have time for. so please join me, in giving roxane and louise around the quad.

uninhabitable due to climate change or other catastrophic event. >> you describe yourself in your latest book who writes about digital technology but not a futurist. >> a futurist is someone come to to tell you what is going to happen in the future. i have been right about that so they come in a future but what i am as a presentist. i look at and describe accurately what is happening right now. it is usually an easier way to

know what is happening in the future. moche futurists -- most futurist say things like propagandist, fighting for what they want to see and positioning them as a consultant in the most needed place to keep people interested in the future by scaring them. if you are a presentist, which is a sociologist looking at what is and you end up free to talk about things in ways other people don't. when i realized i was a present just as when aol was buying time warner back in 1999 and everyone was excited, the first big digital company is going to buy time warner, the old media company and new-media was coming and how great it was and new

york times call me to write a piece on it. i wrote a piece saying as i look at it and understand it, looks to me like aol is cashing in its chips. the founder of aol group it and subscriber rate is probably peeking and using his inflated stock to buy a real company like time warner that has amusement parks and cable and libraries and all of that. it's probably means we are probably at the peak of the.com bubble and they said we can't publish this. it means all this stuff is coming and the new age is coming. i am not futurist but i am looking at what is and it looks to me like the end of a videogame where you either level up or cash out and i think he is

cashing out. i turned out the right and not because i am a tourist but it is predictive and more predictive by looking at what is rather than trying to guess what is out there. so when impact of the emerging digital technology, we do describe yourself as an optimist for pessimist? douglas: an optimist is always optimistic about how this is going to work out. i would say i am frustrated and hopeful but frustrated. i am always hopeful that human beings will find a way out of the mess they are in but i am frustrated we are using technology on people. we are using it on people instead of technology people

with faith in their ability to use it, that we are surrendering this digital rental firm to the needs of the market and when i look at the people running the biggest media companies today, if they think of themselves as the demagogues who should be in charge of everything from covid and farming and society and education and politics. it is like wait a minute, to what end? what are your values and ethics and economics and anthropology classes did you take in college, if any, before you dropped out in richmond year? i kind of look at it that way. host: douglas rushkoff is our guest and with us for the next two hours to talk about his book and some 20 books. he takes us back to siberia,

what were your expectations at the time of this emerging net, as it was known? douglas: i saw the internet, emerging internet, the emerging computer networks as part of a larger cultural phenomena. we had just been -- we had just had cb radio, the first in the movement since ham radio. fax machines, our television screens which have always been passive monitors, we were using joysticks to move things around, playing pong, had faxed machines we could send each other messages. people were walking around with phones rather than having to be

home to get a call. there was a new understanding of how the world worked. there was electronic music and kids throwing raves with no one on the stage, just entertainment in the middle of a field. there are psychedelics it seemed to me that all these things and the internet were part of the new culture, west coast psychedelic, cyber punk, diy, holter kind of culture that might shake things up. and i was an east coast educated theater director and i loved theater. at the time, i was fed up with how elitist and expensive

theater it had become and predictable the plays had come. i felt stifled. this internet thing was surprising. it like you i was raised in a world where people who like computers were like geek people with pocket protectors in high school and those who turned in the hallways at little right angles. by the late 1980's, i was finding out that my most psychedelic friends from college were going to silicon valley to work for apple and sun and intel. it was confusing. wyatt where the weird people working with computers -- why were the weird people working with computers? i started covering it as a journalist and i saw a different technology story. these people would be working at intel during the day and going

to oakland and scraping buds off k oddi -- peyote cactuses and getting high at night. something was happening that was different and the first book i wrote, siberia, life in the trenches of hyperspace, was looking at all these different threads of culture as part of the same new cultural assertion that we could redesign reality and all of these different things whether it was fantasy role-playing games. i know people were scared it was satanist. dungeons and dragons, instead of kids watching a movie would create their own movie together. it was choose your own adventure, hypertext was used to yet. the idea that you could read a story and text on a computer and put on a word and choose where that takes you, opened the

drawer and look inside and go in your own pathway. that was very new. too many of us, it seemed to be kind of an omen or precursor to the idea that we were going to move into a much more deliberate and interesting society, when that was much less passive and much more of a choose your own adventure in spirituality and politics and government and education and arts in all forms of tech committee -- human activity. host: credit we give net cyberpunk, psychedelic culture to survival of the richest? caller: -- douglas: last couple pages in siberia my book were

canceled by bantam doubleday bell in 1992 because they thought the internet was going to be over by 1993 when the book was supposed to come out. we think it is a passing fad and you are too late on it. host: is that letter framed somewhere? douglas: i have it in a drawer with all the other rejections of the book. by the time i was putting it together, it was three or four years in the making and by the time i was putting the famous touches, wired magazine had just launched and wired magazine came along and told a very different story about what was happening in the internet. wired said this was a thing and what it is is good for business.

the internet is going to create more surface area on the market and thank to the internet, the nasdaq stock exchange grow forever. they look at digital technology as the ultimate derivative. the way finance works is by moving one level above what is actually happening, a transaction between people and you could buy stock in that. thanks to computers you don't just have to buy the stock, you can buy eight derivative of a derivative. or you could look at colonialism and only so much territory on the planet but thanks to the internet we will get infinite real estate, and infinite number of websites so market can expand into new territory, virtual

territory. it is interesting what is happening but is it eight financial or business phenomena? once business people came in, my fear was there is a window of opportunity for us to seize this cultural phenomena for what it is as a new experiment in the collective human imagination and a new unfolding of human culture. there are folks who want to enclose this as a business phenomenon and turn it into something else and make it more about profit and expenditure growth and i am not sure what that will do to the culture. it turns out what it did was kind of killed the culture, because if you can look at the early internet about exploring the infinite possibilities of a

connected culture and what is the connected human imagination to. what can we do when we are connected that we can't do when we are totally alone and what happens when we share processing cycles in the giant projects? once you are betting on the internet as a stock, you are not looking for how do you increase possibility, you are looking for how do you increase probability. what do you want. you bet on aol, compuserve, the web. whatever you bet on you want that as the highest probability. instead of using technology to increase creative possibility, we started using technology on people to increase their probability. you could see it in 1993, 1994,

