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Fantasy Culture and the Flight from Reality

September 16, 2023
Notes
Transcript
This week I’m rejoined by Jonathan Taplin, author of The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto, to discuss the ways in which popular culture may be leading the public down a dark road. Mr. Taplin has previously been on the show to talk about his career in the entertainment business, from tour manager for Bob Dylan to producer of early Martin Scorsese classics Means Streets and The Last Waltz to his early efforts to introduce video streaming, so he knows a thing or two about the ways in which politics is downstream from culture. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to share it with a friend!

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:06

    Welcome back to the Bulwark goes to Hollywood. My name is Sunny Bunch. I’m Culture Editor app the Bulwark. And I’m very pleased to be rejoined today by Jonathan Taplin. Now I had, mister Taplin on a few months back to talk about his previous book.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:18

    We’re here to about his new one today, the end of reality, how four billionaires are selling a fantasy future of the Metiverse, Mars, and Crypto, mister Taplin, is a public intellectual writer, film producer and scholar, the director emeritus of the Anenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. And he he has one of the most interesting and varied careers of anybody I’ve had on the show. You know, he used to he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the band. He produced Martin Scorsese’s mean streets, as well as the Last Waltz, which has an excellent new criterion four k job. Have you seen the new, criterion four k of that movie?
  • Speaker 2
    0:00:56

    Yeah. I just saw it last week in a big theaters. That’s great.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:59

    It it looks amazing. I mean, those those guys do good work. But, we’re so we’re we’re here to talk about your new book. Now your new book, I mentioned this over email. It’s a little bit beyond the purview of the show, usually.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:13

    But there was a there’s a very interesting chapter. In it, the rise of fantasy culture, which I I am I am always interested in because there’s there’s a real there’s a real question, and I think this is the eternal question about our Right? How much does art shape our reality and how much does it reflect our reality? And I I I am torn by it all the time because if if art is shaping our reality, there is a much different ethical imperative to it. I think, than if it simply reflects our reality.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:49

    Or am I am I getting this confused? Do you think do you think that’s wrong or backwards?
  • Speaker 2
    0:01:55

    Well, you know, the the very famous business analyst named Peter drucker once said, culture eats strategy for breakfast every day. And I actually would argue that culture eats politics for breakfast every day too. And so in that sense, I’ve always taken the position that art is leading politics, leading other forms of society. And so in the sense that art makes things app. So I would draw from my earliest experiences of young kid in high school.
  • Speaker 2
    0:02:34

    Joining the student nonviolent coordinating committee, and in nineteen sixty three, Bob Dillon went down to Mississippi and sang at Boting rights rallies, a year later, three in that same town in Mississippi three civil rights brokers got killed, but it wasn’t until another two years later that the politicians, and specifically Lyndon Johnson, actually said, okay. We have type of voting rights law. So I’ve always felt that the artists were out ahead of the culture. And and, you know, Mark Kuzza has said that the role of the artist is a is to project what can be So there’s always a a little bit of a utopian role that artists should play. And in many eras, they do.
  • Speaker 2
    0:03:28

    I’m certainly in the Renaissance and things like that. I’m not sure sure that’s happening right now, but but in many heroes, the artists are the leaders.
  • Speaker 1
    0:03:39

    It’s it’s interesting. Again, it’s, you know, one of one of the, Running threads of your book is, the ways in which the, the, the four billionaires at the heart of it, e we’ve got Elon Musk, Mark Anderson, Zuckerberg, and, oh, who’s who am I who am I forgetting? Here’s the fourth.
  • Speaker 2
    0:04:00

    Peter Till.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:01

    Peter Till. Thank you, Peter Till. How can I forget Peter Till? Energy vampire? I, and and one of one of the things that you talk about in this chapter about fantasy culture is the ways in which, their worldviews were shaped by utopian science fiction, that it was, that it that they they they saw these worlds, created by you know, Heinland, H.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:26

