How Billionaires Captured the Media - 5CAST (#21) Ft. Steven Renderos

Summary

---

5CAST w/ Andrew Callaghan – Episode #21: "How Billionaires Captured the Media"

Guest: Steven Renderos (Executive Director, Media Justice)
Date: April 23, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Andrew Callaghan sits down with Steven Renderos, Executive Director of Media Justice, to unravel the mechanisms behind the corporate takeover of American news media by a handful of tech billionaires. The conversation explores the rise of media capture, AI’s impact on journalism and communities, the consolidation of media ownership, the influence of billionaires’ political agendas, and grassroot efforts to resist techno-oligarchy. Renderos brings both personal and professional insight, sharing stories from his organizing work and highlighting cases where community resistance succeeded.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Tech Oligarchy and Media Capture

(Starts ~00:00 – 07:13; 22:39–27:53; 35:34–38:25)

• Six Billionaires Now Control Most US Media: Including Larry Ellison (Oracle, IDF donor), Jeff Bezos (Washington Post), Elon Musk (X), Marc Andreessen (Substack, Meta board), Marc Benioff (Time Magazine), and Peter Thiel (Palantir).

• Warner Brothers/Paramount/Skydance Merger: If this merger and Ellison’s acquisitions pass, he’ll control thousands of media channels including CBS, CNN, MTV, Pluto, Nickelodeon, BET, and possibly the algorithmic infrastructure of TikTok.

• Impact of Oligarchy: Tech billionaires, operating parallel to the state, exercise outsized political, social, and economic power, using media not just for profit, but to shape worldviews and serve specific agendas.

  "We have a fully active tech oligarchy. They get to control who actually exists in our society and who doesn’t. There are many of us paying the cost to make these billionaires even richer. And we have to call attention to that. We have to fight back."
  – Steven Renderos [00:00]

2. AI’s Infiltration of Newsrooms

(11:39–16:39; 30:43–34:48; 87:12–88:45)

• AI Partnerships: Big AI firms (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) are striking deals with newsrooms to ingest their content and develop AI tools which may eventually write news stories, undermining both jobs and editorial independence.

• Economic Incentives: Financially desperate media companies see AI partnerships as life rafts, creating a dependency that discourages critical reporting on tech partners.

• Data Center Boom: AI’s enormous data needs spur construction of data centers, often in disenfranchised or politically weak communities, leading to higher utility rates, water shortages, and environmental injustice.

  "They’re building them in drought-ridden conditions, places with broken power grids, or communities with limited political power. When a data center comes in and your water changes, that’s probably why."
  – Steven Renderos [14:27]

  "Resisting using artificial intelligence is futile."
  – AP newsroom quote, shared by Renderos [30:43]

3. Why Billionaires Buy Media (& What They Do With It)

(18:52–21:49; 25:36–27:53; 49:56–53:14)

• Control of Narrative: Media ownership is a tool for power and influence, not just profit. Owners install sympathetic editors (e.g., Barry Weiss at CBS) and blacklist dissenting voices, amplifying their own values—often, pro-technology, pro-Israel, anti-labor, and culture war messaging.

• Larry Ellison’s Expanding Influence: Through control of cloud infrastructure, Ellison now oversees TikTok’s US algorithm auditing (potential to suppress countercultural or Palestinian voices).

  "An individual, or a set of individuals, here in this case can manipulate the algorithm to suppress what’s happening on those platforms ... With Palestine, this already happened on Instagram and Facebook ... Many accounts were shadow-banned."
  – Steven Renderos [20:04]

4. History and Timeline of Media Consolidation

(22:39–24:59; 61:45–63:51; 34:48–38:25)

• Media consolidation accelerated in the ‘70s, Reagan-era deregulation, and the 1996 Telecom Act.
• Family- or regionally-owned media was replaced by corporate giants and, increasingly, by tech billionaires in the last decade.
• Economic woes and mounting debt continue to make newsrooms vulnerable to buyouts by deep-pocketed actors with political agendas.

"When you build massive companies ... the debt has gotten downgraded, which has made it possible for a really rich, deep-pocketed person to just go come in and say, I will buy up the company because you don’t have to actually purchase all of the debt because it’s been downgraded, you only pay some of it."
– Steven Renderos [63:04]

5. AI, Surveillance, and the Human Cost

(28:08–30:43; 79:30–83:37; 94:39–96:37)

• AI development is predicated on data and labor extracted from marginalized communities (e.g., Kenyan content moderators, South American mineral extractors).

• Data centers bring few local jobs, primarily serve as surveillance infrastructure for law enforcement and ICE.

• Surveillance commodifies users while erasing their agency; those opposing control risk censorship and invisibility.

  "There are so many humans that actually touch [AI] but they’re invisible to us. ... They get to control who actually exists in our society and who doesn’t."
  – Steven Renderos [28:08]

  "There’s no AI ... There is just corporate executives and shareholders saving money by having to use less human labor. But there are still human beings involved."
  – Andrew Callaghan and Steven Renderos [96:28–96:39]

6. The Internet: From Promise of Freedom to “Inshittification”

(35:34–39:55; 41:45–43:07; 45:03–46:07)

• Early Promise Lost: The Internet once offered the hope of a decentralized, democratized info commons; now, it mirrors prior media consolidation, with access, visibility, and even storage controlled by tech giants (Google, Meta, etc.).

• Black Box Media: True editorial decision-makers remain behind the scenes, shaping narratives and suppressing stories.

  "Media system exists as a giant black box. Someone controls it, but we don’t know exactly how it’s controlled."
  – Steven Renderos [40:09]

• Alternatives Exist, But Are Hard to Access: Community broadband, mesh networks, and independent hosting are possible, but economically and technically challenging for most creators and consumers.

7. Psychological and Social Manipulation

(81:19–86:52; 40:09–41:45; 68:44–71:27)

• Outrage and controversy fuel clicks, engagement, and profit—by algorithmic design.

• Social platforms are engineered to addict users, polarize communities, and obstruct class-based solidarity in favor of non-threatening (to elites) culture wars.

  "The content that you know, outrages people, that angers people tends to perform better than just straight up information."
  – Steven Renderos [55:21]

  "If it bleeds, it leads."
  – Pulitzer, cited by Andrew Callaghan [56:08]

8. Grassroots & Policy Resistance

(16:39–18:28; 59:11–61:45; 74:29–77:39; 104:41–105:51)

• Communities successfully resisting data center construction (e.g., Port Washington, WI) by building cross-party coalitions.
• Foundations (Gannett, Knight, MacArthur) offer some support to local journalism; state funds and journalism collectives in Vermont and elsewhere provide models for sustainable, independent media.
• Push for wealth taxation, stronger regulation, and the creation of resilient, community-based networks.

"Fight [AI data centers]. Slow them down ... Their projections are ridiculous and to fulfill them, they need the infrastructure to get built out flawlessly. So everywhere we’ve been working, it's helping communities actually fight back and say no to this thing."
– Steven Renderos [100:41]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Anything else that gets in the way, like ethics, civil rights, like human rights, are just obstacles ... There are many of us who are having to pay the cost to make these billionaires even richer. And we have to call attention to that. We have to fight back."
  – Steven Renderos [00:00]

• "He seems to have a vested interest in creating a post humanist technologically transformed future wherein real people like you and I cease to exist in our flesh form, instead living on as immortal creatures up in the cloud."
  – Andrew Callaghan [02:16]

• "Media capture is about who actually controls the platforms and the channels that deliver news and information to us. ... It's increasingly a smaller and smaller number of people."
  – Steven Renderos [07:22]

• "If you leave, you're ceding ground and who are you ceding ground to? ... You have to stay inside the platforms because if we leave, it creates space for someone else to occupy that."
  – Steven Renderos [45:27]

• On censorship and algorithmic control:
  "If I were to build my own website and post footage from Palestine or stuff about Epstein ... would there be a way for ... power structures at hand to actually take that down? ... It has to be stored somewhere. Who are the dominant players in the cloud based infrastructure in the US? It's the tech oligarchs."
  – [41:14]

• "Antonio Gramsci said you have to think about cultural change like trench warfare. You're constantly kind of fighting for inches, trying to fight for new ideas. ... The moments where you can make transformation happen is when people can act into a new way of thinking."
  – Steven Renderos [69:46]

• "So there's no AI. There is just corporate executives and shareholders saving money by having to use less human labor. But there are still human beings involved."
  – [96:28]

• "Going back to Gramsci, he has a quote. Probably the most famous quote he has is, you know, the old world is dying, the new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters."
  – Steven Renderos [92:59]

• "Who are the top five monsters right now? Larry Ellison ... Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel ... and Marcus Andreessen. He’s a sneaky one."
  – [93:09]

---

Key Timestamps & Segment Highlights

• 00:00–04:45: Opening statements on the dangers of AI, tech oligarchs, and consolidation of media power.
• 05:04–06:40: Renderos introduces Media Justice and their organizing track record (Trump removal from Twitter, fighting prison call costs, net neutrality).
• 07:13–11:02: Defining “media capture” and oligarchic control.
• 11:39–14:27: AI’s incursion into newsrooms, economic pressures, parallels to the tobacco industry.
• 14:27–16:39: Data center location, environmental and social impact, targeting disenfranchised communities (e.g., Memphis “Boxtown” case).
• 18:52–20:04: How Ellison made his fortune (Oracle, TikTok, media).
• 22:39–24:59: History of media consolidation since the ‘70s.
• 25:36–27:53: Tech billionaires’ worldview (long-termism, eugenics, technocracy).
• 30:43–34:48: AI’s displacement of journalists and algorithmic curation—implications for creativity and agency.
• 35:34–38:25: The “inshittification” of the internet (per Cory Doctorow).
• 41:14–43:07: Possibilities for independent platforms, public broadband, mesh networks.
• 45:03–46:07: On staying inside platforms vs. leaving (audience, message control).
• 61:45–63:51: How media debt makes them susceptible to buyouts.
• 74:29–77:39: Building cross-political coalitions to resist data centers (Port Washington, WI).
• 81:19–86:52: Algorithmic manipulation of outrage and engagement; historical continuity with print media.
• 92:59–94:39: The “time of monsters” and top five billionaire “monsters.”
• 100:41–101:46: Why data centers are the linchpin of AI (and thus media capture).
• 104:41–105:51: No truly benevolent billionaire media executives; philanthropic foundations doing some good at a local level.
• 106:16–107:12: Closing thoughts—taxation, the inevitability of resistance, fighting for local control.

---

Conclusion

Renderos and Callaghan paint a sobering yet galvanizing picture of the current state of American media: dominated by a handful of tech billionaires whose investments, partnerships, and infrastructure (notably, AI data centers) are fundamentally transforming what news is delivered, who is heard, and whose interests are served. Alongside the consequences—journalistic layoffs, environmental injustice, community fracture—they highlight ongoing resistance, from grassroots campaigns that block data centers to emerging models of community-owned media and internet infrastructure.

Steven Renderos asserts the importance of media literacy, local organizing, and policy advocacy, echoing Gramsci’s call to “fight for new ideas”—inch by inch—against the encroaching techno-oligarchy.

---

"I'm optimistic that this moment of collapse actually gives us an opportunity to think about something new."
– Steven Renderos [90:03]

---

For further resources, the full Media Justice report discussed in this episode is available via the podcast’s episode description.

Transcript

[Steven Randeros]

Resisting using artificial intelligence is futile. There are people behind the curtain that are controlling the information that's being distributed to us. And it does come with an intent, it does come with an agenda. Anything that gets in the way of that, it's just an existential risk to the greater possibility of techno progress. Anything else that gets in the way, like ethics, civil rights, like human rights, are just obstacles. We have a fully active tech oligarchy. They get to control who actually exists in our society and who doesn't. There are many of us who are having to pay the cost to make these billionaires even richer. And we have to call attention to that. We have to fight back.

[Andrew Callahan]

All right, what's up, guys? As you can see, I'm sweating pretty hard because I'm quite nervous about where our country's at right now. Today. On a real note, we are at a crucial crossroads in press freedom that our country has never seen before. There are now six billionaires who own a majority share of American news media, and one family in particular, headed by Oracle CEO, IDF Donor, and AI Data center kingpin Larry Ellison, is on the verge of controlling CBS, CNN, HBO, MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, Pluto, and the actual algorithmic infrastructure of TikTok itself, which in itself may be more influential than all those outlets put together. So in real time, if the Warner Brothers and Paramount Skydance merger goes through, we're going to witness the hostile takeover of our entire news media infrastructure by Big Tech, with Ellison's acquisition coming on the heels of Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, Elon Musk buying X, and Marc Andreessen acquiring large shares in Substack,

[Interviewer]

the Free Press, and many other outlets,

[Andrew Callahan]

while simultaneously serving on the board of directors at Zuckerberg's Meta. Aside from those three, you also have Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

[Interviewer]

I think that's how you say it.