1995, but we started using on the web is stickiness, to create a website that was sticky and they would get to your website but couldn't leave. they had an ad for one of the companies that major website sticky show people stuck on a flight strip, as if that is the happy user because they are stuck on what you are doing. we use a metric called "eyeball hours," and that was how long the human eyeball would spend looking at the monitor. we were in the "attention economy," and people who weren't paying attention were the enemy. we started to see all the diagnoses of attention deficit disorder and all of the prescriptions for getting people to pay better attention to these websites. i started to write about, i

wonder if a shortened attention span might be a defense mechanism against the world where they are creating sticky websites and using every tool at their disposal, behavioral finance, slot machine algorithms . there is a division about how to capture human attention and modify human hate your online. that relate for me was the turn, especially for people in the technology industry began to think of their users more the way heroin dealer thinks as a user. how do we addict them and control them? host: what is the mindset. douglas: it is a few things. there are a few ways i can describe the mindset, this idea you can earn enough money to insulate yourself from the damage you are creating by earning money. you can develop enough

technology to correct for all of the problems you created the technology that you just made. the mindset is a silicon valley belief that more tech and more money, they can solve for anything. it is a techno solution must understanding of the world, where human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. they tend to be libertarian. they understand human relationships as purely a market phenomenon. there -- they tend to be frayed of women, nature, black and indigenous people. they tend to want to own everything. the object is to see one's own contribution as unique. it is without precedence. it is the urge to neutralize the

unknown by dominating it and d animating it. when you hear them talk about progress and increasing choice. it isn't funny, tech pros want to build a new perfect city they are going to live in, renewable and computerized stacks for education and religion and traffic and autonomous vehicles as the perfect. it is like going to mars or the dark side of the moon or moving to new zealand or alaska. they need to do it as if they need to begin. it is a colonizer urge to get to a new territory and pretend there is no real life or humans there and then start over

completely. when you talk to these guys, whether it is zuckerberg or musk or bezos, they all share these same understandings of human beings as the masses and them as one level above. mark zuckerberg wants to go to the metaverse, elon musk wants to go to mars. peter teal talks about one order of magnitude above everybody else. that is the mindset. it really peaks in this almost eugenic idea called "effective altruism," where they believe it is ok to be awful person now as long as you earn a lot of money and give some of the money back. it is a weird utilitarianism on digital psychedelic steroids, or

they believe -- this is how far the mindset goes -- it is this tech worship, hatred of the human, the body, of everything earthly that they think in the future there will be hundreds of trillions of post human artificial intelligences spread throughout the galaxy that will launch these things come apart biology, digital, silicon. their post human entities all over the universe. and because there are so many of them, their total happiness matters more than the happiness of the 8 billion larval human maggots that happen to be alive on the mother nest right now. and that is a very dangerous way to look that the lives of the people today matter less than this future of trillions of

little robot consciousnesses. that is part of why i am not a futurist, you can use eugenics and a certain kind of scientific rigor to say that's true, they do matter more so let's invest in bitcoin, save ourselves and let the people die and get the rockets to the next planet. it is ignoring the present. i have much more faith in the reality of the 8 billion people alive today who actually matter. we would make very different decisions if we thought the people alive today are what matter rather than the robots in the fantasy future. host: for more on survival of the riches the fantasies of billionaires, it is douglas rushkoff's latest book.

we are looking at them in depth. for mines are open -- phone lines are open, to go to, mountain or pacific -- 202- 748-8903 to send us a text. go ahead and send your questions and start calling in. you talk about the mindset? what is the concept of team human? douglas: it came up along time ago when i was on a panel, a brilliant guy would the chief scientists at google. he was telling the story about how evolution is really a matter

of information finding more complex homes. information like the adam and the molecule and the real organism that human culture. as computers become more complex, capable of handling more complexity than humans and human culture, information will migrate to them and they will prove to be our evolutionary successors. once that happens, human beings have to cash it to the -- pass it to the artificial intelligence and accept our own inevitable replacement and extinction. i was upset by that. i think human beings have some qualities that artificial intelligence and things raised on binary logics may never have. human beings can live in the in

between space between the yes and no. they can sustain paradox over time without having to solve it. we can at eight problem as something we can sustain rather than solve. a human being can watch a david lynch movie and not understand what it means and still experience that as pleasure. what is that? if human beings are special we deserve a place in the digital future. he said, you are just saying that because you are human, like it was an act of hubris. i said fine, guilty, i'm on team human. that is when the term came up. guilty as charged, i admit it, i am a human and i am going to fight for the rights of other of my species to have a place on the planet. the more i thought about it, the idea of team human, i realize it

goes against the mindset to call humans team. the mindset is about the sovereign individual, the man in per, the zuckerberg, the single lord over everyone, the idea that team human is arguing and being team human is a team sport . if you actually read darwin, read the book, you will see page after page this guy is marveling at the way species collaborate to ensure mutual survival. they do that within species and within the coordination. human beings -- if human beings are the most evolved, it is the most evolved collaborating and

cooperating with each other. a lot of them are when you are in real life with a human being you see whether there tuples are adding larger or smaller, are they taking you in, are they making motions with their head? you can't see any of this on zoom or skype or on a text message. we are trying to conduct a very complex and difficult human society in a world that is not letting us get the social cues we need for the neurons in our brains to fire. if you are online and someone says they agree with you but you don't the biological feedback, you can't help but be suspicious of them. this body says they say they

agree but they didn't get it in my body. so team human is about saying wait a minute, we have to reemploy and retrieve tht mechanism for working and being together. it is putting the social back into socialism. i care about people knowing their neighbors and understanding the human project is not about who gets to escape to their bunker but how do we do this together. host: i wonder how you think this emerging technology fits in. mark zuckerberg in a 2023 event this week previewing upcoming ai and artificial intelligence technologies. here is one he showed off. arc: the industry over the coming decades -- mark: the industry will be how do we unify this in the coming decades.

