The Tech Oligarchy’s Campaign Against the Media w/ Eoin Higgins

0:00 Instead of it kind of being like a natural evolution, the net effect of this was always to weaken the entire institution of journalism, whether it was like independent or mainstream.

0:36 Now, before we get into this week's episode, I just wanted to say you might be wondering why there haven't been many episodes on recent developments like Deep Seek and everything that's happening with Elon Musk, the Tech Billionaires in the US government. Well, that's because I was on vacation the past couple weeks while many of these things were happening.

0:53 So if you have been waiting for episodes on those sorts of issues, you can be sure that over the next few weeks I will be covering those things. You know, we will be talking about what Elon Musk is doing, we will be talking about the state of AI, we will be talking about what's happening in the US government and the wider consequences of that.

1:09 I just needed a little break before we get into it all. Now, this episode I recorded before I went on vacation, but I still think it very much relates to what is happening in this moment. For people who are really into, you know, the politics of media, they might be really up on the stories of Glenn Greenwald, the Matt Taibi, and their changing political orientations over the past number of years.

1:33 And that forms a big part of Owen's book, tracking the trajectories of these particular people. And while they do come up in this interview, I wanted to talk about the more structural factors with Owen that get discussed in the book as well. But how this transformation in the media ecosystem and in the funding of media, including how they have funded particular media ventures, has affected and shaped the types of media and the types of coverage that we now receive, especially as there is this growing shift away from, say, mainstream traditional reporting toward independent content creators and independent journalists and things like that.

2:10 And how that becomes an opportunity for these very powerful, very influential, very wealthy people to use that power that they have to influence the type of reporting, the type of narratives that get pushed out to the public, not just by funding the people doing that work, but also by controlling the platforms and the algorithms that kind of determine what we see, or at least what is initially presented to us, if we don't try to look further and seek things that we specifically want to be watching.

2:37 So for that reason, obviously, I thought that this was a really fascinating conversation with Owen. I was really happy to have him back on the show because he was on the show in the past to talk about Mark Andreessen, someone who, of course, comes off again in this conversation. People like Mark Andreessen, Peter Thiel are big characters in this story.

2:52 And I think you'll enjoy it as well. At least I hope so. So if you enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week so we can keep having these critical in-depth conversations.

3:10 You can join supporters like Juan in Berlin, Johnny in Seattle, Clay in San Francisco, and Sasha from Ottawa by going to patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us, or you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Owen, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

3:26 Really excited to chat. You know, you've written this really interesting book that digs into the tech billionaire's relationship to media, how that has transformed, how some people cover the tech media and these broader shifts that we've seen in like independent media and those sorts of spaces over the past number of years, right?

3:42 Uh, that I think a lot of people who listen to this show will have observed, but might not know exactly why that has happened. So I'm interested in digging into all of this with you. I think I would start by saying we have this story that the media is very friendly to the tech industry, or at least was up until like the latter half of the 2010s, and then became a bit more critical.

4:03 But that's not really the full story as you explain it in the book, right? There was this more critical vein earlier than that, and one that tech billionaires really wanted to stamp out before what we're experiencing today. So, can you talk to us about how the media has covered tech and how the leaders of that industry thought about it and related to media?

4:22 If you want to go even back to the 90s when Bill Clinton became president and tech kind of took a more, I guess, enthusiastic role in government, kind of lobbying the White House, lobbying Congress. I think I talked about in the book how, you know, like the beginning of the Clinton administration, I think Microsoft had like uh two or three lobbyists, and by the end of it, they had hundreds.

4:43 And, you know, the the industry learned that they needed to work to effect change within the political and media realities that they were encountering as a massive industry that was becoming the leading industry for the US and for the world. Tech coverage throughout this period, I would say, kind of varied, where it would be critical or analytical or praiseworthy, all of those things at once.

5:10 And then near the end of the 1990s, during the boom, there was a really big explosion in tech. And following that, tech media became this kind of almost like sycophantic subservient thing where they all wanted access and the tech titans were happy to give it to them, and they were doing like, you know, lots of interviews with them, and there was a real back and forth uh flow.

5:33 And this kind of continued, with the exception, I would say, of the dot-com bubble bursting. I think there's probably, you know, some critical stuff around then, but for the most part, kind of continued throughout the 2000s as the tech industry became a partner of the US government through the war on terror, were able to kind of like reshape themselves as less of like an alternative industry and more of an industry that was, you know, part of the American security state, which of course it always had been.

6:00 That's another longer story that I don't really get so into in the book, but you know, it it had kind of always been like that.

6:06 But I think that's an interesting point, right? Because even if you think about how we often understand the tech industry and how it has portrayed itself, even through that period where it is aligning with government, where it is becoming a major partner in the war on terror, the narrative that we have and that is dominant through that period is kind of like, oh, the tech industry is separate from government, and there is this notion that like the internet is rolling out, it's it's all this kind of liberation and all this kind of stuff.

6:35 Oracle stands out as one of the companies in like Larry Ellison that is very close to government and really like openly saying that, you know, the tech industry should be working with the CIA and things like that. But I feel like in general, like the narrative that we have around tech is still one that doesn't really recognize or doesn't really grapple with the degree to which these companies were deeply engaged in this project.

6:56 Yeah, and I mean I I would say even before that became the companies that they became because of massive subsidies. That's kind of the part of the story that I think like that goes back to the 70s, 60s, 50s, like, you know, not to get too in the weeds there, but yeah, in the 2000s, they were certainly integrated in.