[Andrew Callahan]

Who purchased Time magazine and Time Ventures. And then, of course, you have Palantir's Peter Thiel, the architect of our modern surveillance state. According to several of our whistleblower sources, Thiel is also personally invested in Sigma boosting friend of the show Braden Clavicular Peters. This support and Clav's rapid viral rise makes total sense. Thiel has made a number of strange statements about the future of humanity you

[Interviewer]

would prefer the human race to endure, Right? You're hesitating.

[Andrew Callahan]

Well, I.

[Steven Randeros]

Yes.

[Andrew Callahan]

I don't know.

[Interviewer]

I would. I would. This is a long hesitation. It's a long hesitation. There's so many questions.

[Andrew Callahan]

He seems to have a vested interest in creating a post humanist technologically transformed future wherein real people like you and I cease to exist in our flesh form, instead living on as immortal creatures up in the cloud.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, transhumanism is this, you know, the ideal was this radical transformation where your

[Andrew Callahan]

human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. This is not just like a black mirror style conspiracy fantasy. There is a race to create this kind of technology right now. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is now involved with a startup called Nectome, who planned to preserve and then upload his brain after death as a base model for what's called cyber immortality. And Google co founder Larry Page recently declared that digital life is the natural and desirable step in cosmic evolution. So in this context, it makes sense that someone like Clavicular who has already sterilized himself by injecting peptides into his nuts and ask questions like what's the ROI on love? When asked about going on a date with a potential romantic partner would be algorithmically pushed to impressionable pubescent American boys. All speculative comments aside, I think these people might actually want to engineer our extinction as humans and create an artificial neural network in which they own and can further monetize digital copies of our brains and souls.

[Steven Randeros]

The truth is, these people are f

[Andrew Callahan]

cking insane and that's totally impossible. But they're still investigating it. And for now the agenda looks like this. More AI data centers, unlimited military support for the Greater Israel Project, endless funding of media outlets that push culture war issues and keep the public bickering and evenly divided while while the insidious mission of corporate capture continues unchecked, that means the collapse of small businesses, the erasure of communities, and tightening of control over key industries like the media, which we're gonna discuss today. In today's five casts, we're gonna be sitting down at our desert compound just outside of Barstow with activist and LA native Steven Randeros, who is the Executive Director of Media Justice, a Chicago nonprofit that focuses on news media transparency and accountability. They recently released a bombshell report on media capture focusing on Larry Ellison and of course the Time Warner Paramount Skydance Discovery, which can be found in its full PDF format at the link below in the description box and pinned comment. But first, I want to mention this entire interview is available in its audio only format on every major podcast platform. Just look up 5cast in all caps and you'll see a beautiful drone photo of some autumn foliage with our logo emblazoned and blasted on top. So that's the one right there.

[Interviewer]

If you don't like video and you

[Andrew Callahan]

want to check out our podcast. If you're driving important load of cargo across America for the semi quincentennial and want to just slap some audio and

[Interviewer]

not have to watch all this shit,

[Andrew Callahan]

you can do it.

[Interviewer]

Anyways, let's get into it. All right, well, thanks so much for making the time, man. I really appreciate it. For those who don't know, can you tell us your name and a little bit about the organization you work for?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, for sure. My name is Steven Randeros, and I'm the executive director of Media Justice. We're a national racial justice organization. We basically work to build power to challenge the way that corporations and governments wield control over media and technology. I've been with that organization since February of 2012. So it's been 14 years doing organizing at the national level, working with communities all over the country, trying to fight for better media and better technology.

[Interviewer]

So before we get into the actual report itself, what are some of the achievements prior to that that you feel like you're most proud of?

[Steven Randeros]

I helped to get Donald Trump kicked off of Twitter. That was fun. Beyond that, I worked on several campaigns. My first campaign coming into Media justice was actually working to lower the cost of phone calls from prisons. It was my first fight, and we established the first ever kind of regulations at the federal level to lower the cost of phone calls. I stopped the Comcast Time Warner merger, you know, way back a few years ago, passed the nation's first, like, net neutrality rules, got Facebook to conduct a civil rights audit, got Amazon to stop selling facial recognition tech to police departments. So those are some of the campaigns I've been a part of that I think hold hold a good place in my heart.

[Interviewer]

Getting Trump kicked off Twitter is a pretty big achievement that happened after January 6th, right? Yeah. And what did you have to prove to the platform itself to make that happen?

[Steven Randeros]

Well, the thing is, like, we actually had started pushing for that well before that, actually, right after the incidents in Charlottesville where a protester was killed by a white nationalist, started making the call to Twitter, pushing them to push him off the platform just because of the way that he responded to that situation, because he was both, like, inciting violence and perpetuating that violence. Even afterwards.

[Interviewer]

Kill the first ever higher.

[Steven Randeros]

They showed up in Starloville to protest.

[Interviewer]

They didn't put themselves down as viewed. And you had some very bad people

[Steven Randeros]

in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You know, after January 6th, like, Twitter just became much more willing just given everything that had happened. Clearly, like a whole giant crew of people just rolled up on Congress and started like bashing stuff. And yeah, it just created the right conditions for them to actually be willing to do the thing that we've been asking them to do for a couple years by that point, you know.

[Interviewer]

So one thing you talk a lot about in the report and also on different social media platforms is the idea of media capture. For somebody unfamiliar, what is that term refer to?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, media capture is about who actually controls the platforms and the channels that deliver news and information to us. And part of what we're trying to communicate is that it's increasingly a smaller and smaller number of people that capture isn't just people buying media properties so that they have it as like a vanity purchase. It comes with a real sense of power. There's Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who had this theory of cultural hegemony. How do you wield power over society? Yeah, you can do it through armies, you can do it through force, but then there's a way that you can wield soft power, which is control the way the systems that actually help shape what people think. And so for a really long time, it's not the first time in our modern history that we've had billionaires and gazillionaires owning the media system. Throughout time when that's happened, it's always been with an intent to actually shape what people think. Media capture is telling us there are people behind the curtain that are controlling the information that's being distributed to us. And it does come with an intent, it does come with an agenda, it does come with a worldview. And it's often not really aligned with, like, what most of us come from. What most of us think cbs, NBC,

[Interviewer]

abc, or the major newspapers in America are owned by big money. And the concentration of that ownership is becoming significantly more severe. And what is that worldview you feel like they want to push on others?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, I mean, today in the report that we pushed out, we were focusing on the capture of the media system by tech billionaires. We've been asserting as an organization for the last, like, year that we're living in a moment. And we're which. We have a fully active tech oligarchy, an oligarchy that lives kind of parallel to the existence of the state, but who wield an incredible amount of political power. You saw this, like on full display on inauguration. You have all of the richest tech billionaires show up on inauguration, pay to actually be there. That oligarchy is shaping the political conditions in our society. The economic conditions, the social conditions. And it's a segment of that oligarchy that's actually been buying up big chunks of the media system. People like Larry Ellison, through his son David Ellison, have been purchasing big media studios like Paramount. That merger happened last year. And most recently are trying to purchase Warner Brothers Discovery, which has thousands of media properties that they own. If that sale goes through, Larry Ellison becomes the biggest media mogul that we've seen in a really long time, even more so than Rupert Murdoch. You know, when you think about Larry Ellison, his wealth was built through Oracle, a tech company that provides cloud based services. They're one of the biggest pushers of data centers across the country. They're building some of the biggest data centers that we're seeing as a cloud based business. Their business is with the federal government and a lot of that is for like the surveillance tools that law enforcement agencies are using across the country. He has a very particular worldview. When he came in and purchased Paramount, cbs, he made a lot of immediate changes to cbs. Installed a new kind of editor in chief at CBS News, Barry Weiss, who's a known Zionist and someone who was not too, too fond of like racial justice, like DEI programs. And those things got cut and gut immediately. Paramount Studios overall, like created a blacklist of actors that have been friendly to the Palestinian cause and have basically said we're not going to put them in our films. And now purchasing an even bigger studio, Warner Brothers, you can stand to guess those are the kinds of choices that they will replicate there. And then Warner Brothers also owns cnn, so they've already very openly talked about making some big changes to what CNN does and how they're structured.

[Interviewer]

The very first November fired by my agency specifically for marching and speaking out about Gaza, for asking for ceasefire. So you have the tech billionaire class and this like small group of oligarchs kind of acting as like a rogue non state entity with as much GDP as the country of Taiwan. And they're going through the process of capturing mainstream media outlets and embedding themselves inside of social media platforms to push various agendas. And one of the big agendas is AI. What is the connection between AI and active newsrooms right now? And what is the importance of making sure there's a positive reportage on AI?

[Steven Randeros]

Well, I mean you think about anybody who picks up a device sees artificial intelligence being pushed on them all over the place. Apple's got their version of artificial intelligence they're pushing to you. You go to any of the social media platforms and your search Bar all of a sudden, is embedded with AI. So we're living through a moment of AI hype. When you think about the big companies that are behind artificial intelligence, be it OpenAI, perplexity, anthropic, they have built a certain ve version of AI that relies upon bigger and bigger quantities of data. You know, newsrooms are actually, like, really critical sites of generating new data because reporting happens every single day. For starters, part of what we noted in the report that we're seeing is partnerships emerging with every single major news organization. Those partnerships are all about, like, feeding more content into large language models, you know, and then we're also seeing other kinds of deals that are all about training large language models to continue doing what they do better. But I think the other thing I would say is, like, by embedding these tools and actually using them for things like editorial decisions, to edit reports that journalists write, to even write entire articles, you're creating the conditions for, like, for journalists to be displaced as workers, for starters. Additionally, I mean, for newsrooms, the reason they're doing it is because it creates a revenue stream for them. And anybody who's been following journalism knows that, like, there's been an economic crisis inside of journalism. How do you fund it? AI deals are like, a big source of revenue for many news organizations. And that's unfortunate because, you know, historically we've seen this dynamic where when you have an industry that has, like, a significant financial influence over the industry, it makes it less likely that the news industry will criticize it, will cover it fairly. This happened in the 60s with the tobacco industry. You had a lot of research that was pumping out, that was drawing the connection between smoking and, like, cancer. Because the tobacco industry was the number one advertiser in newspapers. You seldomly saw those reports get covered really fairly. So my concern is, in the moment that we're living in now, where there's a big AI hype machine that's telling us keep using the thing, and you're seeing data centers being built just about everywhere, including in the desert where there's no water. But let's build it here. AI is becoming so central to news organizations, making it so that the kind of critical coverage we need in this moment is not happening because the financial influence is there.

[Interviewer]

So you feel like the main drawbacks of AI is the gutting of newsrooms, the construction of data centers, and the potential impact on communities. Where in particular, do they choose to build these kind of data centers, and is there a socioeconomic component of where they choose to construct them?

[Steven Randeros]

It used to be even 10 years ago that many of these tech companies, because data centers have been around for a really long time, you need data infrastructure for things like the Internet. But for several years they were building them in places where they were thoughtful about where they. Is there a place that has a power grid that can absorb the kind of energy consumption that we're going to use? Is there a place that has plenty of access to fresh water? Because you need that to cool down the computers? In recent years, and I'd say probably in the last three years as the AI hype machine has been really building, they've just kind of thrown that caution to the wind. And just about in every community you can think of, they're being built in big towns, in small towns. They're being built in places that are in drought ridden conditions. They're being built in places that have really messed up power grids that can't really, really sustain it. You know, one of the things we tracked in a report that we released last year was also they're going to places where they think that they won't meet local opposition, where they think that the communities have limited political power. So last year we released a report called the People say no Looking at the trend of data center growth in the South. And in a lot of the places are, you know, rural white communities and like deeply populated black communities in areas where like what's known as like Cancer Alley down in the south where there's like high rates of cancer. They're building up there. They're building them there. Yeah. I mean the calculus that many tech companies are making is where can we go where we'll meet favorable conditions on the ground and where we won't meet local resistance. And what they've been finding out is like that's not the case. Like people are fighting back because it's very clear to people, like when a big data center comes to town and you start to see your utility rates go up and you start to see the water tap come out differently, there's a reason for that. And it's probably because of that big data center that got built down the road.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I know too. There are also a couple different reservations in the US And Canada, like the Pyramid Lake Reservation in northern Nevada and then also somewhere in Alberta. They're trying as hard as they can to essentially bribe tribal officials to greenlight the construction. So they're looking for places where there'll be very little local resistance or where it's so impoverished that people are incentivized. To let them build recklessly if they can get like a chunk of change from the center itself.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, I mean, you saw this in Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee, where Elon Musk built one of his data centers, Colossus, for his company xai. And he came in, you know, Memphis is a place where historically black community and the neighborhood where they built it was called, it's called Boxtown. It's a neighborhood that was founded by freed slaves. Has a really interesting, like, storied history, but it's also a history of a lot of environmental racism. There used to be a Valero Gas refinery, like right next door that pumped a lot of toxic air. Cancer rates in that particular neighborhood are like four times higher than anywhere else in the city. And it's an impoverished neighborhood. The mayor saw an opportunity with like, Elon Musk, the world's richest person to come to town. Maybe this can like, help raise our tax revenue. This can help us pay for things that we haven't been able to afford. And the thing is, like, in so many communities across the U.S. like, that need for more revenue is there, like, for sure, because you've had. Had cities that have been dismantled because industry has left town, you know, because the coal mine shut down. So, like, I totally get that part of it. But part of what we see happening is these tech companies come in and local politicians are mortgaging the entire future of that community for like a very short term gain for temporary jobs that will exist while the data center's being constructed. But then once that's over, like, it's only a handful of jobs that get created for like, tax breaks that don't ever come back, you know, and you have like half the states in the country that have tax breaks on the sale of the land. So tech billionaires right off the top don't have to pay a whole lot, you know, to get the access to the land. So those kinds of, those kinds of deals I think represent like, unfair bargains for local communities that actually won't get to benefit in the longer term, you know, and it's all to make, like, Elon Musk even richer.