to create it more coherent and better than anything we have today. in the future, you are going to walk into a room and there are going to be as many holograms for you to interact with as our physical objects. think about all of the things that are physically there that don't need to be physical, think about the paper, media, art, workstation, all the interactive holograms. take about hanging out with your friends. he soon we will be at the point where it will be physically with some of your friends or some will be there in digitally and will feel just as present. or you will walk into a meeting and sit down at a table and you will be there and there will be

people there physically and digitally as holograms but ultimately the people with you will be ai's. host: on back technology. douglas: the word unify, the object of the game for him is to unify the real world with the gentle world so they can continue colonizing world we are in. it is that unification that may be the problem. when he ascribes being -- hanging out as -- with friends and some are virtual, that makes me feel sad versus you could be in a meeting and some. that, who cares. for me, the technology is great for increasing our utility value , which i understand, since the industrial age, people have been

measured in terms of their utility value, how much money do we have to have for this meeting. i get that. the idea of not adding to meet in real life, even if it as easier on the service -- surface , it isn't. all the things that don't need to be physical, in order to get to the place where you don't have the physical thing, you need to have a lot more physical things involved. in order to make the ai and the user projecting polygraph whatever machine it is that will create the virtual avatar in the room, you have to send kids in the minds in africa to get the rare metals and put huge factories around water to get cobalt and pollution out and in and you have to have energy and solar panels that they will get

energy from the sun but how is the solar panel made and where is it stored? he is describing more physical matter being used to deny human beings of actual physical presence. the avatar is a great substitute. grandma isn't netherlands and the baby is in cleveland and they can see each other. that is beautiful. or someone stuck in a hospital bed or as a paraplegic and can have a virtual expense of togetherness at a picnic they wouldn't be able to get to, that is beautiful. people who can actually be together, the complexity of human relationship just imagine the complexity of a mother nursing a baby. we could get a virtual bottle and virtual mother associate can be at work and you are going to

be missing something. if the virtual baby is missing something from the mother, than i would argue that i am missing something if you are not at my house watching the game with me but your avatar is on the couch, it is not the same peer we are denying it and turning the game into like work. the other thing that is interesting is the technology he describes, you will never be in the position of being someone on the street and not remembering what their name is. it is uncomfortable. you meet someone on the street, hey, doug, how are you? oh hey, that is doris. it will tell me all of those things and i can fake rapport with the person i didn't know.

it is moving me into desire, almost a dishonest relationship with my world and wondering what matters? what really matters that i remembered that person's name? it was a sales connect or business, then it is good. we used to have these databases, someone calls you and their profile comes up and you say, how is your wife mabel? and you know that because it came up on the computer screen. it is a fake business relationship trying to sell mattresses to macy, ok, fake relationship. in the real world with these -- the sense of data as part of our interaction and then a world where who pays for the data? i'm walking down the street to pick a restaurant and who is going to pay to be in mark zuckerberg's mutual -- virtual

augmented world? that might be the best pizzeria on the block. host: 30 minutes into our interview. looking for calls and questions. this is jim in california. you are on with douglas rushkoff . jim, are you with us? we will try michael in broward county, florida. jim, hang on the line and we will try to get to you. michael, go ahead. we will work on the calls. i think we have julie on the line, minneapolis, minnesota. go ahead. caller: i am here. i am glad to be here.

i heard him say a number of things and it fired me up. you are passionate and insightful and have a great many opinions and questions and a lot of ideas which could be discussed by people who agree with you and people who oppose you for achieving progress. you write books, you teach, you appear here, how do you actually get people involved in talking to one another? how do we, because i share some of those characteristics from some of your thoughts -- how do we begin to -- i think at one point you said we had an opportunity to take intro of the digital age and instead we seceded it to business much like our universities have -- how do

we retract that and say we want it back, we are capable of doing this? host: thanks for the call. douglas: i am asking precisely that question. the first thing i realized for me was at the construction of how do we get people to ... is a potentially hazardous construction in itself. how do we get people to do this? how do we get people to do that? once we think about getting people to do something, i am putting myself in a superior place we get into almost television style influence. you become an influence peddler. how do we influence society, change people, because i know how people would be better if they are doing this instead of that? i tried to move away from that

as the way i think about it and rather about it on how do i have an environment which people feel welcome to ... you are welcome to socialize and care for it other and nurture each other rather than care for each other. i broke it down into four ways of changing the environment in which we are operating. the first one i called dean actualize to power. i am trying to help people recognize how many things in our world are a social construction and not conditions of nature, money, these bills. this is not money, it is paper we used to represent money in our society. when i go on cnn or somewhere and they are asking me about ai

and the unemployment problem, it is like exactly why is unlimited a problem? when was complainant invented, what was it for and what is the difference between employment and work? when were they forced to start doing wage labor instead of the kind of work they were doing? challenging these underlying assumptions which leads to the second one which is triggering agency, trying to help people feel that they've got more agency, authority over what they are doing. for me that was the digital revolution did that for me, when i realized i could save a file not just as a read only file but as a read and write file that others could edit and why it was so much of the world established as read-only, television, money, religion? why is this up for discussion? the third

