good evening.

welcome. my name is katie o'neill. i am the director of lenox library. i just want to welcome you. thank you all for coming tonight. this very timely program. i'm so grateful to. matt and johnny from the bookstore for reaching out to us so that we could, on this fantastic event. just a few housekeeping items. please remember to silence your cell phone for the duration of the program. and we are very pleased tonight to welcome c-span to booktv to film talk. so just you probably the cameras during the q&a there will be a lovely person named shane circulating with the boom mic so

don't be alarmed when that part of the program happens just to give you fair warning. so again thank you welcome to lenox library and. i'm going to turn over the introduction of the program to matt tannenbaum from the bookstore. thank you, katie and thank you to the lenox library. coming, coming to to us. with us. so i know i've known eoin higgins his family for many, many years and i am so pleased that he has chosen us and. the library to which he has a connection. he'll tell you about to start his book for owned this incredible book we have hosted many authors at the bookstore and here at the library literature poetry poets nonfiction, creative writers. but this, as katie said, this is the most timely presentation

we've ever had political events as you well know, are happening, breakneck speed. and this book will, when you read it, will provide you with a roadmap. find out how we got here right now, i own will own and dan i'll introduce dan in a minute. will. oh, and we'll sign books after the reading and i just want to introduce owen higgins and dan neilson, professor of political at simon's rock, who will be with owen. thank you both. you. thank you. katie and matt for the welcome and thank you all for coming. owen good to be with tonight as just mentioned, you have some connection to the lennox library and. berkshire berkshire kid once

upon a time. so this a little bit of a homecoming stop on your book tour. could you tell us a little bit about about your the first part of your story for berkshires and and this particular place, the lenox library and and why it means so much to come back here. yeah, absolutely. i grew up in monterey, which many of you know, and i left and came back in my mid-thirties when i did my masters at fordham university and for my thesis project, i examined julius rockwell, who was a lenox native, who was the republican party's first gubernatorial nominee in history in 1850s. and i did research here because his papers are here and in the process, me and the librarian amy lafave found a letter from david davis, who was a supreme court former supreme court justice, which was rather and important. he it was about the election,

the tilden election. so i won't bore you guys with all of that, but it was a very special time. i spent a lot of time here in the library doing my work here. it was really nice to be back here, not only in the berkshires, but in the library. thank you. your training in history really shows through in your book, which, as our host said, is called owned. it's got a great subtitle to how ten billionaires in under the power of the right. all right. yep. i'll let you i'll let you set. but owned is a very nice one. one word summary. let's get into it. you're a historian, you just said. and one of the things that comes through so clearly in this book is the thoroughness, care and research you put together a story that's super helpful that maybe is not shocking, but is really coherent and if you haven't been paying attention the whole way, you might not have seen the big shifts that's happening in in the story that

you're telling us about the tech industry and its connection with the media and and how that has shown up, especially in current politics as we'll get to, could you give us a little bit of a sense of what the book is about and why we should it? yeah. so this book uses it kind of weaves narratives together. so the first narrative is how journalist specifically glenn greenwald and matt taibbi, these formerly left aligned journalists and writers, have from being allied with the left to being allied with the right and kind of partizan republicans in in a lot of ways now and it takes journey and it watches their political evolution which is ideological ideologically driven and materially driven and it mixes that with the silicon kind of public turn to the right, which of course we've all seen over the last few months. right. but this has been going on for quite some time. the book really focuses, i think, on the last 20 years.

but the the moment when this became really public is like the last ten years. and i that it it of uses taibbi and greenwald's journey as a way of exploring this then it gives background for particularly marc andreessen peter thiel, david sachs and of course elon musk. right. so these are kind of like the four tech billionaires who's in politics and the media has brought us kind of to where we are today. it their right wing radicalization. and then it also examines kind of they brought the silicon valley mentality, the move fast and break things which we're seeing now in the federal government, they brought to media and the results of this right wing alternative media ecosystem kind of created a lot of the foundation for the kind of misinformation and disinformation landscape that we find ourselves in now thank.

so as you just said, we've got sort of a journalism media story here and tech, silicon valley finance story, and it becomes a political at some point, too. a lot of the book is written in terms of the individual piece that that you're focused and you sort of follow some of some the big public moments, debates that they were part of and and events even world changing events that they were part of one thing that maybe it would be helpful for us to hear is why would we have thoughts? there was a point in time where we might have thought mattered and glenn greenwald were really strong, critical voices on the left, and maybe they even were offering a real of powerful people and made a name for themselves. so could you put us back in that moment just a little bit and. help us see what this world looked like, which is sort of at the beginning of your story. yeah. so the story as far as this goes is kind of begins in the mid 2000. this is as the war on iraq is

kind of going poorly the general so-called war on terror is is just kind of disintegrating. bush's approval ratings are going down. and for someone like me who had been of opposed to this stuff the entire time, starting to feel like people were kind of getting on board with it, someone like greenwald was, a really important voice because was focused not on why the wars were bad, but why the civil liberties, betrayals and that was kind of how he approached this stuff. so in his blog, which was called unclaimed territory, he then went to salon and then went to the guardian. he approached this moment in time as a question of civil liberties and a question of kind of principled to this. authoritarian might be a little too strong, but this this this moment in american history and that aligned him with a lot of

people on the left, left wing blogosphere. so he was friendly. these are names who you'll know. but at the time were were rather independent. people like chris hayes, rachel, maddow. and that showed he was ever friendly with joy. but she was kind of, you know, in this same milieu and. entered. and when obama administration came in, he kept same kind of principled opposition to the war. and at a time, i think a lot of democrat aligned and liberal and politicians found that a lot of the things that they'd been saying during bush, they no longer kind of felt like they felt a little bit differently now, now that it was kind of their side doing it. and greenwald presented a what i found to be a really principled opposition this and to say hey know let's let's keep the same approach so i consider that a left wing critique of power even if he is going against the

non-republican party right? taibbi i think is a little easier to define. he was a writer for, a rolling stone at the time when the financial happened. he became probably, i think the voice of the generation, maybe a little strong, but like he was he was certainly he he coined the the vampire squid phrase to describe goldman sachs. he was quite i think, influential and important for people at the time. and he definitely pushed, i think, most of his opposition toward the republican party and towards republicans. and during the 20 tens, he was not, as i think, opposed to the obama administration in the same way at least that that greenwald was. but he was still presenting this kind of left wing, principled opposition. and this is kind of where we find ourselves like the mid 20 tens, right?

as trump and bernie sanders are both of coming up in the democrat and republican primaries and things are getting shaken up quite a bit. there's, i think, especially with greenwald. but i think with tv as well, there's a sense of frustration with where democratic party is at this point. and that's kind of like where the story i really jumps off because then. then we start to see like the big yeah and that big shifts that you're getting to depends a lot on the other big thread of the book, which is tech money. so one of the, one of the metaphors that you come back to many in the book is the man in the arena, which is this way, that that the big tech entrepreneur is have sort of imagining themselves it comes from a, you know, a sense of what capitalism is even before tech and we're talking about self-made man and, you know, who's out there really doing stuff and and you take that

metaphor apart pretty thoroughly, too, before the end of the book. spoiler alert. but but but around this time we see the the financial energy coming from tech very particularly starts to have an influence on where these critical voices are are. so how is it that that that tech's sort finds its way into influencing these media around that time? sure. so the man in the arena is a section of, a speech by teddy roosevelt, where he says that it's not the critic that counts and he's saying that they that the man in the arena doesn't need to listen to the people who trying to take him down or put him down. but he has to just keep doing what he's doing. and the reason that people in silicon valley like this so much is because it presents a version of their own kind of merit. pratik rise in in the american

system that makes it so that anyone who's criticizing how they got there or what they did is is just like a hater basically. like they don't they don't really matter so much. it is a metaphor for that. they themselves have have spoken about it quite a bit and it is kind of how they see things. now, the reason they got involved in media, this is my thesis. the story is there was kind of like an unspoken deal that they felt like now in recent has talked about this as far as it applies to the democratic party recently like within the last six months. but i think this applies as well to the media going back essentially the deal is that the tech industry is going to provide paid media. the media that's covering with, you know, conference issues and nice new gear and access and in exchange, the media is not going

to cover them particularly critically. now, this wasn't like universal gawker media's valley wag, which comes up in the book, was a very harsh, attacking that treated silicon valley kind of like it was like any kind of like us weekly, basically they were just it was they were just doing gossip and they're being very critical and magazine has often been critical, the tech industry. but overall, the kind of understanding was that it was kind of a friendly relationship. now around 2013, this started to change thanks to the reporting of one glenn greenwald. right. so he reveals the snowden papers snowden gives them the documents. he reveals the extent of nsa's spying. this implicates the tech industry in a huge civil rights violation for americans. as i'm sure that we can all remember, this was, you know, only 11 or 12 years ago, massive

and the reporting to become a little more critical and as it becomes a little more critical the tech the tech titans specifically i think andreessen is really the one who i think is very open about this really felt that this was like an unfair and recent also made. poorly thought out comments about india and colonialism on twitter back in 2014. and he was raked over the coals for them and after that became kind of angry and kind of like a reactive, like a reactionary response to this and so this the tech industry, by the time 2016 rolls around, they're already feeling upset and sick of the way that mainstream media is treating them. and then after 2016 and trump wins, there's lot of criticism of the social media companies of which, you know, these tech vcs in, these tech companies are heavily invested.

