The Daily Beast Podcast - How the God Complex of 4 Billionaires Could Destroy Society

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

Author Jonathan Taplin tells The New Abnormal how Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, are providing the tools to let fascism flourish. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears.

Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab Jonathan Taplin, and he's here to tell us all about his new book, The End of Reality, how four billionaires are selling a fantasy future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips.

So on Wednesday, it was day three of Trump's latest trial, which he's actually attending. And he employed a tactic that has been used by many crime bosses before him, working the media and the lobby of the courtroom. Let's listen to how he did that. This trial is a total witch item. And I should be entitled to a jury like everybody else is entitled to a jury. I have no rights to have a jury. It's ridiculous.

Thank you very much. Someone should have asked him why he doesn't have a jury. Right. Because I'm pretty sure it was paperwork, right? Would what if you like to explain why he doesn't have a jury? Because his lawyers forgot to ask for one? That's correct. Very easy light work there would have been to file, you know, and ask for a jury.

So no one is denying him anything but his own lawyers. And then the other thing is like in other trials, he says he, it's not fair. because he can't get a fair jury. It's never fair to him. It's never fair to him, exactly. The world has treated Donald Trump very unfairly throughout his life. You know, I always think of that like, you know, throughout the Bush years, when Romney was running, the Ohio years, we'd always just hear how Democrats are always the victims.

I have never heard someone claim they are the victim more than just that. Put that man up against the whole populace. Oh, yeah. And he can single-handedly beat everyone about how often he claims. to be the victim. Oh, it wouldn't even be close. Well, at least he's good at something because there's not much he is good at. Like, at least Romney and Bush knew that they were privileged. Well, they also had that, like, remember Romney had that book, Never Sorry. And like, that's kind of the opposite of the victim thing. If like that's like, no, no matter what I do, I'm owning it. And but now, no,

victim of everything. Yeah. And now we have a clip from Benny Johnson, the most cringeworthy man on earth. He has a little show where he had on a fellow named Mike Davis, a top Republican staffer who got Brett Kavanaugh confirmed and clerked for Justice Neil Gorsuch, and he's doing one of our favorite parts of this show, saying the quiet part out loud. Mike, I've never called for lava to rain down from the heavens, but maybe upon Washington, D.C., would you be that sweet red hot lava for us? I've never been called sweet, and you call me sweet ginger, so I think I'm then. During my three-week reign of terror as Acting Attorney General, before I get chased out of town with my Trump pardon, I will reign hell on Washington, D.C.

We've talked about this, Ben, I have five lists ready to go and they're growing. List number one, we're going to fire. We're going to fire a lot of people in the executive branch of the deep state. Number two, we're going to indict. We're going to indict Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and James Biden and every other scumbull, Slees-Ball Biden, except for the five-year-old granddaughter who they refused to acknowledge for five years until the political pressure got to Joe Biden. Number three, we're going to deport. We're going to deport a lot of people, 10 million people in growing, anchor babies, their parents,

the grandparents, we're going to put kids in cages. It's going to be glorious. We're going to detain a lot of people in the D.C. Gulag and Gitmo and list number five. I'm going to recommend a lot of parts. Every January 6th defendant is going to get a pardon, especially my hero horn man. He is definitely at the top of the part list. Yeah, I saw that quote. I honestly don't know what you say to that.

I literally, I have no words. Yeah, I don't know. What's another way? I need a the source. You know, the thing that this brought up to me is that when Ronald Reagan said all the shit about cutting taxes. He was always lying. He'd raise the taxes. He'd never cut the deficits, all these things. And like, just generations of Republicans knew that their policies were fucking

stupid and they wouldn't really do them. But these guys fucking believe every bit of the fucking fever swamp bullshit. And did not get the fucking memo that these policies are total fucking bullshit. And believe it with zealot enthusiasm. Zellate enthusiasm. I like that, Coyne that. Also, I think the only thing worth pointing out is that everything that Davis said, none of that is extreme by the measure of today's Republican Party. All of that is mainstream 2023 Republicanism. In fact, if anything, it just sounds like an average five minutes on Bannon's podcast, which every one of the Republican staffers listens to. Yeah, including what's her name, who we're supposed to keep believing is a voice of reason in the Republican Party. Oh, you mean Nancy

base? Yeah. Yeah, that was fun today. Her appearance on there. Okay, well, similarly, speaking of the sent in to hell of this stupid party. So this week, if you already forgot, Matt Gates helped bring on the demise of Speaker of the House, Mike Kevin McCarthy. And Newt Gingrich, the man you could argue poured the poison in the reservoir that was the real fatal dose to our Congress has thoughts. claim therefore you know why they did it because ultimately Matt Gates who hates let's be clear he hates Kevin McCarthy was determined to find a way to get to today let me be very clear it's disgraceful and I hope they're expelling from the conference I would Newt Ingritch defender of norms oh that's good it really is like amazing because like in a normal situation where you would have a host, maybe pushback would say, like, hmm, how do you think we got here, dude? Yeah.