and then the third one, if we are going to do that, once you had agency you need other people, the third one was to re-socialize people, help people feel less afraid of each other. the great example i like to use is if you need to drill a hole in the wall and you don't -- most people go to home depot, purchase a minimum viable product drill and use it wants to drill the hole, leave it in the garage and it will probably never work again, it won't recharge, then you throw it away. you syndicate into the cave for the rare earth mineral battery, use it once, trade all this carbon, throw it away and it is sitting on a toxic waste heat, inside it. what you could have done was walked down the block and not on -- knock on bob app store and say can you bar your dress. why are we so scared of what we

are going to owe something to bob because you have a barbecue next weekend and if you haven't and bob sees it, he will inspect to be invited over, maybe you want bob over there, it's going to be funded if bob comes over the other neighbors will smell it and think why did he invite bob and not us, worst case, you have a block wide barbecue party, but that's the nightmare come a we have to look at why that is, the last thing i was looking at is cultivating. what is that party and why are we so resistant to it, why are we resistant to the state of because when you have a state of whether it is looking at a canyon or enjoying a party with a bunch of other people, you experience the world is bigger than your self and it has a side again respond to your body, your immune system gets better, you're more generous for days later so the experience of seems to be a natural, important part of

human health and you don't get it with the vr goggles, you get it in communion with other people or nature or the expansiveness of reality. i'm looking at those, how do we help people feel less encumbered, less locked in to the status quo institutions and beliefs and more willing to move into that space between the one and the 0 where life actually happens. >> host: let me come back to jim in california, the first person to call and when we opened the phone lines, thanks for waiting. >> caller: my question is different from what you have been going on but i see in your resume you went to hollywood, you were an apprentice director, with brian depalma on a major movie which was a huge flop and apparently it turns

you off on movies and hollywood. i would like your comments on that if you could and your thoughts on movies today, directors that influence you when you were younger, i'm interested, i am a movie buff. >> that's beautiful. i was -- the real story, this is booktv, i was a theater director from the time i was 11 or 12 years old i was directing plays, i directed plays in junior high school, theater, i went to princeton, then cal arts and did theater and when i was at cal arts i was going to drive across country. i was driving with my best friend and he fell asleep at the wheel and we hit a tree and he was impaled and died next to me. i haven't told the story publicly. booktv, welcome. he died next to me and all of a

sudden i was like theater is so ethereal, it dies, it disappears. it is a thing where you had to be there and i will do films because it was that existential moment. i want to do film because it is going to stay. it's going to be there after i die, after these things. so then i took film, man in the white suit, i was with james mango who did the wolverine movie, we worked together they are a lot. i was making films, then, like theater. i liked jim jarmusch and warner herzog. i like to bob fosse, camarena and lenny. i liked my dinner with andre. i like theater films that

anthony gregory did. i liked theatrical films and then i got the brian depalma apprentice gig. i'm his apprentice on this big movie and they are spending at the time $50 million on a movie that was just not thawed out. it was a very thin satire and i did the new york part of it but when they went to la to do the studio part i dropped out and returned to theater at that point and got tired of theater because of -- i was supposed to do a production of threepenny opera and the cheapest seat was going to be $40 and kind of mind troop kind of thinker, i'm not going to charge $40 for the cheapest seat of three penny opera which is a marxist player but then i turned to the internet thinking that the internet was going to be the people's medium, i want to get

from all the commercial theater and go to the internet which is going to be the countercultural antibusiness pro-human, it was for a moment. it is going to be that alternative. in terms of the movies i say are the best. maybe i am typical but cupric and lynch do things in movies that are -- cupric does something with movies that is beyond what people realize is quite happening. he makes movies that are all about inviting multiple interpretations. as if the movie has a plot but doesn't really have that plot, you can almost project anything onto it, not anything but many different things onto that plot as you want to. they are much about yourself as the movie and i like what he does.

i like his hallways that imitate asher, that he's really playing with illusion and reality. i like david lynch's work because it is about opening questions and i find i am annoyed with guys like, nothing against their films but i get annoyed with jj abrams, christopher nolan style movies which do similar things but always with an answer, you figure it out. to me the beauty of film when it is working is it opens out word, the answer isn't the answer. there's many. it is an object. it works more like, don't tell him i said this but works more

like -- it has a magnificent level of experiential value, but what it means to you could be different every time you go through it. >> thanks for sharing that story about your friend and the accident. for viewers who don't know, you have a podcast, 300 episodes, 20 books. i just wonder why you think you haven't shared that story publicly before? >> when you share a story about the death of your friend it seems a little like baking for sympathy, you know, like a cheap shot and so you talk about that dead thing, and maybe also because it takes a lot of years to move through trauma. i remember, back from my theater days, there was

something called sense memory, you ever seen where you have to cry or be upset or whatever it is in a play, what you do is you recall when you have had a similar emotion and think about that in order to activate that emotion in the scene. at least you do that in the rehearsals that our teacher told us that it has to be from at least 6 years ago, otherwise you haven't processed the trauma in such a way that it is useful, it will end up being non-useful. and i think maybe now, whatever this is, 30 years later, i'm distant enough from it that when it came up, it didn't have the texture that made it feel inappropriate to bring to bear and also because of the audience. i know some of the audiences, whoever is there but i'm

thinking of booktv as largely, these are a lot of these people are book people and i don't get to talk to book people that much. another her, book people, we go through life differently than other people. book people understand how to engage with an idea or an emotion over an extended period of time whatever book you are reading. it is a different thing than remote control media. i felt it was safer and more appropriate to bring the processing of trauma for people who write, people who write and people who read. >> host: plenty of book people waiting to check with you. you are on with douglas rushkoff. >> the question i want to ask,

how -- thank you for your books, by the way. how can we get this aspect, like you have a way of expressing the big picture of things going on and it is great because i like you picking an aspect of that like capitalism, okay? it's done a lot of great things but a lot of people use it is a self defying germ practically. it put us on the map, but how can you use -- i believe that capitalism is great, did a lot of good things, but people just