and that just kind of adds to this sense of the enemy. know, the media is the enemy, and we need to do something about this. and the way i see what happens next is that they take the media and they say, we're just going to invest in it. we are going. put our money into, the media and try and decentralize it and whatever, you know, rises, the top survives and whatever you know doesn't. and then it was just, you know, it wasn't meant to survive and it's just dead weight that we're going to cut and this kind of slash and burn approach to the media has basically put us in a situation where we now have like a lot of alternative media sites like substack, which which i use i use and rumble, which is right wing youtube alternative alternative locals, which is it's blogging. there are a lot of different decentralize media outlets and

media platforms out there, but they because of this kind of huge investment and be one of the major motivations for this for decentralizing the media is to power the institutional media and the power of the critical media. and so that there is kind of it's kind of harder to find, you know, an opposition. and i think that if you look at where we're at now and i think that they've been quite successful, we're going to get to where we are right now. but i want to just fill in a little bit more of the story. first. so these men, the arena, it turns out, are super thin skinned. and when we're no matter how much money they might have in power in their in their industry and in the world, when people start criticizing, they they retaliate. and they're willing to retaliate pretty hard. these are patterns that have become pretty, pretty visible. and common in our in our

politics. they're not us. they're also not really self-made man. right. and so this is also, i think, important to say that that you tell in the in the book, you see clearly history of silicon valley and how it depends on government contracts, various various kinds. and this is continues it continues today. military other kinds of defense contracts, surveillance contracts. so so there's a way in which there's this whole story about silicon, the self-made entrepreneur, all of that falls away in your telling. and in fact, it's always been a way to to direct public resources toward private wealth. yeah i think i quote olivia satel, who is a professor communications in in new zealand, in front mind. and he said, you know, behind every libertarian there's a big fat government contract. and this definitely applies to silicon valley, right? elon musk right.

who is, you know, has his hands all over every of these federal agencies. space x, i think has $18 billion in federal contracts. i mean, these guys are making money hand over fist. peter tails, palantir which is a data surveillance firm that does lot of shady stuff. it began an investment from in-q-tel which is kind of like the cia's like investment arm. this is not like some conspiracy or some hidden thing like that. that's what it is. that's what they do. they seed into these tech companies in order to. basically, they're just trying to find things that work that they can use within the defense industry, in the national security industry, until i think 27. and this palantir thing was found in like 2003, four, four, four or five years. it didn't have any private contracts. it was all public contracts. it was making money from the federal government. so deals. deals. well, peter thiel is is an arch

wing and we can get to him in a minute. but, you know, his his wealth is really based a lot on these federal contracts like i said, musk's wealth is as well when consider the way that the primarily the defense industry but the federal government in general is intertwined with all of these tech all of these silicon valley firms the self-made man does kind of fall apart. they're not so much the in the arena. they're not doing this by themselves. they're they're being supported by taxpayer money. and to the tune of billions dollars and they they have used to get a lot of power, quite legitimately mean we're saying nothing in this book is conspiracy you right this is you got people in their own words much of it was done in public. there's there's not we're not talking about new revelations really of things we never knew before. you put in the whole story

together in a way that hasn't been told this clearly yet. but also not it's not fiction. it's easy to check. and the story comes through really clearly so appreciate that. and for someone who grew up with this stuff like i did, i sort of saw it all along the way. and now to see 20 years in a single go is super helpful, alarming especially given where we're it's taking us now. but. but clarifying. so so let's talk a minute about where we are right now because you finish the book up in the latter part of last year and you can kind of already where things were headed. but we didn't have the election results yet and then we didn't have early weeks of the trump administration that we've now been living through. you know, in ten years ago, even we might have we might have thought that silicon valley's alliance with the democrats was permanent and immutable thing. as it turns out, these tech

billionaires backed trump this time around. and it might have been a risky gamble, but. but it is paying off for them pretty significantly now. so these same characters that are in your go on in the next episode to take over the white house alongside donald trump, and it looks like really, really good business for them. tell us a little bit about about, you know, how the story moves into the what we're seeing right now in the headlines. sure. so i'm going to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about. peter thiel. yeah, and just and as i get back up to 2016 really quick before we get here, so peter thiel won't maybe back up a little bit longer because peter thiel in college even was already a far right ideologue and the his political journey, which basically brought him to be one of the most influential men in silicon valley, one of the most influential men in, the current right wing movement, although is kind of under the radar. most of us, through investment, he he has been like for a very