No, this is all, I mean, it's a very famous tweet now from like, I think it was like 2015 or whatever, but from a while ago, a famous woman who voted for the leopard eating party says she never thought the leopards would eat her face. Yeah, yeah. Or the leopard face eating, you know, whatever. Yeah. But this is exactly that. But that was trying.

Let them in with the weapons. They're not here to harm me. Like, it's all good and fine until the monster turns on you. And they all have this belief in their amoeba brain that, like, it's never going to happen to them until it does. Well, continuing with that theme, but now we're going to take it to a much more fun place. One of the fun parts of when your party turns into an authoritarian worshiping cult is the infighting gets real bitter over who can suck up to the leaders the most. Here Fox News was covering a mass shooting, you know, one of the hourly ones. and they can't even get a man on the street ground witness

to not turn into a bitter infighting in their cult. And that's where they declare a mister and a miss Morgan state. And we've got Tyrone on the phone with us now. Tyrone, when you say poker game, what exactly happened? What transpired? Well, first we were watching,

we all get together every Tuesday night and we watch Tucker Carlson's show on X. We used to watch him on Fox News. Obviously, he's out there and no more. and still being the most credible guy in the media in America, we always get together to watch Tucker Carlson, and I think he's doing probably better now if he's not with Fox News because the corporate media always controls what the teleprompter readers are able to say.

And now he doesn't have that hand. Thank you, Tyrone. Maybe we can work to get Don back on the phone. Tracy, we can get that. Clearly, that was not a student at Morgan State University. Donald Trump's voice sounds different. He's going to say Tucker Carlson's voice. sounds like.

I just love, too, that, like, you know it's authentic because it's so untethered to reality. That's amazing. Tucker, trying out some Phil Hendry-style voices in characters. Way to fool us. Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andresen, Elon Musk. According to Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, Jonathan Taplin, these four men have perpetrated an incredible con on America and the world, a scam that has had

incredibly destructive effects on our society. He lays out his case persuasively in a new book called The End of Reality, How Four Billionaires are selling a fantasy future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto. And he joins us now to talk about it. Jonathan, thanks so much for being here. Good to be here, Andy. So I don't think anyone can say you pulled your punches in this book. You are pissed about what these guys have done to society. And it's very much a right. anger, along with a sense of, damn it, we didn't have to let this happen, isn't it? Yeah, I think that's true. If you think about it, there's really two views of the future on offer for us. One is that we use the collective genius of our technologists, our scientists, our humanists,

to fix the actual problems that we face on Earth, such climate change, mental health crisis, housing. And the other is another view which is held by Musk, Zuckerberg, Antriesen, and Teal, which is that the future is a world in which AI and robots will do most of the work, and most humans will sit at home living on universal basic income. Sam Altman, the head of open AI, said that the marginal cost of intelligence is going to fall very close to zero within the next 10 years. So he says the earning power of many, many workers would be drastic reduced in that scenario. It would result in a transfer of wealth from labor to the owners of capital so dramatic that it could be remedied only by a massive countervailing redistribution known as

universal basic income. So these four basically have decided that the birth as we know it is not going to exist. And so what they're interested in is kind of fantasy. future. One, Elon Musk would like us to give him $10 trillion to go to Mars. Mark Zuckerberg thinks you're going to spend seven to eight hours a day with a virtual reality helmet on because you'll be at a home without anything to do. Peter Thiel would like to live to 200 and has got lots of plans for how you can do that. And Mark Andreessen is wanting to sell you an NFT, which, you know, as someone noted yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, 95% of those holding NFTs that they bought in 2021 are worthless investments today. Zero. So I think we've got to think about what they brought us.

I mean, obviously what they brought us is chaos. What they brought us is, as Tim Snyder says, to abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. These are the biggest wallets and they're paying for the most blinding lights. Yeah. Tell me about a term you use in the book, techno determinism. What is it and how does it apply to the philosophy of these four men? Well, when we started trying to think about the internet and this goes back to the Clinton era, we decided that technology, this new technology needed to be unregulated. And in fact, it needed to be protected in a way that no other business is. So, each of these businesses has what's called the safe harbor. You can't sue Twitter X for anything that's

on its platform, even though you could sue Robert Murdoch for telling lies. You can't sue Twitter for doing that. So because we decided they weren't going to be regulated, we assumed that these geniuses would design a future for us that was going to make things better. And I'm arguing that actually some of it is making things worse. If you look at the teenage suicide figures or the deaths of despair, or you look at female self-harm on Instagram, all these figures show you that there's a lot of things that have happened since the coming of social networks that have actually made life worse. But we still yield to people like Musk as if they're geniuses. I mean, Walter Isaacson just put out a book, which is the number one bestseller in the country on Musk,

and he treats him like he's some modern-day, bipolar, semi-preapic Thomas Edison, which is not true. You know, Thomas Edison actually invented things that help the average citizen. Elon Musk makes $100,000 cars, which liberals can buy to virtue signal that they care about the environment or immisement. makes rockets that he gets a 30% gross margin on for every trip he sends up for NASA. I mean, he calls himself a libertarian, but he's actually a crony capitalist. Most of his money comes from the U.S. government or other government. Yeah, you had a really interesting quote in the book. You wrote, I'm not saying that Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andreessen, and Elon Musk are fascists.

