[SPEAKER_00]: The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now is the time of monsters.

[SPEAKER_00]: With those words from Gramsci, I welcome you to the time of monsters podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is sponsored by The Nation magazine.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jeet here.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a writer for The Nation.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the podcast is also widely available on all podcasting platforms, as well as a few radio stations.

[SPEAKER_00]: This week, I want to take up some monsters that are always in the news, which are the sort of tech billionaires like Peter Teele and Elon Musk and Mark Andrey Sun and David Sachs.

[SPEAKER_00]: And in particular, their relationship with the media.

[SPEAKER_00]: And in some cases, what has was once a surprising relationship that they had one time, I would say, [SPEAKER_00]: of radical voices who have now really aligned themselves with the tech billionaires.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm talking about people like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taiyebi.

[SPEAKER_00]: And to talk about all this, I'm very happy to have on returning guests, Owen Higgins, author of own tech billionaires and the right about the loudest voices on the left.

[SPEAKER_00]: The book has been out for a while now, but it's very timely because these characters are always in the news.

[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe I was always like Peter Teele because I think he gave a kind of interesting interview by the New York Times recently, where with Comist or Ross do that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And at one point Ross do that had asked him, well, you know, you do want the humans' feces to continue.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Teele, which is a fairly simple question.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Teele hemmed in hard and had a very difficult time.

[SPEAKER_00]: giving a straightforward answer.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he eventually came to yes, but I think it's in his case qualified in a number of different ways.

[SPEAKER_00]: So who are these like tech lords and why are some of them like teal?

[SPEAKER_00]: Not so sure, you know, whether they want humanity to continue.

[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps that's the first of all.

[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the program.

[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.

[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for having me.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and let's start with that question.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like who are these characters?

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think [SPEAKER_02]: Peter Teele is an interesting one.

[SPEAKER_02]: And as you said, you know, he is in the news right now after that interview with Ross.

[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, his, he's a longtime kind of conservative activist slash VC guy.

[SPEAKER_02]: So he's a co-founder of Palantir, which is a data processing kind of surveillance company that works alongside of the federal government.

[SPEAKER_02]: It gets a lot of contrast from the federal government.

[SPEAKER_02]: He co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk before that.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's how he made his money in the first place.

[SPEAKER_02]: He's an early investor in Facebook.

[SPEAKER_02]: He has his fingers in a lot of pots, I guess.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's the right phrase there.

[SPEAKER_02]: His investments have paid off in a lot of ways, but his [SPEAKER_02]: And he's been somewhat relatively apolitical there where he's contracted with the government quite a bit.

[SPEAKER_02]: But his ideological commitments, his politics, him always skewed pretty far to the right, going back to his college years.

[SPEAKER_02]: And he kind of has this conservative tech utopianism where he believes that tech is going to kind of save the world.

[SPEAKER_02]: And Mark and Jason is a lot like this too, specifically.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think kind of everybody [SPEAKER_02]: in Silicon Valley is tech utopian to one extent or another.

[SPEAKER_02]: Teals is kind of very specifically right wing.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's targeted to this kind of [SPEAKER_02]: I kind of far right vision of the world where there's kind of like this idea of the post humanism, transhumanism, where humanity can kind of dismiss the reality of the physical world or at least like our physical world as we experience it.

[SPEAKER_02]: It feels also famous for [SPEAKER_02]: injecting himself with the blood of younger people in an effort to stay on.

[SPEAKER_02]: However true that story is the fact that it exists in the first place kind of speaks to his reputation.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, I mean, he's very interested in longevity.

[SPEAKER_00]: As some of these characters are, he has family said that he rejects the ideology of death.

[SPEAKER_00]: By which he means the ideology of death means like the biological fact that we all die.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he thinks like there's no reason to accept this.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you had a pretty good point.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think in the nineteen nineties, he and a lot of other people in Silicon Valley were interested in things such as crygenics, which were with a view towards freezing their bodies and extending their lives forever.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, I think more broadly, one can post humanism as a phrase that gets thrown around.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's more broadly, one can say that he, T.L.

[SPEAKER_00]: and these other characters all have a kind of variation of the sort of going-gold fantasy.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is a fantasy of Atlas, France, famous [SPEAKER_00]: Libertarian Creed, Apple Shrug, where the rich get tired of being the producers, the makers, and getting taxed by the takers and the parasites, and so they go off and Leo, create their own utopian society away from the rest of them.

[SPEAKER_00]: humanity.