long time and. he was an early supporter of trump back in 2015, 2016. and that was a gamble paid off because the rest of silicon valley was not like they for a number of reasons. i think i think he they may have maybe they agreed with trump privately. maybe they liked what he was saying, but he was just unstable at the time. after he wins in, i think the december of 2016, he has peter, he'll reach out to a bunch of different tech leaders and bring them all in to kind of sit down with trump. and he does he has microsoft there, he has google there. he also has elon musk there. and alex karp karp is the ceo of palantir. now, these guys should not have been there far as like their market cap. they were not at that time. they were not you know, they didn't have enough money to be there. but they were both friends of thiel's because he knew musk from his paypal days. and karp is the ceo that he picked to to shepherd kind of palantir through through his

evolution. so teal kind of you know, brings everybody in you know they may have publicly said that they didn't like some things that trump may have said on the campaign trail, but none of that stuff came up. they just said how much they liked him he said how much he liked them. and they kept working together and the federal contracts kept coming in. and then biden comes into office in 2020, contrast keep coming. it doesn't matter kind of where you ideologically, then i think we get to. so i started writing this book in september of 2023 and i finished reading it and with all the edits and everything, like september 20, 24 and i mean, i don't need to recap like recent history for, but you know, we watched as biden's impairment it became more and more obvious and the democrats to kind of scramble and figure out like what to do we watched as went from almost like nobody thought

he could possibly win then it was really just like a coin flip. and then trump gets shot at and at that. that's when elon musk says that he supports trump. i think that's when andresen says supports trump and also talks about crypto. but that's another story. but these guys started to come out publicly that they had they kind of been like, we're not going to come out on either side. you know, we're going to take a neutral position here. but instead, they started to back trump and i see this as a really calculated move in that they realized that if they backed trump and, biden won or that harris won, there would be zero political consequences for them. their contrast would keep coming because that's just not how the democrats play, right? they don't they don't play that kind of politics. whether or not they should or not i'm not i mean, i think that they should. but, you know but you know, but

that's somewhat irrelevant to him. right. they don't. and trump does. so to look at what jeff bezos. right a couple of weeks before the election, he stomps on washington post endorsement process. the washington post was going to endorse harris. they now bezos stomps on this because realizes that if they endorse harris and trump wins, then he's to be punished for that. but if he removes endorsement and harris wins, there's not going to be political consequences for him. so if you kind of look at it like that, like they're just they're kind of, they're kind of gambling right there. they're things forward. they're pushing all their chips in. they're realizing that even if they lose this one bet, they're like, they're not going to like out of the game. and they end up winning and. musk won probably the most and now he's in the white determining which federal

agencies are going to get money. he is it executive was signed where he has some control over like federal hiring this guy wasn't elected he doesn't he doesn't you know he's he's not part of the government tactically he's like a senior adviser to trump. it's it's kind of it's interesting because while you're watching it i'm sorry, go on. like a little digression here. but while you're watching it. it's is just kind of snowballing, right? it's like like they keep on pushing things forward, trying to see, hey, is anyone going to stop and nobody's stopping them. so just continues and continues and continues like it would be really nice if we could separate trump and musk, but that hasn't happened. and trump doesn't seem to have any interest in curtailing musk's power whatsoever at this at the time that we're saying. that's right. right now. right now, february 21st, it doesn't like there's any trump cares to stop this or wants to stop this. not that we should expect him to, but, you know, it doesn't seem like he has any interest in

this at all. and musk is just going to continue pushing and pushing as much as he can. and. it is interesting because these these guys know that contracts are going to keep coming, the money is going to keep. and in the process they're just kind of barreling over everything. so it have been really nice while. musk and you and andresen were putting all their chips in on this bet for for trump it would have been really nice if we had had some some are these voices the left that had that had been willing critique power. we do have some voices on the left of course that were willing to critique power. but the ones you're you're following here ten years ago, you might have said that they would be in a position to do that. and and now it turns out that these guys are the loudest voices on the left, as you say, are falling in line to support this right wing. plus tech, political alliance. and they started with civil

