72 million people. And most of those people think Elon is a god. And so, of course, they believe everything he says. Just a little historical perspective, I was trying to think back on, you know, this is not the first time that we've had, you know, massive concentrations of both wealth and power. We had the robber barons of power, not just in politics, but in the economy

and in the culture. Maybe I'm naive. Maybe somebody's going to say this is the way that it always used to be. But certainly in modern liberal democracies, it's hard to come up with a parallel. And I think it would be even harder to come up with a parallel in which there was this kind of concentration of oligarchic power in which the liberal democracy successfully made it through. What am I missing? Well, the reason earlier ages of oligarchy, and you mentioned the rob that John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan were actually brought to heel by Teddy Roosevelt was that there was an independent press that investigated them. And, you know, a very courageous woman, Ida Tarbell, wrote a series of articles about how Rockefeller completely controlled the oil business and how he squeezed his competitors and everything. And it caused outrage.

And needless to say, Rockefeller had no control of communications or media. He was just an oil man, right? But here's Musk. He's a rocket man. He's a car builder. And he controls one of the largest communication networks in the country. And the same with Zuckerberg. So I think you're right that there is no parallel anywhere close to this in terms of the accumulation of power. And there's one other thing, which is that these people were given, unfortunately, by Bill Clinton and Al Gore,

a pass, which is called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, or otherwise known as the Safe Harbor. In other words, you cannot sue Facebook for putting lies on platform because Facebook says, oh, we have nothing to do with this. We're just a platform. We're not a publisher. Now, this is nonsense.

You notice that there's no porn on Facebook, and that's because they spend hundreds of millions of years with AI to filter out porn. If someone tries to post porn, and I've done some research on this, and porn is uploaded to Facebook about 800 times a day, but it all gets caught on the upload and shunted to another queue and a human looks at it. And if for some reason it was a Margaret Mead ethnographic clip from National Geographic. Maybe it'd be allowed on the platform, but otherwise it's put in the trash bin. They have a pass. They're the only business that has a liability shield in America. Okay. So how do you fight back against all of this? I mean, I don't want to end this, you know, with the sort of the doom and gloom. And you talk

about this in your book, you talk about collective action, like what happened with the entertainment unions last year. I mean, that was a win, right? I mean, we were right on the precipice there. So collective action can, if not stop this, at least slow the roll. Well, you fight back in two ways. One, you fight back like the actors and the writers did last year, which is say, to the AI companies, you cannot take our content and ingest it into your systems. And by the way, everything you've ever written or done on video is in chat GPT. I checked that out. Okay, so they've taken your content to make stuff for new uses, which they get all the money and you don't get any of the money. So I could actually be doing a podcast for the next 50 years, but it's not me. Right.

But also, like the New York Times, if you ask ChatGP to give you an answer to a question and it just spits back to you a quote from the New York Times, which is an ingested, but there's no link for the New York Times to get any revenue. That's the thing. If you want a piece of art, I can ask one of the art diffusion AIs, give me a picture of Joni Mitchell in a Western saloon in 1850. And man, in three seconds, it'll give me that picture. But how did it get that picture? Because it ingested 12 million images from Getty Images without permission, all of them copyrighted, and used that to tell its AI what Joni Mitchell looks like, right? So that's one thing. The second thing is, I think we've got to get rid of this safe harbor, Section 230. And last week, Klobuchar and a few other people started talking about that, that we have to just get rid of it.