[SPEAKER_00]: And once you can see, variations are going called in things like sort of cironics, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, freeze yourself and you'll wake up, you're at where your head will wake up, you know, five hundred years in the future in the utopia.

[SPEAKER_00]: So you don't have to deal with the current world.

[SPEAKER_00]: But also in Elon Musk's idea of colonizing Mars, of creating, and it is a specific political utopia of he and his libertarian followers will colonize Mars and make it separate.

[SPEAKER_00]: You see the same variation in other ideas of like sea studying, which T.L.

[SPEAKER_00]: was interested in, of basically creating these like shipboard utopia that are outside of international law and where he can be the kind of king.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the sort of longevity stuff is a variation of that.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I think we're broadly, you know, one can see a spectrum of ideas, all of which basically amount to, we're going to exist as a separate master race apart from the rest of humanity.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think that's a really good way of summing up their belief system.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's interesting to use Iran's Atlas Rogue as [SPEAKER_02]: as kind of a way in here, because I also think of, and I mentioned this in the book, Teddy Roosevelt's Man in the Arena speech, which, and the part that I isolate is about the media, but the speech overall is about how, or the man in the arena section of a longer speech, which would just kind of about how, you know, those who do do, and those who can't do just criticize, you know, like that, and so if, [SPEAKER_02]: If you criticize what the tech guys are doing, you're just, you're just a hater.

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's how they see it like they see themselves as worthy of a level of adulation that they never feel that they're getting.

[SPEAKER_02]: Their politics are kind of based in this resentment.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that that it kind of sums up a lot of their beliefs as someone when it comes to things like the cryo or [SPEAKER_02]: like the blood exchange stuff or this guy who is always trying to find a way to be younger, he's trying to make his body younger.

[SPEAKER_02]: That's like the new frontier for these guys.

[SPEAKER_02]: They consider themselves to be pioneers and so they think that tech is going to develop a way for them to live forever or at the very least live longer.

[SPEAKER_02]: And this kind of just goes into their broader belief system, this tech utopianism, which in kind of the next stage of it makes them believe that whatever they do is justified.

[SPEAKER_02]: And when it comes to that kind of mentality, there is a belief in the meritocracy kind of like that we got here on merit and hard work, even though that's seldom the case.

[SPEAKER_02]: But this is the self-mathologizing that they've done.

[SPEAKER_02]: And if they got there on merit, anybody who's getting there on any other way and they usually use this against affirmative action is doing it.

[SPEAKER_02]: They're cheating.

[SPEAKER_02]: They're getting a hand up.

[SPEAKER_02]: You're not my fault that I'm a white guy and I had success.

[SPEAKER_02]: That's just happened to be more talented.

[SPEAKER_02]: I don't really have to spell out right how how this kind of didn't actually goes like racist politics and like and if all right politics.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I didn't particularly uh striking in the fact that a lot of these characters are you know actually like white South Africans.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, like real and yet before we're talking about it.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, it was a musker from there and Teele spent some time there when he was was a child.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, no.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I mean, you know, very clearly benefited from, you know, like an overtly racist system.

[SPEAKER_00]: But as part of their, you know, generation of wealth that they had started off with.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we don't need to like underscore that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, like this type of rich person, you know, who thinks that they're the producers and it presents everyone else.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is an old character in American like, you know, the Robert Barrens.

[SPEAKER_00]: were like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: But certainly, the rise of tech has created this new class of Robert Barrens.

[SPEAKER_00]: What I think your book, you know, delves into is this other side of the story, which is that they're not content with simply being like, you know, wealthier than anyone who's ever lived.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they're not content with having a normal sway over the political process and both parties, they also want to control the cultural space.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you mentioned this aspect of resentment, which I think is very key to their personality.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you won't season all their writing.

[SPEAKER_00]: They kind of very strongly feel like, you know, why are there people who don't appreciate how great I am?

[SPEAKER_00]: And who are critical?

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the, you know, these obviously is psychological element.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that there's also like a kind of economic element in that sense.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of their economic models in Silicon Valley are based on sort of like venture capital and investment and in creating like selling like these like sort of piling this guy proposals.

[SPEAKER_00]: Some of which like Facebook pan out and make a lot of money.

[SPEAKER_00]: But a lot that go nowhere like that thermos.

[SPEAKER_00]: That sort of blood transfusion thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: that Mark Andre said invested in, or like all the stuff that Musk has been saying for many years, like selling, saying, you know, we're going to get driverless cars any day now.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, Musk has revealed he said, you know, we're going to be in Mars in ten years, which he's been saying for, you know, more than ten years.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he's been saying this in twenty fifteen.