liberties, privacy and so on. that really got twisted around into a conversation that we're having now about free speech. so so so where were these guys by the time that happened? taibbi and greenwald in particular. but that that critical voice on the left, where was that by the time this happened? yeah. so let's go back to 2016 because that's where we left these guys right? so, you know, they're getting pretty sick. the democratic party, they're getting pretty sick of how liberals are approaching the national security state and the war terror and the financial crisis, etc., etc. etc. trump wins and. the democratic reaction to this is to focus on russia at expense of everything else. pretty much the democratic media organs. the democrat party, their primary thing is time trump to russia rather than trying to present, you know, try to show like an alternative view for the country or trying to push on the policy only clearly they did do all of that, but they also

really focus on this russia stuff to the exclusion, i think, of a lot of other things could have been doing and tv and greenwald and myself as well, like i was writing at the time, i wrote this in a very critical way and, try to push back on it as much as possible possible. where i differ from them and where a lot people who think i do, journalists who think like i do at the time and i think still do, is that there is a it is important to push back on these kind of media narratives and it's important to push back on the opposition party when is not doing what you think it should be doing. when you do that to the exclusion of any kind of criticism of the party in that's where there's a problem and that's what greenwald and taibbi began to do. they began to become so kind of reverse polar ized by. their anger toward the democrats

which again, with them you got to understand like this has been going on since obama had been elected. they felt really betrayed. not only by obama, but also by the quote unquote liberal media. right. there's a lot of this stuff is just like their reaction to discourse. so by the time that 2020 comes around. i wouldn't say that they are right wing. i wouldn't say that they are. i mean, there's some other stuff that happens as well. like, you know, taibbi kind of gets canceled and but i wouldn't say that they are like right wing pundits at this point. we're not quite where we are now, but they certainly opposed to liberals and democrats in a that excludes any kind of criticism of republicans or the right wing and covid happens this really breaks lot of brains in silicon valley as well as in washington. everybody we've talked about is

someone who's whose brain is broken by this stuff. and. the end of late 2021, when when trump gets elected, you know, greenwald leaves the because he feels that an article that he's writing about hunter biden is being unfairly edited. taibbi shortly thereafter leaves rolling stone do substack full time. greenwald goes substack and then he and in may 2021, peter thiel and j.d. vance lead a funding round into rumble. the conservative youtube clone that i mentioned before. that's may 20, 21 and august 2021. they do a pay deal with glenn to have him all of his content over to their site. he and tulsi gabbard are like two people in august 2021 who get that deal in december of 2022. matt taibbi puts out his first of these twitter files. elon musk buys twitter, and then

he gives matt taibbi this very curated like list, these documents from from internal twitter. so these guys are kind of tilting right. and as they're tilting right, they're being rewarded by this media infrastructure that's already being kind of built in and created by these silicon valley right wing guys. and then by the time that you know by the time the 2024 rolls around, they're really, i think, in a lot of ways indistinguishable from republican pundits. and if you go on to their social media now, i mean, i think, glenn always been smarter than matt. so his stuff is like has like a little bit of like there's some deniability in the way that he's writing about this stuff. but he's he's still saying things like, you know, trump's i don't think brain is very good right now. and so, like, when he's asked things by journalists, like he just of says whatever comes off the top of his head. a couple of days ago, they were like, would you reduce the

military by 50%? and he was like, sure, maybe. and like, glenn was like, yeah, so this is definitely going to happen. like, how do you feel like democrats and just like, no, obviously he's not going to happen today. i think it came out that they're going to cut 8% of the budget and then just reappropriate it for things that trump wants in the military. like there's no cut is coming. right. so that's kind of what glenn is doing. then if you go over to matt's social media and his substack, it's just transphobia and just covid vaccine, conspiracy theories and mean it's just it's just and that's kind where these guys are right now and they don't seem be particularly just to rabid all the way back the way were saying like they don't seem to be interested all not only how silicon and the republican party in the white house are working together they don't to be interested at all in what any of these policies would mean for people civil liberties they don't seem to be interested how these tech companies making

money hand over fist because of trump's immigration policies they're not interested in this stuff at all so it kind of makes you wonder like where their priorities are at this point, too. yeah. and and the book does a great of holding that disregard for for rights, for immigrant rights, against where these guys started their career, when you might have thought you have thought something different and owned is is how you sum it up in one word the stories about them. and i thought it was fun to sort of follow these guys and you have them in their own words in important places just saying what they think very straightforward they and you can really get sense of the characters directly from it which i think is helpful at the same time, i found it to be a story not really about about the other guys matter and what happened to them matters. and you know, how elon musk carries himself it matters for how the story plays out.

