Current Affairs

Jonathan Taplin has had a fascinating career, from being a tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band to a film producer for Martin Scorsese to running the Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California's communications school. In recent years, he has turned his attention to writing critically about the tech elite. His book Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy focused on leading monopolistic corporations. His new book, The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto, examines four leading billionaires (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen). Each of them is extremely powerful and has a vision for the future of the world. Taplin thinks those visions are bleak, antidemocratic, and dystopian. He joins us to explain how he thinks these men are destroying our culture and even trying to "end reality." Taplin's background in rock-n-roll and New Hollywood gives him a dist