    G. Well, E and M banks with his culture series. And and thought that’s what that’s what I want.
  • Speaker 2
    0:04:34

    Exactly. I, you know, look, they all had very tortured childhoods. Elon Musk was beat up and thrown down the stairs and concrete stairs in his school. Mark Ron DeSantis had horrible childhood hated his father. Certainly, Peter Till was taunted for being displaying gay symptoms, even though we didn’t come out of the closet for another twenty years.
  • Speaker 2
    0:05:09

    You know, certainly, Zuckerberg had a kind of weird autistic affect to him in in in his early days. So they all buried themselves in this science fiction and most of the science fiction that they liked, depicted a world in which nobody had to work. The government paid for every your basic living. And you made your reputation in society by either how well you played video games or other ways of of kind of making your bones in society. But This notion of a kind of universal basic income and that the AIs did everything is something that I think These people really embrace.
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:03

    I mean, there really are two views of what the future is gonna look like. One of which is we take the combined brains of scientists and others and work on real world problems like a sustainable energy future or, housing for homeless people. Or the other view is Well, the AIs and the robots are are gonna basically doing most of the jobs, and we better get ready to have universal basic income. Because most people are gonna be out of work and thus Zuckerberg can actually pause at the future in which people will be on the Metiverse for seven or eight hours a day because they won’t have anything else to do. So they’ll want a fantasy life.
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:51

    That want to be able to not just watch Tony Stark in the movies, but be Tony Stark and and live in Tony Stark’s house. Which meta will rent to you and and date Gwyneth Paltrow, which, meta will rent you her avatar. And And that’s that’s a pretty sad future as far as I’m concerned. That’s not a future of, you know, that the epicureans who who I consider myself one would would believe in.
  • Speaker 1
    0:07:24

    Well, it’s it’s interesting because it is, Again, this is there is I I think there’s an argument to be made that this is a utopian future, right, that people are freed from the drudgery of having to go to McDonald’s. And work their eight hour shift. Right? Or, you know, go to the the the car factory and, you know, turn out a bunch of teslas instead, they can they can relax. They can some will better themselves.
  • Speaker 1
    0:07:50

    Some will, you know, slip into a sort of metaverse, addled, drugged state. As you as you mentioned at the start of this chapter, you know, the split here is between brave new world in nineteen eighty four. And this is very much a brave new world future, that we face, but I tend to agree. Look, I’ve I’ve always been skeptical of the UBI argument, the universal basic income argument because, I I I do not have a lot of confidence that people will, in fact, spend their times reading, you know, the the ancients or even the moderns, and and and will instead kind of slip into this, I think, stupor that you you, you yourself are worried about.
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:37

    Yeah. I first off, do you think any Republican controlled legislator would vote for universal basic income. I I’m I’m highly skeptical of it. So I I don’t see even if if All the wanted people who gathered yesterday in the capital, which Senator Holly said was the greatest collection of monopolists since the gilded age in one room, with Schumer and and the senators on AI policy. I don’t think that there’s a possibility of of universal basic income.
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:17

    I just don’t see it in the cards in a in a basically world that where the, you know, the minority controls the legislature. So given that, The second problem I have is that I think that work, you know, I refer to curious earlier. He said there are three things that make a great life. One is, meaningful work that gives you a sense of autonomy. The second is a core group of close friends, and the third is some sense of higher purpose in your life.
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:55

    And if you had all three of those, you’d have a good life. And if you didn’t have them, you’d have a shitty life. And I I think taking away people’s work has been shown to lead to what Angus Dayton that Princeton calls deaths of despair. People eventually end up just, you know, going on to crack or or, you know, some other opioid or something, and and and just kind of falling down a hole. And and if you look at the rise of this deaths of despair, in the last ten years.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:32

    It’s astonishing. It’s it’s it’s off the charts, and there’s no other society in in the world. It’s it’s bad.
  • Speaker 1
    0:10:41