but also we're seeing how a media can be absorbed politically using money, a strategy on the part of silicon valley that played out over multiple decades and a whole realignment of or at least apparent realignment of tech the way tech conducts itself in politics to the point where you have tech in a republican white house, in way that would have seemed surprised, surprising many observers at the beginning of your story. yeah, i think i mean, one thing that i think is important to keep in mind is that while silicon valley staff workers may have liberal left wing, left leaning for for decades, at this point, the people in charge are apolitical to leaning like before musk became kind of radicalized to the kind of far right person that he is. he was courting democrats and

courting liberal and, you know, getting his name, you know, the simpsons and different like, you know, kind, liberal, coded entertainment properties. you know he was building his own mystique, guess, you know, just trying to build his own legend, own myth. and it was definitely very much about like liberal politics. he he presented himself like a savior of green technology savior, mark zuckerberg. i mean how many political positions has he taken it just goes back and forth and i think it's just cause for him and musk's specifically like they're they're their politics are very fluid. they just don't care. someone like teal has been right wing for a long time, but that didn't stop him from hiring alex karp to become the ceo of palantir. and alex karp now now i think is pretty far right with the stuff that he's saying. he was a democrat pretty liberal democrat when when he appointed ceo of, palantir and teal didn't

care about this, wasn't about like ideology so much as it was just about like game. the person that he wanted to be in there. same with andresen i think andreessen political path has starts probably wake when he gets out of college and found netscape and then to where he's at now this is this is is an arc right he didn't start on the right so i think it's just like a confluence of all of these different factors and. i think that but part of it is that right now the right wing is in power and these guys are not going to challenge power, especially when the person who is in power. trump so vindictive, right? because at the end of the day, no matter how these guys feel about stuff they, they love money and they love the billions of dollars in contracts that they have from from the federal government, they're not going to jeopardize that. and we're all living with the consequences we're up to time. and i want to leave some time for four questions from the audience. so i'll give you i just want to

ask you one more question, and then we have some time for questions from you folks. you resist the temptation to give us a happy ends to this book. and thank you thank you. because it's too big for for one book. right. and we're not going to i'd be i'd be lying to us if you if you were able to find a happy ending this moment. but you do have an which i wanted to give you a chance to tell us more and think a bit about about lenox, massachusetts where we are and you know, the gilded age history that we walk around in this town where you end the book is that maybe what we need to think hard about is maybe being done with the idea of a billionaire and not the guys themselves but. the idea of someone who who could be able to have that much wealth and therefore political power and sway and over media. what do you think about this tell us a little more about

about the idea a billionaire and why we maybe should be done with it? yeah. i mean, it's just. it's an almost indescribable amount of money, $1 billion. i mean, $100 million is almost like an indescribable. like, if you have that much money, you know, you have generational wealth. what do you need more for musk on paper is worth $400 billion. he's the richest man in the world. i think that if he actually, like cash it out, it would be less and buy less. i mean, know, maybe one or $200 billion. i mean, that's still a lot of money, right? so but, you know, i think that amount of wealth in the hands of one individual is just too much. and that's just that i mean that's just my politics on than my feeling. i don't think that that is right i don't think that one person should have $1 billion. i think that that's is just too much money and so there's that. but i think separate from that

as well, it's like how they've gotten to this point is the dismantle of the tax code in this country, the dismantling of this kind of great new deal great society agreement that wasn't perfect by any means but, you know, kind of allowed some redistribution and. we're we're at the kind of the tail end of i mean, my entire life has just been going this way, like, you know, reagan and then just ever since then, it's just been continue really heading in that direction with, you know, a couple of bumps, but nothing, nothing major. and now we're at a point where the richest man in the world is possibly the most powerful person in washington, dc. he has no restrictions on his wealth and his power. no, i realize that i'm focusing on must go out right now, and that's because of right now. at this moment, he is probably the most person that we're talking about. but this applies to all of these guys. like they don't need this much. peter thiel destroyed gawker. right. so you may remember the

beginning. insane value, right was this gawker media property. it was harshly critical of silicon valley and harshly of tiller did some things that i don't agree with. it outed him, which i think is not right. but it also criticized his financial acumen and his ability to make kind of rational decisions and that. and he didn't like that either. and so he put millions of dollars destroying gawker he funded all these different lawsuits including the hulk hogan lawsuit, which is the one that they then you shot the into in to florida and that's broke gawker that and then know once once the blood was in the water all these different lawsuits came out and then years later it comes out that thiel funded that lawsuit but also funded dozens of other lawsuits none of which caught hold and he to destroy gawker by doing this now i i just don't think that for somebody like teal who's billions of dollars a few million dollars does not matter to him that does that is a

