Jonathan Taplin is a writer, producer, and Director Emeritus of the ⁠Annenberg Innovation Lab⁠ at the University of Southern California. He's had an amazing career as outlined in his book ⁠The Magic Years⁠ and recently published a book, ⁠The End of Reality⁠, about the failure of our "great thinkers" to prepare us for a humane future.

In this podcast we talk about the failure of the 1960s that directly led to our culture of despair and he offers some small ways we can resist - and survive - the coming crisis.

Our theme music is by ⁠Policy AKA Mark Buchwald⁠. (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/policy/)

Transcript

John Biggs

Welcome back to Keep Going a podcast about success and failure. I'm John Biggs. Today on the show we have Jonathan Taplin. He is a writer, film producer, Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California, and the author of two of my favorite recent books, The Magic Years, which was about your life, in amid all these rock and roll stars, and then we have the end of reality, which is about Facebook, Metaverse, crypto, and Mars. Welcome, Jonathan. Good to be here, John. Yeah. So I wanted to the premise of the show is basically about failure. And I think the two books sort of lead up to each other in the sense that The Magic Years was about a very, very special time in history, culture was changing culture changed to a degree that was probably unheard of in recent memory. And then when we come up to now we come up to the End of Reality, we sort of see that high watermark, and then the receding of that culture in the form of social media, which to a degree has destroyed almost everything that you talk about in the magic years, would you is that? Is that a correct statement?

Jonathan Taplin

Yeah, I think so. I mean, you know, Peter Drucker famously said, culture eats strategy for breakfast every morning. And essentially, what he meant was that you can have all the great strategies of how you're going to change the world. But if the culture is not in supportive nothing's going to happen. And so if you think about the 60s in that sense, culture, led politics and ate politics for breakfast every morning. In other words, if you think about 1963, the guy I worked for Bob Dylan, although I wasn't working for him at that point, went down to Mississippi, to Greenwood, and sang it. Voting Rights rallies for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were a kind of daring thing in the sense that that same town a year later, three civil rights workers were murdered by the Klu Klux Klan. And in the sense that that happened, and nothing happened politically for another three years. In terms of voting rights do so in the sense the culture was out ahead of the politics. And in that sense, the culture played a very important role. I would argue, and I do we in the end of reality that since about 1999, or 2000, the culture has taken a knee holistic turn. So you have the rise of gangster rap. You have the rise of gangster television, in the sense of The Sopranos, leading to the wire leading to match down Breaking Bad succession. In other words, series that all of the important TV series was essentially about bad men struggling for power in a world with no morals whatsoever. And so if you have that for, say, 15 years from 2000, to the winter of 2015, and into the 2016 election, it doesn't surprise me that a bunch of people say, Well, maybe we need Tony Soprano to be president. In other words, you get a Trumpist gangster-type figure, becoming the ruler because you think you need somebody to kick and take names on. So that's one element. And of co