    Yeah. Yeah. Let’s alright. So let’s let’s dive into this chapter here. In in at the at the beginning, and and earlier, we we discussed a little bit of, about Bob Dylan and kind of oppositional culture you know, the the idea of, artists looking at at how things are and and pushing back against, you know, civil rights violations or that sort of thing.
  • Speaker 1
    0:11:08

    What would what does oppositional culture look like today? I mean, what is what is the what is the thing that the artists, you think should be pushing back against that the the the government, or the the corporations are really pushing for pushing pushing people toward.
  • Speaker 2
    0:11:28

    Well, I mean, I I’m not so sure it’s coming from the artist anymore. I mean, although to some extent, it is. But but, you know, when you see Coco golf, stand up and say, hey, those people who were protesting environmental damage and stop my tennis match for twenty five minutes, thirty minutes, we’re right. You know, that’s that’s fairly brave, you know. So I you know, I mentioned that I thought LeBron James did more, in the twenty twenty election in terms of getting people to vote and getting people registered, then then certainly, Kanye West or or anybody else, JZ did.
  • Speaker 2
    0:12:17

    And and so maybe the the cultural mantle has moved from the artist to the athletes. That’s one possibility. The other possibility, though, is that maybe something is changing in in the artistry. And just in the following sense. This summer, the biggest tours, music tours, the summer were all led by women.
  • Speaker 2
    0:12:45

    I mean, specifically Beyonce and TaylorScript, but they made twenty, thirty times as much money as any male artist was out there. So why is that? Well, it could be that we’re getting tired of the kind of Macho. Jason Aldine, you come into my little town. I’m a kick your ass or young thug This is how many people I killed.
  • Speaker 2
    0:13:10

    And and we’re we’re getting tired of that. And and so these women, I mean, Beyonce called her tour ran a song is women opposing this other vision of the future, which is hopeful, which is vulnerable, which is filled with kind of wonder and everything. And people are attracted to that rather than the kind of dark culture, which I think we’ve been living with, not just in hip hop and not just in, you know, I cite TV you know, the the kind of antihero TV that we’ve been living with for the last almost twenty years. And that, you know, would you really wanna hang out with the people in succession? No.
  • Speaker 2
    0:13:56

    You can look at it as a kind of car crash in the making, but they’re not nice people. Neither is Tony Soprano. I mean, you may think he is admirable or has some sense of honor, but but he kills people. And and neither is Don Draper or the Waler White in breaking bad. I mean, all these people are anti heroes.
  • Speaker 2
    0:14:21

    And, you know, I made the the notion that in the nineteen fifties, film noir was the same kind of thing. You know? And why was that? Well, when just gone through a horrible, you know, world war, and we dropped the bomb. And and so we we had a kind of depressed sensibility, that was only maybe broken out from by the beat poets or the or the jazz bebop guys.
  • Speaker 2
    0:14:56

    You know?
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:58

    Let me ask, since you since you bring up TV, I want I wanna I wanted to to bring this up because I I do here’s My my take on the the rise of the anti hero in TV is that it is very much a reaction to the, corporatized, again, kind of MCU theme park, like, nature of film. Film is now the place for adolescents and adolescent ideas, and TV in an inversion of the natural or normal state of things TV has become the place where adults go. Right? And and I I mean, I I just look at something like, I look at I look at Scorsese. Right?
  • Speaker 1
    0:15:41

    I look at mean streets, goodfellas, I don’t know, after hours, taxi driver, that sort of thing. And I see, I see the Sopanos and mad men or the shield as the kind of natural air of that. Is that is that not is that not correct? I mean, do you not do you not see that connection?
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:01

    No. I I think you’re right. I mean, David Chase has made that very point that, you know, he was trying to write normal TV, and he couldn’t stand it, and he went off and and started to write the sopranos. You know? And then so I I think that’s a there’s a good point.
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:23

    And and so there’s two sides to that. One of which is If film has devolved into this kind of fantasy culture machine, it’s very formulaic. Then the adults really have nowhere to go. So they go to TV, but that does not necessarily mean that TV has be only filled with anti heroes. So there’s there’s two sides to that.
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:54

