Author Jonathan Taplin speaks about his book The End of Reality¸ which explores and provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of four billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen (“The Four”). He shows how their tech monopolies have brought middle-class wage stagnation, the hollowing out of many American towns, a radical increase in income inequality, and unbounded public acrimony.
The End of Reality is both scathing critique and reform agenda that replaces the warped worldview of “The Four” with a vision of regenerative economics that seeks to build a sustainable society with healthy growth and full employment.

Jonathan Taplin is a public intellectual, writer, film producer, and scholar. He is the director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and was a professor at the USC Annenberg School in the area of international communication management and digital media entertainment until 2017. Since graduating from Princeton University in 1969 his extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band, producer of major films such as Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, an executive at Merrill Lynch, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium.