Random Acts of White Claw: Philip Anschutz and David Sun

Zero Sum Empire

In place of our normal intro this week, Joe made me offer a disclaimer about my behavior during the podcast. I tried to loosen up to promote a more relaxed vibe, so I drank a bunch of White Claws while we were recording. It worked pretty well at first, but by the end of the episode I was more or less incoherent. (No laws when you’re drinkin’ claws, baby! Woo!). In case you were wondering, now it’s clear: Joe is the daddy of the podcast, and I’m baby. Some really important links down below today, so make sure to check them out. This really did turn out to be my favorite episode so far. First, we talked about which Democratic presidential candidates are getting the most billionaire donations (3:15). Mayor Pete was the big winner (i.e., loser): 23 billionaires! Bernie was the big loser (i.e., winner) with zero billionaire donations. Chad introduces us to Philip Anschutz (11:30), a conservative evangelical media mogul and real estate bigwig. He’s one of the richest we’ve covered so far and his empire is so large that we had to skip over some interesting aspects of what he does. We chose to focus on his media ownership, which includes Walden Media (see links below for some truly horrifying trailers). Walden, along with Anschutz’s Foundation for a Better Life, are ideology mills for what Chad is calling “market morality,” the notion that the being a moral person begins and ends with individuals exchanging good deeds with other individuals. It’s morality for people who think “there’s no such thing as society.” Joe talks about David Sun (38:00) co-founder of Kingston Technologies. He ends up not saying a whole lot about David Sun other than that Sun is involved with flash memory. That factoid serves as a prompt for a wide-ranging discussion about memory, media, history, Victorian fantasies, epiphylogenetic memory, and even some sci-fi style speculative theorizing about the future of data storage. All of these wild ideas prompted a fairly drunk Chad to embarrassingly say the conversation was “like a mushroom trip.” Sorry everyone. CORRECTION: It is not actually clear at this point if White Claw has bad politics—we’ll keep you updated. CORRECTION: There are still laws when you are “drinking claws.” All the normal laws still apply. Everyday Heroes, an Orrin Hatch joint: https://youtu.be/ArXw-ls5pXA Walden Media movies: https://www.walden.com/movies/ A Dog’s Purpose: https://youtu.be/1jLOOCADTGs Won’t Back Down (The charter school propaganda movie): https://youtu.be/1e5CAG4MU2w Foundation for a Better Life (radio spots): https://www.passiton.com/radio Bernard Stiegler from the film The Ister (memory stuff begins around 8min): https://youtu.be/Znvdk5cq9f4 John Durham Peters "Space, Time, and Media": https://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1389/1467 Seagate "Data Age 2025": https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/our-story/trends/files/idc-seagate-dataage-whitepaper.pdf