    One of which is If you think about the formulaic nature of fantasy feature, then you probably can understand why there’s a huge battle and the writer’s guilt strike. Right? Because what does Marvel want? Marvel wants to be able to put every screenplay it has into a large learning model. And churn out new content without having to pay screenwriters.
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:26

    In other words, you know, the screenwriter will become a prompt writer. And this will be somebody who will put in. Okay. In this movie, the Hallk meets Captain America in Iceland, and then in the second act, Bulwark Widow coming in, and it it it gives it a three paragraphs of the instructors. And literally in a day, you have a first draft screenplay written by chat two t p type thing.
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:56

    And then, of course, they got a problem, which is the copyright office won’t copyright something written by So they’ll hire some screenwriter, and there’ll probably be a lot of screenwriters how to work. And that screenwriter for ten thousand bucks a week Will Saletan it for three weeks and put some humor into it thing and be willing to put his name on it so they can get it copyright. And from their point of view, hey, it costs us thirty thousand and instead of seven hundred and fifty thousand to get a dropped screenplay. And it took it took three weeks instead of Two years. So from a pure, just economic efficiency standard.
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:45

    The studios went there. I mean, more entries than said last week. That AI will save the world. And specifically, he thought it would save the world of entertainment. Because it would make it more efficient.
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:01

    I thought that was insane because I mean, If you can go to the Bob Dylan Museum in Tulsa, and you can see ten drafts of, like, a Rolling storm. Handwritten paper. It took him a long time to write that song. And he as he would tell you, the process is everything. This idea that we can get AI just to turn out this is is I need craze?
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:35

    Yeah. There is there is something crazy making about the idea that efficiency is the be all and all of art. I mean, and look, this is this is this tension has long been at the heart of Hollywood. Right? This is the whole studio them.
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:48

    You know, I don’t know if you saw the movie, Babylon, but there’s there’s a lot of that in there as well. The, you know, this this kind of move from from silence to sounds, you know, trying to becoming less efficient, but also more difficult and more iterative, which is, again, it’s it’s it’s fascinating. And and I I look, I’m I I I’ve I’ve said this before on the show, but the writer strike, in particular, but the actor strike as well, is one of the few times I’ve been pretty fully on the side of the labor unions and the the Hollywood, the the Hollywood debates because it it this does signify a real, sea change moment, this idea of AI driven scripts of AI driven performances created from recordings of of actors. When you talk to people out in in the entertainment industry. What are what are their fears and thoughts, and hopes right now?
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:54

    Well, one of the things that the studios have proposed is that for a thousand dollars, they could pay someone who used to be called an extra Now it’s called a background element. It could pay them to scan their body three sixty. And then they would own that body in perpetuity, and that was at one thousand time, one payment, one thousand dollars, and then they would create a bank of experts. Which then they could virtually clothe in different periods. They could virtually keep different haircuts.
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:39

    You know, they could they could just have it and never have to pay for extras again. Now, you know, the the great myth of Hollywood, but but it’s actually true. It’s the only way to get into the screen after skill is to start as an extra and hope that a director gives you one line because if you get one line in a movie, then you can get your screen actors guild card. And so the idea that they would just Okay. I can I can pull I can put ten thousand people in the background of the scene, but they’re all virtual?
  • Speaker 2
    0:22:18

    And they’re all they generate. I mean, to me, certainly, the employment prospects in Holly would go down erratic. And and then fairly soon, they’ll move it to the foreground. And and why not provide Humphrey Bogart virtually? And, you know, why not?
  • Speaker 2
    0:22:43

    Take Robbie Robertson and put him on stage, you can. And and and, you know, I mean, I I don’t know. It it it all seems like that these guys really believe that they wanna replaced nature and humanity with machines, and they’re perfectly okay with that, the dead notion of the singularity. And you and I always thought of that as a science fiction concept, but these people think it’s coming, and it’s coming soon. You know?
  • Speaker 1
    0:23:18

    Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is so this is this is another another key point of this chapter. You you talk about the the idea of disenchantment of the world, that in a in a in a in a world in which we can explain so much of reality through science, people, need something to believe in. And and what’s interesting, particularly looking at a lot of these really again, fantasy based cultural products, things like the the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
  • Speaker 1
    0:23:50

    Right? Science is the basis of the fantasy. Right? Iron man is a creature of science. Iron man is a is a scientist who, you know, saves his own life and then becomes the, you know, peacekeeper of of the universe.
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:05

    Captain America, again, is, the the triumph of science over the weakness of the the human body. Wakanda, the whole nation of Wakanda, in Black Panthers based on a a super scientific society. I mean, these are fantasies of science. This is a way this is a way for science to become a new faith of sorts. Right?
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:25

    That’s kind of the the sense I get from from, again, from from reading this, but also just living in the world we live in. The the singularity is a is a is a belief in the afterlife.
  • Speaker 2
    0:24:37

    It’s it’s a religious notion. You know, when the guy who came up with the idea that singularity was asked, if people believed in god, he said not yet. And and so in some sense, you you know, even Isaac’s biography, which I find to be pretty ridiculous of Musk says that must thinks that he is he has a mandate from heaven to do this stuff. What he’s doing. You know?
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:15

    And so if that’s not someone who thinks he’s as close to a god, and and, you know, Stuart Brand says, we better get good at being god because, you know, that’s the future. I mean, I don’t I think disenchantment, you know, I mean, the enchantment once came from Wonder at the transcendent. Right? And and that’s what religion was all about. Is people want to eliminate wonder of the transcendent and and substitute this wonder of of, AI’s ability to to write poem, like Edgar Allen Poe.
  • Speaker 2
    0:26:00

    I mean, and and really, when you read the poem, it’s kind of been up. If you if you really think about it, one of the things that the people who are really deep into AI are worried about is what they call model collapse. So the more AI sucks in from the internet. The stupider it gets. It doesn’t even have to say it’s absorbing huge amounts of false information.
  • Speaker 2
    0:26:32

    And nobody’s telling it what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s just assuming everything out there is stuff to learn from. You know? And so now people are saying, well, we kinda have much smaller models. We have to just train it on some textbooks or something, things we know to be true.
  • Speaker 2
    0:26:53

    Because this idea that we just let it loose on the internet, to learn everything. It’s not working out pretty well. Yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:27:04

    That is a it it really is the the central paradox of our times as we we’ve created this vast repository of human knowledge. But we forget that most humans believe things that are wrong, of, all the time. So, we talk about the transcendent. And one one area that humanity has has, long, thought of as a transcendent you know, event or, capability of space travel. Right?
  • Speaker 1
    0:27:38

    Space travel was the great hope of the twentieth century. You you saw it not just in literature and film, but in policy, actual policy sending sending people to the moon. And it it it’s interesting in your in your book because on the one hand, I I think I I get the sense that you’re you are a believer in the idea at least the promise of space travel, but very skeptical of how it is being pursued right now, particularly by, Musk who I think you describe as kind of a, I I don’t know. The the the universe’s biggest contractor, basically, is what is what he wants to turn Mars into is a is a ten trillion dollar, strip mall. But the but, you know, I also also Jeff Bezos.
  • Speaker 1
    0:28:24

    I mean, I’m I I’m curious what you think the role of space travel is in terms of giving humanity something to strive for? Is it is it a false hope? Is this a false idea this this this hope to go to Mars and terraform it and all that? Or is it something worth setting our sights on and and trying for?
  • Speaker 2
    0:28:48

    So I went out to JPL, the Jet Propulsion laboratory, which is near where I live. And and the first thing the guy the leader of the Mars rover team said to me, well, he said there’s this old saying in NASA. No buck rogers. No bucks. And the thesis of that was that if we didn’t have some bold John Glenn figure in the capsule, risking his life, that Congress would never get excited and never give the money.
  • Speaker 2
    0:29:24