[SPEAKER_00]: We'd be in Mars by twenty twenty five, but we're nowhere in here.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, getting anywhere near Mars.

[SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, like, realistically, like, we're not gonna be there in decades, many decades.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a feature.

[SPEAKER_00]: But you're raising money with these kind of, like, pinesky proposals.

[SPEAKER_00]: So if that's your business model, then any sort of journalism is actually threatening.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because you get like these journalists that are starting to ask questions, like, is this led system actually working the way that you are claiming it's working?

[SPEAKER_00]: or is this like you're using fraudulent science.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I think these two components, first of all, come on, of a psychological resentment against criticism and a business model that requires materialism, maybe explains why these characters are interested in this.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have any other thoughts on that?

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think that it's very much about the material interest.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think that's the primary focus for these guys.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I want to kind of piggyback on what you said about venture capital.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, like they are, they are interested in investing in all of these different things.

[SPEAKER_02]: They are interested in hyping them up for their own game.

[SPEAKER_02]: Musk is maybe the king of this, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: He always makes these huge promises for what his companies can do.

[SPEAKER_02]: They sell them if ever deliver and it doesn't matter.

[SPEAKER_02]: He continues to just make money hand or fist mostly on paper because of the valuation of this companies, but you know, like if it's still happening, people are still believing it.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I do think that they are concerned about journalism because it both exposes them psychologically in ways that could damage their investments.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that there is the venture capital side of that, but I want to talk about the maybe the more important.

[SPEAKER_02]: aspect of how Silicon Valley became so powerful, which is government funding, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: So you have venture capital you invest into this company, but the way that the company often makes a lot of money is through government subsidies or outright government contracting.

[SPEAKER_02]: And when I mentioned Teele earlier, I said that, you know, he made a lot of money off the government and he's ideologically to the right, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: So these are two things that are not as contradictory as you might think that they are.

[SPEAKER_02]: In that, Teele, for example, like genuinely thought Barack Obama was a communist.

[SPEAKER_02]: He genuinely thought that he was an authoritarian socialist.

[SPEAKER_02]: But that did not stop him from making money of the Obama administration.

[SPEAKER_02]: It did not stop him from contracting with Obama.

[SPEAKER_02]: It did not stop him from palentier taking tons of money from the companies that he's invested in making money off of a democratic administration.

[SPEAKER_02]: And while a lot of these companies did quite well under Trump in the first term, they didn't like lose their contracts under Biden.

[SPEAKER_02]: They still continue to work with the government under Biden, even as they were saying, all of these things about him.

[SPEAKER_02]: And look, I don't think that the federal government in a country that not only has free speech, right, should [SPEAKER_02]: make your contract dependent on whether or not you agree with the president, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, sure.

[SPEAKER_02]: So I don't have a problem with them continuing to, like in that manner, right, continuing to contract with the guy, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think that there is a fundamental issue there.

[SPEAKER_02]: But what I do think is important to note is that if you're going to be saying all that stuff, [SPEAKER_02]: and continue to contract with the federal government.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like that hypocrisy does need to be exposed.

[SPEAKER_02]: And in the exposure of that hypocrisy, journalists will often find out other things about these individuals that they definitely don't want to be revealed.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like Elon Musk's alleged drug habit that's been reported on.

[SPEAKER_02]: Right.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think there was some reporting that he was getting a tipped off to drug tests.

[SPEAKER_02]: before they were happening right like these are these are allegations.

[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think this has been definitively proven yet but but like a couple people said that this is what's happening.

[SPEAKER_02]: Enough of that kind of stuff and it's possible that under a functioning government you might lose your contracts.

[SPEAKER_02]: For Musk, the real fear that he'll lose his contracts is because of the capriciousness of Donald Trump and like him just deciding that he wants to cancel the contracts, whether or not that would actually happen, I think, is a different conversation.

[SPEAKER_02]: But their concern is that when they're not just having just nonstop adulation by the press, [SPEAKER_02]: When the press is looking at them critically, that it might impact their bottom line.

[SPEAKER_02]: Whether it is, as you say, like the VC side or whether it's the government contracting side, anything that can damage their bottom line is something that they don't want.

[SPEAKER_02]: So any time that there's a journalist who's asking any kind of questions that they don't want, they react poorly to it and they have for decades and kind of like that process of them reacting poorly to it.

