Jonathan Taplin, tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band, producer of Mean Streets and The Last Waltz, and later a professor at USC's Annenberg School, discusses his book The End of Reality with Pinchbeck. Taplin recounts a career running from the Newport Folk Festival and the Concert for Bangladesh through the 1984 fight to block Saul Steinberg's raid on Disney, a stint in Merrill Lynch's mergers group, and Intertainer, an early video-on-demand company he shut down and then won an antitrust suit over. He explains that his earlier book Move Fast and Break Things began with Levon Helm's collapsing royalties as streaming replaced the CD. The discussion covers libertarianism, the history of propaganda, and the political power of tech billionaires; Pinchbeck raises Jane Mayer's Dark Money, and Taplin names Senator Chris Murphy as a rare coherent political voice.
Guest: Jonathan Taplin
In brief
- Taplin says his 2015 book Move Fast and Break Things argued that Amazon, Facebook and Google cornered culture and undermined democracy, a claim his English publisher wanted removed from the subtitle.
- Taplin traces his critique of platform monopoly to Levon Helm, whose recording royalties collapsed after the CD boom ended and streaming took over.
- Taplin recounts that the major studios cut off licensing to his video-on-demand company Intertainer to build their own services, and that he later won the resulting federal antitrust suit.
- Pinchbeck points to Jane Mayer's book Dark Money as evidence that the right built its institutional strategy deliberately while the opposing side lacked comparable strategic capacity.
- Taplin says he foresaw the emergence of a new oligarchy and expects Elon Musk to retain power rather than be discarded by Trump.
- Taplin and Pinchbeck raise the possibility that a Vance-Thiel axis consolidates real power while Trump recedes into a figurehead role.
Full text
hey everybody uh today I am here with Jonathan taplan whose um work I encountered recently uh reading his um fantastic book the end of reality uh which covers a lot of the same themes that I've been writing about recently uh about the sort of tech um billionaire boy club and the impact they're having on society but Jonathan I know you've had a very long and like storied career and like done all this incredible work in so many fields I think it's best if I let you just introduce yourself for a minute uh because I yeah I think you'll do a better job than I will uh so I got started in the media business in 1965 when I went to the Newport Folk Festival as uh just before my freshman year at Princeton and got introduced to Albert Gman who was B Dylan's manager and um eventually to Bob Dylan and I started working for Albert grman as a road manager for various groups while I was at Princeton on weekends uh the Jim Quin Jug Band Janice choplin uh and eventually I became the tour manager for the band than Bob Dylan and the band in the late 60s early 70s uh and then I produced the concert for Bangladesh for George Harrison then went out to Hollywood because a lot of the musicians I wanted to work with didn't want to go on the road anymore and uh met a young filmmaker named Martin soressi was a film editor at the time and kind of didn't know enough not to put my own money into making a movie so we made a movie called Mean Streets uh which fortunately turned out to be a very good movie and uh then I love that film we sold it to Warner Brothers and then I was a movie producer and I produced the last Walts with Marty I produced Under Fire with Nick NY and Jean Hackman I produced to die for you know a lot of movies a lot of documentaries then in 1984 I was um a producer at Walt Disney when a guy named Saul Steinberg started a corporate raid on Walt Disney and I got some friends of mine in Texas the Bass Brothers to save the mouse as we put it so we made a deal for the basses to sell their real estate uh Empire in Orlando to Disney for stock and put enough stock in Friendly hands to block Steinberg and so you know the bass has paid me a lot of money for that and since I made more money in three weeks than I'd made in five years uh they said we'd like you to go to work for our investment banker uh which was Merl Lynch mergers and acquisition group and so I did that which was a kind of range transition but it was it was fun for a while and then it was not fun you know it was the basses were originally oil money is that correct or no they were oil money uh but they had expanded radically into investing in a lot of big companies um and then you know near the end of the80s there was too much of Mike milin and Ivan bosi and a lot of slease bags and I just didn't like the vibe and so I went back to making movies with a guy named V vendors and we made a movie called until the end of the world and many years ago us all around the world for two years it was like joining the French Foreign Legion and and then I started producing long form documentaries for PBS uh one called the prize on the history of the oil business and another one called Cadillac desert on history of water in the west and then in um the mid 90s I had a movie called shine which I took to Sundance to sell and I sold it to a company called Fine Line and Harvey Weinstein who had had the opportunity to buy it before sundan and had passed uh all of a sudden realized that he'd missed a good thing and he you know famously confronted me and tried to strangle me in a restaurant in Sundance and you know he was a he was a big bully and and uh so that was a very famous blow up and then I in the late 90s I started a company called Entertainer which was the first video on demand company streaming video on demand company and Entertainer was getting very successful in the early 2000s but the major Studios decided they didn't want another intermediator between them and the customer and they started their own version of Entertainer