    And so Musk has taken that no buck rogers, no buck’s pieces to the extreme because quite frankly, we’ve been sending rovers up to Mars for almost twenty years. Right? And they do a very good job of digging up rocks and doing analysis on them and sending the data back to Earth. And and and they don’t need any oxygen. They’re not affected by the radiation, which would kill a human.
  • Speaker 2
    0:29:54

    In well, I mean, it would give you skin cancer and in like fifteen minutes, the radiation level is so hard. So the idea is we have to spend ten trillion of the taxpayers money on Elon’s ego trip. It’s insane. And and when asked by Isaac and, you know, why why we should go to Mars. He said Well, the the well, another motivation was that colonizing on the planets would help ensure the survival of human in case something happened to our private planet, it may somebody, they be destroyed by an asteroid.
  • Speaker 2
    0:30:42

    So we gotta spend ten trillion dollars to go up there in this chance that some asteroid is gonna hit earth. And destroy human consciousness in Elon’s view. As, you know, I don’t know. It it just seems like as absurd an idea as Zuckerberg’s notion that you’ll spend eight hours a day with a virtual reality on the phone.
  • Speaker 1
    0:31:17

    Oh, I mean, I I would I mean, I would push back slightly against that in in the sense that I do think that the idea of worrying about a dinosaur style event, you know, extraterrestrial event is not unreasonable, but the but one of the points you make in your book is that the the real thing that they are worried about, and that frankly we should be worried about is, environmental deck irritation. The the, destroying, the planet and having to move to another one because we we’ve kind of ruined this one, which, is is another real, you know, concern.
  • Speaker 2
    0:31:54

    Yeah. Because What what are they doing in terms of the let’s just say that the total sum of these four projects Going to Mars, building the Metiverse, having transhumanism so that Peter Tiel can live to a hundred and sixty years old. And building killer robots like Mark Ron DeSantis doing. So let let’s say that’s twenty trillion dollars of investment capital. A lot of which would come from from taxpayers.
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:30

    Because injuries and teal and Musk are all on the government of dole as much as they call themselves libertarians that really crony capitalists. So if you think about the balance of that, versus actually taking that twenty trillion and fixing the plan. I mean, we could have an energy system that was completely clean. You know, we could have no own business. We could have will you probably solve cancer and the mental health crisis?
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:09

    There I mean, there’s so much we could actually do to prove our planet, and they don’t seem to be interested in that. They seem much more interested in this escapist future. And that to me is a a problem.
  • Speaker 1
    0:33:27

    Let’s let’s shift gears slightly here, to a to a broader, a broader question, like, a a more theoretical question. In in your view, can can video games be art? Can can, I mean, there there are artistic elements in games designing characters and worlds and all that, but can the games themselves, be considered art, do you think?
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:57

    I think there have been some games that that were art. I’ve just concerned that the biggest selling games are always first person shooters. And I don’t think there’s much question, although everyone says this is like classic cultural panic. But I don’t think there’s much question that the amount of first person shooter game play has kind of corsened the culture of young men specifically over the last twenty five years. You know, I cite a fair amount of American psychological association data to to back that up.
  • Speaker 2
    0:34:55

    So, I mean, It’s I mean, it’s just a problem. I mean, it’s part of the whole corsening of the culture, we go I go back to the drucker thing. Culture eats politics for breakfast. You know, we can have all the ideas of how to fix our country. But if if if we’re living in a culture, that is violent and, you know, nihilistic.
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:29

    We we end up with what we don’t want, you know. And and the other problem is that and and certainly your colleague Charlie Sykes talks about this all the time. These people have also put our democracy in danger. Someone once said that democracy’s assassins always need accomplices. And these guys are the accomplices.
  • Speaker 2
    0:36:00