[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the kind of alternative right-wing media ecosystem that they built out of it is kind of, you know, the argument of the book.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, sure.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I know.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, did sort of like build on that.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's another aspect of like Musquare.

[SPEAKER_00]: He wouldn't want reporting, which is that a lot of his contracts depend upon security clearance and like access to high-level information.

[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, there was reporting which apparently is one of the causes of the rift with Trump that Musquare is trying to get a hold of pentagon information.

[SPEAKER_00]: that, you know, was not part of his purview.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so stuff like that, I mean, is an actual real material threat to them.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you get reporting that, you know, like a major government contractor is, you know, like acquiring security information that they shouldn't.

[SPEAKER_00]: I would also have like a broader, like ideological level.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, if you get like enough reporting, [SPEAKER_00]: I think it does open up questions about their whole role in society.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's to say, if their wealth is based, as it is, like on government funding and often government research, [SPEAKER_00]: The question is, why do we have these billionaires?

[SPEAKER_00]: Why are they allowed to profit off of this?

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a kind of like neoliberal model, we all public private cooperation.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if something like the iPhone, largely created by state Monday, and you have an alternative model of a nation like China, which [SPEAKER_00]: funds a lot of its own research with the state controls then why why would be like a lot of the continue why why not just like cut out the real man and just have state funding and that the wealth is controlled by the state like I think that's actually also a real threat to them like if you people start raising questions about like why why are they allowed to exist yeah the [SPEAKER_02]: I wonder how much of a threat they really think it is just because the danger of the US government, like walking something like that back is probably pretty low.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, no, it's just not like a media threat, but it doesn't like, it's like, any sort of reporting does kind of like open up these questions, you know?

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, I think that I think that when they see things like Mom Donnie winning in New York, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: When they see people like Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ilano, Mar, other left wing.

[SPEAKER_02]: voices talking about a more economically just kind of, you know, like more maybe nationalized economy to the extent that these figures really talk about that.

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we are still in the United States.

[SPEAKER_02]: They, I think that they kind of see it as something that is terrifying to them.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I do actually want to just go back to calling Obama a communist.

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, that's why I'm so I think it lines fine.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like I think that even like the very mild form of like, you know, like redistribution of like Obama care, they see as like a massive threat.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, maybe there's an element of paranoia here.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I think there's also a more realistic sense, like if people do get a taste of, we could actually change the rules and the enormous wealth that these guys have is actually just a function of policy decisions.

[SPEAKER_00]: We could have a different set of policy decisions.

[SPEAKER_00]: I actually think that they're legitimately right in like fearing that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like that is not a conversation that will work out well for them.

[SPEAKER_00]: If that becomes the center of public debate.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's not a conversation that works out well for them, but it's like it's an own goal because if you call someone like Barack Obama a communist, then you're kind of diluting the power of that word if you can find make it a bad thing, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: If you call AOC communist, if you call even mom donning a communist, I mean, these guys, they're not projecting a vision of politics.

[SPEAKER_02]: It is actually that damaging to private industry.

[SPEAKER_02]: They are projecting a vision of politics at the moment that sees private industry as in the partnership [SPEAKER_02]: with the state, it's just one that is kind of less of this kind of ergonomics of vision that we've been under for like the last forty five years that's only gotten worse and worse, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: Like they're just saying, hey, like let's kind of like wind this back a little bit.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that if you continually like fear monger about that, you are diluting the [SPEAKER_02]: kind of extremism of that word and that ideology to the point that, you know, people as they're growing up, younger people are kind of more susceptible to these arguments.

[SPEAKER_02]: And eventually you have more left-wing politics coming out of it.

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I do really believe that if the right, and here I'm not talking just about like the tech guys, one time I like the right-wing media and right-wing politicians, if they hadn't freaked out like they had over Obama, [SPEAKER_02]: And you know like called everything he was trying to do socialism and communism and kind of any other word they could they could slot in there other than black to say why they didn't like him.

[SPEAKER_02]: That you know essentially by the time that someone like Bernie comes around with his argument.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like it's a popular argument that the American people are primed for anyway since like two thousand eight, but all but the idea that a democratic socialist is running is no longer as terrifying because they have put in place this kind of like like they've they've they've hyped this up and fear mongered about it so much that it has actually had this kind of reverse effect that they that they maybe did not intend for.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: He wanted that to be filmed on that because I actually had to use it in really interesting rhetorical term that one now sees with Mamdani where Trump has just said, you know, he's not just a socialist.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's something far worse, which is a communist.