and stopped licensing us movies just literally in the week we went from having 8,000 movies on the the service to having eight movies on the service so I shut it down sued them all in antitrust Federal antitrust court and since I was suing all the major Studios I couldn't go back to being a movie producer so the dean of the anenberg school at University of Southern California asked me if I wanted to come teach and I thought why not So eventually I won the antitrust suit so I could afford to teach and I taught it USC for uh almost 15 years uh and started writing books in 2015 about big Tech and how it was as my first book was called move fast and break things how Amazon Facebook and Google cornered culture and undermined democracy and to give you an idea of how strange an idea that was in 2015 the English publisher asked that we take the ru you know undermine democracy out of the subtitle right and I refused uh and then you know I just continued to write books I uh retired from USC in in 2018 and um you know I wrote A Memoir called the magic ears and then I wrote uh end of reality and now I'm writing another book cool so that's that brings present yeah let let's talk about this um you know the techn technocratic uh you know the tech proo Elite and the disruption of democracy and the end of reality a little bit right um yeah so I mean the book covers a lot of ground actually it's you talk about the history of libertarianism of the history of propaganda and the media in the US and um yeah I guess um for you coming from kind of this entertainment Music World perhaps you know an entry point for you was like Spotify and You Tube and the way that um uh you know kind of creative artists began to be kind of like ripped off let's say by by the Monopoly power of of these uh of these companies and so on so um yeah maybe just tell tell us a little about your critique yeah you are now you know it really uh move fast and break things started from a a very personal story which was that Levon Helm who was the drummer and singer in the band uh was even though the band stopped recording in 76 was still making a fairly decent living off of recordings because in the lat ' 80s the CD was introduced and so everybody who had a vinyl record collection completely renewed their collection on CD so the the royalties that flowed to musicians and since the band's records were all classics were great I mean he was making 150,000 a year from royalties record royalties up to 99 and then you know you have this very strange thing where all of a sudden people want to put music online for free and that just completely stopped the royalty payments to Levon and Levon had throat cancer in 91 and so he couldn't perform and you know he he didn't even have enough money to pay for his Cancer Care and so that was just made me crazy and so I I started writing about that and of course you know You Tube at that point was given what is called Safe Harbor which is one of the great mistakes of the Clinton Gore this is a proposition 230 in the 1996 yeah section 230 of the communications decency ACC which basically says that an online service a social media service like You Tube or Facebook or X or whatever is not a publisher but is a platform right and so they cannot be sued for anything that is on their platform now the idea that X is not a publisher is such a bizarre idea I mean you know Elon Musk is as much a uh publisher as rert Murdoch is you know he he skews the algorithm in such a way that his posts get to everybody unless you actively block Elon Musk you have to see everything he says I have a question for you I mean you know retrospectively that section 230 the Safe Harbor Clause turns out to have been so immensely important What would the background like who who because 96 these Tech you know Giants weren't as gigantic as they are now you know what what what was the the minations that that uh LED that to be the idea was that internet is and this is a lot of it's Al Gore I must tell you um Al Gore and a senator from uh Oregon named Ron wden and and they basically they thought this this technology is so delicate and so new and so Democratic that we have to give it special protection what they called the liability shield now Johnson and Johnson doesn't have a liability Shield if Tylenol is poisonous you can sue Johnson and Johnson so this was just like a special deal for a very small number of companies and of course it became the way that they built their Monopoly because they never have to worry about anything that was on their service um the the users provided all the content so you didn't have to pay for content and they took all the advertising money and maybe under the force of a gun began in you know the late 20 20 9 2010 You Tube began to give the record companies a little bit of the advertising that was attached to their content but it still didn't prevent anybody from putting up any song on You Tube that they wanted whether copyright or not and of course for musicians that was a disaster yeah uh so okay so you had this kind of personal kind of like access where you saw the destructive impact of this of this stuff and then you sort of went on to inquire into the you know whole ideology behind it I noticed you talked about John Perry Barlo who I knew knew a bit from the whole Burning Man world and the sort of um yeah like so so how did this like uh you know how did how did how did technology and libertarianism come together well look a lot of these people were huge iron ran fans I mean if you ask Peter teal or Elon Musk or Mark Andre or Mark Zuckerberg they will all tell you they wrote they read the Fountain Head and they read all of iron Ran's stuff so it was kind of baked into Silicon Valley from the beginning it's so funny she's one of those writers where I just literally cannot read her like I read like a paragraph and I feel like my brain is going to fall out ears or something it's