I'm saying that they are providing the tools to destroy information spaces and break down reality. So let me know if I'm not reading this correctly, but it sounds to me like what you're saying is, to what degree they themselves adhere to what we would consider a fascist ideology, almost isn't as important as the fact that they are through their works, creating the conditions under which fascism can flourish. Yeah, and it's just beginning, you know, I mean, obviously the very fact that every judge who's doing a trial for on Trump has to have a large security. detail, that probably all the jurors in these trials have to have security details. There's a level of political violence in this country that is we've never seen before, and most of that is being driven by social media posts. But it's going to get worse, because these people are also the people that run the largest AI firms. And if you think about the election of 2016 and the fact that Progosen had a room full of young Russians pretending to be young Americans on Facebook and

Twitter and posting stuff. Imagine that to the 100,000th or millionth expansion with AI, where I could just ask AI to write a piece of disinformation and say, I want a million different versions of this, and I want them in the next two hours. ability to a year from now as we get close to the election to understand what's true and what's not true will be almost impossible, not just on text, but on images, on videos, on everything, all of this being used AI to completely create an disinformation space. Another thing you said in the book, you described Peter Thiel as you say he's not the richest of the four men, but he's the most influential.

And as you point out, he has repeatedly made it clear that he himself is no fan of democracy. Yeah, he said that capitalism and democracy are not compatible. He told the Wall Street Journal that only 2% of the people know what's really going on. That's the venture capitalist and the scientists. And most of the people are just sheep. So, I mean, that's his view of the world. And that's a view in which the mob or the demos, as he calls it, is getting in his way. And so obviously he would love a president like Donald Trump who will let him do what he wants to do.

And all of them, their business would be enhanced if Trump got president again because, you know, Trump has made it clear that he'd like to send Elon Musk and 100 people to Mars, even if it, to plant the American flag on Mars as if we owned it. So, I mean, despite the, the fact that that $10 trillion that is going to cost, which means that Elon earns between $2 trillion and $3 trillion on the trip, will come out of the taxpayers' wallet. And think of all the other things we could do to fix the world with $10 trillion. Well, and you mentioned earlier that, you know, Musk has gotten a lot of money from the U.S. government, i.e., from the U.S. taxpayers.

But as you also point out in the book, all four of these men own business. that rely specifically on Pentagon, CIA, and NASA funding? Absolutely. So Andresen is probably the largest manufacturer of the software that runs AI autonomous weapons. So that would include everything from drones that are run by AI, not by some kids sitting in a trailer in Nevada, but actually that are autonomous and have the ability to pull the trigger on their rockets with their own software, to what are known as killer robots, which are literally robots with an M-16. Obviously, the earlier tests on killer robots have not been good.

The ability to distinguish at 100 yards a man with a gun from a man with a broom is almost impossible. And so, you know, most of the world would like to ban those weapons. but the U.S. and Russia have exercised their veto power at the U.N. to keep that from happening. Peter Thiel's business, Pallenteer, is almost exclusively supported by governments now. There was a while that some corporations tried the Pallentier software. I think IBM tried it and some others, and even Walmart did a trial. And instead it just wasn't worth of money, even though Thiel claims he has. has all more information than anybody in his surveillance capitalism company. I think Zuckerberg

doesn't get a lot of money directly from the government, but his notion that the Metaverse, his business plan that you will spend seven hours a day in the Metaverse can only work if there's an awful lot of people out of work sitting at home with nothing to do and living on universal basic income. By the way, all these four people, are complete supporters of this notion of universal basic income. That is that the government just will pay everybody to sit in their pajamas all day. And to my mind, not only is that unrealistic, the notion of men without work or women without work is, from someone my point of view,

is a chilling and horrible possibility. Well, it's interesting. And along those lines, when I was growing up, two books that were, either they were ubiquitous or they felt ubiquitous to me, were obviously George Orwell's 1984, which of course is quoted and misquoted to this day. And Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which seems to have fallen out of ubiquity, but you argue several times throughout the book that in the ways that Huxley described his dystopian future, he was actually the one who got it right a lot. Absolutely. So Orwell thought that we would have to ban books.

and we'd have to, you know, have constant surveillance on people and the boot on the neck kind of thing. Big Brother is watching you. But Huxley basically thought that we would be in a future in which you would take drugs every day. It was called Soma, and it was kind of a combination of Viagra and Prozac. And you would go to the Feles, which is kind of wraparound entertainment, which is as close as you can imagine to the metaver. and that people would be so blest out that the government wouldn't have to worry about anybody, you know, invading the homes of the rich with the pitchforks. That basically people would just not care anymore.