7:11 And that wasn't really discovered until later, which is when a lot of critical reporting came out. And before we get to there, I just want to say there was some critical reporting, particularly Gawker Media's Valley Wag, which was kind of like a gossip magazine of Silicon Valley that went after Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen and other members of this kind of Silicon Valley elite in ways that they did not care for.

7:34 And arguably uh the way the Valley Wag went after Thiel, both outing him and also casting some doubts on his investing acumen, that had a lot to do with his antipathy to the media and his anger about it. But really, the bad press around tech and kind of its role in society really came out when the surveillance, the warrantless wiretapping came out.

7:58 And we found out that the Bush administration and the tech companies and you know, the people like, you know, working with your phones and your computers were just like giving your information to the government without asking. And of course, at the time, Bush being, you know, this big bad figure, not only for people, liberals and people on the left, but at that point for pretty much everybody.

8:17 I mean, have to remember that he ended his presidency with approval in the I think teens. I mean, not a popular guy, and it was trending that way at the time. And so that was some negative press. And they didn't particularly care for that. And then the Snowden leaks then came later, and that embarrassed both the Obama administration and the tech industry once again, which was very close with Obama.

8:39 I think you know, the Google executives were in and out of the White House helping him to develop policy. So this had been building for a while. For the purposes of the figures that I talk about in the book, I'd say there are a couple of high watermarks. I'd say that Value Ag going after Teal is one of them.

8:56 He basically decided that he was going to get them back. And it took him like 10 years, but he did it, made sure that not only the media company and its affiliates uh would not be able to really challenge ever again Teal or somebody like him, but also kind of sent this chilling message to the rest of media.

9:13 And Mark Andreessen, who's another figure who is prominent in the book, for him it was more just the realities, I think, of being online and getting pushback. And then I think in like 2014, he made some like, I think you could call them ill-advised comments about India and colonization, and was just raked over the coals on Twitter for it, and you know, just basically disappeared for a while and came back later, but has been angry ever since.

9:39 I think there's a sense, if you kind of look at the way that Andreessen has acted since then, and his reaction to that is like the idea that the common people could ever speak to him like that for him is just like completely out of bounds. Like that's ridiculous. How could they ever say that? His desire for a more pliant media and a more pliant public perception, I think, probably began before that.

10:01 But I think that was kind of the moment for him that really sticks out. Musk, I think, is is more difficult to pinpoint. So is Zuckerberg. They're kind of less fixed in their politics and more just interested in power and money. But for Thielen Andreessen, I certainly think you can pin that. And for the industry as a whole, it is true that it had been building for a while.

10:21 But yeah, like the mid to late 2010s, and then once Trump gets elected, obviously, then the Democrats decide that part of the reason that that happened must be the tech companies, and so they go after them. And then that that turns into a whole kind of back and forth.

10:33 I I think that gives us a really good overview of that period. And there are a number of things there that I want to drill down onto a bit more to explore in more depth. And I'd like to start with that stuff that you mentioned around, you know, Bush and the Snowden leaks, right? Because as you say there, there is this reporting on how these companies are aiding the surveillance state.

10:53 I feel like with the Bush stuff, you know, it's a bit more focused on telecom, maybe, uh, but you can correct me there. And then as we move a bit later and we have the Snowden leaks, like it's very clear that not just the telecom companies, but also, you know, these nascent internet companies are very much implicated in this mass surveillance.

11:10 But it does feel to a certain degree that that doesn't really stick. And I don't fully understand like why that is. Like it feels like it's not until the later 2010s that, you know, this narrative around the companies really starts to change in a much more concerted way, even though there's so many moments when you look back when this could have started happening, but it feels like these stories came and and then they went.

11:34 And even though people are concerned about it, it doesn't really hold.

11:37 I mean, the reason that I bring up the telecom companies in the Bush era and use them as a way to talk about this continuation is that that and then the Snowden internet company stuff is kind of like, I think in the perception of the public in general, is kind of all the same thing. Your phone now is, I mean, this is such a cliche to say, but it's a supercomputer that fits in the palm of your hand, right?

12:00 Even then, it wasn't quite at that point in the early two, late mid-2000s, but it was still a device that was certainly stronger than personal computers had been in the 90s, right? Like it was already at that point. And so the idea of tech being all of these different devices and computers and stuff, I think is something that's been going on for a long time.

12:19 That I think kind of just like led us into the like a slight mistrust, if that makes sense, kind of between the public and and these companies and this this sector in general. In as I said, in the late 2010s, I think that the election of Trump and liberals and Democrats blaming the tech companies in part for that happening has a lot to do with it.

12:42 But I think that also the negative effects of social media were kind of starting to become apparent. Max Fisher has a great book about this called The Chaos Machine, where he really digs into like the history of this stuff and how the algorithms work. And back in like the late 2010s, the tech companies were using social media, like they almost didn't know what they had.

13:03 They didn't quite maybe even understand not so much how powerful it was, but how much they were going to be able to deploy it and how much they were gonna be able to use it to influence the public. 2017 rolls around, Democrats are very angry about the election. They are going after the tech companies, and meanwhile, people are noticing that all the time that they spent on Facebook and on Twitter, they're just fighting with people the entire time.

13:26 You're on Instagram and you're just like talking about how much like you would like everyone's curating their life in a special way. And I I I really kind of remember that time is when like a lot of backlash to all of this started to happen. And online writing and media, that kind of started to slow down in a way that made the internet like less fun.

13:46 Everything kind of got consolidated. Everyone made this pivot to video that didn't work, everything felt kind of stale, and I think that it all just kind of combined to turn the way that people were looking at tech to a negative. But in the wake of this, like these companies are still making money hand over fist because Trump has opened the cap spigot to them before he was sworn in after he got elected.

14:10 He had a bunch of the tech CEOs come in and meet with him, Peter Thiel arranged the whole thing. He was sitting right next to him. He had plans to deport people, to do all this horrible stuff, and they just didn't they didn't say a word about that. They didn't care. All they wanted to do was just to make sure that their contracts were still in place and make sure they were still gonna make billions.

14:28 I mentioned in the book that Alex Carp of Palantir and Elon Musk of Tesla were in the room. At the time, neither one of them had any business mean in this room as far as like market cap or size of company or anything. But they were allies of Teal, so he got them in.

14:45 I think it's fascinating, right? Because as you're saying there, like when they appear at this meeting, there is a lot of criticism of that. Tim Cook, despite disagreements or whatnot, sees the opportunity to work with Trump in order to get these uh big tax breaks for Apple to be able to import its kind of foreign earnings or profits or whatnot and pay a lower tax rate on it.

15:06 Musk, of course, is on this like council of tech business leaders that Trump puts together and doesn't leave after he brings in the Muslim ban, but later does after he leaves the Paris Accord. This time around, he doesn't seem to be so worried about that. I do want to backtrack a little bit to some of those other things that you were talking about, right?

15:24 Before we talk about the pandemic and the shifts that happened there too. Because you mentioned Valley Wag and this gacker site that was very critical and called out a lot of stuff in the Valley and how pissed off a lot of influential tech people, but in particular Peter Thiel, who later basically developed a campaign to try to get this website to be destroyed.

15:45 Can you talk about how Teal did that and also like what the effects of watching this happen and seeing how a tech billionaire could really take on critics like that, like what that did to how people in media felt about criticizing these people?

16:00 What Valley Wag did, I mean, the publication did two things to make Teal angry. So, on the one hand, they outed him publicly, and that is something that I think he should have been mad about. Even if it was an open secret, even if he is evil as hell, it doesn't matter. I personally feel like that's a violation of privacy, and I don't think that that was a good thing to do.

16:22 The second thing that made him angry was that they exposed his right-wing leanings in a way that he wasn't comfortable with being public. They wrote about like his bad investments, they made him almost like a figure of fun and someone to be mocked, and Teal is someone who really wants to be taken seriously, and so this made him very angry.

16:42 I spoke with a couple Silicon Valley insiders who said that they believe that it was the latter that made him more angry and made him want to destroy Valley Wagon Gawker Media. I think that it's probably pretty likely the moment that triggered him to say, I'm gonna just end this company was that final humiliation of having his personal life, not the humiliation of being who he was, but the humiliation of having his personal life put out there in a way that he didn't want to happen.

17:15 Can you give us an idea like around when that was?

17:18 Uh, I believe that was around like 2007. Later, in Hope That I don't fudge the dates here. I think it was like 2013 or 2012. Gocker posts a video of the wrestler Hulk Hogan having sex with his friend's wife. All consensual, like, but embarrassing. That's a big humiliation. But Hogan is like freaking out because he knows there's a video of him saying racial slurs that he doesn't want to get out there.

17:42 Uh eventually it does, but he files a lawsuit against them, sues them in court in Florida, wins. Uh it's it's a huge defamation lawsuit that bankrupts the entire company. No one knows where he's getting the money to fund this for most of the time. Turns out that this teal is bankrolling him. And it turns out that Teal was bankrolling a number of lawsuits against Gocker Media, hoping that one would stick.

18:04 And this is a purely personal thing for him. He just wanted to destroy them. That was what he wanted to do. Put hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars into doing this. Charles Johnson, a uh notorious right-wing anti-Semite, far-right figure who uh was friends with Teal at the time. I'll say that Johnson's recounting of things is people sometimes have questions about how true it is, but I think this is probably a true story.

18:29 Like he said that he was at dinner at Teal's house and all of a sudden it clicked. Like they were talking about Gawker Media and all the lawsuits, and all of a sudden it clicked to him, and he was like, You're doing this, aren't you? And Teal didn't deny it. Teal told Megan Kelly this year that I think maybe for the first time outright admitted, yes, I bankrolled it.

18:44 I did it because these people I consider them to be evil. Sorry, not this year, last year.

18:49 Yeah, I was just gonna jump in and say, Oh, I know it's early 2025, but yeah, it was last year, which which was a weird interview. I I watched that one. And he seems to be like gloating to a certain degree as well, right? But I do think that this is like a telling moment, right? Not just to see the power that someone like a Peter Thiel can wield, right?

19:08 Because when you are one of these tech billionaires, when you have so much money at your disposal, you can easily put aside a few million to try to bankrupt a publication that you don't like because they have said some things about you that whether that's legitimate or not, as you say, like reporting on his shitty business dealings and stuff probably pissed him off, but he didn't want that stuff out there, you know, regardless of whether it was accurate or not, because I'm sure he's made some poor investment decisions.

19:34 Notably, he sold out of Facebook very early and didn't make nearly as much as he he could have made there.

19:39 If I recall correctly, like that's one of the ones that like that like made that they highlighted and made him angry. Yeah.

19:45 Watching basically this hit on Gawker Media for the reporting that it was doing on these very powerful people, like, did that have a chill on the kind of reporting that was being done on the tech industry and these powerful figures?

19:59 It certainly affected the tone. For members of your audience who either you know weren't paying attention to Gaker, maybe too young to remember it, or or you know, just weren't locked in or keyed in at the time. Gaker was quite unique in the way that it would go after the powerful in a way that was courageous, fearless, maybe not always well thought out, but but certainly like they weren't afraid to do that.

20:21 And since then there really hasn't been another site to take up that mantle. I think in part because I don't think that the urge and desire is gone, but I think that the willingness to bankroll that is gone. Investors don't want to put their money into a company that might get sued into the ground. They also don't want to like upset other rich people, of course.