something about the language and I just I feel the same way I I don't I just don't get it and yet I hear people I mean Donald Trump tells you that that ion ran is is the greatest author in the world and and it's probably because one of his characters is a builder right you know and so Trump imagines himself to be that character but look it's the idea that unbridled self-interest and colle itive interests are ultimately the same thing yeah I mean she basically says there is no such thing as altruism altruism is is is a poison and you have to forget about it so that's something like Curtis yarvin who I just spoke with you know he's he's espoused the same idea that oh they you know any compassion or any altruism on the part of liberals is just like a fraud it's like this whole idea that human nature is uh ultimately egocentric and greed-based and anything else is actually just a shield or or like a sort of um a Nicha kind of like Will To Power kind of like uh you know subversive way to express that that same uh you know thing any way exactly it's it's like the people who took Darwin and said the world is about the survival of the fittest yeah you know and then eio Wilson comes along and says well that's not actually true yeah he said you know it in the early caveman days somebody had to stay behind and tend the fire because if the fire went out it was disaster so some guys could go off and hunt for food but other people had to stay protect the women you know to the fire the whole idea a dog eat dog world and yet dogs actually don't eat other dogs you know yeah and actually yeah that actually people work together and even even different organisms work together often yeah and the and the successful tribes were the ones who were the most Cooperative yeah you know Margaret me has a famous moment in her teaching career when she was questioned by a young man in her class in her anthropology class of what was the first sign of civilization that she encountered in her anthropology work and he expected her to say some clay pot which meant that people were cooking things or something and and she showed the picture of a broken femur lower leg bone that had repaired itself and from a very early caveman and she said okay if you broke your leg in that world you were dead cuz the animals would come and get you you couldn't run away from the animals and and so what had happened here she surmised that someone had lifted this or couple of people had lifted this guy up it was a man's flag bone and carried him to the Village someone had been with him and tended for him and make sure he healed and fed him and got him water and did all the things that helped him survive and eventually the bone healed and that was civilization that Cooperative helping each other thing was what made the difference but these guys don't believe that Peter chill doesn't believe that for a second you know um yeah I mean in the uh the end of reality kind of you talk about you know kind of um the more idealistic kind of ideas in you know earlier technology whether it's like Steve Jobs or steuart bran this idea that internets were going to be the internet or the networks were going to be you know kind of um innately democratizing Cooperative Technologies um and um yeah now now we've seen it's gone in a totally different direction uh so so so so what so what happened there so you know the early guys that were inventing the internet and and Vince surf is one of them that I've spent time with um they really thought it was going to democratize Communications completely and their notion of course uh you and I are both old enough to remember when there were three TV networks you know there was a monopoly of Communications on terms of television news and stuff stuff like that so they were very optimistic about this but what happened was that they gave all their protocols tcpip HTML all those things they donor them for free to make this thing happen and of course it was all organized by the Army by DARPA the defense Advance research project Administration and the reason to build it was of course we were afraid that the Soviets would launch a nuclear missile to Dallas and if Dallas was went down the whole phone network would go down everything would go down so you wanted to build this self-repairing network that would stay up no matter in the middle of a nuclear war so what happens of course is that within 10 years you know Google meta whatever you know three or four corporations end up completely monopolizing the the business part of the internet you know Google has 90% market share as the recent antitrust trial proved you know who who's ever heard of a a situation where someone has 90% market share that isn't called a mon Monopoly but for some reason it was always and I call it techn determinism was always that well we the politicians don't really know much about this complicated thing and we're going to just kind of Leave It to the people who are building it to tell us what should happen so if you think about the introduction of social media we could have told by 2011 you know that it was being a destructive force you could see the the hockey stick of teenage suicide soon as the like button is introduced to Facebook it just takes off same with Instagram all of that so we could have done something about it but the the notion was always well these politicians don't don't know anything so why should we let them anywhere near it and of course you know quite frankly Zuckerberg would come to Congress and some yob would say well how do you make any money off this some Senator you know uh from Nevada and and and you know it was like they were clueless so the general thing was leave them alone I read a book called internet internet for the People by this guy Ben mezich a very nice book but he was talking about how crazy that essentially the government just gave away the internet to these corporations like we spend