[SPEAKER_00]: What's my mind basically means that Trump is seeding that, oh, yeah, yeah, socialist.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's an acceptable politics.

[SPEAKER_00]: People will say it with a birdie.

[SPEAKER_00]: and stuff that they like.

[SPEAKER_00]: But you know, like he's actually something far worse.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's a communist.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I would imagine five years from now if we were going to say like, you know, well, this guy's not just like a communist.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's like a malice.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you have to keep up with the rhetorical latte.

[SPEAKER_00]: As these ideas get normalized.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, once we bring in this, I think that's a good point to bring in the other half of your like book.

[SPEAKER_00]: which is the journalism side of it and some of these characters because one of the characters in your book, Matt Taibi, has weighed in on this controversy about Mamdeni and he has written very harshly against Mamdeni and saying that this is a new level of crazy American politics and that we have someone who's talking about [SPEAKER_00]: you know, thinking over the means of production.

[SPEAKER_00]: And really sounding like, you know, like Bill O'Reilly or like an angry Fox News grandpa.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is, you know, like anyone has followed Matt Taiby knows, like maybe he is shifted in his politics over the years, all he denies it.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it seemed like a particularly significant change [SPEAKER_00]: considering that this is a meta-ebies guy who made his fame, you know, writing about Goldman Sachs in two thousand and eight.

[SPEAKER_00]: And suddenly, you know, he's making the sort of standard right-wing argument that, oh, this is a communist one.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think that's a standard right-wing argument pretty much sums up everything Matt Taibi does now.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's nothing particularly interesting about his writing anymore.

[SPEAKER_02]: this kind of like one cat for Edge Lord's style that he has that back in the late two thousands was kind of a good way of explaining.

[SPEAKER_02]: the financial crisis to people and kids in college and other people too.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think that a lot of his reporting back then was very good.

[SPEAKER_02]: And his politics were quite obviously to the left, no matter what he says now.

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it was against this kind of corporate control, this corporate power against the financial kind of politics that the financial control politics that today [SPEAKER_02]: He's now arguing, I think, in favor of whether he's doing it explicitly or not.

[SPEAKER_02]: Going after mom Donnie in the way that he did is something that, it sounds like Mark Levin, who is this kind of, just particularly insane, but just a Fox News conservative.

[SPEAKER_02]: And that's kind of what Matt does now.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you go to his Twitter feed, [SPEAKER_02]: It's just him ranting about vaccines and trans issues and rush a gate.

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's in, you know, still talking about rush a gate like nine years.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: We would Trump also does.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like, if from what's the deflect from Jeff, you have to say, he said, it's just like rush a gate.

[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, but the vaccine stuff is like five years old.

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, like, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_02]: The mom donning stuff is relatively fresh.

[SPEAKER_02]: Just because it's something he hasn't been just talking about for about the last like however many years.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's not that you in the news.

[SPEAKER_02]: Something is actually in the news, but this isn't even like particularly new itself.

[SPEAKER_02]: He went after Howard Zinn for Thanksgiving, you know, a few years ago, just talking about how America's awesome and you know, like how dare you say that it's not good and like, yeah, go ahead.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, actually, let's step back with Matt Taibi because there's this.

[SPEAKER_00]: So this, I think you are wearing an agreement that there has been a kind of evolution, but maybe it's worth stepping back because I think one of the things about you're both this, that's very good is that it gives a very fine grain analysis of the evolution of two of the major figures, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibi, showing both of them starting off with [SPEAKER_00]: perhaps not a standard left wing position, but maybe like a left libertarian anti establishment radical position and then you know like evolving course something that's much more in conformity with you know sort of like just a fox news Republican ideology [SPEAKER_00]: So when we'll tell you, I mean, like, you know, I think, you know, let's the flesh out his evolution a little bit.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you, I think you rightly pointed out, as an example of a gen X figure.

[SPEAKER_00]: Born, I believe, in like, nineteen seventy, and really coming out of an age in the sort of like nineteen nineties and the sort of cynicism of the end of history, moment of, you know, the Clinton presidency, [SPEAKER_00]: And making his name, I guess, as a writer first in Russia.

[SPEAKER_00]: So you want to talk a little bit about, you know, who where Taiyubi's coming from?

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, he had a kind of what sounds like a [SPEAKER_02]: bit of a wild boisterous youth, like had to go to a couple, I think one reform school went to NYU then went to Bard.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's a bad boy.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's a bad boy.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm a high school dropout, I get it, man.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm certainly not judging him at all for that.