20:44 But the intercept is an interesting case because you can kind of consider the intercept and gocker somewhat of like sister publications in some ways, because they both go after the the rich and powerful. But the intercept was always kind of more invested in hard reporting. That's kind of a long way of saying yes.

21:01 Uh it it did have a chilling effect. I think that the ramifications of it are probably still being felt. It's not hard to write something critical of a rich and powerful person, but in that specific way, it's still quite difficult. So I think it did work for Teal, and I think that it was probably a good investment.

21:19 Just like, you know, arguably Twitter was a good investment for Elon Musk. I mean, he's losing tons of money on it, but it is worked to do what he wanted it to do.

21:27 So many of these tech billionaires use their wealth and the power that they have to try to put pressure onto media, right? Whether it's the companies giving much better stories and stuff to people who write the types of things that they want to see, you know, like Apple is very well known for these things, but a lot of these other companies are as well.

21:46 But also, even these tech billionaires who don't like to be reported on in a particular way, and the companies as well, will of course have PR people and even lawyers reach out to publications that write things they don't like. And even if there's nothing really wrong with the story, just to try. To scare them into making some changes or make it inconvenient for them to be trying to do the type of work and the criticism that they might want to do, right?

22:08 You also mentioned Mark Andreessen, right? And I feel like that's a bit of a different story than Peter Thiel, who is someone who is very ideological, who has been writing about conservative issues and saying very extreme right-wing things for many years, going back to his college days and I'm sure before.

22:24 You know, you mentioned how Mark Andreessen really has this moment where it seems like he shifts in his opinion of media and not just the media, but like the public in general, it feels like, right? How does this shape, on the one hand, how he responds to media, but also how he seeks to want to reshape it so it benefits the tech industry and covers tech in the way that he feels it should be covered after we see all his manifestos and things like that around how he really feels uh how wonderful him and his industry are.

22:55 Andreessen has a less principled ideology than Teal does, if that makes sense. I'm not sure that's exactly the way that I would want to say it, but Teal has believed in one thing politically his whole life and he hasn't really deviated from that. While Andreessen has kind of taken a more circuitous route to get to where he's at now, he has the opposite belief of the title of this podcast, right?

23:17 Like he like he believes tech will say this. He believes that tech is the pinnacle of human achievement, and that if we continue to go down this path, it's only going to be good for everybody.

23:28 Particularly if it will make him and his venture capital firm uh quite a bit of money.

23:31 Yes, yeah, yeah. A happy byproduct, I'm sure. He has described himself as a former Democrat, former liberal who went to the right as he got older. I believe this was an interview he did with Joe Rogan. It might have been the one he did with Ross Doubthad. I'm pretty sure it was the Rogan one. But he talks about this betrayal of this kind of unspoken deal.

23:49 Oh, that was in an interview he did with uh Barry Weiss.

23:51 Oh, that's with Barry Weiss, yeah. Sorry. Wrong, wrong one of the three conservatives that he did the interviews with. Yeah. Oh, good.

23:57 St. Ballpark. St.

23:58 Ballpark, yeah, yeah. Democrats and liberals and liberal society were supposed to basically let the tech guys do whatever they want, and in return they give us cool gadgets. And he feels like that's been betrayed. And I think if you think of his entire worldview as feeling aggrieved about, you know, one betrayal or another, it it all starts to make sense.

24:19 He grew up in rural Wisconsin, and then once he got to college, he creates, you know, an early internet browser that is then just like taken by the school, all the credits taken by the professors. He then goes in the private sector, creates Netscape. Being resentful about those series of events is pretty reasonable.

24:38 Like, I don't think that that's an unreasonable thing to be upset that like you created something that's ahead of its time, potentially world-changing as it was, and then it's just taken out from under you because you're an undergrad student. I think that that is not right. And and I understand him being angry about that.

24:57 But there's always this feeling of resentment. There's this time cover that he goes on to, like he does a time cover and he gets ridiculed for having his bare feet on there, and just people are like, like you, you know, what is this? And it's almost like he can never be taken seriously in the way that he wants to be.

25:13 And he strikes me, and again, like I don't know what his interior life is, but he strikes me as someone who doesn't have a very great sense of humor about himself. And so it's, I think it that that probably compounds and makes it more difficult for him to be able to shake any of this stuff off. I think that his evolution makes a lot of sense, kind of from a somewhat psychological point of view, and that I can see like why he would feel this way about it.

25:38 What I don't see is that like him then being like, and that's why I'm gonna go like far right. Like that part I can't go with him on, but I understand the feelings of resentment and feeling like things just aren't working out and and you haven't gotten to that point yet, and you've been trying your career stalled, and like doesn't matter that you're successful and have money, like you still want more out of life.

26:00 And and I think that that's like a lot of what like drives Andreessen.

26:03 Yeah, but it's also like a lot of people in life feel that way, right? Like they don't get the credit for the things that they feel they deserve credit for, you know, and in many cases, rightfully, they they don't, right? Like there's a lot of people in this world who do very important things and don't get praise heaped on them by all of these media publications and all this kind of stuff.

26:23 And it does feel like, especially for someone like Andreessen and for a lot of these tech figures, like you were saying when he was doing that interview where he's talking about the deal, where they feel that like part of the trade-off that they expect is to be showered with praise and adoration because they have like coded some stuff in a way that you know a lot of other professions don't.

26:42 And and certainly they've been showered with wealth, but they also want like us to love them too. Is that a realistic justification? Well, they certainly seem to think it is.