public money to build it and actually all these are these Libertarians who you know believe that they shouldn't be taxed the the basis of their wealth is is a public good and a public trust that they were just handed over uh without any um you know quid proquo or any any any kind of oversight or anything but now we're into something brand new in the sense that the oligarchs in the classic sense that we talk about them in Russia or thing are inside the tent they're in the White House and and Elon I believe has so much influence that they're going to basically get to do what they want to do I mean if you think about this Doge thing that he's going to run the department of you know efficiency is it's such a scam I mean who could have thought of that you know it's a classic kleptocrat scam and and so he's going to go in and say well locked and Boeing are really inefficient the way they're building the missiles for the government and let's get rid of them and who's left him and Jeff pisos right you know essentially you're privatizing everything and you're getting rid of competitors I I completely agree with you but I also want to just look at it a little bit at Devil's Advocate way because I think that's it's think about that you know I mean it is the case that you know I think when musk took over Twitter there like 8,000 employees I think he cut it like 80% and it still I mean you know then he also fuss with the algorithm but it seems like it does still kind of work exactly as it as it did before so there probably is I mean the military budget is what $850 billion a year you know there probably are like highly bloated you know bureaucracies you know people taking huge amounts of pork and you know there there would be an argument for shiming that down it wasn't going to happen under the Democrats so you know some sometimes I think there could be a little bit of an argument that like you know we we'd hit a structural impass and you know the Democrats were stuck you know they they they they killed off Bernie Sanders when he could have rescued the party from Oblivion and uh and so we put ourselves in a situation where structural trange is needed everybody is incredibly frustrated and you know as awful as this is going to be and it's so much in the wrong direction and probably cause so much pain and suffering and you know all sorts of stuff I mean maybe this is the only way to to you know to break down to break through I I don't I don't know but I could see an argument there look Daniel I agree with you 100% you know I think the Pentagon budget is is absurd you know I because I write about big Tech um and its dangers it's something that's fascinating to people all over the world so I travel around and give speeches right and whether it's in Asia or Europe I go through these brand new beautiful airports and get on a 300 mph train to someplace and I pass by giant wind farms or solar farms and I and I think to myself why is it all these countries whether it's in Asia or Europe that are much poorer than us have a much higher level of infrastru structure that's actually monitored and there's one very simple solution none of them spend 51% of their discretionary Budget on the military yeah well there's two things there's that but then there's also you know the taxing of the wealthy right like in the you know when America was the Great Society in the in the in the 50s and so on the uh you know tax rate on the on the highest earners was over 90% over $200,000 a year so that money was going into Social Services that's why public education got good that's why like public health was decent and then they dismantled that you know from from from Reagan on you know maybe even earlier yeah but look I I I'm writing a new book and and part of the thesis of it is that we need to go back to a much more Jeffersonian view of how America Works in other words if if the trumpists are going to control Washington then there is no reason that California has to have its ban on assault weapons overruled by Washington there's no reason why New York or Vermont has to tell women how you know their reproductive freedom has gone through there's no reason that California has to reduce its auto emissions law in other words what we need is a kind of Live and Let Live society in which and it's called federalism and and Jefferson designed it that way he said the states are independent and is everything internal to themselves and they're United with the federal government facing out to other countries so in his day when he was president was a there was a Secretary of the Treasury a Secretary of War and a secretary of state and an attorney general and that was the entire cabinet and everything else was done at the state level and so on a certain level I'm happy if these guys want to go in and just you know root and Branch get rid of all these things and leave it to the states that would mean a very different taxing structure because you know needless to say is the blue States completely subsidize the red States California for every dollar it puts in in taxes it gets back 7 cents and Mississippi for every dollar in taxes it puts in it gets back a130 um so that's just the way it's been for a long long time and so I I'm feeling in the face of this kind of trumpist world that we need to go back to a a much earlier view I mean I call it new federalism and and I think that's what has to happen yeah I mean I guess within the uh you know the people who've just taken over the national government or about to take over the national government there's also different you know Tendencies right there's a libertarian crowd like teal although teal is kind of like a you could say you know somewhere between a authoritarian Neo fascist and a Libertarian a lot of those guys are right like they they they they're happy to work with the you know the federal government when it benefits them uh and then to pretend that they