[Interviewer]

And this all connects to the media because the media would be the tool that could maybe get in the way of the construction of these centers by raising awareness about the potential negative ramifications that would come with that. And just AI critical speech in general would not be published on outlets and different news channels that are organized, that are owned or at least have a majority shareholder who's involved in the AI world somehow, which brings Me back to Larry Ellison. Let's talk about Larry. How did he make his money in the first place?

[Steven Randeros]

Oracle is the company that he built. It's a cloud based company, provides services to a variety of different corporations and governments. You know, it's, it's where you store your stuff. Like, you know, everybody thinks the cloud is just this kind of nebulous thing. It's actual real infrastructure. So he's built a lot of data centers all over the country to kind of service that cloud based business. In the age of AI, like that data infrastructure need has ballooned, so he's doing more of that. He's also making his money. He's kind of leveraged his wealth to do other things. In addition to buying up CBS News and now Warner Brothers, he's played a very critical role in the sale of TikTok. In the last year. We've seen that TikTok became a big talking point for Donald Trump and wanting to see TikTok in the hands of a US owned business. And so he's part of the conglomerate that's actually taking an ownership stake in TikTok and his company, Oracle is actually going to be in charge of auditing TikTok's algorithm. So that's interesting. So he's making his money there and now he's becoming a media mogul, so probably making his money there too.

[Interviewer]

When you say auditing the TikTok algorithm. So the algorithm itself is a mathematical equation that can be modified by a person?

[Steven Randeros]

Oh yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. It's interesting because let's give it some context. Right, so TikTok came into the public conversation among many people on the right in the aftermath of the genocide in Gaza because of the role that TikTok was playing in, you know, kind of helping Palestinians actually speak truth to power and get messages out about what was happening down on the ground. TikTok has been a platform much like many other platforms before it, where, you know, progressives and leftists have been able to actually like tell the story of what's happening. You saw this during Arab Spring and the role that Twitter played in the rise of Arab spring back in 2011. So there's always been this relationship between like media tools and the ability of those who are living at the margins to leverage those tools to tell their stories. Because often corporate media become gatekeepers that then manipulate the story and don't tell the story at all. Right, so TikTok, that's the context for TikTok and why someone like Donald Trump is saying we need to Change that because it's amplifying perspectives that are not in alignment with our agenda. So yes, an individual, or a set of individuals here in this case can manipulate the algorithm to suppress what's happening on those platforms. And actually with Palestine, this already happened. It happened on Instagram, it happened on Facebook because those platforms, like those changes were tweaked and so many, many accounts were shadow banned. Like where the user didn't even realize that they were posting content, but it wasn't reaching anybody and much of the content was being taken down. So I would anticipate that something similar is coming to TikTok eventually, which not only just has an impact on Palestinians, but anybody who has kind of a countercultural worldview, you know, an alternative worldview.

[Interviewer]

And what is Larry Ellison's connection to Israel?

[Steven Randeros]

That's a good question, man. I don't actually know. What I can tell you is he's always been sympathetic to the Israeli cause and he's been very deliberate in placing like pro Israeli voices on his platforms.

[Interviewer]

I read somewhere that he actually donated to the idf.

[Steven Randeros]

Oh, interesting.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, he's been an IDF donor. I think that a lot of Americans, especially young ones, don't necessarily know corporate capture of the media has already reached like maybe 75 to 80% completion. It's reached almost a boiling point now to where the actual fraction of independent media that still exists has to be under 5%. Even stuff that looks independent is somehow funded by a billionaire who's connected to the establishment or the tech establishment in some way. Even before this report, what do you mark as the beginning of the timeline that led to today's current moment in media capture?

[Steven Randeros]

In part it was, let's go back to the 70s when Wall street paid attention to news organizations. Up until that point, many major newspaper TV stations were either family owned or just like regional conglomerates that owned it. Around the time of the 70s is when Wall street took a look and said, here's a place where if we bought this, we can try to tweak it and make as much money as possible. So you start seeing like corporate consolidation start happening right around the 70s. It really ramped up in the 80s under Reagan. Reagan kind of cleared the way some deregulation that allowed for the sale of big companies to start consolid. And then it really ramped up even further in the Clinton years with the passage of the 96 Telecom Act. Part of what the 96 Telecom act did was it just completely eliminated any kind of media ownership caps or just like really raised those caps. Allowing bigger and bigger companies to get built. And so from 96 on, we start seeing like mega, mega media companies start to emerge. That's where like your Disney's, your Walt Disney start coming. Your News Corp Started emerging around that time. And so back then, a lot of the big companies that were purchasing were cable companies that became these giant media companies. In the last 10 years, it's been tech billionaires who have the money, have the resources, have the capital. And we started to see this shift now towards like tech being kind of the primary media moguls that have captured the media system. But it's been deregulation. It's been like kind of getting rid of guardrails that have existed for a long time. That has allowed for this wave of consolidation that we seen.

[Interviewer]

But what happened in 2016 specifically, to begin the timeline and your report. Yeah.

[Steven Randeros]

In 2016, AT&T attempted a merger with Time Warner. Eventually, like, we actually actively opposed it. Eventually that sale did go through and we started to see, like, where, you know, a big telecom company purchased a cable company and consolidated at a levels that we hadn't seen up until that point. That deal eventually, like, didn't really amount to a whole lot. Eventually, like, you know, Time Warner was spun out and sold off. And what emerged later was Warner Bros. Discovery, which is the deal that we're seeing take place now with Larry Ellison purchasing it.

[Interviewer]

How many different prominent news organizations that you can think of would exist under Ellison's umbrella if this goes through?

[Steven Randeros]

There's well over 2,000, you know, news channels, media channels, just to name a few of the popular ones off top. You're talking about bet, mtv, cnn, those, some of the major ones that would come under his control. But several thousand, a couple thousand media properties.

[Interviewer]

And what separates him from, let's say, somebody like Rupert Murdoch? Rupert Murdoch, CEO of Fox, owner of the Wall Street Journal, and a number of different outlets in the UK and across the world. What separates someone like Murdoch from Ellison?

[Steven Randeros]

They're very similar in the sense that they share a conservative worldview. The difference is Rupert Murdoch came up in the news business, so that's his bailiwick. His point of view was I'm gonna use as a way to impose the way that I think the world should be conservative worldview. And you saw that play out in the way that he built out Fox News. Larry Ellison is a tech billionaire, is a tech oligarch, and he believes in trying to advance the cause of tech. And many tech billionaires, including him, have a variety of different kind of worldviews that inform the world that they're trying to build. But a lot of it is rooted in techno progress. Let's build technology to its greatest possibility, not let anything get in the way. The idea that like, you know, a data center could completely dry out the well of a community over here, that's just like, that's just nonsense to worry about that. Because ultimately the gain that we get by creating better technology like, outweighs the bad that it does.

[Interviewer]

Do you think they have a utopian worldview of like total convenience?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, and it's a utopian worldview that is about like, some people get to live in that world, others don't. You know, there's this philosophy called long termism that this guy Nick Boson, who created this think tank called the Future of Life Institute ascribes to. And they believe that there's a set chosen few people in the world who are geniuses. And really what the world needs to do is cater to every single need of those geniuses to allow them to become the geniuses and do the things that they want to do in society. That the world that we're trying to build towards, if we allow those people to do that, is going to be much better than the world that exists right now. Anything that gets in the way of it, that, you know, climate change, like, it's just an existential risk to the greater possibility of techno progress. It's a, it's a worldview that a lot of it is like informed by eugenics that believes that some people are smarter than others based on like racial characteristics. And it's very techno utopian. It's the belief that like technology ultimately is the greater good and everything else is just anything else that gets in the way, like ethics, like civil rights, like human rights are just obstacles.

[Interviewer]

Sounds like they want fewer people in the world.

[Steven Randeros]

Oh yeah.

[Interviewer]

You know, because the gutting of the working class and erasure of the non rich is the same thing as dying. Yeah. You know, the elimination of jobs and mass, mass unemployment. Have they voiced any like, theories about slowing the birth rate down?

[Steven Randeros]

Some are. Again, it's, it's interesting. I mean, Silicon Valley has a mix of a variety of different worldviews. You have some who are like, we need to make more babies and in particular more white babies. Yeah, I've seen that. You know, and then there's like people who are where the human extinctionism. Some of the people who are behind a lot of the AI development believe that the push for artificial general intelligence is about creating a kind of a superior being to what exists now. And when that superior being is built, when we achieve artificial general intelligence, us humans are less worthy, and therefore we don't deserve to be around. So there's human extinctionism in the mix in this. I don't know if Larry Ellison is ascribing to any of that, but the. That certainly is in the mix. And how people think about the world, it's very nihilistic. But I think regardless of whether it's let's make more white babies or let's extinct all the humans, or let's not worry about the implications to climate change, when we build technology at a scale that destroys the planet, regardless of whatever you ascribe to, there are certain communities that are always sacrificed along the way. And it's the poor communities, it's the communities of color that have always kind of existed on the margins. It's in the name of AI. It's the communities in the global majority that are doing all the mineral extraction to kind of fuel the computer chips that are being built. It's the content moderators in Kenya who are actually the ones physically doing the work of training large language models. People think that artificial intelligence just kind of works on its own. There are so many humans that actually touch, but they're invisible to us. And there's a reason for that. And so going back to, like, Larry Ellison, the reason it's so dangerous to have tech figures actually controlling the media system is that they get to control who actually exists in our society and who doesn't. And that's my concern. I think, like, my thing is there are many of us who are having to pay the cost to make these billionaires even richer, and we have to call attention to that. We have to fight back.

[Interviewer]

And one of the ultimate goals of AI, especially on the domestic manufacturing side, is maximizing profit for. For corporate business owners and making it so they don't have to pay workers. You know, it's like, how can we make sure that our actual warehouses are staffed by robots and that we can pay as few people in real life as possible? And so thinking about that applying to the newsroom is kind of scary too, especially when you see all the layoffs they're doing. Like, are journalists gonna be robots, too?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah. I mean, I don't know if they'll be like automaton robots, but certainly what you're seeing is, like, the introduction of artificial intelligence and newsrooms that hints at that possibility. And you'll start to see it in, like, slow waves. You'll See, editorial boards, like, the editorial level of, like, the cycle of creating an article might shift to artificial intelligence. You saw this with the Associated Press recently. They have a leader inside of their newsroom who is like, their AI lead and basically told the journalists, like, resisting using artificial intelligence is futile. Like, so you have to adjust to it. And his vision for what should happen is the reporter should go out there and gather the information and just let the AI write the article. And that might sound like, okay, that's less work for journalists to do, but eventually, like, eventually it will lead to the next stage, which is like, do we really need humans writing the news altogether? And that's a scary thought to think about. I mean, I think about my role kind of. Growing up, I actually spent some time working inside of a community media organization. I ran a show at a radio station. What I loved about it is I got to tell the stories that I thought were interesting to me, and it was not really what else was on the air, but, like, I got to curate something and build my own audience. I mean, you get to do that, too, with your show. The thought that we could turn all of that creativity over to an algorithm that gets to decide what actually matters to us, like, that's a very scary place to be. And it's not really even an algorithm deciding. It's the human behind the algorithm. It's the people that control it. It's the people that own it. That's not a world that I want to live in.