strongly side with it but they don't see -- i often believed that capitalism unchecked starts going bad and it starts doing damage, like the big corporations and things like that. >> host: let's pick up on that because that is a theme of several of douglas rushkoff's books. >> guest: for sure. the first book i wrote on capitalism was called "life, inc.: how the world became a corporation and how to take it back". that got me on the steven colbert show. which is something in itself. i was really looking at where did capitalism come from? where did central currency come from? i traced it to the late middle ages. there was the growth of a new economy right after the crusades, the marketplace, they learn how to do from the bazaar

in morris countries. they brought it back, people were trading and we had a new middle class, women were tolerant at any time in the late middle ages in that market than they were until the 1980s in england. it was a successful thing. the aristocracy got poorer as the middle class got wealthy so they came up with two great ideas, one was central currency that said you are not allowed to have a transaction unless you borrow money from the central treasury at interest. so now because there is interest built into the economy, the economy has to grow just to stay the same. it worked fine for colonialism. as long as there' s new places, as long as you can grow and keep growing faster and faster, that works, the second one which i alluded to earlier was the chartered monopoly that says you are not allowed to do business in a particular industry unless you have a charter from the king so you had to have a monopoly charter to make shoes and anyone else who has a shoemaker had to be an employee for the shoe

company and that has come down to us today as corporate capitalism that we don't even question. even a nice president like biden talks about we've got to have the gdp grow by 3% to 5% every year. why do we need the economy to grow? what does that have to do with feeding people? nothing. it is in some ways the opposite. is about balance sheets. what it does is favors increasingly abstract economic instruments. it is why derivatives are valued more than stocks. this end stage capitalism, we live in a world where in 2013 the new york stock exchange was purchased by its derivatives exchange. the new york stock exchange, which is an abstraction of the real market, which you could argue is itself an abstraction of the exchange of actual human need, was consumed by its own

abstraction. this is the way it goes. that is why we end up in this world with tech millionaires who are looking at what is the next level of abstraction. what we could think of as the ai craze and the digital craze is all about looking good for how do i go meta-cuecue how do i go abstract on reality itself, and to be one of the robots, be one of the derivatives, be one of those things because who wants to be a little human? this is jack welch, general electric style capitalism. he is the guy, when he was far from ge realized one day i made less money making and selling a washing machine to you than i do lending you the money to buy the washing machine so that is when he sold the productive assets of ge, the making of stuff, and turned ge into a financial services company

because the abstraction makes more money than the actual work. it worked really well. in 2,007-8 when the financial crisis happened and they had no more productive assets, that's the tendency of capitalism which is why it works great to a point. it worked great for colonial empires if you're not looking at who are the people they are enslaving and what land is being taken away and what are you dispossessing, labor and all that, it still can work, and there is more balanced forms of capitalism that we could use but when i tell that story about the drill to people and i say if everybody on the block, what if your billing -- borrowing drills from each other and only have one or 2 lawnmowers on the block instead of every house having their own lawnmower and we shared a lawnmower because you will need a lawnmower or two or three hours a week and it is that much less production and pollution and spending, don't have to earn as much money at all that somebody invariably

gets up at the end and says yeah, but what about the lawnmower company, what about the people who work, the people who have stock shares in their retirement plan for the lawnmower company, what are you going to do about them, and that is the backwardness of starting with capitalism as the underlying premise of our society rather than thinking of the economy is something that is supposed to serve us rather than a supposed to serve the economy. >> host: we are an hour into our 8 to our interview with douglas rushkoff. question coming in from pearl city, hawaii. this is from tim who says do we exist within a simulation and what tests could we devise to prove or disprove it?

>> guest: if we don't live in a digital simulation created by a martian graduate student of the future, let's say we live in a jewish or christian or buddhist reality, what would they say we are? what would they say this is? they would say this is the illusion, there is something else going on here. so one way or another, we live in a simulation because we don't even see what is going on. look back at phenomenology and all. we have sensory organs that are trying to create a picture of what is going on here but that is all we get anyway. we are just sensory organs

trying to process based on what we see. i don't think -- the question doesn't matter, but no, i don't believe we are in, like in westworld, one of a million simulations being run by someone to figure out what kind of society works. if we are iterating it is much closer to karmic iteration of the civilizations over time than it would be, running simulations. on the sensory experience. >> host: you were talking about the importance of the experience of our. i want to go to your 1899 book coercion and talk about the difference between the experience of our and spectacle and how you deny spectacle,? >> spectacle is more like a

nuremberg rally or trump rally or nfl football game where the energy of a crowd and many of the features of our are leveraged for a purpose so there is in betweens like walking into a great cathedral as a catholic person and doing math, it is a combination of architect do who made this inspiration machine with lights and stained glass and arches to generate an experience of our you go to a rave and they put the lights and music and one hundred 20 beats a second, beautiful young people around dancing, half dressed at all, like in that scene in the

matrix of the rave that they had. there is in between but for me, spectacle is less about inviting true participation and more about stoking the rage of a crowd against a unified enemy. in the jets game it's the dolphins, let's get the dolphins and then you can use that to sell airline tickets, to still steak from outback, whatever you want, you take that warlike rage, enthusiasm, or against a particular racial group or whatever it might be or against democrats or whoever so spectacle lose more and designed, for me anyway, a more designed experience in order to focus the energy of the crowd onto a named enemy whereas our

is more about breaking people out of the trap of the illusion of individuality and letting them experience themselves as part of something much larger, don't name that large thing for them, don't say now you're in the army of this or group of that. that's why when -- i was calling it team human. the team is open up that any person during team human but it's not team human against team squirrel or team tree, it is just team human as this is the way we experience our perspective on nature and everything else. >> host: this sentence, think