    You know, it’s not just it’s not just musk. Saying blaming the Jews for the financial problems of Twitter when he let Kanye West and all the other anti semites back on the platform fired all the content operators then the anti defamation league has the temerity to point this back out to advertisers. And and Musk just unleashes his hundred and thirty million followers on the ADL as if, like, they’re the they’re the problem. And it’s it’s insane.
  • Speaker 1
    0:36:45

    It is. It really I of the Elon Musk is a I find Elon Musk, a terribly vexing figure because I do think he I do think he has had a couple of key insights and a couple of key innovations. The the first of which being, if you’re gonna make electric cars and make them work for the world. You you don’t pitch it to people as here’s how we’re gonna save the world by doing you pitch it to people as, here’s a cool car that’s fun to drive. Like, I I think he has an understanding of the human psyche in a way that that makes sense and and work for him as a business model.
  • Speaker 1
    0:37:24

    But also, like, he is a he has Twitter brain poisoning to the extent that I’ve never seen before. It’s it is it has rotted his brain to the extent that he spent forty four billion dollars to buy it and destroy it. I I it’s it’s wild. It’s it’s wild to me.
  • Speaker 2
    0:37:42

    Yeah. I mean, look, Walter Isaacson wrote this book about Musk and and he opens it with an epgram from a quote from Steve Jobs who said the people who are crazy enough to think that can change the world are the ones who do. And so, Isaacson reminds me of that character in almost famous, who is the young Rolling Stone nineteen year old journalist who gets on the private jet with the rock stars and the groupies are coming on to him and everything. And he just He just feels like he fell into, like, this magical paradise with power and moving around. And and I’m sure that two years of flying around in Elon’s gulfstream, has has kind of worked his imagination because he makes Musk out to be some kind of modern day bipolar pre epic Thomas Edison, but he’s not Thomas Edison.
  • Speaker 2
    0:38:48

    Thomas Edison made inventions that actually made most people’s life better, the electric light, the phone graph. Elon Musk makes very expensive cars for rich people who want a virtue signal that they care about the environment. And they may be cool cars, but did most of them cost a hundred thousand powers. And he makes rockets for NASA that he gets a thirty percent profit margin on every launch. And he makes a satellite system that he sells other governments and still retains the ability to turn it off when he doesn’t agree with what they’re using it for.
  • Speaker 2
    0:39:37

    Like when the Ukrainians want to get close to Russia, and push back Elon geo fence system so they can’t do anything. They have no communications. It makes it impossible for their drones to fly into the Kremlin. You know, I mean, so he’s got too much power and and he’s he’s got to be called to account. I mean, Howard Feynman, the journalist wrote yesterday that he should be in jail you violated the Logan Act, which says that private citizens cannot engage in foreign policy.
  • Speaker 2
    0:40:17

    But Isaac’s and Access, if this is just some neo Iron Rand Howard Work type hero who, you know, who’s a little crazy, but and very horny, but that’s okay. You know?
  • Speaker 1
    0:40:34

    Yeah. That is a a little little rourke in. Alright. One one last, one last area that that you discuss at LinkedIn, in the in your in this chapter on fantasy culture is the rise of online gambling. And and this is one area where I feel totally, totally in sync with you that the the rise of online gambling is there there are no good.
  • Speaker 1
    0:41:00

    There are no there are no good consequences here. There is nothing but bad. What what does what does the I mean, look, I what what does this represent about where we are as a society that, you know, the the biggest growth industry right now is downloading an app to your phone you can bet on whether or not, I don’t know. Aaron Rogers makes it out of the first quarter of the Jets game.
  • Speaker 2
    0:41:23

    Right. Well, look, it is the fastest growth industry in the entertainment business, quite far. And and it says that, you know, we all know that you can never beat the house. It’s the law of the gambling business. So everyone somehow believes that they’re the one in a trillion person who’s gonna win the lottery.
  • Speaker 2
    0:41:50

    And and so this is the biggest fantasy of all that somehow you’re gonna beat Fan dual. And and panthers can lose a lot of money. Pantals never lost any money. You know, it just doesn’t happen. That’s the way gambling worked.
  • Speaker 2
    0:42:08