[Interviewer]

You know, I mean, if you look at Google AI some and that impact on the viewership and visibility of news organizations, even mainstream ones, I mean, I think that's kind of a more sublime example of journalists being replaced by robots. Because, you know, even though it's not like a robot replacing a reporter at a news desk in D.C. or something like something crazy visual like that, I mean, can you speak to how Google AI summaries have taken away viewership and jobs and eyeballs from journalists?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, I mean, and some of this is like, going back to the history of tech of, like, they've always pushed innovations on us that we've had to adjust to. You can think back to the first time. I remember when Facebook switched up its newsfeed, and I was like, what the fuck is this? And this happened with Google, where all of a sudden, you put in a prompt now, and instead of taking you to search results, which is what Google was always founded to be, like an index, like a library saying, here's the information and where to go, what neighborhood do you think? This appears to be the King's Cross area of London. It is known for its railway station and transportation connections. Instead it's taking you to a box that says, here's like, here's an AI summary of the information we think you want. And there's a lot of power. This has always been true with Google. There's a lot of power in what makes it to that feed. And so the fact that they're like now redirecting you to a closed space that says here's the information for you, that's scary. What we've seen news organizations start to do is to actually work out deals to ensure that it's their information that's making it there. The Associated Press has a deal with Google so that its Gemini chatbot will promote its content. But you know, when you think about the larger landscape of media, that leaves so many institutions out, that leaves independent media out, that leaves the black owned newspaper out. And you know, the fact that they've done this without any real kind of consent of the users and just kind of like focusing your attention, like eventually it creates more work for us as the user. Because what I've come to find and what everybody who does the research on this is coming to find is that there's generally mistakes. The BBC did a report on this. They found that like there was 75% of the, like the query results that they had put in had mistakes in them. As a user you have to like scrutinize the information. Now you have to do more work than you would have done before if you had just read an article from a credited news site that you trust.

[Interviewer]

And the frustrating thing there is that, you know, you talked about like the media consolidation in the late 90s and around 2001 with like the 20 or hour news cycle is when people became hip to just like the sort of ridiculous partisanship in the cable news system. But then people saw the Internet come out, the early Internet, and that was supposed to sort of be the savior of like the corporate gridlock that had consumed, I guess, cable news feeds. And people were like, oh, the Internet's here now we're going to be able to get free access to information. It's going to be all good. We can curate news how we want from real people and just cut out the middleman and get straight to the point. And it sounds like, especially when you talk about Larry Ellison having control of the TikTok algorithm through Oracle and these sort of other things happening, that the Internet has failed to achieve its purpose. In that sense, is that an exaggeration or do you think that's fair?

[Steven Randeros]

No, it's fair. I mean, there's an academic named Cory Doctoro who put a name to it. He calls it inshittification, you know, and that's what we've seen happen to the Internet. I mean, I remember those days. And part of actually what got me into the line of work that I do now is, you know, I was in high school during 9 11, and I remember having debates in school about, like, is there going to be a draft? Because there was a drum up to. And when you looked at the media coverage back then, like, everything was pushing us towards war, right? And so we see the consequences of having, like, consolidated corporate media that can. That can be that kind of echo chamber to push us towards something that we probably shouldn't have done. And in 2003, when we invaded Iraq, I remember seeing, like, the fall of the Saddam statue and seeing the image being displayed across every news organization. Come to find out that if you had just kind of like zoomed in, zoomed back the lens a little bit, you would have seen that, like that entire square where supposedly the people had risen up and torn down this statue was really US Military personnel with their tanks all around the square. That would have been a very different story to tell. That would have been a story of invasion. That would have been a story of occupation. And that sort of radicalized me to the idea that actually media can play a very distinct role in telling a certain later on. This happened to me again in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, watching the way that certain people that were trying to survive during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were being depicted by the Associated Press in the photo captions. And when it was white folks that were going around scrounging stuff, they were surviving. When it was black folks, they were looting. So there's always been this kind of relationship between what happens to the infrastructure that shapes our information and our media and what story it's trying to tell. The Internet was supposed to be, like, wonderful. This, like, you know, my colleague Alfredo Lopez calls it, like, the biggest social movement in history. Cause he really saw this infrastructure as like a tool that actually connected us in a way that we hadn't been connected before. But instead, in the ensuing years, what happened is what happened to corporate media, which is big gatekeepers emerged and they sort of shut down the Internet. And what you have now is just like little fiefdoms, the Facebook fiefdom, the, like, Google fiefdom. And, you know, you can play within their sandbox. And if you try to go somewhere else, it doesn't quite play with each other. And it's all kind of shut down, you know, and it's controlled. And of course, there's always possibility inside of that. And I see that, like, in the show that you do, like, in being able to really tap into your audience, but it also exists within a context where it's a corporation that ultimately controls the means of distribution to reach your people.

[Interviewer]

And so what's an example of them limiting coverage in a way that would be consistent, like, traditionally a free speech violation?

[Steven Randeros]

You know, we saw this a lot, actually, in the aftermath of, like, the really well documented killings of black people by police. You had a lot of black users who were posting stuff on social media saying, like, hey, this police killing is whack. It's bullshit. And we were getting reports from people saying, hey, like, don't we just keep noticing our content keeps getting taken down and it doesn't really tell us why? And there's no way to actually, like, try to talk to someone about. So that's when we started doing a lot of work, like engaging with companies like Facebook and Twitter to find out what's going on and to advocate for better policies. But really, the thing that got me working on that with Facebook was the killing of this black woman in Baltimore County, Maryland, where she was actually live streaming at the time the police were. She was in a confrontation with police, and the Baltimore county police department asked Facebook to shut down her live stream, and they complied. And shortly after that, they entered her home and just like. And killed her in front of her son. So, you know, I think, like, the choices around the takedown of content, particularly when it doesn't suit, you know, a police department or the federal government or like, or the platform itself can have, like, deadly consequences. And I think we've just found that to happen more consistently with marginalized voices online. You know, particularly communities of color, marginalized voices.

[Interviewer]

And then also when there's information that may challenge existent power structures. I saw a CNBC report that said that in the couple days after the most recent Epstein file drop, if you looked up the word Epstein on TikTok and elsewhere, it would have an error message and not show you what was going on.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, and the thing is, like, you know, that's the innocuous thing about this is, like, how much is controlled by a handful of people. Then when these things pop up, like, you think, like, is something up with the platform? Did I do something wrong? Like, there's no way to actually know. Like the media system exists as a giant black box. Someone controls it, but we don't know exactly how it's controlled.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, it's also people always say to me like, oh, is the Internet still free? People say that. I think that it kind of is free. If you choose to make your own website, then you would have to almost market directly, like go to channel5truth.com but most, I think it's 95% of online traffic, like you said, has been filtered into the platforms that are owned by these private companies. Meta owns Google and Facebook. You have X owned by Elon. Then you have small minority platforms like Rumble and Blue sky that are owned by different, small, more small time wealthy people. If I were to build my own website and post footage from Palestine or stuff about Epstein or stuff about police brutality, would there be a way for the government and power structures at hand to actually take that down? Or can they only touch me when I'm on major social media?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean the thing is like a lot of that content has to live somewhere, right? It has to be stored somewhere. And that's where you go back to like who are the dominant players in the cloud based infrastructure in the US and it's the tech oligarchs. So could there be a way to like take down content from your website but probably through your cloud based server? Like shutting it down? Yeah, yeah, shutting it down at the point of where it's being stored.

[Interviewer]

Right, but there is a blueprint for a free Internet. Assuming we don't have a cloud server and we just make a website.

[Steven Randeros]

Absolutely. I mean that's the thing. It's like the pathway from the current moment that we're in to what else it could look like. It's actually not that complicated. And a lot of what we've been pushing and actually pushed for during the pandemic especially is to support resources towards building like community owned broadband networks or municipally owned broadband networks. Like your first kind of gatekeeper that you have to enter when you go on the net is who's your Internet service provider?

[Interviewer]

T Mobile.

[Steven Randeros]

Right. T Mobile, Verizon, AT&T Comcast Spectrum. But there's a way to build that infrastructure that's community owned. You know, there's places like Detroit that have built mesh networks that are community controlled. Like social media, not social media, but like, but Internet networks. There's a group out in New York that we work with, Community Technology of New York that builds these temporary mesh networks. That they prop up during times of emergency. Because the problem with like centralized consolidated infrastructure, whether that's Internet infrastructure, data infrastructure or media, is that it has like vulnerabilities. Like if it shuts down, it shuts down. You know, you see this like during hurricane season, like the cell phone networks always don't work. And that's a product of like design and policy. Not because of a natural disaster. Because I remember, you know, growing up in la, we had earthquakes all the time.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Steven Randeros]

And guess what, like our lamp line still worked. And that was because there was policy that said the copper line that goes into your home, the telephone line that's got to be self powered for these kinds of situations. And this group CTNY goes around and builds these temporary mesh networks that actually allow people's cell phone devices to communicate to each other. If you're inside the network and in moments of crisis like that, it's the difference between life or death. Being able to reach out and talk to people and communicate. In Hurricane Maria, like in Puerto Rico several years ago, there's several people, I mean hundreds of people that died, that would not have died if they had had a way to communicate, you know, so, you know, building alternatives are totally on the table. We don't have to have the insidification version that we have now, you know,

[Interviewer]

so there's no regulating board that is capable of taking down websites themselves. The Internet still exists as a potentially like anarchist sphere if you decide not to, to build your following on one of the major platforms.

[Steven Randeros]

Totally. And you know, and it's, and actually there's people out there that are actually like trying to teach people how to get off of like the major platforms because people think it's impossible. But there's this, there's this computer scientist, Janet Vertese. I just met her a couple weeks ago. She's interesting. She's like, she was part of the Mars Rover team. She like actually built a robot that made it to Mars, unlike Elon Musk. But she has a project now that's just about teaching people how to like wean yourself off of the, the big corporate tech players and like exist in an ecosystem where you can still do the same stuff. You can email, you can store stuff you can message without living on their, in their fiefdoms, you know, so it's totally possible. Takes some work. But I really like the work that she's doing because it's like, it's showing me that it is actually possible and incremental steps to not be so tethered to these tech oligarchs who have a very different agenda that's counter to the world that I'm trying to live in.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, it's just hard because in theory, like, I want to say, yeah, like I'm going to leave every major social media platform and make like my own Channel 5 website, but the reality is, like, that would be a huge economic loss.

[Steven Randeros]

Totally. Don't get me wrong, man, I'm not saying you should do that. No, I'm not saying I should do that.

[Interviewer]

It's tough because it's like I'm economically tethered for survival purposes. Everyone who counts on the payroll of the, of the Channel 5 LLC to use these major networks to promote everything we come out with.

[Steven Randeros]

I mean, here's what I'll say. Because, like, I also think that there's a value in staying inside of the platforms because, like, if you leave, you're ceding ground and who are you ceding ground to? Who replaces like the content, the perspective that you bring?

[Interviewer]

Compromise copycats.

[Steven Randeros]

Exactly, yeah. People who won't necessarily bring the perspective that you try to bring or the curiosity that you bring. You know, and I think about that myself, like on the platforms that I'm still active in, like, I'm still, I still have an X account. I don't post there as much, much all the time. But like, there's a value to staying there and holding ground because if we leave, then it creates space for someone else to occupy that.

[Interviewer]

And I feel like that's why this combo is so important for me. Especially because you mentioned the media being this like, black box. And I've had experiences with Time Warner and HBO and CNN that like, I'm still trying to make sense of, but they're so confusing. So when I had to promote an HBO film a long time ago, they had me scheduled to go on primetime CNN with Don Lemon and Kaitlan Collins. The movie's not just about the Capitol riot and all that. It's also about media echo chambers, you know what I mean? And the dangers of the 24 hour news cycle and how I think mainstream media like Fox and even CNN competes for views by running constant 24 hour news cycles based upon fear, division, outrage and panic. And I signed an NDA, but I'm gonna break it anyway. But they had to give me this weird media training session. And it was like these 16 people I'd never met before, more people on a zoo than I thought you could ever even have. I had to get Zoom Premium. All these people in suits, like going through point for point being like, you need to tell. If they ask you about Trump, say this. If they ask you about revolution, say this. If they ask you about your background, say this. Don't reveal that you're arrested for graffiti. All this weird ass shit. And I'm like, okay, this is kind of strange. They had one cool guy who literally had a kangal hat on. I guess they thought he would, like, get through to me. And he's like, yo, my man. So check this out. I know these people. These motherfuckers don't look cool to you, but they're cool, son. And I was like, all right.

[Steven Randeros]

I don't know.

[Interviewer]

I was like, whatever cabal you're a part of, it's free freaking me out.

[Andrew Callahan]

But it was only an hour, but it was mandatory.

[Interviewer]

So they told me I was gonna go on CNN and Don Lemon was gonna ask me about, like, my life and all this shit. And I get on and he goes, what can you tell us about the mental state of Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio in the lead up to January 6th? I'm just like, what the fuck kind of snitch question is this? Like, I had gone. I'd embedded myself in this men's group, the Proud Boys, for a long time, and I had still had those active relationships. Revealing any information could put my life in danger. I just wasn't ready for it. So I clapped back super hard and I was like, actually, Don, the film is about how the mainstream media, including cnn, uses the cable news system to push partisan divisions that have led to events like January 6th by essentially pitting working class Americans against each other and pushing culture war over class war issues. And he was like, what the hell? They cut the segment short. It was never aired. No one ever saw this shit. I leave the studio and I guess the CNN had a handler for me. Well, they technically worked for a 24. Like I said, this black box is all connected. And she's panicking. She's, like looking at her phone, all nervous. I'm like, what's going on? And she was like, time War C Suite is furious. And I'm like, who is Time Warner C Suite? And she said, you don't know that. The same people that own HBO also own cnn. And so they looked at it as like an in house beef. And I was like, no, no, no. I was just. I was just projecting my opinion. And they were like, don't you remember the media training? You weren't supposed to do that. She was panicked. They canceled my press tour right then. And there no more press appearances. My final press appearance for the movie was also never aired, but it was an extremely hostile NPR interview where the first question is, how do you think the Sandy Hook family would feel about you fraternizing with Alex Jones, one of the most despicable people on the face of the planet, when the movie itself is an expose of how people like Alex Jones created the conditions for January 6th.

[Steven Randeros]

Right.

[Interviewer]

Do you feel responsible for what happened to the Sandy Hook families? Yes, I killed the children. But beyond that, I know, I mean, I went in that school, I pulled a gun out and I shot every one of them myself. I mean, I'm guilty. And it was just nuts. And I always wondered, like, that's so weird that all of these organizations that are technically disconnected, some of them like npr, isn't necessarily connected directly to Time Warner C Suite, but they seem to have like some sort of high up corporate meeting where they decide who is going to be made to be a hero and who's going to made to be a villain, who's going to be amplified, who's going to be stamped down, and they have preferential treatment for those who really walk the line and don't rock the boat. And so what I'm wondering specifically is who is in that black box? Now I know that was a few years ago. Like, who are some figures that you think might be up there with that high up conversation who actually make those calls beyond the people who you might see on tv?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, I mean, of course, like many of the tech oligarchs that we cover in the report, like Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison are chief among them. Peter Thiel, who's a big Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who's invested a ton of money. I mean, he funded J.D. vance's Senate career and J.D. vance is now the vice president, but also has invested in a variety of different media companies as a result. Jeff Bezos, who has his own kind of particular kind of worldview and agenda that he's pushing, who's made tons of changes at the Washington Post, and Marcus Andreessen, another venture capitalist. And he's someone who has invested in a variety of different. He's invested in substack, hundreds of millions of dollars there. And it's really shaping that from the inside out and really reforming it into a tech company.

[Interviewer]

That's so crazy. You just said that. Because I got an offer from Substack that said that if you delete your Patreon, we will match whatever you're getting a month.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer]

Oh, saying no, wait a second. So that billionaire you just mentioned is

[Steven Randeros]

the one Marcus Andreessen. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

So that's where that money would have been coming from.

[Steven Randeros]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's. And Marc Benioff, for example, he bought Time magazine a few years ago. He's the CEO of Salesforce. If you remember last year, the Time person of the year were the AI innovators. So Sam Altman, it's Elon Musk, you know, they basically put themselves on the COVID of Time magazine. So yeah, I mean, those are some of the figures that in like in indirect and direct ways I think are shaping a lot of the information we're seeing.

[Interviewer]

So those people, and I guess their posse would be in that black box.

[Steven Randeros]

Oh, yeah.

[Interviewer]

High ups and yeah.

[Steven Randeros]

And then you think about the industries that they're vested in. Right. So they're not only like invested in media, but Marcus Andreessen is also heavily invested in artificial intelligence, is invested a lot of money in OpenAI. Sam Altman is interconnected into all of that. You have tech focused companies that are playing, doing plays with the defense, with the military. And so you have figures like Palmer Luckey, you know, who, who runs Anduril Industries. So that's all kind of like the. Where the money is coming from. The platforms that are being built, the technology is being pushed. Like it's a variety of different figures. We did a series last year called what the fuck? The Rise of the Techboligarchy and we put faces and names to them. It's 14 people, which connects to like my Salvadorian roots because, you know, El Salvador for decades was run by a coffee oligarchy. It's like 14 families. And we sort of have that situation going on right now. 14 tech figures that are controlling a lot of what we're experiencing in our society.

[Interviewer]

And some of those figures are a few that you just named.

[Steven Randeros]

Absolutely, yeah. All of them are included. You know, folks that I haven't included are also some other, like Masatoshi Sun, I might have gotten the name wrong, but he runs a venture capital firm that's been funding a lot of the data centers that are being built. Sundar Pichai, who runs Google. Tim Cook with Apple, and Elon Musk, too. Elon Musk, absolutely.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, all the time. All these people love Israel.

[Steven Randeros]

Not all of them. Yeah, not all of them. But I'll say this, like, don't get in the way. You know, they don't divest. They're still doing heavy business with Israel in different ways. You know, whether it's pushing their products there, doing partnerships, you know, artificial intelligence tools that are being integrated with the idf. You know, you started seeing the use of like AI creating kill lists and you, you know, during the, during the genocide in Gaza. So yeah, I mean not all of them are like Zionists per se, like in terms of holding that worldview, but they're pro business with Israel for sure.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Peter Thiel in particular comes to mind because I read that Palantir just secured a billion plus dollar, probably multi billion dollar contract with the Pentagon which is establishing, I believe their software system as the default of across all federal military branches. Federal and military branches. Sorry. So now the same people that are collecting and selling our data, if that's not a mischaracterization, are also vested in the control of the media?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Interviewer]

A better question actually is what is Peter Thiel's direct connection to the current media?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, I mean he's invested in Rumble. He sort of mentioned Rumble earlier and you know, Rumble's become like a site that's platformed a lot of anti Semites and like right wing figures and that's been kind of his like most significant play into the media system is just purchasing or buying a stake into Rumble. He hasn't invested necessarily in a big way with like traditional media companies. I wouldn't be surprised if we see that happening though.

[Interviewer]

I did read somewhere and I'm familiar with the concept that Peter Thiel in particular has been bankrolling individual influencers and individual podcasters and people in the sort of like counterculture and art world to try to make an impact that way and promote different pro AI, pro AI, pro Trump sort of anti woke ideals in the counterculture to sort of create like a post woke movement. Have you looked into that at all?

[Steven Randeros]

We haven't, but I think it makes sense to me. I mean obviously we've been seeing a lot of like you know, conservative influencers that are pushing out the like the fraud narrative and going out to different places. You know, folks like Nick Shirley, who I know you've spoken to before, genius, just going around showing up at random places, creating kind of like a controversy around it, which has then led to the copycats that are doing the same thing in other places of the country. You know, and I think like those, those behaviors are very much motivated by like what's generate, what's content that we can generate that will generate clicks and engagement. And I think what we've learned about social platforms is that the content that you know, outrages people, that angers people Tends to perform better than just straight up information.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, that's the old Pulitzer quote. If it bleeds, it leads.

[Steven Randeros]

Bleeds, it leads. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And now it's so tough because whenever I see like, you know, fraud stories ridiculously signal boosted by the vice president and everything like that, and every single tech figure on the right wing, my first thought is like, oh, they probably put him up to it. But then that's kind of of like a birdbrained, take no offense to all these chickens here because like the economic incentive to create that kind of content is so strong now that you have people just making that on their own volition because they know it's going to make money.

[Steven Randeros]

Absolutely. I mean you see people who go from like posting videos about like lifestyle and like exercise to becoming like right wing maga, like influencers, you know, and it's searching for the thing that will engage, you know, that will draw clicks and that will. And the thing is like that is the kind of moment that we're living in. And this is like getting to the culture war versus the class war. We live in an economy that has the kind of excess wealth that we're seeing. And the thing I always say about that is like to have like the kind of wealth that we're seeing being amassed by figures like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. Like, that kind of wealth accumulation can only be paralleled by a second similar kind of like wealth displacement by poverty. And so people are searching for a way to get out. People are searching for a way to make money. And in an economy that, you know, where, because of artificial intelligence and for other reasons, there aren't opportunities like people will find a way.

[Interviewer]

So how can small independent newsrooms or creators even get funding in the first place without having to build it from the ground up on their own?

[Steven Randeros]

It's a great question. I think it's a question that there's different kinds of interventions that are being attempted. I mean, the first thing is like we have to think about the importance and the value of a news ecosystem that actually informs people just from even just a straight up, like how do we get information out to people when there's an emergency? Right. We have to value it and it has to be resourced differently. You know, there's good models out there. Like in Vermont there's a regional network of community media organizations that have, like that have established a state fund where their newsrooms are actually funded to do the work that they do. It's way more sustainable than, you know, living in trying to exist inside of this kind of corporate media sphere, but their information is all hyper local. You've seen the establishment of like journalism funds. And the interesting thing there, it's like tying it back to the report. We actually talk about this in the report. But when states have actually attempted to regulate the role that these tech platforms play in sort of suppressing news and information for people, it's led to these companies actually very, very actively trying to undermine that legislation. In California, there was a bill that would have taxed platforms to basically pay out news organizations for the content that users there's access there. And rather than allow for that legislation to go through, they threatened to just deplatform all the news organizations from Google searches. Google did this meta threatened to do the same thing. And the threat worked. And instead what they negotiated was a collective fund with the state to fund newsrooms across the state. And it was supposed to be $250 million over the course of 10 years. And Google stuck to it for three years and then pulled out. So it's not a long term solution. So you do need a way, you need good policy that actually helps to promote local journalism and local newsrooms funding towards it. And you also just need space for alternatives to exist. Whether that's allowing for community owned broadband networks that then allow people to access news and information that way. Because I lived in the Twin Cities when they built the municipality municipal WI FI network. And the thing I loved about it was the moment you connected to it, it took you to a home site. And that home site was from a citizen journalism organization that just provided like local news to people. This can look very different. We just have to be creative about it.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, back to Larry Ellison for a bit. I also read that he was instrumental in the Paramount settlement that was paid out to Trump. What role did Ellison and the Ellison family play in facilitating that? Well, Larry Ellison's a friend of mine. He's a great, great guy. I think he's the buyer. But we did a deal for about $16 million plus.16 million or maybe more than that in advertising.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, I mean, so the context is Donald Trump sued every single major news organization, you know, NBC, abc, cbs, as a result of like coverage that they had done during the last election. His claim was that like he was unfairly treated because of interviews that they did with Kamala Harris. And most news organizations decided to fold. They just like they just settled with him. But the Paramount one for CBS was interesting because it was happening in the context of Larry Ellison purchasing Paramount Studios and CBS and there's actual documented communications that says, like, hey, if you settle the deal here, we will kind of fast track the, the sale. And so there's a very direct relationship. And like one of the conditions for the, for the Paramount Skydance deal to go through was settling this lawsuit, this frivolous lawsuit with Donald Trump, which if any of those news organizations had actually challenged him, they probably would have gotten the lawsuit thrown out, but instead they just paid out, they just gave him money.

[Interviewer]

So in the same way that the hostile takeover of the news media by these tech oligarchs has been enabled by the newsrooms being broke themselves, I would say it's probably a similar thing there. Trump is able to successfully sue these news organizations, mostly frivolously for stuff like defamation, because it's basically like who it's a match of whoever has deeper pockets. And because the news industry has been suffering for so long, they're more likely to fold because they're in free fall. It's the same variable that made it so Larry Ellison and people like Jeff Bezos could come in and buy the Washington Post. And it's allowing Trump to sue them and get his way and kind of influence the narrative that way. Why do you think that traditional news media platforms have been in free fall for so long? And when do you think that most significant shift was onto social media?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, I mean, consolidation is a big part of it. It's like when you build massive companies, you take on all of their expenses, you know, and like a lot of the media companies that got built in the early 2000s are not just news organizations, they are news organizations, book publishers, magazines, TV stations, like the whole gamut. And so. And like movie studios. And movie studios, very famously, like movies cost a lot of money to make, especially, especially the kinds of movies that have been prioritized in recent years.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, Ant Man 6 exactly.

[Steven Randeros]

Let's do a bunch of CGI. More CGI, which cost way more money. Many of these media companies have taken on debt thinking, like, eventually we'll catch up, we'll catch up. But the debt has just grown. And with many of these media companies, the debt has been around so long that their debt has gotten downgraded, which has made it possible for a really rich, deep pocketed person to just go come in and say, I will buy up the company because you don't have to actually purchase all of the debt because it's been downgraded, you only pay some of it. And so I think we're going to continue to see that like we're going to continue to see media companies that are bleeding out, who are also news organizations, who are also like other, you know, function in other places in our media system. And when you look around society, who has the deep pockets, who has the wealth, who can actually buy these things? And it's going to be tech billionaires.