And I think that's about as close as you can imagine to the culture that we're living in. Yeah, and also I kept thinking of the movie Wally as I was reading your book. I completely agree. And Peter Drucker, the famous business analyst, once said, culture eats strategy for breakfast every day. And I think I would say that culture also eats politics for breakfast every day. And these guys are the new culture heroes. I mean, obviously, as you know, from my biography, I grew up when I got out of graduated from Princeton. I went to work for Bob Dylan in the band. And I produced the concert for Bangalaj for George Harrison. I came from a world in which

The culture heroes were these aspirational utopian figures like Dylan and the Beatles. And now, you know, Elon Musk has 130 million followers on X. He is the culture hero. His biography is number one on the New York Times bestseller list. And Isaac's book reminds me of that movie almost famous. You know that young journalist who's like gets on. the private jet with the band that's kind of like the Eagles and surrounded by groupies and there's all the drugs you can imagine. And he just thinks, wow, I'm the luckiest guy in the world.

And then he slowly realizes that he's lost his critical facilities completely. And that to me is what, you know, Isaacson's book is like. So towards the end of your book, you say that people who want to join the resistance against these technocrats can adopt some simple guidelines for their families. And you mentioned four things. The first is don't buy a VR headset or let your children use VR. And I should, in full disclosure, point out that I am reading this to you as I can literally look at my Sony PSVR headset. So I feel shamed. Don't buy cryptocurrency or NFTs. Don't fall for life extension therapies, which as you pointed out is a big thing that Peter teal is into, and don't let your tax dollars finance a Mars space colony. These are the big four for you.

Right. I took my children and my grandchildren on a vacation last year to Africa. You were in Tanzania where there was no cell service and there was no Wi-Fi. And we were camping out. And for the first two days, the kids who were 15, 13, and 10 were like a little freaked out, you know, their phones did. work and they didn't know what to do. And then eventually they gave up and they turned their phones off and put them in their suitcases. And all of a sudden for the next 10 days, they were totally present. And their parents were like, wow, what a transition. They're here all the time. When we're at dinner table, they're not looking at the phone. It was like, wow, this is the coolest thing in the possible. And when the parents got home, they instituted a digital Sabbath, which is one.

day, Sunday, where everybody puts their phones away, adults included, and just talks to each other, is present. And it's kind of transformational, you know, that's the cool thing that we need to do. Yeah, I guess the question is, have we already gone too far where there's no turning back on that? And I guess that's what we need to discover. Well, that's true. But there's also constant movements all over the country of people trying to reassert kind of simple pleasures. You know, I'm the chairman of the board of the Americana Music Foundation. So we just had a festival called Americana Fest in Nashville.

And so it's people like Brandy Carlisle and Riannon Giddens and some channel level. And these people are just playing acoustic instruments. in close harmonies. They're connected to a music that was popular maybe in the 1930s, and there's gospel singers, and there's real blues singers. And it's an American tradition that most people have forgotten that even exists. And I see the same thing when I go to Maine, and there's a woman who runs a restaurant there that's completely simple food, all grown. own within, you know, five, ten miles of where her restaurant is by a group of farmers that's kind of in a carass with her. So I think people are trying to have a more human life. Look,

Stuart Brand, who was, as you probably know, had in the whole earth catalog, said, we are as gods and we might as well get good at it, which is a pretty outrageous thing to say. And he said it in the late 60s. But Ray Kurzweil, who's the prophet of the singularity, said a few weeks ago he was asked if he believed in God and he said, not yet. And my feeling is that some of these guys think they're gods. I think Elon Musk actually, I mean, not literally, but you know what course. He thinks that nobody can rule him. Right. And his vision of the future is to replace humanity and nature with a machine. I mean, he wants to put a sensor in your brain with NeuroLink. I mean, we have to resist this because the future that Altman describes in which the owners of the

AI have all the wealth, and it shouldn't escape you or I, Andy, that the largest market capitalization companies in the world are the big tech companies. They have all the wealth, and we're all just, you know, in Blade and Runner. The end of reality, how four billionaires are selling a fantasy future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto is out now. Jonathan Taplin, thank you so much for coming on to talk about this very important book. And I hope you're right about the resistance being both necessary and possible. Jonathan, thanks again.

Thanks so much, Andy. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts.

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