that's like pocket change really because it's not even like the millions of dollars as a percentage of the billions that he owns. it's he owns so much he has so much wealth that so much of his super superfluous right. it doesn't matter he can he can spend this money and he can go down $1,000,000,000. and he's still a billionaire multibillionaire. it does not matter to him. and so if nothing for him to spend millions and, millions of dollars to destroy this company and these people's lives, that level of and wealth, i think, should think the society shouldn't really allow that to happen. i think we should tax these guys the point that tax them down to a few hundred million dollars. i mean, like that's like i don't i don't think that's an unreasonable position. so yeah, i mean, i don't really know how we get from like where we're like where we are now to that. but i feel like something, something has to be done because

the, the concentration of wealth, the in the top .01 percent of this country is the ramifications of that or what we're seeing right now. and it has to be stopped some level. it does and it end the the the way this wealth is being used through the media in particular means it affects public consciousness. awareness of of debate, knowledge about the it affects all of us in a pretty direct way. not a new story actually in the history of media and journalism but a new twist on it. there were that we've got right now luckily we've got your book you don't give us all the answers. but what you do us is a great way to think about tech and, media and politics. it's a clear history that's easy to read that follows logically as put together. so thank you very much. we're lucky to have that and thanks for talking with us about. please join me in thinking on.

and we have a few minutes now for questions from the audience here and then if you have daily will direct us. to just talk day thank you very much. question on the decentralized media that you spoke about that was funded, i think we all know that, you know, other than it's old folks, very few people watch the network news at night and a lot of people are tuned in to these decentralized medias and all the associated. do you see any possibility that the left or the democrats are capable of either from a funding standpoint or just from an infrastructure standpoint, of standing up some similar type of decentralized infrastructure to to combat what is what is clearly out on the right? i'll just i'll quickly restate

the question. so we get it for everyone to hear the question about the alternative decentralized media which in your story the right has used successfully is are left possibility democratic possibility to use some of those same kinds ideas political ideas or infrastructure for a different political purpose. yes, i don't have like a clear yes or no answer to that. i think in for that to happen, people who have this obscene wealth that we've been talking about are liberal or left leaning are going to have to swallow their pride and support some people and things they may not completely agree with. and because of the there's kind of a difference in the way that right wing and left wing media operate. and i think this is kind of what you're getting at right when you talk about network news. the alternative media ecosystem, the right and fox news, not too

ideologically different. it's just it's just a lot of different ways of of getting the same information while on left. and anybody knows anything about the left. this won't be surprising. like everyone's already always fighting anyway all the time, right? so i think that there needs to be kind of an understanding for very wealthy people if they're going to fund this kind of alternative left wing media ecosystem, there are going to be people who are going to be giving money to who might be saying things like what i just said, about billionaires. right. and if you're a billionaire, probably not gonna like that on the right. they've they've made peace with that. they've made peace with the fact that, like, they may give, like give money to a whole bunch of people, maybe that somebody says something that's that maybe they don't want to publicly say that they agree with. right. but, but they don't because they see the ideological they see they they're like looking forward they're looking decades forward and they're seen that.

and i think that that kind of approach is what we need to have on the left alternative. we can do it through. crowdfunding that's been on the left, i think since 2016. patrick on substack are really good examples of of this stuff. i think it works a limited degree, but yeah. i don't know. i don't have like a clear answer here. i think that i that people are going to have to kind of find a way to give that money and to to support this stuff and realize that they're going to be some hiccups along the and you're just going to have to kind of accept that. i think the elephant in the room is climate change. you can have as much money you want. you can't create water. you can't create things that'll. stop hurricanes from happening. so what what is going happen in

the end is we're all going to because nobody takes climate change seriously seriously. so we have some real problems here in front of us right. and so we are tied up in knots politically. we've got people ransacking white house in the state for their own for their own benefits. and the real problems that we face, climate change being obviously very high on the list continues. so while we're thinking about about problems coming out of the centers of power, the things that that we might like to have a government to work on are still getting worse. yeah. i mean the the easy is they just don't care. i mean like the super wealthy are not going to the ill effects of this. they're they're going be fine. so they don't they don't really care. i mean, this is a real this is a real major problem for the rest of us. but as far as like the horizon that these guys look at things they don't care i mean they're they're to covid reportedly was

to kind of bunker for a little bit you know just kind of hide like they have they're not they're not concerned about that not not not the not the super rich. so i think that it's certainly an issue that we could use their billions of dollars for if we could expropriated through taxation and redistribute it to these efforts. and i think that that would be one of the pressing things to do for us. we've known about climate change for a long time and it's been a left wing issue that's been in the way that it's played out politically. it's always been a left wing issue. now it's real, it's happening. that doesn't mean we're going to get left wing solutions just because the left was right. the left is correct at all. and we're also we are seeing some of the right wing solutions which are building walls on borders in keeping climate refugees out and i'm sure that they can get a lot worse. reality is not going to be enough to to save us in this.