[Interviewer]

Is there anything the average person can do to resist this?

[Steven Randeros]

I mean it starts with like scrutinizing the information that you get. You know, this, this sounds kind of basic, but it's kind of going back to the emergence of our movement, media justice. It really started in, in the kind of heart of that media consolidation. And a lot of the work that we did back then was trying to teach people like the information that's coming out around you is information you have to scrutinize. So that would be my first thing, straight up media land literacy. Like scrutinize every bit of information that you're seeing, scrutinize the search results, scrutinize the article, try to really ask like, who benefits from this thing?

[Interviewer]

Yeah. You know, the difficulty for the future of the left or progressives in general is how easy it is to create infighting amongst leftists.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And that's what I'm worried about most with tech corporate takeover. It's easier to, I don't want to just say like every progressive person is like a complete empath, but it is a more empathetic view of the world and a more community based approach approach. On the left, the progressive side, it's much easier to pit those people against each other than a vast subsection of the right that is just built on hatred. You know, hatred as a uniting force is almost a cleansing ritual for people who have a lot of skeletons in their closet. For example, like in the right wing right you can have like a Bible thumping evangelical Christian who like thinks that every gay person will go to hell. Right. He's had a long life of spewing hatred his whole life. Who knows what he was involved in in the Catholic Church or whatever or wherever he's at. And then you have a guy who's like a sort of second and first amendment, weed smoking, libertarian, 5G guy and they're all uniting over the fact that they hate Somalis or something. You know, in the left I feel like the purity testing has made it virtually impossible for a major movement to mobilize. And I see the mainstream media as being completely implicit in that division.

[Steven Randeros]

It certainly hasn't helped. I'll say this, like I've been organizing for the better part of 20 something years. Involved in a variety of different social movements, from the immigrant rights movement to now the media justice movement for the last 14 years. I definitely take your point. What I'll say is part of what I've seen happen over the last few years is the level of collapse is so significant. And by that I mean, like, the level of economic collapse, the level of political collapse, like democratic institutions not really functioning in a democratic way. The collapse is so obvious and so real and so widespread now that I think that it's affecting people in a way that is pushing them to desire for something different. And I'll tell you this one story. I was door knocking in Philadelphia during the last election, and I hit the door of a young kid, young black kid in west Philly. And he was very tense. Like he barely opened the door. And I was like, hey, just want to talk to you about the elections. What are you thinking about? And my goal was just to have a conversation with him. And he was very closed off the whole time. The energy was just like this, you know, just answering kind of short, like, no, I don't trust politicians. They all suck. That kind of disillusionment that I think, like, you've come across a lot, right, no matter, like, on the left and on the right. And at a certain point I was like, well, then why do you get up in the morning then? Like, then why. Why do anything? It's the only time that he softened up and he was like, my daughter. The thing I found in that moment is that even in the. In the pit of despair that many people are in, there is still something core of what they want, of what they need. And I think you're right. For the left to build real movement, real common cause, a bigger we, like, we have to be able to connect to that and not to the other stuff.

[Interviewer]

You know, it comes even recently, you know, I interviewed Afroman, and he just beat, you know, the Adams county sheriff's department, who sued him for defamation after they illegally raided his home. And he made a song about it, and they tried to sue him for making the song. Will you help me repair my gate? Will you help me repair my. And so Aphraman has like three days in the sun as like this free speech warrior, Sort of like, stick it to the man. Sort of like 12 type icon. And then boom, it's like, he's transphobic. He's transphobic. And I'm like, that's not what this is about.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And now Afroman is saying he's obviously clapping back. And he was like, all you blue haired hating on me, need to, you know, get some money. Funny bias. You're just like, oh, God. And you just, you see this repeat itself so much. And it's very unique to the progressive cause.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

You know, and it just, it was a shame to see even my own comments. Did you ask Afroman about his beliefs on trans people? I'm like, no, because it would have ruined the interview. And I would have put myself in the position where forcing an intersectional framework on someone who is not necessarily up to speed on the movement of today would do more harm than good in the end of the day.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah. I mean, I think my organizing philosophy has always been, you gotta meet people where they're at. In some ways, I was blessed that, like, my first organizing job was to work for a tenants union for people who live in manufactured home parks or trailer parks. So, like in Minnesota, where I was living at the time, you go to manufactured home parks across the state, they're not in the Twin Cities, so it's not in the urban center. They're all in the, like, in the suburbs and in rural communities. And it's like poor white folks who live in trailer parks. And the thing I had to learn as a kid who grew up in Koreatown, Los Angeles, in a neighborhood that was like Central American and Korean was, okay, how do I organize in that space? How do I connect with people? How do I identify? What's the thing that they want to change and work with them to do that? And that means setting aside some of my own identities, some of my own politics for the sake of the world work that I'm trying to do. Right. It's still like, in many places where I organized with people who were hella conservative. It's fascinating the conversations you can get into.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Steven Randeros]

If you're just willing to meet people where they're at. And at the end of the day, you find that, like, the things you actually align around are much more extensive than the things you disagree on. And it creates opportunities to move them. You know, going back to Antonio Gramsci, he's said that, like, you got to think about cultural change, like trench warfare. You're constantly kind of fighting for inches, trying to fight for new ideas. And the moments where you can make transformation happen is when people can act into a new way of thinking. So, like, organizing people, bringing people out and turning them out into something like matters. That's why, like, I'm so excited by the data center work. Like, it reminds me actually Of a lot of the tenants union work that I did because of the. The people that are coming out are across the political spectrum, are all over the place are people who are anti war veterans and people who are fighting data centers because they hate ice and people who are fighting it because they just don't want to see a tech billionaire cake off of their community. And people who hold a variety of different political ideas. And so to me, that's exciting. It's exciting to be able to build with people. And I just hosted a group of data centers center organizers in New York a couple weeks ago. We just went around the table talking about like, okay, if we can, if we don't build the data center, what else can we build? It didn't matter that someone was from Amarillo, Texas or Memphis, Tennessee or Tucson, Arizona. The answers were actually very similar. People wanted a safe space where they could come together and connect with people that broke down any of the kind of political differences, you know.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. So the shared grievances were a segment to, I guess, great conversation and talk about potential future action to what we want.

[Steven Randeros]

And then you find out that like what we want is actually the same, which is a place where we can be safe, A place where people can have what they need. A place where we can connect, you know, and in a moment of like where technology has played a huge role in isolating us, like there's a deep desire for connection.

[Interviewer]

So you feel like communal gratification is the most important human need.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, we're social beings, we want to connect.

[Interviewer]

And poverty and technology and all these things have pulled us away from each other.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, absolutely. A certain kind of technology, a certain kind of technology that was designed in a certain way, technology can actually play a huge role in connecting us, you know, and the early days of the Internet were that for me, I have hella nostalgic ideas of like what the Internet was. Cause I lived in a moment where it was just on Friendster and hanging out with my friends, you know, and connecting with new people. Those are the good old days when you didn't have Mark Zuckerberg like building tools for you.

[Interviewer]

Definitely. I do worry though a little bit about people who only seek out friends and like subcultural niches online. Because on one hand, like the community collapse crisis is so extreme. But then like, if your idea filled that, fill that void is to like meet people on like forums who share your exact frustrations and interests. Sometimes you can become kind of one track minded and lose that perspective that, you know, lose the everyman perspective. But at the same time, it is still good to make friends as opposed to stay of lot in a. Sat on your phone all the time.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I mean, just. Even just interacting with people would be. Would be a step up. I think about my godson and like, growing up in this day and age for him, and I'm like, he didn't. He wasn't a latchkey kid like me. Like, I was out in the streets hanging out with my friends and going to parks and probably being in places I probably shouldn't have been. So super late. But, like, you know, it's just a different way of growing up and connecting with people that I think has served me in the work that I do now.

[Interviewer]

You grew up actually hanging out at MacArthur Park?

[Steven Randeros]

I did go to MacArthur park, actually. It's funny, I just posted an essay about the Dodgers a couple days ago, and the picture in it is me holding like this blue glove I got at dodger Stadium at MacArthur Park. But I grew up actually a few blocks away from Seoul International Park. It's like right in the heart of Koreatown.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah, I know exactly where that is. That's. We don't got to get into gang history right now.

[Steven Randeros]

No, there is history. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's where I played baseball.

[Interviewer]

Okay, cool. So even when it was an active gang park was still literally going on. Oh, yeah, okay.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah. And I went out there to play with the. The older guys who play baseball too. And like, I was just trying to hang, but. And the interesting thing about gang culture, that's another kind of subculture and it exists in response to, like, conditions that are like, present in the. In the community and like la in many ways, like those things emerged out of a need for self protection, a desire to be safe, a desire for connection, you know. Yeah, very similar.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Pretty much everything that we're experiencing, I think that most society are a symptom of community collapse, even political radicalization, like, even finding some of the anger. And just there's so much misplaced rage and so much, so many cultural war issues that have been amplified by traditional media above the actual issues that matter, that sometimes it feels like everyone's lost their goddamn mind.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

You know, especially because, like, we're all united in sort of our shared struggle to find community, to have good health care, good education. I mean, I mean, it's not. There's this idea, and I'm sure you encountered this when you have that sort of like nihilistic youth perspective in the hood and places like that.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Where the idea that nothing ever changes is because the material conditions of certain impoverished areas haven't changed over the course of several presidencies of different political parties. But it's this two party gridlock that I think creates a lot of that fatigue. Yeah.

[Steven Randeros]

I mean, you know, talking to that kid in Philly, like, how can I tell him that a Democrat will change things? A Democratic mayor, a Democratic city council, Democratic county commission hasn't done the trick. And the thing is there, like for me, it's about realizing that it's not about trying to vote for a particular person, it's trying to vote for a particular agenda that we're trying to get through. But yeah, I totally hear it. I think it's interesting. I was talking to a scholar recently about this. He was like, I think too often people face nihilism in young people and try to move past it too quickly.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Steven Randeros]

And it's like, no, you kind of have to sit with it. You kind of have to like, you kind of got to give oxygen and legitimacy to like the grievances that they hold. Like they're there for a reason, you know, and you got to start there. You can't just move past it and tell them like, well, actually you should just value voting because democracy is great. It's like, no, actually democracy hasn't quite worked for too many people. So yeah, you got to sell them on a different idea.

[Interviewer]

Back to the data centers. If we were going to do a report right now on like an actual data center that's being constructed that's being met with a lot of community resistance, where would you send us?

[Steven Randeros]

Port Washington, Wisconsin. There's a data center there. Speaking to Larry Ellison for this project called Project Stargate. It started out as like a collaboration between OpenAI and Oracle. It's kind of a city right next to Lake Michigan. So there's plenty of access to like, you know, fresh water, which is going to be needed. But it's been met with like how heavy resistance. And that's a place that's like a, it's a small town, it's working class, it's across the political spectrum and everybody's been turning out to meetings there, protesting and angry. That one I don't think has gotten as much like play at the national level.

[Interviewer]

What's their primary agreements with it? Just for those who don't know.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah. I mean, so big data center coming to town, it's going to use up a ton of water, it's going to use up a ton of electricity. And the city has created what they call a tax effect incentive district, which has given away like a bunch of basically allowed the developer to pull from their property taxes to improve the land where they're building data center. So that's money that could be going to improve the school or the roads, but instead it's just going to go to, like, make better pipes for where the data center is being built, which is just on the outskirts of town. The other thing is, like, people there know that, like, data centers don't just come as one, they usually get built in clusters because you need, like, once you built a certain amount of data infrastructure, you're going to need more of it. So I think people are gearing up for the fact that this big hyperscaler project is going to lead to more infrastructure in this region. It's going to bring more stresses on our water resources and higher utility rates. That's a good place to go.

[Interviewer]

And I'm sure that the data center constructors themselves justify the project as like a job creator, right?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, totally. I mean, they say, like, it's going to bring in jobs to the community. Here's the thing, though, it's trademark unions who build them, you know, and there's not enough, like, trade union jobs out there for the demand that is being put out there with data centers. So in many communities, rather than like hiring from within the community, they're just going to ship in workers from other states. So even that job argument that it's going to somehow like, create jobs in the community doesn't really hold water in many places where the, like, unionized labor isn't even really present on the ground, you know, to build the thing that needs to be built.

[Interviewer]

So it might not create a bunch of jobs.

[Steven Randeros]

No. And then on top of that, like the data center itself, it's a big, massive computer factory. It doesn't require that many people. It literally, for the scale of what's being built In Port Washington, Wisconsin, you're talking about 50 jobs for the kind of real estate that it's taken up, which is like multiple football fields. Big.