[SPEAKER_00]: go so this is a bit in that sort of hunter Thompson tradition right like you know someone who's like uh uh uh in journalism but has his anti-established been attitude this area of y'all sex drug drugs rock and roll sex drug rock and roll yeah definitely although his father is a pretty well established journalist so he does come from it with with with a certain amount of family background [SPEAKER_02]: Um, you know, he goes to Russia, uh, bounces around a little bit.

[SPEAKER_02]: He goes among Goliath.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think it is like a professional basketball player there for a little while.

[SPEAKER_02]: Um, and then, uh, he, he eventually finds his way to the exile, which is this kind of satirical expat American expat, uh, newspaper in Moscow during, uh, the kind of the, the, the Yelsen years as [SPEAKER_02]: the country is kind of descending into this anarko capitalist vision of like what's going to come in place of the the USS R after it falls.

[SPEAKER_02]: This publication is definitely sex drugs and whatever kind of music there's a lot of.

[SPEAKER_02]: They write a lot about.

[SPEAKER_02]: getting pretty high and drunk and consorting with young women.

[SPEAKER_02]: I guess I'll put it that way.

[SPEAKER_02]: Now they have said that this is satire and I'm not going to stand here and tell you that I think that it is real or not real.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just gonna say that, but he had, but in order to understand, maybe you kind of have to understand that level of the way that he was writing about this stuff was pretty misogynistic, him and his writing partner, Mark games, and satirical or not, [SPEAKER_02]: a lot of the stuff did not age well.

[SPEAKER_02]: Tybee and Ames end up kind of like breaking up their partnership breaks up.

[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think they've ever really reconnected.

[SPEAKER_02]: Tybee comes back to the U.S.

[SPEAKER_02]: He works in New York Observer and then he around the two thousand four election.

[SPEAKER_02]: Then I think by the end of the very end of calendar year, two thousand four, he joins Rolling Stone where he writes about politics and he develops a large following doing that.

[SPEAKER_02]: He has a very strong voice in the way that he talks about this stuff.

[SPEAKER_02]: And the financial crisis hits, and this is kind of like the perfect crisis for him and his talents.

[SPEAKER_02]: He's in the right place at the right time.

[SPEAKER_02]: He coins the golden sacks as the vampire squid sucking the life out.

[SPEAKER_02]: So I can, you know, the money out of everything.

[SPEAKER_02]: From there, he goes to first look media, which wants him to kind of form a more financially focused publication, kind of like in parallel to the founding of the intercept, which is, which is kind of concurrent with this, that doesn't work out.

[SPEAKER_02]: He goes back to Rolling Stone and [SPEAKER_02]: In twenty sixteen after Trump gets elected.

[SPEAKER_02]: Matt is very critical of this kind of Russia gate conspiracy theory that liberals have invested in I think particularly and and this is this is kind of my take on it because I was very opposed this as well like this idea that like from like the liberal side that they [SPEAKER_02]: didn't want to kind of face up to what had just happened and why Trump had won, and it was much easier to say, hey, this happened because Vladimir Putin stole the election.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's a very, very crucial part of this story that, and I think with both the TIEB and Glenn Greenwald, who's the other major figure, they start off from a physician of like being to the left of liberals and having a real legitimate criticism of the Democratic Party establishment.

[SPEAKER_00]: which not knows, deserves all the criticism it can get.

[SPEAKER_00]: And with the Russia case enough, I think, you know, has largely, their position, you know, like largely makes sense.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I do think you can find some evidence that perhaps there was some Russian support, but certainly not of Trump in the year, but certainly not enough.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was used as a deflection to, you know, like basically not have self-critical analysis of like why Hillary Clinton lost the Donald Trump.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, so, you know, like, that's not even like mid-pick.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, like, you know, like, he was coming from like, actually like a very good and valuable place.

[SPEAKER_02]: He was, he was, but what I would say is like that.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that just for listeners, if anybody doesn't remember just how, like, [SPEAKER_02]: wild it was at this point.

[SPEAKER_02]: The way that the Democratic media apparatus was treating this, like any conspiracy theory that you wanted to say about Russia would get you on TV, basically.

[SPEAKER_02]: And so there was an incentive there for people to go further and further and further with it.

[SPEAKER_02]: And for about a year and a half, two years, [SPEAKER_02]: things for a pretty dire, especially MSNBC was a big vector of this, specifically CNN a little bit too.