    So, I mean, it’s it’s like thinking that, you know, the MGM consume is gonna pro go broke because you’re so good at Blackjack. It just doesn’t happen. So, I mean, my worry is that this fantasy culture that created as morphed into all sorts of other things, you know, and and needless to say, my biggest worry right now is yesterday, I was at a form, which was kind of a a side venture to this AI. The AI meeting that Schumer was having. And and There’s a company called stability AI, and they they have an app called Stable Defusion which is a a large language model that allows you to make photographs or paintings or all sorts of a very photorealistic images just with a prompt.
  • Speaker 2
    0:43:16

    Right? And and they built that by taking twelve million images from Getty images. All of whom were copyrighted. Stripping out all the metadata from them, so nobody could identify with it. And using that to train their model.
  • Speaker 2
    0:43:32

    So I can go on you know, stable diffusion and say, make me a picture of Tony Mitchell, and it will make you a really quick picture, Tony Mitchell, accepted no photographer will get any money from that picture. So yesterday, they announced that they’ve got a brand new tool called stable audio, which will, quote, generate high quality music for commercial use. What did they do? They did the same thing. They just ingested every piece of song that they could get their hands on.
  • Speaker 2
    0:44:12

    To create this thing, and now they’re gonna create music so that if you’re making a video game and you need some music in the back of a bar, scene, you would just get this for, you know, a quarter of what you would have had to pay to get a musician actually right something for that, or you can get it out of a a stock library. So, I mean, it’s just as destructive to the music business as napster was. And, and same for photography, and And as I think I told you once before, the same for writing. I mean, there’s more than two hundred books on Amazon that have chat g t GPT as a co author, which probably means they were written completely chat GPT and some kind of put his name on it for Yeah. Finding the prompt.
  • Speaker 1
    0:45:11

    Yeah. It’s, I don’t know. It’s wild times ahead, possibly bad times. I always like to to close these interviews by asking if there’s anything I should have if you think there’s anything folks should know, about, about anything, about the state of, the entertainment industry, about about your book? Do you wanna would you like to to pitch people on the book?
  • Speaker 1
    0:45:32

    I know we we didn’t I didn’t talk about the book, in its entirety. It’s it’s in it’s very interesting folks should check it out. I’ll put a link in the newsletter, if you if you wanna pick up a copy. But the, but it’s it is a it’s a fascinating And, I slightly dark glimpse at where we’re where we’re all headed.
  • Speaker 2
    0:45:51

    Yeah. Well, look, I end a book with a quote from Camu, because I don’t think we have to live in Elon Musk. And this is a book he wrote called The Reble, which was about how artists are part of the resistance. And he said, we are at the extremities now. At the end of this tunnel of darkness.
  • Speaker 2
    0:46:12

    However, there is invariably a light, which we already divine, and for which we have only to fight to ensure it’s coming. All of us among the ruins are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism. I truly believe that there’s a renaissance in the offing. And whether it’s female musicians or I’m going to Nashville this weekend for Americanifest or whether it’s young filmmakers making documentaries or it’s someone thinking of a better video game that’s healthier for kids to play. I just think there’s there’s a a better future ahead of us that is not a machine oriented future.
  • Speaker 2
    0:47:00

    And and that’s what I want.
  • Speaker 1
    0:47:04

    Alright. Jonathan Tapplin, again, the name of the book is the end of reality, how four billionaires are selling a fantasy future of the Metiverse, Mars, and Crypto. Thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it.
  • Speaker 2
    0:47:15

    Thanks, Sunny. I’ve really good too. It was a
  • Speaker 1
    0:47:19

    it was a good chat. Good depressing at. I love it. I love this, what I, you know, that’s, that’s what I love. I, my name is Sunny Bunch.
  • Speaker 1
    0:47:26

    I am the culture editor at the Bulwark, and I will be back next week with another So, the Bulwark goes to Hollywood. We’ll see you guys