so this is kind of like a journalistic david and goliath situation where you're going up against people who are who have a ton of power and. you're calling them out in that. did you come up against any pushback trying to and or kind of like cloak and dagger scenarios? was there any kind of pushback from the money to you putting this information out? i just repeat the question just so we get it for everybody here. you're in this story right. you're you're you know, some of these guys and you're a journalist yourself, powerful people that you're going up. so so give us a little bit of of the movie version in which you are you're part of the story in a way. what's up? i'm like, yeah, i would say matt taibbi didn't want to to me and i use telling me to f off

basically as as some as a chapter in one case. and glenn was willing to talk to me on the condition that he just see the quotes he no quote approval or anything. but just to be able to see them, which i thought was reasonable because i would do that for. anybody for a project like this just so that they would know what i was quoting them. and i think that it's probably no surprise that because i talked to glenn for a while that he comes out probably a little bit better than matt in the book. i there was no pushback really on this. i mean there have been some things since the book came out that have been a little weird for for promotion stuff, but i don't want to. get too conspiratorial about things. i think that. i had to choose my words really carefully. i think that there are probably.

figures in the mainstream media and in mainstream media companies who who would probably not to address this issue so directly. and i guess i'll just it at that and maybe next we'll find out more about that. but one thing we can be sure of is that this is going to make it hard for you to trade in all your principles for fact consulting contract later. yes, it would be a real, real possibility for the very. right. one more question. i got right here once i got away from from work. so my feeling is that the demo, the republicans playing the long game democrats play a game they've had chances and they've

missed almost they bring a knife to a gunfight. my question is i don't think the democrats are going to be able to do anything with this now, do you think that they're too ego egos that are in the white musk and trump will implode and or any of the other egos they're going to play into this? the question is in case you missed it, the question is, republicans have been playing a long game. the democrats been reacting, probably not an easy win right now for the democrats. but you've these in the white house, you've got these two big personalities who are just, you know from a psychoanalytic point of view are, likely to come into conflict at some point. is there what should we expect? fireworks is there some kind of opportunity? how might this break down? a little speculation? yeah, i'll do some speculation, but i'll start one of my

favorite things, which is talking about my disappointment, the yeah, i mean they've been they've been a disappointment for a long time i think that there's a lot of shell shock in the party. right now that trump won and that they lost everything and very little. you talked about how they don't play like the long game. and i think that part of the reason for that is because they're kind of allergic to introspection and so they don't want to really address a lot of the reasons they may have lost. right. they don't want to address support for an unpopular war. they don't want address an economic system that doesn't for people. they don't want to provide these solutions. they don't want to provide solutions that may be difficult for the people who fund and backed their party. and so that puts the party in difficult situation when you're facing a threat like trump, the

threat of trump is existential and. in order to address it, it's going to take like massive of political will. and in order to make a political change and i think we're starting to get to a point where that might happen. joe, just because the grassroots are so angry and fed up with this. but that's what it would take. and i think and i think that as far as what you're saying, right, like right now, that's not going to happen. so i want to say that i will talk about disappointment democrats, but also like i think there are reasons to hope that that there might be some kind of like a liberal or left resurgence that that that could actually challenge power. as far as the egos in the room. i mean, that's been the hope, right, that this would just that they would just know start fighting with each other. i. i'm not a doctor, so i'm not going to say what you know,

like, i'm not i'm not going to diagnose. but would say that trump doesn't seem to be particularly interested in the presidency and doesn't seem to be paying a lot of attention to what's going on other than just kind of signing off whatever musk is doing and. it appears that for now, he's happy. do that. and i think the media has tried to force a wedge between them, which is not like. i don't think that the media being particularly i think that's just the media just tends to do that if they try and find you're looking for a story and and pushing it well these are two guys egos as you say and so so i think that i think that egos are going to do it. but i do think that if if what musk is doing is so unpopular, that it starts to drag trump down. it's already starting to drag down today. there were polls that came out that are pretty bad for trump. musk, i think, is even lower. so he's very hyper aware of that

kind of thing. so maybe that's what does it. but i think that we can maybe hope that that works. but i think that putting all phrase in that basket is probably ultimately a mistake on that note, it's sheer, you know, i think should wrap up for now times are tough but but your book is and and it's a bright light in in trying to make sense and understand this thank you one more time. thank you. i spend.

look for many of these authors to appear in near future on booktv. >> you have been watching booktv, television for