There's one senator named Ron Wyden, who for reasons unknown to me, is so protective of that, that he won't let anyone touch it. He thinks it's what keeps the internet what the internet is. And then, you know, a lot of it is personal strategies. You know, just be educated. Don't spend all your time on your smartphone. Look up, you know, read books, get real information from the sources. That feels like sort of a twilight what you do on the desert island. But I've always been skeptical about the ability of legislation to catch up with this. You persuade me, though, that, you know, if you had legislation that would hold that, you know,

statements and representations made by a company using AI that are a total lie should not be considered immune from lawsuit, right? I mean, there's other possible legislation that would require AI companies to label fake pictures or writings as fake. That seems to me reasonable. And then, of course, there's also this ongoing demand, demand compensation when a body of work is basically pirated to train AI programs like this very high-profile lawsuit recently filed by the New York Times. So, I mean, you can have legal answers to this, you can have personal, but also there might be civil remedies, remedies, not necessarily solutions. Look, I'm on the board of the Authors Guild,

and we've sued OpenAI too, because you can ask ChatGPT to write you a Stephen King short story, and it'll write you a fairly convincing short story that is right in the style of Stephen King. Well, how did it do that? It put every Stephen King book into its system to learn how Stephen King writes. You can ask the Google LLM for music to write you a Bob Dylan Andy War song, and it'll sound kind of like Bob Dylan. It'll be kind of banal and not very good, but it will do it. That's the problem that we're facing. And it affects artists, it affects writers, it affects journalists, and eventually it'll affect millions of middle-class jobs. Well, and let's get back to democracy as well. It's hard to really understand the moment that we're in without discussing this transformation that

we're talking about, where a lie can be both shielded from refutation, but also amplified beyond the wildest dreams of the fraudsters and the charlatans of a previous age. And so, you know, here we are, you know, in early 2024, and half of us are looking like, wait, this guy, you know, has been lying about the 2020 election and now is convinced tens of millions of people to believe things that are demonstrable lies. In fact, he's convinced people to actually attack the Capitol, and he's still running about this. I think it's the irrefutability of lies, and it is just the transmission of this kind of information and again all the other explanations about what's happening in our politics you know i think you have to start with this because nothing else explains how america feels like a very different place in 2024 than it did say in 2015 right mean, this is what you're describing in your book. Yeah. This post-reality world.

The post-modernist kind of led us down a very dark path from which we're going to have to recover, but I'm not sure how we do, you know. I just want to read you a little quote from Albert Camus, the rebel, because he was thinking about, you know, at earlier times when fascism was rising his head, he said, we are at the extremities now. At the end of this tunnel of darkness, however, there is inevitably a light which we already divine and for which we have only to fight to ensure its coming. All of us among the ruins are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism. I think what we're dealing with is a very nihilistic age. 20 years, from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad to Mad Men, all these shows about horrible people doing horrible things to other people. And this started in 2001, right after 9-11. And all these

people, if that's what you watched and you saw that power was the only thing that mattered, then it's not that surprising that in 2015 someone said, well, Tony Soprano should be present. And that's what we got. And that's exactly what we got. Well, at least the good news is, though, that the holodeck is going to save us, right? That we're going to get it to be able to go into the metaverse. Apple has this new, just incredibly overpriced, but really cool looking VR set.

And we're just going to basically be able to go into our bedrooms and our basements and just live our best lives without ever actually leaving the house or interacting with any real human beings anymore, right? On universal basic income. That's right. I mean, that's our future, right?

We're all going to be in our pods. It'll be like that movie, WALL-E. I know, I can imagine that. beings anymore right on universal basic income that's right i mean that's our future right we're all going to be in our pods it'll be like that movie wally i know i i can imagine that we'll be fat and sassy we'll be very fat the book is the end of reality how four billionaires are selling a fantasy future of the metaverse mars and crypto by jonathan ta. It is an extraordinary and necessary read for our time because either this is going to end or it's going to continue, but my guess is the oligarchs will still be among us. Jonathan Taplin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It was a real pleasure, Charlie. Well, thank you very much. And thank you all for listening to today's edition of The Bulwark

Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and do this all over again. But as many of you know, I am stepping back. And as of Monday, there will be a new host sitting here. Tim Miller will be the regular host of the Bulwark Podcast. I'm keeping the seat warm for him. And I'll have a lot more to say about that later in the week. Until then, have a great day. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.