26:51 I mean, I do want to be clear when I said that it's not that I don't find Andreessen as interesting as Teal. I mean, obviously I do. You can probably tell from what I just said. I find him very interesting. I just I find him interesting in a different way, and I think what you're talking about is like it's just it seems almost like small and petty and resentful, while Teal is somebody who has just this more wide-ranging, villainous like view of the world and like what he's going to do.

27:17 And those are two different things.

27:19 I feel like people also like kind of woke up to Andreessen a bit later, you know, like you're talking about earlier, like he kind of had this interaction in 2014 that really like pisses him off and and gets him thinking in a different way. And there's this story that Rick Perlstein wrote about, I believe it was last year in The Prospect or The New Prospect, or whatever.

27:39 You know, Rick Perlstein is an author. He was invited to this book club that happens at one of Andreessen's mansions, and he goes there. And one of the things that Andreessen says is that he's kind of happy that like all these drugs are ripping through the Midwest and rural communities and stuff and killing all these people.

27:55 And it's just like kind of shocking for Perlstein to hear this guy say this, you know, someone who you, as you mentioned, is from like a rural community and just thinks that like these people should sort of be wiped out.

28:06 I mean, I mean, to the extent that like we don't know like what tone he was using, so you could give him the benefit that you know, maybe he was just joking around. Still a pretty dark thing to joke around about. Yeah, I'm from a very rural area as well, where drugs have ripped through the community and it doesn't fill me with joy.

28:22 And I don't really think that I would ever joke about that. But I don't have the same resentment for the community that I came from as he does, and I'm not trying to make myself sound better than him for that. I'm just saying I just had a different experience. I think people didn't really realize who Andreessen was until relatively recently.

28:38 And I really only got keyed into him, I think in 2019. I wrote an article for the outline where I was asked to like track his likes because he hadn't posted on Twitter in like years, but like he was like liking and like faving things in a way that was like almost like a separate timeline where you could see his ideological journey going further and further and further to the right.

29:02 I don't know if he read it. I I imagine he probably did because he was I mean, if I think he reads a lot of stuff about him, but it did get some reaction from people like in the tech world who, you know, were were angry at me for writing it and felt like it was it was unfair. But that kind of like got me interested in him as a person and really fascinated by him, honestly.

29:20 Like I became really fascinated by him. Just found him to be such an interesting character. Everybody who I wrote about in the book, I do find interesting.

29:29 You know, you're you're talking about this transformation that Andreessen is on, like in the mid-late 2010s in particular, right? I feel like 2019, 2020 are really key moments in some of the trends that we've been talking about, but certainly that we have been experiencing for the past five years, right?

29:46 In the sense that, yes, there is this kind of growth and acceleration of, you know, what some people call like the creator economy or whatever, but this kind of growing group of influencers, but also like independent media people that are growing at the time. And I feel like that really takes off through the pandemic and is helped by certain factors and certain investments that are made around that time.

30:10 But also, like you're talking about there, you know, these tech billionaires who are fed up with media as it traditionally operates, as it was operating, and want to start to see media treat them in a different way and also get really involved here. So, can you talk about what we start to see happening in that period and the effects that we have been seeing for the past few years on media and how these people in this industry are covered?

30:34 Yeah, so I had been like watching and following this for quite a while. In 2021, I believe I wrote an essay for Business Insider about how figures like Andreessen, uh I think I used him as like the as the as the primary figure, but I was also talking about like Teal and Sachs, were investing in alternative media and creating their own alternative media in order to deconstruct and break down critical independent media and the mainstream media for two reasons.

31:02 One, because they were critical and the mainstream media because they had money and they had newsrooms and they were able to fight them and fight them legally as well. I would say that it really started to accelerate with the investments into Substack. The reason for that is that Substack, you know, debuted as this UX newsletter company platform that you could use, basically like Medium for newsletters.

31:22 It's just such a smooth and easy thing to use. There's a certain aesthetic to it that I can't really describe, but I see you nodding. So you know what I'm talking about. There's a certain aesthetic. Substack managed to nail that really early on. And Andreessen led a funding round for them. And shortly thereafter, they started to give people paid deals to come over to the platform.

31:42 And they cast a pretty wide net. Uh they had some people on the left, some people in the center, some people on the right. But over time, their investments continued to kind of tilt more right. What they were promoting to their front page was more to the right. Specifically, their content that they were promoting was becoming more and more transphobic.

32:00 Whether this was intentional or not is somewhat beside the point. And they would say that they were just a platform, that they weren't a publisher, but they were, of course, like paying people to come over to the platform. So at that point, saying that you're not a publisher doesn't really hold water for me, at least, anymore.

32:16 Yeah, and I feel like so many of these platforms have said the same thing, right? Even the social media platforms. Like, you know, at a certain point when your algorithms are shaping the things that people see, it's not like just a chronological feed of what the people you're following are posting. What point do you shift from platform to publisher?

32:33 I think is still like something we're like collectively debating and the responsibilities that they should have as a result of that.

32:40 100%. And I think that for people like myself and like members of the Discontents, which was a group of lefty Substack writers who were opposed to this, it was specifically the transphobia and the like promotion of people like Alex Berenson and you know not taking action on like Nazis and demonetizing groups that were in objectively violation of the rules that they had laid down, right?

33:04 So what I'm trying to say is that they used this platform and they used these paid deals to pluck journalists out of these mainstream slash independent critical institutions and weaken those institutions by taking away some of their best slash most well-known writers, right? So you had like for most well-known, you had like somebody like Matt Iglesias.

33:30 For someone who's actually like a good writer, you had Kim Kelly, Ashley Feinberg, another example, right? HuffPost. Strong writers, or at least in Glacier's case, like prolific writers, writers who write a lot. And when you take that away from a publication, you are necessarily weakening that publication.