you know don't like it um but you have these guys who in theory anyway would be all for federalism uh but then you have the Christian rights who are just simply wanting to control the population right so um so you have like different um fact they they don't they they want to tell everybody what to do yeah they're you talk about a nanny State that's what they want they want to tell everyone what to do the Christian right is and frankly I think the Christian right the Christian right has a lot of power yeah I mean JD Vance is straight out of that Playbook yeah uh so let's talk a little bit about uh well I want to talk about crypto a little bit and and Bitcoin and your perspective on that I mean um yeah I mean you know it feels like you know now that this has happened there feels like a little bit of inevitability or like that somehow things were going to you know Reach This culmination like you know the same way you might have thought of Nazism you know once it happened or communism as having a certain kind of inevitability like there were a lot of things pushing I mean you know what one major issue which the new Republic I thought just had a very excellent piece that you know the major reason that Trump won was right-wing media you know and and that sort of um the established and Progressive media world really didn't uh or the you know the backers of that of that world they didn't really realize how quickly right-wing media was growing and whereas you know 10 years ago or 15 years ago like establishment media like the New York Times and ABC was like a basketball and right-wing media like Breitbart and fox was like a was like a was like a golf ball at you know as time has passed you know all these right-wing media Outlets have grown bigger and bigger so they've become like a volleyball and um you know establishment liberal you know liberal Progressive whatever you want to call it or just neutral media has become more like a tennis ball you know so they've they've actually out you know their reach has out has out has outgrown and so you know if if we were to try to like take back you know the US from what's happened it seems like there would need to be a media a new kind of media approach or media infrastructure what what do you think about that well here's the deal you know and I been saying this for quite a while so Elon Musk has 200 million followers on Twitter and near the end of the election season they were every one of them was getting five to 12 tweets a day from Elon and he had got his Engineers to fix the algorithm such a way that everyone saw every tweet he in other words you may have you know 300 people that you follow on Twitter but you don't see everything from every one of those 300 people clearly it was clearly he he he he TW he tweaked the algorithm so the New York Times has 10 million digital subscribers right once a day probably look at their paper and maybe might look at the opinion section which by the way has quite a few conservative opinion writers too so the diet people were getting from elon's propaganda feed was just unrelenting and and so is there's no comparison well there's there is kind of a worship of wealth in this country right and he's the richest man so for many people that just means he's like he's like you know God or something like that I I did you see that the uh the new thing where Le musk is suing the state of California because they they set up a they put a state law where you couldn't use deep fakes uh to influence elections and he's saying that that interferes with First Amendment rights I mean that that's another whole thing the weaponization of free speech is is a very is a very powerful thing here yeah I mean I my sense is that some of this is almost Unstoppable on a national level in other words uh and that's why I'm saying look I live in California I don't have to have this affect my life uh I'm very happy that California has banned assault weapons uh I'm very happy that California has a very strict auto emissions law I'm very happy that California gives women the freedom to do whatever they want with their bodies and as long as that is not affected by the national government then you know they're going to go do what they're going to do and who knows whether it'll turn out to be a total disaster or not I mean you know there's a lot of discussion to be had of whether tariffs uh is the solution to the all the problems like Trump says it was because you know there were people in 1931 who thought that was true and they put past smooth Holly and it turned out to be deepen the recession by you know five to seven years yeah Great Depression so I I'm not as optimistic about this uh Jeffersonian idea of of the states turning inward uh I just think that um I mean you know yeah there's there's just too many forces at play that um you know I I I think it would be more that we would have to try to um uh build an alternative media infrastructure uh if we cared to try to like you know move move things in a different direction but since when has truth had any purchase in the last five years I mean that's why I wrote the book yeah truth has is you know even ascent and and who's could make a come back you never know well I mean it clearly you know Elon could post that the you know the Haitians were eating the cats and dogs yeah multiple times and nobody called him on it yeah uh so let's um let's s over I mean um yeah I mean you know I I guess one possibility is uh that these guys are going to overreach in various respects uh and you know one one area of potential overreach you know could be crypto and I think you talked a little bit about Bitcoin in the book um I I don't know you know what your feeling about Bitcoin is I mean now I think it's like $99,000 for Bitcoin uh but there is you know the the the actual reality of what Bitcoin you know is made of is still very flimsy right it's basically a social agreement it's a