of any great spectacle having three man acts, first, unify the crowd, second, stoke their passion and third, speak as god or nature. help me understand that third-party little bit more? >> when you speak as god or nature, you can think of hitler speaking about himself as the father and all the people as his children or, that you are -- it is interesting, you look at, look at the twitter means that people like elon musk put up of themselves with them as gods, you think about, even zuckerberg and musk challenging each other to a mixed martial arts fight as if they are demigods, that they inhabit

silicon valley is like their mount olympus and now they are going to have a spectacle battle through media that we get to see the gods with each other. speaking as god or nature is really just -- it depends. a book on propaganda from the 50s is really good on this. it is having people identify you as the mother, as the father, as connected to god, as you are both universal and completely personal, where the person feels you are speaking just to them, and taylor swift has the ability to do that but she's pretty benevolent about it, she's doing it with the message of empowerment and

identification and all but someone with her abilities could be doing it politically, could be doing it differently which is why again, we've got to be careful about how do we get people to blank, because then we are the same as those who are let's create a big rally where we get people to live in damage believe in our got our vote for our party or get people to do this, there's that vulnerable moment that happens in the spectacle where people are like it's the same moment, it happens when someone walks into one of the original shopping malls and they show it on tape, you can watch videos of it, the person's jar opens and their eyes glaze over. that moment that you can drop in whatever you want, whatever brand, whatever party, whatever political ideology, whatever enemy, that is where -- and you just see it and when they do

that they drop that in and they act as if and now we are meeting our destiny together. with the blood and the soil and the forest and the god and there is in the rhetoric comes a certain assertion that this is the natural way, that this is more natural, that we are returning to some kind of pagan barbarian masculine, original authentic, back to what we really are, that it is a more natural, open, from my gut state of being but it is not. it is completely manipulated.

>> host: from 1999, "coercion: why we listen to what 'they' say" has a quote from senator bob kerry on the front cover, remind folks who he was and why he ended up on the cover of your book? >> a senator from nebraska who lost his foot in the vietnam war. he was a presidential candidate and there was a scandal about a particular episode during the war, still unclear what happened, but it was not good enough to cost him his bid but he was always nice to me, an artist and interesting, he was the boyfriend of my neighbor when i lived in the west village back when you can live in the west village as a single, barely working writer and she lived across the hall from me and he was her boyfriend so i got to hang out with him a little bit and asked

if he would do a blurb for the book and he did, he did really funny one. his whole blurb originally and they wouldn't accept it and i thought they were foolish, read this or else, which is perfect, the book is called coercion, get it? >> what ended up on this was a clear warning to americans who are unaware of the power of words to intentionally mislead the reader, listener or viewers, read this book and nobody gets hurt. >> at least he sent it back and he added to it so they would accept him on their. but it was a real gift, he then became president of the new school in new york for a while and help them build up this big building and absorb parsons and a bunch of things, he was controversial but very useful figure in bringing that place

to its current standing. >> host: this is michael, broward county, florida. douglas rushkoff. >> caller: culture is biology and social contagion. and chatting with chat gpt the other day i discovered in trying to get some information about governor desantis that it is doing exactly what the santos is doing, because it is basically just a semantics engine, it admits to the fact the responses it provides and the way it is programmed outweighs the same reason he wents to avoid things that are potentially negative, say things that are just positive. what i'm talking about is if you look into anything having to do with racism or misogyny or homophobia, one thing, people will be like you get it to say one thing and say the

other, i guess you are right but the really exciting thing, success ptsd where it changes your brain just like trauma does so you react in the same way to being more self-interested, brains are causing a lot of what you are discussing which is interesting because herbert spencer started that in the 1860s which is why 30% of our kids can't read, we teach it that way even though 100% of them can't and we verify medically that they can read but we teach to an adult group, not to prevent it but like they attach the hair on the rabbit like up to 10 greyhounds, we pulled information to be a sure we achieve the 30% failure and the state department has done for 50 years, they've done randomized ajit - educational tests country to country, we never had more than 30%. >> host: you bring up a lot of topics. was 20 want to talk about.

>> guest: the embracing feature of this is applying industrial age logic to our many social institutions and coming up, whatever metric you put on the wall is the metric you are going to get, right? that is what you are going to go for and they are necessarily reductive metrics so you bring the kid in, in vitro, into a classroom and say we are going to teach this kid long division and without any understanding, what's going on in that kid's house, the kid's mother is moving shelter to shelter and the father is a drunk and not even there in the kid is trying to contend with that, how do i take care of my mother, the challenge, the life challenge that kid is dealing with and what the child needs to learn in that moment is not reflected in the assessment they have done in their long division at the end of the week and that is

the problem with the kind of one size fits all education system that everything system, when we decided there is this famous story about when they were trying to use incentives to get hospitals to perform better they said they would give more money to hospitals the reduce the amount of time people spent in the emergency room waiting room for them to get onto beds as quickly as possible. what the emergency room did is they took the wheels off their gurneys to call them beds, they lined the hallways with the gurneys, put people on those and declared them being in the room, but the time and energy it took to do that actually slowed the rate at which people who got medical care. in order to win the metric,

they ended up reversing the thing. what i hear in, what i hear in this caller's concern is the way that we institutionalize, short-term oversupplied values at the expense of whatever the thing is that we might want to accomplish and the bigger and more convoluted the bureaucracies get, very often the harder it is to get down to what it is that we want, the same with chat gpt, people have to realize, most of your viewers do, chat gpt is hyper right now. it really is hype. it is a stock market desperate for another big thing. zoom and all the covid apps are not being used as much. the screaming media companies

are not being watched as much because we are going outside. they need another thing, chat gpt is just an advanced search engine right now. that's all we are looking at. it takes your google results and pushes them into something that looks more like human speech but it is wrong most of the time. it is not actually correct. it's just reverting everything to the need, what's the most average answer to that question that doesn't offend anybody or say anything controversial or upsetting so it is wrong and it is self censoring so it is not what we think it is, it is just search right now, where these things are smart, but we are not there. >> ruth st. george, utah.