[Interviewer]

And what's going on in there, it's

[Steven Randeros]

just big computers that process all the data. Like, sure. Like the prompts that you put into ChatGPT and like, and Claude, like some of that is pulling into like those computers to process that data, to like, process through the vast quantities of the data set for the large language model to then spit out the response. Some of it is that, but, like, increasingly, because of how vested artificial intelligence companies are with the military. It's to process, like, data for the military or to process data for local law enforcement. And, you know, connecting it to Palantir and ice. Like, Palantir provides a lot of equipment, a of lot. A lot of surveillance tools to immigration. And it's going to be used to process the quantities of data that help identify who needs to be deported, who needs to be tracked down, who needs to be detained. It's being used to run facial recognition searches.

[Interviewer]

So a lot of stuff like that. I know we're jumping around all over the place here, but I was thinking about Oracle and algorithmic control of TikTok, and we talked about, you know, obviously they want to filter certain stuff that's critical of the Israeli occupation. They probably also want to filter stuff that's critical of AI but then also there's a bunch of money to be made in just screen time itself, like, getting people on their phone all the time, hooking them in with the algorithm to increase their revenue through actual eyeball time. Like, they want to, like, basically harvest cash, print cash from your eyes. And I feel like I could be wrong. I don't think I am. They're banking on a solid fraction of Americans being addicted to did to outrage. Like, I actually think there's a solid. I look at the comment sections of dudes like Nick Shirley and Tyler Oliveira, and I look at Elon Musk's Twitter, and this guy is the richest person in the world tweeting like 100 times a day about, like, sort of, I don't want to say meaningless culture war issues, but meaningless to him. Issues that will never, never affect his bottom line, that don't challenge his material stability or his company in any way. And there's people online and it's becoming such a massive part of the Internet that it's just addicted to being mad at someone furious caus. But then that's reflective of, like, their situation probably being like, not what it should be. Like, they probably have some kind of. They might be late on their bills, they might be overworked. They have some sort of, like, economic hardship that's pushing them into just, like, choosing a new person to get mad at every day. That's one of the things that scares me the most because we have to deal with the ramifications of that in real life.

[Steven Randeros]

Oh, yeah.

[Interviewer]

You know, and every week it feels like online there's a new scapegoat. It could be Hasidic Jews in New Jersey. It could be Somalia. It could be Haitians eating cats. It could be there's always something, and it's just like this roving hate target that seems to generate a lot of money. What communities have you seen targeted through this machine?

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, I mean, you know, well documented cases like the Rohingya in Myanmar, where Meta Facebook was used very strategically to spread mis and disinformation about that community that then actually led to violence. You know, here's what I'll say. Like, there was a recent lawsuit and court decision that came down against Meta and YouTube, holding them liable. Like, a single person sued them for the addictive properties of their platforms, you know, specifically with young people. And the judge ruled in the favor of, like, of the, the person, the individual, which I think will create a wave of that kind of accountability that comes next. Because what they were able to prove in the court case was like, yeah, actually these things are designed to be addictive. I actually remember when I first got involved in working, working around Facebook, I heard about a study that they had done, I think back in 2011, they had partnered with a news organization to study how do their users react to content. And so they specifically fed users content that would make you upset, content that would make you happy. And just studied, like, well, what happens to the user, how do they engage with the platform at that point? And they found, like, back then, oh, actually the stuff that makes people pissed off, like, that's the thing that leads to shares, that leads to likes, that leads to, like, engagement in a way that was just vastly different than stuff that made you happy or just straight up news and information. So the playbook has been set for a really long time. That the stuff that pisses you off, the stuff that keeps you engaging is the thing, and that's being actually transferred to how we see AI working today. Like, if you go to ChatGPT and you put in a prompt, what you'll notice is that it'll always respond with, like, with some validation. Oh, that's an interesting thought. Oh, that's amazing. Very insightful. And then it will close by asking you a question. If you want to continue. Do you want to continue engaging? Should I build out that agenda for you? Should I do this other thing? Would you like me to share more? And it's like it's the same cycle repeating itself in a different way, but it's kind of creating that, like that constant validation, that constant gratification, that constant hit right of like, of cortisol, that just gets you, like, gets you going. And it's addictive. It straight up is addictive.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. And those two Chemicals, cortisol and dopamine. That's like the warfare of the algorithm. So I bet you they have a calculation as to what keeps you there for longer, and it's got to be cortisol. You see something that makes you pissed off. You're so much more likely to comment. And comments mean money. Comments and views are liter, literally a value system for revenue. You know, when you look at the metrics of social media companies, you know, they will calculate their return based upon how long you look at the content, how many comments you leave. And when I. When people see a video of a cute dog, you know what I mean? Not everyone's commenting like, damn cute ass puppy, right? But if it's a video of, you know, let's say someone shoplifting of a minority, shoplifting, you can believe every bald Oakley wearing dude is in there being like usual suspects, you know, and they're pissed off and they want to be heard.

[Steven Randeros]

That's long been the thing with the media system though. And this is the thing for me, like, and how I think about media. The very first newspaper, even before the United States was the United States, was this thing called the Public Occurrence. And in their very first edition, they had an article about the savage Indians and how to like deal with the savage Indians and they had an article about like, beware of the enslaved black people, they're gonna try to kill you. So the entire history of media has always been about othering and that's been that kind of engagement, that kind of content has been core since the beginning of the media system. You know, it's always been there, it's always been, it's always been profitable, it's always been engaging. It's always been the thing that has driven more purchases of the newspaper or more clicks.

[Interviewer]

One thing you mentioned too is the ChatGPT validation structure. Yesterday, if you remember, I asked ChatGPT, just for fun, who's the most famous journalist in America? And it said me. It was like, number one, Andrew Callahan. I think it might have made a sound, but I don't know if it did, but it had like a gold trophy and it was like number one, Andrew Callahan. They were like, he's the best. He gives like really interesting subcultural, really interesting peers into different subcultural fringes of Americana. And he's the best cutting edge journalist in the world. And I was really.

[Steven Randeros]

You disagree with that?

[Interviewer]

No, I totally disagree. I'm not the most famous journalist in the world. I appreciate what ChatGPT said. And I was like, hell yeah, that's awesome. And Lisa was like, yo, I'm gonna look it up on my phone. And it was this guy, Aaron Parnas, and it was hella other people. It was like 10 more. And I was like, all right, how about top 10? I wasn't even there. And so I was thinking to myself, damn, it knows who I am. And it's trying to make me feel good to hook me in for longer.

[Steven Randeros]

Well, that's the insidious part about it. There's a. There's a professor who actually did this with his class where they practice, like, just putting prompts into ChatGPT for a couple months. And then after a couple months, they had everybody switch devices. And it was fascinating. Like, he found that, like, as people engaged with a different device, same platform, they just. They immediately recognized that it was different. It was a completely different. So, like, the large language model creates a version of itself that connects to you, that responds to you, that feeds you, that validates you. And it becomes obvious when it's someone else that's gone into to your little chatgpt and trying to communicate with it, it's not going to land the same way, you know, so it's a. It's part of its addictive properties. Right. It's like it knows you. So it's going to talk to you in the way that gases you up and tells you you're the best journalist out there.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. And then on a surveillance level, it's also developing like a dossier or a profile on you and everything you like and enjoy, which can be sold to advertisers or sold to the FBI through data brokers to make. You know, if they wanted to vet. I'm willing to bet that if. If they wanted to develop a domestic dissident database, AI models would be the perfect way to do it.

[Steven Randeros]

Sure.

[Interviewer]

They could probably geographically map out where you're going to get coffee, and they could assassinate you Fred Hampton style. Or they could be like, I just think that if they. These AI tools strike me as a surveillance tool in general. And so I think that's got to be an agenda at play there as well. And so not just spying on people and figuring out what they're into, but also selling them products, I feel like

[Steven Randeros]

it's all going to happen. I mean, that's already happening. You know, Sam Altman, for years, the guy behind OpenAI ChatGPT was saying, I will never, ever advertise on ChatGPT. You know, just a few months ago, he was like, we're going to experiment with ads inside of the prompts just to see how it goes. So it's heading in that direction.

[Interviewer]

And so you mentioned these tech oligarchs. Are they pro Trump or are they just following the money because Trump is in power?

[Steven Randeros]

I think in this moment right now, tech oligarchs and the agenda of Trump are very aligned. They want to promote the idea that, like, tech fits the national interest for the United States. That's why we need to go out there and get all the minerals that we need for the computer chips that we need. That's why we need to make sure that the computer chips that Nvidia makes keeps flowing into the United States so that they can keep building larger and larger, large language models. We need to build as many data centers as possible. So we need government to deregulate and get completely out of the way. So right now, their agendas are aligned, but many of them, like, ascribe to a philosophy of technocracy that actually believes of corporations actually replacing the state. So for now, they're aligned. But sure enough, in the future, they might not be.

[Interviewer]

Do you think that America itself is a corporation?

[Steven Randeros]

The country itself? No. But who is it beholden to? I think corporations very much play a huge role in shaping the direction of this country.

[Interviewer]

I just always thought of the US as an LLC because it was first a profit colony for England, and then it kind of bought its own independence or I guess forced its own independence with Revolutionary war, and then kind of became a company with a limited number of shareholders that's only gotten smaller with time.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, that's an interesting concept to think about. I mean, I. I think about it as a state because of just my experiences and how I've experienced the United States growing up. Like, even before I was born, my. My family's migration history to the United States was in large part because of US Interventionism in El Salvador. And sure, I mean, corporations have done that. Corporations have messed up Central America too. Like, that's why we had a banana republic.

[Interviewer]

There is a United Fruit Company or Chiquita.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, United Fruit. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting concept, but I guess I've always experienced the United States as a state that's wielded power over me.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I guess maybe a corporation could, but not to the extent of a state, because state can use violence. A corporation, corporation can only use security, I guess.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah. Which they have, you know, for sure.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Steven Randeros]

If you're Coca Cola in South America, you have a very checkered history.

[Interviewer]

Definitely. Are you optimistic about the Future of the media ecosystem.

[Steven Randeros]

I'm optimistic that there's a recognition that the media system that exists today is one that serves the interest of a very handful of people. I think just seeing the reaction to the report and how people have engaged with it, seeing, like, you know, other reports that have come out kind of telling the same story about what's happening in the uk, which is very similar. And so I am optimistic that this moment of collapse actually gives us an opportunity to think about something new. There's a Zen Buddhist master that I follow named Norma Wong, and she talks about, like, collapse as a moment of great peril and great opportunity. It's both. You know, she describes it as, like, kind of the delta, because in a delta where the river meets the ocean, it's super biodiverse, but it's also very turbulent. So it's a moment in which, like, people are waking up to what the system is. And I think there's greater appetite to imagine a different world. You know, there's projects that we've been very closely allied with, like, Media 2070, that are thinking about a media system that exists in the future that's free of this kind of corporate capture. And so I think there's. There's more space for imagination now than I've seen before. And I'm excited.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, the turbulence is definitely something that we feel. I mean, we're totally independent, and that would be impossible without people's fatigue with media capture. It would be impossible without the failure of the mainstream to uphold the standard of the fourth estate. If people trusted the media and if the media hadn't been compromised by billionaires, we wouldn't have an audience because people would just be like, I don't need this. I'm gonna go read the New York Times.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah. And I mean, it's great that I think you've actually captured an audience that, like, largely probably doesn't go to those, like, corporate media channels. They're searching for information that in. In part because I think they've recognized that, like, the information that's been pumped to them, like, doesn't make sense to the life that they're living. That's like. That's core to how I was brought up, you know, growing up as a. I was born in the U.S. but my family were immigrants from El Salvador. Watching political attack ads, like, using immigrants as political ponds and being like, you know, this was during the era of Pete Wilson in California and seeing attack ads of, like, immigrants flooding the border and bringing in crime and, like, disease. And I'm like, my mom's a garment factory worker, my uncle's a day laborer. You know, they're going out there doing all the, all the crappy jobs and it didn't match up with my experience. And that's what made me fascinated to go out there and look for media that actually represented me. And I think that's true for most people who, like probably many people that are coming to your channel who are just like, you know what, like the other stuff that's been pumped to me doesn't make sense, but this does.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. The only flip side of that is these turbulent media times have allowed straight up grifters, especially right wing ones, to kind of masquerade themselves as being independent journalists. But they're actually just signal boosting false claims and different scapegoats that are established and made by the sitting president.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, I mean, going back to Gramsci, he has a quote. Probably the most famous quote he has is, you know, the old world is dying, the new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.

[Interviewer]

Who are the top five monsters right now?

[Steven Randeros]

Larry Ellison is up there for me. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel. I got one more right. Marcus Andreessen. He's a sneaky one.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah, he is sneaky. For those unfamiliar. What are some sneaky things he does, especially with the synthetic influencers.