mathematical code uh it's a it's um how how do do you look at this I mean do you think that the crypto inflation could be something like a subprime mortgage kind of you you you because you know it's it's also a situation where I think only 2% of Bitcoin holders own like 98% of the Bitcoin so wealth distribution it's totally a bubble and get what's going to happen is you know the the people that in the crypto world are called the whales so these the the people you know it's a classic 8020 situation that 80% of the wealth is held by 20% of the holders it's even worse that it's much worse you know it was much more severe than that the last time the whales dumped all their currency you recall in the the winter of 2021 when all the exchanges started advertising and you had Matt Damon and Larry David and yeah Le Bron and everybody Tom already out there pitching and of course the Andre of the world were dumping their coins at at that point it was 65,000 and by the spring it was down to 20,000 so the you know these bubbles come and go and right now the reason people are in is Trump says he's all in for crypto and so they think there's going to be some kind of magical thing happened uh crypto is not built for any use at least with gold you can melt it down and make jewelry you know I mean and and crypto is essentially the same play oh the world is going to go to and I'm I'm going to have this asset that is a store of value as opposed to owning stocks or bonds or anything else and there is some reason to think that gold has some of that quality there's none to believe that Krypto has any of that quality and you know as far as people thinking well the dollar is about to fade or you know we're not going to be the world's Reserve currency that to me is also nonsense yeah um so what do you what is kind of your thoughts about given all this and given the direction I mean um where what do you think people you know should be trying to do right now like uh should they be trying to build community networks that be like are you talk about regenerative uh models and so on I mean um should should be opting out should be depl plugging should we bu should we be building kind of Open Source uh versions of of of the tools I mean like blue sky people are talking about now as a kind of a an to Twitter and so on first thing we need is some kind of cultural Renaissance I mean I think part of the reason that people feel so alienated you know the the Democrats were confused right they were looking at the charts and they said look inflation is coming down the economy is doing pretty well unemployment is very low why are people so angry and the point was that their cultural diet was one of anger distrust cynicism it was almost equivalent of film Noir in the 50s and and my take on that is if if you think about what your TV diet has been since 911 The Sopranos Breaking Bad Mad Men succession all this stuff is all these terrible people screaming for power and and if you were playing a lot of video games it's Call of Duty or you know these firstperson shooter games and if you were listening to gangster rap it was the same nonsense and it was all nistic and I think it actually affected people people's mindset that they thought well if that's the way the world works why not have a gangster like Trump be president because it's just a power struggle that's all the world is and so I think you know my feeling is that sometimes in times of very deep political repression we get all of a sudden a a cultural revolution that counters it so my experience was obviously being a junior at Princeton in 1968 and having my two political Heroes killed within three months of each other Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and it felt like the end of the world it felt like what the there is no point in being involved in politics and so a lot of us just opted out and went into the music business or or you know join the Rock and Roll Circus what happened culturally from 68 to say 80 when Reagan came in was the flourishing of American culture in a way that nobody ever saw the music business literally doubled in size from 68 to 78 the the total amount of Revenue the movie business was the greatest period of time in the movie business ever whether it's the movies I made like Mean Streets or Badlands or The Godfather or you know you name it Chinatown whatever it was just extraordinary time of creative flourishing even though Nixon was our president so we just basically ignored him and we went on and and some of it was political and oppositional and you know one can argue that The Godfather is a political movie and one can argue that Chinatown is a political movie because it's about corruption and stuff but they they were thinking deep stuff I don't see that right now I you know the general Marvel Cinematic Universe pop culture is not going to be something that we're going to look at in a 100 years I promise you and as far as right-wing culture I mean who's going to care about Kid Rock in 20 years give me a break you know I once had a a dinner that a friend sponsored me to come meet Andrew Breitbart and he was railing about we need our own Hollywood the rightwing Hollywood and and why don't we own a studio cuz there's there's plenty of money to be found and everything and we do and I said to him I said that's the stupidest idea I heard in my life you think Steven Spielberg is gonna ever gonna want to make right-wing movies you know I mean give me a break you you know you have to it isting that I feel like right now um I I just visited this thing in Miami called hereticon which was put on by Peter Tel's Founders fund and there is a sense that the um kind of like you know left- wiish kind of counterculture is kind of like out of out of juice or like out of ideas and there and there is kind of like the the the sort of farri or neoreactionary movement has kind of co-opted uh the sort of rebellion the sort of the sort of um humor like the left doesn't really have humor anymore because everything is quite sanctimonious you can't you can't make you know fun of anybody because you know you're you're you're stepping on their Identity or something um and uh yeah also kind of like the sanctimony on the left um and also kind of even some of the diversity stuff like if you go to a you know I go to the Whitney Museum for the bi Bal you know there's no like white young white male straight artists can't even get a show you know but you have to be you know from from a depressed group and a different and so I agree with all that yeah so all that's true but here's here's the problem there's nothing from the right that is count is culturally inspiring in other words counterculture has to involve culture so I have a very good friend who's a great critic his name is GRE Marcus and I posed this question I said where is The Counter Culture because I my general sense was that everybody has sold out you know you know 15 years ago it was public enemy and fight the power and now it's Snoop Dog Shilling for anybody who will pay him he doesn't give a what you're selling he'll he'll sell it for you and and so if it's true that the what we call the counterculture became the mainstream then what is the counterculture so Grill said to me he said well John you might want to consider that it's not you know the left drug taking whatever culture he said it might be white nationalism maybe that's counterculture that is the case and that's a scary thing now my counter to him was well that's not culture that's politics that's counter politics but it's it's not culture in the sense that there's nobody out there making fiction that's in that mode or making movies that's in that mode except these bad propaganda documentaries that Steve Bannon makes and stuff like that or or the you know you know the mule or you know all those things I mean the fact is that for young people you know the way they're taking in media and and the way they're being entertained is profoundly shifted right it's it's a Tik Tok Instagram you know you know there isn't you know I mean you know you know there's some maybe subsets where novels are making a bit of a comeback or you know but but yeah I me I mean um there's been a huge rearrangement to you know culture uh and uh it's it's it's a moving Target that you know it's like it's like a different thing in a way you know well look the mocking memes on Tik Tok of mocking the left that may be very powerful um but it's not going to pass you know art is long life is short it's not going to pass the who cares test yeah you know it'll all be down the memory hole in in five years and what I'm hoping is and I'm you know in this new book I'm writing about some kind of new shoots there's this genre of music called Americana and a a woman named ran and giddens who have been spending time with in North Carolina just speaking extraordinarily good music but it's all rooted in the past you know I went up and visited a woman Chef in Maine named Devin finnean who has created a way to make organic food at a two star Michelin level and she's taught the local oystermen how to do it better how to talk to local scallop Growers how to do it in the Japanese style and she's just this this force of nature this created amazing thing so I'm hopeful you know I I actually think that out of this thing is not necessarily going to be a political resistance but a cultural shift that gets people to not feel so damn depressed all the time yeah uh I I I think all bets are off right now you know we're all just kind of like uh you know we're we're like uh strapping ourselves in you know to the to the plane the plane is uh you know torpedoing towards the mountain you know and uh it'll be very interesting but listen I mean um maybe this is a you know good place to sort of end for today uh I'd love to stay in touch with you and um talk more and maybe offline too but um yeah I mean um I think we you know sort of need to get more people I'm really happy you wrote these books and I think it's great like you know completely agree with with almost everything you said in them um but um yeah we have you know the thing is that a lot of strategizing went in on the side of of of the baddies like or you know these people who've yeah you know built these destructive structures whether you you ever read that book dark money by Jane Mayer which is about the Heritage you know so they they they they really sculpted this whole thing out and unfortunately I feel like there hasn't been uh on the other side as much of a strategic um capacity uh and um you know I I don't know yeah yeah you know is really making sense right now is uh Chris Murphy he did a piece uh an interview in New Yorker or in New York Magazine for the intelligence that is extraordinary and just how how for Democrats to react to this situation and uh he he's the only guy who's making sense to me right now in the political sphere yeah well you must have felt that you kind of predicted all this with the 2015 book yeah yeah you know and you know I I I think I also saw the the oligarchy coming you know the new oligarchs yeah which you know I I'm I'm pretty sure that Elon will stay in power and and it will affect all sorts of other people you know because there's also theory that Donald Trump is just GNA get sick of him and and send him off you know maybe but you know there's the other possibility that yeah that the Vance teal yeah axis asserts their power stronger and Trump decides that he just wants to be on the golf course that is quite possible at this point he's like a king than a prison yeah totally uh okay Jonathan wish we had happier things to talk about today but uh you know sometimes you gota anytime thank okay good let's stay in touch great to me great to meet you thank you for your time bye bye
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.