>> i have a couple of points to go back to some of the things you were talking about earlier in the conversation, a little over two years, longtime caregiver and so i live in this gorgeous area so my life is all about experiencing things in real time, not virtually, and i love live performance, i don't care, little kids, teenage kids, adults, professionals, i like people seeing people trying and delivering something essential, it is great for my soul. >> thanks for that. >> i have been blessed to be

able to drive through utah a few times and if you haven't had the opportunity to do it, do it. it is different, you feel connected to creation itself, go and stare at a rock for five minutes. it is the trickiest, talk about, utah, some parts of new mexico do that too. it is amazing. but it is so, the thing that amazes me about our state of disconnection is how quickly you reconnect, recalibrating to reality is almost instantaneous. if you don't have nature like she's describing, the real world, find a friend and look in their eyes, take two or

three breaths with them. it is almost unbearable if you haven't done it in a while. it reconnects you almost instantly so it is interesting, how long it took to do you calibrate us, how much technology, how much engineering, how many billions or trillions of dollars were spent to get us in this crazy state where we all need ssris and you need and apps to cure your from the apps you just used him you got a wellness apps at meditation apps to get you over the facebook apps and the snapchat apps, you touch ground, put your feet on the ground and look at another person, look at the shore, look at a cliff, breathe in a forest, look in the eyes of your dog or cat even, you get it so quickly, so accessible even where the forest fire hayes we are looking at today

on the east coast, it is so accessible that when i have hope in the future it is how quickly these bonds, these systems, how quickly they restore when you give them half a chance. >> host: you were talking about creation a minute ago, when you were talking about writing, podcasts and interviews but when you are writing, is there a place you go to create, to think? what is your process for writing now 20 books? >> i tend to go about it the same way whether it is fiction or nonfiction, i write notecards. i have ideas on note cards and i end up putting them on the wall, what are call floods, sort of like content areas and then content areas kind of

mutate into chapters and then i order them so that each chapter flows as a five act structure. because of that, i need to have a place where the book happens. in office. because the book ends up being physically represented with the note cards and i have had so many years of experience with the note cards that i know how much i have based on how many cards there are and how dense they are and how important the topics are in each one so i can steal the book - feel the book more intuitively or semantically.

i wrote the end of "survival of the richest" here. i rearranged it since, this is the one where the book was written and i have been trying to use a program that looks like note cards as a substitute and it doesn't organize the same way, i've got to feel the book as, i have to be in physical relationship to the ideas of the book. it is a chapel of memory or something. these ideas are here and then it is in my head, located there and that chapter so i can look at any book as a chapter and remember where the chapter was in the room where what i was writing at. >> host: what was the hardest book for you to write? >> interesting. this last book came right out because it has a more quality, all these stories and it. my agent told me the best part of your book is not the

rhetoric, it's the story so i end up telling all these ridiculous fun stories about my experiences with these crazy billionaire people and their antics so that one kind of came right out. the most researched book was life -- "life, inc.: how the world became a corporation and how to take it back" that i went to the yale library and looked at company charters, that was pretty intense but the hardest one was probably a graphic novel of alastair and adolph, it is about the real, but in my case somewhat fictionalized are called board between alastair crowley and adolph hitler at the end of world war ii. and the first three artists who were hired to work on the book, i do the writing, they all had

major life catastrophes like illness and suicide and awful things and i was starting to get scared, you write about someone like alastair crowley and there's like bad juju in there or something dangerous happening so i got really scared as i was writing that that i was touching energies that i shouldn't and then it was just really hard to do, to be really faithful to the actual world war ii story and to tell that story as reality, as history while also getting into these characters in the part that wasn't real and trying to distant was between the two in what felt like a responsible way, so that was the most harrowing writing experience i have had. >> 35 minutes left with douglas rushkoff. this is marshaling houston, texas. thanks for waiting. >> thank you very much, gentlemen. this is a fascinating conversation. i'm interested in your role

with research, particularly that "life, inc.: how the world became a corporation and how to take it back" book, does the research and writing overlap each other, how much do you need to do before you start writing and also your role with agents. thank you very much. ably in my role with agents? like literary agents? okay. so with "life, inc.: how the world became a corporation and how to take it back," i like to have all the research done before i start writing. i do a little bit of research to get to the proposal stage and the proposal is usually something that turned into a version of the introduction to the book so the proposal usually gets me to what in academia we would call the research question. so for "life, inc.: how the world became a corporation and how to take it back," where did the corporation come from and how did corporatism become the

religion of our society and what can we do about it? and i had done enough research to know, i was going to look at central currency, the charter monopoly and figure out, but i didn't know when i wrote the proposal that i was going to find that i was really going to uncover the nature of the deal between the monarchs and the first charted monopolies and what that wasn't how it worked and i discovered things that weren't understood before so that was real research, but once the research was done and i had this stuff, i make my outline on the wall and i can see occasionally there will be a little blank area but i'm really scared to write up to an area that i'm going to discover something that will undo what was earlier so my process is usually once i get the outlined on the only way i get through the book is going straight through with blinders on and i

justified it that i'm putting on a miner's lamp and digging the whole tunnel until i get to light on the other end of the mine and i have to go straight through it and i go straight through it because the reader, the convention of a book unless it is a weird book, they are going to have to go straight through it so i do the same thing and don't look back because if i look back, i have tried that where you rewrite the book to the point you are at and continuing to rewrite until you continue, then the end of the book has much less attention than the front of the book, it is lycoming someone with really long hair, you end up kind of different at the front if you haven't gotten all the way down so i get to the very end of the book and then i edit, then i edit going through it. the only thing weird that might happen as i'm writing the book is i realize a chapter is so much bigger than the other four five chapters that i break up

into two, this is actually, i could break this here and create two chapters so for me it is that. the research. occasionally i will do research, be two thirds of the way through and i need another story or i don't understand what happened here. i will go back and get more justification. worst case, i find out the justification pushes things in another way and i either drop it or tell that story in a different way and have to use it otherwise. my relationship with agents has been i have had a bunch of them. i started getting an agent because i had written a screenplay for somebody and that screenplay had an agent, than there was a co-agent, got my first literary agent through the back door and ended up doing the wrong thing.