[SPEAKER_02]: I remember New York Magazine Jonathan Chate said that maybe Trump has been a Russian agent since the KGB, like picked him up in the eighties when he visited Moscow, like, that's crazy.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's crazy.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's definitely the chain thing because he's like literally said, you know, like, you have Trump been a Soviet Russian agent since, yeah, in the eighties.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it would be irresponsible not to speculate.

[SPEAKER_02]: It was another one.

[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, not to digress too far into this.

[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, no, I mean, but I mean, I think that I, you know, like, you know, as you mentioned, you were critical and then there were other people who are very critical of that, but you know, did not end up becoming Fox News conservative.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it is the case that he was starting from, you know, like an appropriate response to a case of like liberal access and really liberal like fear-mongering and fantasy politics.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think that where kind of I diverged from him and Glenn Greenwald as well is that like eventually [SPEAKER_02]: It's no longer interesting to me and what's going on with the Trump administration is far worse than this.

[SPEAKER_02]: The reason that I was invested in pushing back on this is like, I was like, look, the Democrats are, they're, they're what there is right now for an opposition party and like they are wasting their time with this stuff.

[SPEAKER_02]: And so like that's like why in my view, it need to be pushed back on because you need to have like some level of [SPEAKER_02]: reality as you are pushing back against like the horrific policies that the Trump administration was pushing for, but for Matt and Glenn, they will for Glenn certainly, I think that there was like a lot of just like in tip of these words liberals and that just and that's for a lot of reasons and I don't know if we'll have time to get into that, but for Matt, he did try to do a reset with his liberal audience.

[SPEAKER_02]: And that was this book about Eric Garner [SPEAKER_02]: uh...

victim of police brutality called i can't breathe and this came out and i believe uh...

october uh...

twenty seventeen yeah and as he was promoting it like there was a whole book tour plan like this was going to be like his really like there's no other way to look at it like then like this guy want to do a big reset with uh...

his liberal base and kind of get back on their good like hey we can disagree about rush a but like that's you know uh...

but uh...

[SPEAKER_02]: The anger toward him from a lot of liberals was already existing and a kind of right-wing operation, media operation to [SPEAKER_02]: delegitimize him, went back to his writing about women in the exile, especially during this moment of me too, that was going on at the moment, and they kind of used this to not only torpedo that, but to try to torpedo his career.

[SPEAKER_02]: And Matt felt really betrayed by this, really betrayed that nobody was sticking up for him, that nobody was supporting him, Walker Braggman, [SPEAKER_02]: uh...

reporters as as I know in the book like he did a whole investigation into these allegations of like you know not at the x-hour like his his other work that he was like abusive to women and like found that they were pretty much unsubstantiated but it didn't matter at that point the book tour had basically been canceled uh...

the book i don't think sold very well uh...

although you know and maybe it did but it certainly wasn't like this huge success i think that he had hoped it would be [SPEAKER_02]: And his reaction to this was to get further entrenched into liberals bad worse the conservatives kind of territory.

[SPEAKER_02]: And that kind of set him up for this kind of like right lean as kind of kept on getting further and further to the right and then by the time that we arrive in twenty twenty.

[SPEAKER_02]: When COVID hits, he's kind of primed to the AA right wing actor and COVID, I think kind of pushes him over the edge.

[SPEAKER_02]: And then of course, the Twitter files couple years later, they kind of like, yeah, it's kind of complete, complete the process.

[SPEAKER_02]: But I would say that COVID and the vaccine stuff is really kind of, that was where this shift that had been going on for a while kind of like went into overdrive and he went all the way to the right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, I think that that makes sense.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's good to emphasize the role of kind of like audience.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the fact that after the MeToo stuff, he had was like looking for a new audience.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, the MeToo thing is a complicated story in the sense that as you mentioned, there's actually no serious allegations that's been associated of like actual [SPEAKER_00]: activity, you know, having said that.

[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote some pretty horrifically massage of the stuff, you know, like in the exile, which you know, like, you know, the, which is like legitimate subject for criticism.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, they put an awkward situation.

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I want to be very clear that when I say that the allegations have been a substantial, I'm not, I'm not defending nor condemning him.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just saying that that Walker didn't find anything there, like that that would indicate that there was like some serious abuse of behavior, but you're completely right.

[SPEAKER_02]: His writing was bad enough.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, yeah, you know, I wasn't harming.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, but I also think that the writing was very bad, but I think it's also the case that the accusations were also weaponized against them.