33:47 Uh, which is why you know Taibi was on Substack from the beginning. He wasn't given a paid deal. He was on there from the beginning. And the the way that he worked around it, there was a loophole in his contract where he was able to write a book there. He was just like writing the chapters there, and and he could still work for Rolling Stone.

34:01 When Glenn Greenwald left the Intercept, he went to Substack because that was a place where he could have a larger or you know, as large a platform and make more money. When I'm talking about Taibi and Greenwald here, I am not saying that them leaving to use Substack is Substack's fault for providing a platform for them to do that at all.

34:22 Uh if it wasn't Substack, it would be something else. What I'm saying though is that even if there was no intent on the part of Substack to weaken institutional media, and I don't think that there was, really, the net effect of what they were doing was weakening. Same with David Sachs's Colin, which I had a contract with, right?

34:40 Same thing. They were taking people off of different podcasting platforms and giving them money to come over to this one. Same with Rumble, the conservative YouTube clone that Peter Thiel and JD Vance seed funded and now employs uh Greenwald. Like, I mean, they were kind of more intentionally saying we're gonna take away from YouTube, but they were saying that because of ideas around like what they saw as censorship around COVID.

35:01 In each one of these instances, you have an alternative media platform that is highly subsidized slash invested in by these tech billionaires who have already stated that they want to see some sort of alternative to the media that exists and they want the media to exist to that exists to basically not exist the way that it exists, they give money and then these platforms proliferate.

35:21 But instead of like adding to the larger like web of publications that are out there in the way that this stuff kind of happened in the 2010s after the blogosphere didn't like so much implode as kind of just like dispersed into all these different websites, instead of it kind of being like a natural evolution, the net effect of this was always to weaken the entire institution of journalism, whether it was like independent or mainstream.

35:44 And so that's kind of what I'm trying to get at there.

35:46 I think it's really interesting to hear that. And I think as I hear you describe it, I wonder, because you were mentioning there, like you don't think Substack like intentionally went out to weaken journalism. To what degree is it an intentional attempt by the tech industry to weaken establishment media that we are used to?

36:06 And to what degree is it just kind of like a shifting of business models where money is moving into like digital advertising and things like that, and weakening those traditional institutions, the story that we have been talking about for the past couple of decades. How much of this was like changing economics and the struggles of traditional media because the model that they had built was kind of collapsing, and so people needed to seek opportunities elsewhere, versus a concerted attempt by very powerful people to use these newer platforms and to use the internet to try to harm and take down these institutions that they over time started to feel very oppositional toward.

36:49 It would be conspiratorial to say that they made these investments solely because they wanted to disrupt media and to kill media. That's not what I'm saying, and and that that's not what you're saying either, right?

37:00 Exactly. I'm I'm just curious to see how you how you think about it.

37:03 If I'm reading you correctly, I think what you're getting at is these are investments in a new form of media, a new form of a business. And we are disruptors, we are our digital disruptors. This is what we do, right? We're Silicon Valley investors. We invest in things and sometimes it works, sometimes it we move fast, we break things, but the end result is that we create something new, right?

37:23 Like that's how they think of themselves. I think that they probably came into this and were like, we don't like traditional media. The solution is not that we're going to invest in alternative media to destroy traditional media. We can do media better. We can find ways to do it better. We're going to invest in all of these different things and we're going to find a way to do it better.

37:41 And you know what? As a great byproduct of this, we're probably going to kill a lot of these old media companies. But you know what? They should die anyway. They don't really deserve to exist. Like they're not making money. We're going to introduce something that's going to make money. And also, we're going to make sure that it spreads the kind of information that we like.

37:55 And I don't think like those two things are like incompatible. And I don't think that it's conspiratorial, right? To point out that that is the way that these guys tend to think about these things. By making that decision and doing that, like they're getting what they want, an alternative media ecosystem that benefits them.

38:15 And they're also getting to destroy some of the things that their enemies have built, but they're doing it in a way that they that they can probably feel like good about. Peter Teal killing Gawker is Peter Teal killing Gawker. I mean, I think if he could, he would, but like he's not like interested in like killing the entire media.

38:30 That's not a realistic goal for him. That's not something that he's going to like advocate for or go after. What he wants to do is to teach media a lesson through killing this one. And then otherwise, it's you know, he's just building out alternatives.

38:43 I feel like one of the key things that your book is chronicling is how obviously people have their criticisms of the mainstream media, people on the left, you know, level them all the time and have so many issues with like the New York Times and the Washington Post and all these places, right? But as these people kind of separate themselves from the traditional media ecosystem, there feels like there is this incentive structure to embrace more right-wing ideas and to like engage in this sort of I don't know how you'd put it, but like this sort of reactionary anti-cancel culture, like, you know, all these sorts of issues that we have seen become these major points of discussion over the past number

39:22 of years, but that often feel very empty and very motivated by these right-wing ideas. So can you talk about how this shift also sets up this incentive for so many of these people who go independent and who are seeking these really large audiences to embrace these right-wing framings of issues, even if in the past they would have argued against the very same thing that they ended up doing?

39:46 Well, yeah, you know, I mentioned Greenwall and Tybee earlier. They are kind of like the driving forces of the book, right? Like they are the two figures I kind of use to explore this phenomenon. And, you know, I talk about Musk and Teal and Andreessen as well. Like they're they're also a large part of it.

40:00 But the Greenwall and Tybee journey from left, nominally left to right, gets at what you're talking about here. I think that there are a lot of complicated reasons that people change their politics. I think it's kind of like less important to what we're talking about, because what we're talking about is like what does that look like when you do it, right?

