Stu Levitan welcomes someone who’s had an exceptionally interesting and varied career in music, movies, finance and technology - Jonathan Taplin, author of The Magic Years: Scenes From a Rock and Roll Life. And what a life it’s been, with scenes filled with figures from the pantheon of pop culture – Bob Dylan, George Harrison, the Rolling Stones, the Band, Judy Collins, Martin Scorcese, Wim Wenders, even the Walt Disney Studios.

And as the founder of the first streaming Video On Demand Platform in 1996, called Intertainer, and holder of two patents for that technology,  Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California, and former Professor at the USC Annenberg School, Jon is also among our foremost thinkers and doers concerning the intersection of technology and culture, a topic he addressed in his very prescient book in 2017, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.

As for the requisite Madison connection, I was at two of the seminal concerts he tour managed, saw three of the movies he produced, and still listen to the music he helped bring into the world.

It is a great pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Jonathan Taplin