[Steven Randeros]

So part of what he's investing in is companies that are creating synthetic influencers, fake, fake AI profiles. And they're being used by like some countries actually to promote tourism in their countries. And many people, I mean, most famously recently, I think like something came out of like a, a synthetic influencer that was promoting like the military and showing up in images next to traffic, Trump all over the place. But these are being created and it's displacing even just the influencer economy that's really robust. I mean, those are actually real human beings that are making a living doing this stuff. But Marcus Andreessen is finding a way to take off of influencing without having to pay anybody.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, we're actually visiting a click farm that he has contracted in Vietnam in a couple weeks or actually a couple months. And that's one of the centers where, where I guess the synthetic influencer content is distributed far and wide. They create these profiles of not real people with fake imagery to promote various, like you said, countries that want tourism or just different political movements that have a lot of funding behind them, but not that many actual people interested. And what happens is people end up tacking onto it cause people have that herd mentality where they're like, oh, a lot of people feel this way. Maybe I should too.

[Steven Randeros]

Which is fascinating because again, like, this is the thing about this moment that we're living in. Behind every major technological innovation is large quantities of people that are being sacrificed to make that moment happen. Synthetic influencers are not synthetic. It's a Vietnamese person who's like making it happen. Waymo isn't a self driving car. There is a Filipino who is ready to take over the wheel the moment that the car requested to take over. You know, there are actual people that are the underbelly of this moment that are invisible to us, that are, that are being exploited, that are being extracted from, including us. Like the data that's being collected from us. You know, we're all part of the product to make Marcus Andreessen and those other monsters super rich. So there's no AI, there's no artificial intelligence. I mean, it's also like, what is the idea of intelligence? What is it tethered to? You know, it's a certain kind of, kind of intelligence. How do you actually, how do you actually measure that? You know, it's using human intelligence as the basis for what intelligence is, but it completely misses out on other forms of intelligence that exist in our world, other animals, the, the known universe. Like so, yeah, I mean, I think like the idea of AI is hype. It's not actually true. It requires a lot of people, a lot of extraction, a lot of exploitation. It destroys communities, it destroys like the, the environment. So like, you know, to give us that one response that you're the greatest journalist of all time, which I agree with. Damn, I agree with ChatGPT, but like, no, but I mean, but seriously, I think it's the thing of like behind the things that we are engaging with, there's a deep layer of harm that has to happen in order to make those top five monsters super rich.

[Interviewer]

So there's no AI. There is just corporate executives and shareholders saving money by having to use less human labor. But there are still human beings involved.

[Steven Randeros]

They're just made very much so. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

What are some other sneaky things that Andreessen does?

[Steven Randeros]

Let's see. So he's a venture capitalist. He invests in a variety of different companies. I mean, he's invested in a lot of media companies. He's heavily invested, invested in Palantir. So he's put money out there to help build out the kind of surveillance apparatus that is collecting data on migrants. And yeah, I mean, I think Those are some of the more sinister things I think I would point out.

[Interviewer]

And data is being collected on migrants and the detention industrial complex is primarily existent to benefit the shareholders of Core Civic and Geo Group.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer]

It's a closed corporate loop here.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah. I mean, it's funny, the essay I wrote about the Dodgers was actually writing about Mark Walters. He's heavily invested in actually both sides of this. He has invested in Palantir. He invests in a company called SHIELD AI that creates drones to, like, that has a contract with the Customs and Border Protection. And he's also invested in. Has a kind of owner ownership stake in the Geo Group, so.

[Interviewer]

Which, by the way, is the private prison contracting company that owns the majority of ICE facilities in the U.S. yeah.

[Steven Randeros]

And the gist of my, like, essay grappling with my Dodgers fandom is to say, like, you know, this thing that actually meant a lot to me growing up still does, like, is owned by a guy who gets rich off of the, like, the surveillance of migrants and then gets rich off of the tank detention of migrants, which, you know, for anybody who knows, like, the LA Dodger fandom, like, it's a heavily Latino fan base, so he gets to get rich off of Dodger fans, you know, and that. That just presents this dilemma for me, like, how do I keep rooting for a team that's owned by a guy

[Interviewer]

like that and you're still rooting.

[Steven Randeros]

I mean, you know, my, the. The conclusion of my essay, because originally I was like, I'm going to write an essay breaking up with the Dodgers. And as I was writing it and just realizing what the Dodgers mean to me and what it means to so many people that I grew up with in my community. It's a thing that we have fought for, to have fought for, to make ours, you know, And I think you see this a lot in black communities and how they think about patriotism and how they think about their relationship to the United States, to think that they fought for, to make it theirs. And I think my ultimate conclusion is, like, that is a Mark Walter can't take away what the Dodgers have meant to me, what it means to. To other Latino fans. But we can fight for it. And. And I think we will.

[Interviewer]

Whenever you were growing up as a Dodger fan, was like the whole Chavez Ravine displacement on the front of people's minds, or was that more brought up recently?

[Steven Randeros]

No, it came up for me, like, later on in life, you know, when I, my first Dodger game was going to see Fernando Valenzuela.

[Interviewer]

Oh, that was during that time? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steven Randeros]

It was 1989. He was pitching against the Montreal Expos, and, man, he was like, it was riveting. And my brother's dad was the one who took me, and I didn't grow up with a dad, and so he was like the closest thing I had to a father figure. And so I got to bond with him at this game. Fucking high fiving when Fernando Valenzuela struck someone out. And so my experience of the Dodgers when I came into it was like, this is where I get to go to be with other people like me, to root for a guy who looks like me, play in the big, best platform possible, and win. You know, that was, like, super exciting for me. Then later on, as I learned about the history, like, yeah, it's like super deeply messed up.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Steven Randeros]

You know, it's a contradiction. It's a contradiction. We have to deal with that. Like, a place that means so much for Latinos is also a place of heavy displacement of Latinos.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. I made a video once that was, like, about the Dodgers World Series victory a couple years back. And the first half of the video was about Chavez Ravine, and the second half was just like, in Echo park, which just like almost. Almost all Latinos partying. And I was like, you know what I mean? I'm like, yo, there's two visions here of what it should mean historically and what it means to people now. I don't think AI is going to go anywhere, but I think the average American consumer can be more considerate with how they use it, you know, and maybe think twice before the installation of an AI data center in their area.

[Steven Randeros]

Oh, for sure. I mean, I think on the data center front, fight it, fight it. Slow them down. I was talking with this office author, Karen Howe, who's the author of Empire of AI, and she was saying, like, the revenue projections for all of the AI companies are just ridiculously bogus. It assumes a certain amount of revenue that they can build over the next few years. But very central to them even having a chance of reaching those revenue projections is data centers. They need more data infrastructure, so they need that infrastructure. Infrastructure to get built out flawlessly. And her thinking was just like, don't make it go flawless. So that's why everywhere that we've been working in, it's helping communities actually fight back and say no to this thing. Push for moratoriums, shut it down.

[Interviewer]

It feels like data centers are like, the nut of the issue here. Oh, yeah. Like, it feels like that's why media capture is even occurring.

[Steven Randeros]

It's a huge, I mean, it's a huge vulnerability for the AI CEOs. They need it. They desperately need it because the drawback

[Interviewer]

facts are so obvious that they need narrative control if they're going to be able to pull this off.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah. What they've seen in the last couple years, just last year there were 26 data center projects that were shut down. Like most of those were shut down in the last half of 2025.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Steven Randeros]

And so momentum is building around organizing and it's getting actually a lot of press coverage. It's been actually in the, in all the major, like, news organizations have covered it. But if I'm like a AI CEO, I want to see data centers get built. And so you have to deal with the fact that organized opposition is currently winning the story. It's communities saying, we don't want this thing here because it's going to drive up our utility rates and it's going to eat up like it's going to drink up all of our water. And that's like super enticing. And it's an easy story for people to grab onto. And that's why there's a lot of opposition around it.

[Interviewer]

And they have to have full media control to be able to execute what they want to do.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah. I mean, in some ways, like, all you have to do is make it so that like, if those stories are reported, they don't reach people. And that's part of the sinister part of like media capture is that you can, you can capture it by mergers and acquisitions to actually become the owner, but you can also capture it by AI partnerships that create financial dependency. And you can also capture it by the fact that like, you have control over the platforms and the distribution of information. So you can make it so that that article that might get written that is critical of AI, that is critical of data centers, never actually reaches people because when they click into their Google search results, it doesn't even pop up.

[Interviewer]

And then a secondary motivation might also be the execution of the Greater Israel project.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, it has to be, right?

[Interviewer]

I mean, that's also. If you look at Palantir and the connections there, I feel like that is one of their primary goals as well. Especially if you look at cbs. I mean, they're not just installing pro AI people, they're installing Zionists. And the AI companies have contracts with Israel. So I see it as so explicitly connected to warfare and the expansion of their territorial aims. And it's a grim situation. But I Think we'll come out on top. Because even if there is nuclear warfare, that will mean the end of the existence existing power structure. Not that I'm hoping for some kind of nuclear holocaust, but, you know, if the tech oligarchs do drive us into extinction or near extinction, we're gonna wake up and be like, man, those guys suck. For real. And the average man is gonna agree. And then we can build our mesh network.

[Steven Randeros]

That's right. Well, the good news is Elon Musk is building spaceships so we can. We can pop them into a spaceship and send them on their way.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I mean, I want to go to space too, but not that bad. Yeah, that was more of a kid thing. Yeah. I think if you're an adult and you really still want to go to space, you have two.

[Steven Randeros]

There's a whole. There's a mission to the moon right now, trying to. Trying to get back on the moon.

[Interviewer]

Who's leading that one?

[Steven Randeros]

I think NASA's involved in that. But like, NASA's cool, right? NASA's done some interesting things, but like, over the years they've been so heavily defunded that like, now they're beholden to like, big corporate figures like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Musk that have actually been the ones spending all the money trying to do space research.

[Interviewer]

Is there any benevolent figures that have a bunch of money within the news media space?

[Steven Randeros]

Benevolent figures that have a bunch of money within the news media space?

[Interviewer]

Someone is using their purchasing power to not gut newsrooms and force editorial control to enable AI data centers. Like someone who just has money and they're putting it in the right place and they have a good heart.

[Steven Randeros]

I think the place where it's showing up the most has been in the foundation that have popped up from like, past media figures like Gannett Newspapers or like Knight. They've actually been trying to invest in, like, supporting like, local news ecosystems. The MacArthur is another one that comes to mind. They've spent a lot of money, like, through initiatives like Press Forward, trying to fund like, local news ecosystems. I can't think of like an active billionaire who is like, who's trying to do good with their money. I mean, I think the examples I feel found of that have not worked out.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. So there's no, like, cool media executive?

[Steven Randeros]

No, not right now. Not for me.

[Interviewer]

Not yet.

[Andrew Callahan]

We'll see.

[Steven Randeros]

Hey, there's still. There's space for that.

[Interviewer]

So do you think that to become a billionaire you almost, like, have to sacrifice some part of humanity and just like Learn to step on people and train yourself to be a psycho.

[Steven Randeros]

Well, you, you have to exploit people. So on some level you have to render some of the people that you're exploiting invisible to justify your wealth, you know. So I think it is a challenging thing to be to get to that place. Like it requires a certain compromise of values. So. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Do you think we should have a wealth cap?

[Steven Randeros]

Absolutely.

[Interviewer]

What do you think it should be set at?

[Steven Randeros]

I don't know. I mean, I really, like, that's not something I've necessarily heavily explored myself. But I do think that like there should be like taxing on wealth. Like let's just start there. Like let's just tax people for wealth and you know, especially like if wealth is being transferred from one generation to the next, like making sure that like that's being taxed so that like that kind of benefit, you know, is borne by others, you know, not just a handful.

[Interviewer]

It'll happen eventually. You know, they always say revolution can only really happen when somebody loses their material stability. And I think that right now, even though people are sick and suffering on a mass scale, Cracker Barrel is still open. 711 hasn't shut down. And I think there's still people that are clinging onto those material stuff comforts as I guess a justification or proof that like society is still functioning and hasn't changed that much. And I'm sure you've seen working on the ground investigating the current media capture that we might not have much time.

[Steven Randeros]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think people are feeling it really hard. Even those kind of quiet comforts are tough to come by when even the grabbing a meal at the Cracker Barrel now is a feat. Like if you need to get to the Cracker Barrel near you, like it's going to cost you hella money just in gas. So you're being cut in multiple different ways. And the problem is you can't at a certain point, if you keep cutting from those who have the least, eventually they don't have anything. So yeah, I think people are waking up to even those quiet comforts not being enough.

[Interviewer]

Well, thank you so much for your time, man. I really appreciate it.

[Steven Randeros]

Thank you.

[Interviewer]

Anything else I didn't ask or you

[Steven Randeros]

want to say, just that it's great to be here. I really appreciate the work that you're doing. I can see who you're reaching and how you're kind of structuring the program. It's really amazing. It's good to see.

[Interviewer]

I appreciate you guys too. Hell yeah.