40:19 And when you do it, you are now in a network. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibe get to go on Fox News, huge audience as their Substack, makes them more money, gives them incentives to continue to work with that audience, to appeal to that audience. And again, these guys are smart, like they're not like, they're not completely doing a 180 on every single thing.

40:42 They're not going from like, oh, you know, I'm an independent journalist to like I'm a uh virulent right-wing hack on every single issue, right? But they are going on enough issues that people on the right are staying with them, they're getting more of a right-wing audience. Then they get to go on Joe Rogan.

40:56 That's another huge audience. Joe Rogan is friends with like all of these guys, like he has Andreessen on, Teal on, Musk on, like he's personal friends with these guys. He was at the White House uh for the for the inauguration parties, like he's part of the Trump thing, like he's like there's no like mystery about what this dude is at this point.

41:14 There hasn't been for a long time, but people have tried to say that there is. So that's why I'm trying to like say that now. Like there's no mystery about this guy now. But yeah, so you go on there. I mean, this is the biggest podcast in the world, one of the biggest podcasts in the world, uh huge audience that that you're exposed to.

41:28 That's more attention, more subscriptions to your newsletter, more eyes on your product, more social media following, which in turn just kind of like it's it's just like this kind of endless churn of attention and money. So if all this stuff hadn't happened, well then there's no way that Elon Musk would have turned to Matt Taibi to disseminate a heavily curated tranche of internal documents from Twitter that they called the Twitter files.

41:54 And then that turns into like, you know, millions of dollars a year for Taibi through Substack subscriptions. This also did for Barry Weiss as well. Like that, like she she also was able to utilize that. Not to digress too much, but I think she did in a much more clever way in that she did it just enough to get that and then pivoted off of that, said she opposed Musk for like free speech reasons and was able to kind of keep a little bit of her dignity.

42:16 Taibi was not able to do that. He still wants to get back into Musk's good graces. You can you can just tell from the way that he talks about him. So now you just have like this kind of self-perpetuating circle where you have like you're going on these right wing shows, that's getting you more money and attention.

42:31 More money and attention gets you back on the right wing show, then it's like, and now you're in. You're in with these guys. And now are you really gonna start to like criticize their interests? Are you gonna really like fight back? I mean, Rumble gave Glenn a, I don't know how much it was, but they gave him a pretty big deal to like come over, do his system update podcast slash video cast exclusively on Rumble.

42:52 He also, if you know, if he writes anything, he can't do it on Substack anymore. He has to do it on locals, which is a blogging platform that they bought a few years ago. They bought Colin from David Sachs. David Sachs is on the board. I mean, like if you like just look at all this stuff, it's just this endless like churn of all these guys just helping each other out.

43:09 As we were just saying, like, really trying to focus on not being conspiratorial here. It's not like in The Simpsons with like the Republican headquarters where like you go and like it's like this evil like cabal of guys in a castle, like sitting around being like, okay, so now what are we gonna do? You know, we're gonna get Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibe to like turn to the right, and then we're gonna use them for this or that, and we're gonna destroy media and like all this.

43:28 It's like these are just natural evolutions out of the way that they are approaching this topic, but these are also ideological positions that they hold. They do want this stuff to happen, so they are welcoming it happen, they are pushing to have it happen. It's a little more complicated, I think, than saying that it's that then it's a direct one to one, right?

43:49 It's not like we haven't seen this in the past, right? You know, if you look at say the way that Rupert Murdoch and all these conservative interests fund Fox News and have Sinclair broadcasting and take over all. These radio stations to try to push the mainstream media, cable news, radio to the right so that these are the opinions that people are interacting with.

44:09 And then those right-wing opinions, because they are legitimized, because they're in so many places, then move their way into CNN and MSNBC and become things that you need to talk about across the media because if not, you know, you're not showing both sides and all this kind of stuff, right? And so it's a way of promoting that sort of a thing happening in independent media as well, bringing this shift to another era and also allowing it to continue happening, right?

44:36 It's like the next stage of this attempt to move media to the right and to move public opinion to the right. You know, I have two more questions kind of based on this. And the first is like when we see these people shift toward the right, when they move into this like independent media ecosystem, how much is that driven by like money?

44:56 And how much is it driven by other factors? You know, we were talking about social media earlier and how it sets up all of these incentives to have this media ecosystem that is more right-wing. I think we can very clearly say that today, right? And even more explicitly since Elon Musk has bought Twitter and we see these, you know, continuing changes that say Mark Zuckerberg is doing recently and these other platforms are doing to keep the conservatives happy, right?

45:21 So that's my first question. How much is it driven by money? How much other things? And then my other question is like, how influential is this really? Because I feel like on the one hand, yeah, I see Barry Weiss and and I see the influence that her publication has, but I feel like, and maybe this is just speaking to my bubble.

45:39 I feel like someone like Glenn Greenwald, I like barely ever hear from anymore. He's I don't know if he still goes on Fox News, but like without that Chaco Carlson platform and moving to a more niche platform like Rumble, it feels like, I don't know, he is someone who has completely escaped my view. So I guess those are my two questions.

45:57 What's driving it and how influential is it really?

46:00 I'll take those in the order that you ask them. What's driving? I'm a pretty vulgar Marxist materialist. I tend to think that it is money and attention and the career stuff, and that anything else is just a internal justification. I think all of these guys are, and not exclusively men, obviously, but are are doing this because it's a way to kind of stand out in the crowd.

46:24 Like being the former lefty who goes to the right makes you unique. In the book, I was talking with Jim Narekis, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting uh Managing Editor, a longtime friend of mine, and he said that there are two types of people who go on Fox News. First, there's the one who is there so that you know the conservative can learn how to beat up on liberals.