[SPEAKER_00]: Bye, you know, people like you're like, you know, like, is there a certain sort of story?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, who are like, you know, like, [SPEAKER_00]: early, uh, you know, very sinister characters and and by liberals who like, you know, like, I don't think would have given that stuff much attention if we were for the fact that he were critic of reciprocates.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, like, like, um, in a sense, like, you know, like, I don't think he's totally wrong and thinking that he was ill served.

[SPEAKER_00]: by that.

[SPEAKER_00]: In the sense that like the level of his cancellation was like far under proportion of like whatever since and it was done for other reasons.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was done by people, you know, on the right to do like his politics and liberals who do like his politics.

[SPEAKER_01]: I told him to totally agree.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, having said that, I think that where he ends up and this will have to be like the last point, but I think it [SPEAKER_00]: ties back in with the right-wing tech lords, which is that they created this new ecosystem where they could be of great help for someone like him trying to recreate his career, but with institutions like Substack, [SPEAKER_00]: with his new relationship with Twitter and the Twitter files, which gave him a new kind of saliency.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the tech lawyers were ready to take notice of his right-wing turn and then make him an ally.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the aspect is not just tech lawyers, but that the model that they're creating is a very [SPEAKER_00]: audience centered model which on one level you might think is a good thing but actually make someone a prisoner of their audience with the sort of self radicalization that one sees on social media where like you know like if you get hits from spreading COVID conspiracy theories then you have an incentive to spread a lot more COVID conspiracy theories because that's how you will get subscribers and so so I mean like [SPEAKER_00]: The economic, you know, status aspect of it is also a part of this story, like it's an ideological evolution.

[SPEAKER_00]: And within this sort of media ecosystem that rewards this right-wing turn.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's a huge part of it.

[SPEAKER_02]: And when Musk selected Taibi to kind of report on the Twitter files, these [SPEAKER_02]: very carefully curated self-selected documents from inside the company that kind of pushed forward this story that that Musk wanted to have put forward.

[SPEAKER_02]: Taibi was one of the people he picked and he said that he picked him because he was like this independent journalist and he knew that he would do a good job.

[SPEAKER_02]: But the reality is the David Sachs of fellow billionaires, the person who selected who suggested Tyvey, much like Mark Andrewson and other fellow tech billionaires was the person who suggested Barry Weiss, because they knew that these guys were somewhat pliable and would tell the story that they wanted.

[SPEAKER_02]: And what you say about audience captures totally, totally right.

[SPEAKER_02]: And it completely applies here.

[SPEAKER_02]: You have [SPEAKER_02]: Tybee, the first story that he publishes from the Twitter files are about the Hunterbine laptop, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, like this is like not, you know, not really a real story like the quote unquote suppression of the New York post story about it, but this is the whole thing.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like there were stories within the Twitter files that were somewhat interesting, notably the intercept had one on the white listing of certain like State Department aligned accounts [SPEAKER_02]: But this was, this was just like red meat, right, for the right way.

[SPEAKER_02]: And there was a reason that he decided to do that.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's a reason that he selected that.

[SPEAKER_02]: That was because that's what Musk wanted to do.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that Tybee also knew that his new audience was going to eat this up.

[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, the, the, [SPEAKER_02]: Incentives, the audience incentives of Substack have led, Tybe, to continue to tilt further to the right.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that that is a large part of why he's still so invested in the conspiracy theories around the vaccine.

[SPEAKER_02]: He's still talking about the Twitter files and Roshigate.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's why, just to bring it full circle, why he wrote this thing about Mondani, because he knows that his audience is like these kind of disaffected conservatives [SPEAKER_02]: And the tech guys who have supported his career, and where it is now, and he is going to continue to kind of total line as opposed to kind of go back to his roots as a more left-leaning journalist, more left-leaning funded.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, no.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's right, Linda.

[SPEAKER_00]: You think to wrap up?

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it's what, you know, deals with that typey, and his relationship with the sort of like tech billionaires like Moscow.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's also a section which we don't have time to get into about Glenn Greenwald who has had, you know, like a somewhat similar trajectory, but you know, with significant differences.

[SPEAKER_00]: And as I said before, like I think I really strengths this book is a kind of nuance of actually reporting out these stories and giving this sort of, you know, how these evolutions happen and how these relationships are formed.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very, I can't recommend this book howly enough like it's actually very illuminating for understanding both the the political economy of the tech world and how it's changing media and very well reported out.

[SPEAKER_00]: So on that note that I would just encourage everyone if you've enjoyed this conversation, go ahead and get the book because you'll be very well rewarded.

[SPEAKER_00]: with the great read.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to thank Owen for being on the podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me.