46:42 Then the other person is the one who's saying, Hey, I used to be a liberal, but Greenwald and Tybee are that. Like that's who they are. And it is kind of questionable like how long that's going to continue to be a viable path for them, which kind of gets us to the influence question, right? How much influence these guys have.

47:01 Let's start with Barry. I think that Barry's free press is becoming essentially Fox News state media for the Trump administration. She's going to be able to maintain a level of distance from the administration because she's smart and she knows how to portray her news outlet as an independent voice and as objective.

47:22 But if you look at the stuff that she promotes, it's all extreme right-wing radicalization porn for disaffected, middle-aged, wealthy liberal conservatives.

47:33 Explicitly funded by tech billionaires and by these people too, right?

47:36 Yeah. Series rounds by Andreessen. I think Musk is invested. I mean, it's exposed. And if you look at the stuff that she does, I mean, like the sycophans is just off the charts. As far as Taibi and Greenwald, I mean, that's interesting. It's interesting because we're we're hitting a new administration, so what's going to happen now, right?

47:54 Last year of the Biden administration, Glen mostly was on Twitter a lot, yelling about Palestine in ways that I generally agreed with, although I didn't agree with him using it as a way to hit the left as much as he did, but like whatever, that's just what he does now. I said this about him years ago.

48:12 Like he's just kind of become like a Republican pundit. And you can get that anywhere. So what's the point? He has that deal with Rumble. I mean, he told me he has a pretty decent like audience there. Like his audience has come over with him. You know, they did lose some audience from Palestine commentary, but then he said it came back.

48:28 So not necessarily like those people came back, but other people did. So I think Glenn remains quite influential in his little corner. The difference is that he's no longer influential in the mainstream, and I think that's because, in a large part, like that Fox News platform has been taken from him, but also cable news isn't really like that important anymore, like it used to be.

48:45 So, also, like, where does that kind of leave us? I still think he's an important and influential figure, but it's kind of a question of who's he reaching now. And finally, Matt, I don't even know. I mean, he's just kind of like lost whatever semblance of like coherence to any politics he had. I looked at his profile the other day and it was just like over the top, like anti-vax stuff.

49:06 Just like ridiculous. Like he's talking about Russia Gate and like the Twitter files. He's playing the hits and doing um anti-vax stuff. I don't think he really has much of a future as far as like kind of restarting his career at this point. I still find Glenn the most interesting because I think that he has the most interesting nuance with his views and he has the largest ability to be able to become critical of the Trump administration without seeming like he's lost that much of his credibility.

49:33 If you look back at his old tweets and the old stuff that he wrote, it's very cleverly put together. He leaves himself an out every single time. And so if you go back, like if you're trying to prove what he was saying, you have to have like the whole context of what was happening that day, what he was saying.

49:47 Because if you don't, it doesn't look like what it was. So I think that he will end up probably of the three of them having the best path for it under a Trump regime.

49:54 And if you want to push back on him, you really need to be willing to put up with his like incessant arguing anyway. So listen, there's so much we can talk about with this book. And just based on what you're saying, like Glenn might be the interesting one. I feel like Barry has been like the most successful one, right?

50:10 We've talked about many different things. In the book, you explore even more of this trajectory, you know, the story of the tech industry and and these particular tech billionaires' influence in the media, as well as this like transition that we have been seeing with these particular figures who have become very influential and how they have been pulled to or incentivized to go to the right and to push these right-wing opinions.

50:31 So, my big question to end this off is really like, what is the big takeaway here? What is it that we need to understand about this and and why is it important for us to know this going forward?

50:41 Yeah. So, one thing when I was writing this book is I never wanted to do a final chapter of like, here's like the solution. And thankfully, my publishers did not ask me to do that or they didn't insist on it. I really think that, you know, the purpose of this book is just to explain a phenomenon, explain something that happened.

50:56 This is real, this is how this happened. This is kind of like where we're at now. This is how to keep your eye out for this kind of thing happening with other people. You know, if you see other people on the left or or or mainstream, whatever, like it's centrist, doesn't matter. Commentators who whose work you enjoy, and you start to see them make this tilt, you gotta like look at who they're talking to and who they're working with.

51:20 And I really think, again, like it's this vulgar materialism I realize, but I think that if you really boil everything down to those basic interests, you can usually get a good sense of like what is motivating people. People have their political ideology, people have their beliefs 100%. I'm not saying that they don't.

51:35 I'm saying that when people make this kind of right-wing pivot, that's usually what it is. And as far as the the tech side of it, like the tech billionaire side of it, really what I wanted to do with this book was just to show not only the phenomenon of these billionaires like investing their time and money into this right-wing project, but also to show like their general evolution over time and to provide kind of like a primer for that, who these people are, and this is how they ended up here.

52:01 And I think that if if you come away from my book just with a better understanding of one or both of those things, then that then I'm happy. I mean, that's really the purpose of the book, is just give a little more context and explain the moment that we're in as best I can.

52:13 Yeah, and it's hard not to feel that that is only going to further deepen with the Trump administration and the evolutions that we're going to see. You talked about kind of watching these transformations happen. I feel like we're seeing that to a certain degree with some of the key people at the Young Turks these days and the the journey that they have been on.

52:28 That's a whole other episode, yeah.

52:30 Uh yeah. Listen, Owen, really great to have you back on the show. Thanks for coming on to talk about all this with me. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much.

52:37 Paris, thank you.

52:39 Owen Higgins is a journalist and the author of Owned, How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. Tech Won's Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

52:55 You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.