i thought they dropped me and they haven't called me in a long time but they gave up selling the book and then i had a friend who was an agent who said i will sell the book and he sold it in the first agent was like wait a minute, that's my book. it was a year since the first agent has called me or done anything and i got sued and had to give a bunch of money to this one and a bunch of money to that one so than this agent and that agent turned out to have a lot of issues, he was stealing money from a bunch of people so i left him and went to william morris, had them for a wildlands my agent left william morris, do i stay or do i followed so i stayed and the next agent wasn't so good so i went with a science agent named john brockman who is a great literary agent. the agency ended up having an epstein association that i felt like they weren't fully acknowledging so i kind of left and wanted to do more hollywood things at that point and that

agency was only just books and i wanted to get things on the screen and start playing there so ice - i ended up a creative artist agency. don't talk to my agent there that much but she's really good, she's the one who told me don't write another book like this, reaching these people with these more polemic things. if you want to reach people you've got to tell stories, that is in the literary medium, that is what it is. she was right and now and always i've seen my agent but even more so my editor as my partner in the project. i don't want to sell to a publishing company that has an

editor that is not adding value to the book. not just to the distribution and the cover and sales of the book but the editor should be my partner, it's like a drama terry in a way, they really are the first audience at my editor, tom mayer, at norton, i'm not going to leave him unless god knows what happens, but he was the one who told me to write this book, he had read a couple articles i had written, doing stuff on medium and they were doing well and i did this article on the survival of the richest about five billionaires who wanted advice on how to get out of their doomsday bunkers and a year or two later i wrote about the covid crisis, how it felt like a lot of people were retreating and adopting the billionaire mindset if i'm going to retreat into my house with my 60 inch tv and my

oculus glasses and get a private tutor and i can make this work out on the hamptons and i wrote that piece and that's when he called me and said this is your next book, you have to do this and called my agent, if you could do it in stories, do it, then sure, do it so it was a book that came from the editor to me. i was writing for an audience of one and he would write this again in this chapter but what about this and what about that and to be at the place, took me to do it so i see the notes and critiques from the editor as gifts, as ways to get in, this guy will help me make this better, he's making me a better writer, the fear and who bruce that someone else doesn't know

better than you or as well as you was good for me so i look at these people as my partners in crime and feels better to come out with a book that you know, it is a group project. is my whole human thing but i'm finally living it. >> it is how douglas rushkoff began "survival of the richest," escape fantasies of the tech billionaires, 20 books over the last 30 years, also a professor of media theory and digital economics in new york and we will go to new york, mike is waiting in new york. you are on with douglas rushkoff. >> caller: a question for the professor in terms of individual human nature.

communism and socialism throughout the world has been very ineffective, a miserable failure but in terms of self-appointed tech billionaires and so forth, i want people listening to understand what complete hypocrites these people are. zuckerberg, soros, gates, they are surrounded by highly trained armed bodyguards and they advocate for the average man or woman in the united states in terms of defending themselves and so forth. i want people to understand these theoretical systems of government don't work and people say it hasn't been tried to a full extent, it should be. free market capitalism has been

the most effective and constitutional republic we live in in america by far the most effective way to govern and live in terms of economics. tech billionaires, really disgusting, bathed in hypocrisy, the entire way they live versus the average person in america. >> host: got your point. douglas rushkoff. >> guest: capitalism has worked as long as when we get to periods of extreme excess, we have major, big regulation. when things spun out of control, franklin delano roosevelt, g.i. bills, education bills, you

reform the thing. when capitalism works best is when you do that, you end up in a situation, and 80% or 90% during that time in order to bail out what was happening. when capitalism works too well when you automate it you extract so much value that the make the people around you poor. when uber and facebook and google are doing well, you see tenant villages, they end of destroying markets through what they call creative destruction but actually district of destruction. they are storing more money and you get to the place where mark tucker berg says i will give back 95% of my money back to places where i took it out. if you had made facebook 90% less extracted you wouldn't be

trying to shove your money back into systems that you decimated, these ecosystems and societies. i would argue communism and socialism, the reason why i would say they haven't worked is because they have been, they are trying to do these things at scale. i look at scale as is itself the problem. when marx was writing about socialism what he really meant was how do we return, how do we retrieve the social element of commerce and exchange, me borrowing a drill from the neighbor instead of buying one at home depot, is that a crime? or is it okay? i understand the perspective that it is a crime. even though i don't need a drill, if i don't purchase the drill, how will home depot

grow? how will black and decker grow? it is my responsibility as a citizen in capitalism to promote the exponential growth of the economy. that is the part where it gets off. where we see it not just as a means to a end but as the end. as the thing. as the only way. when i look at socialism, how do you put the social back into it and minimize the-ism. communis -- communism, i don't like communism. it is not something you can orchestrate well from a politburo. this is where marx went a little off or lenin trying to exercise marks, he's got this great track where he writes about robinson crusoe, robinson crusoe had all these little

ledgers, he needed to maximize his own efficiency so he needs 5 fish per week so spend this much time fishing and collecting water and this much time making a rope and has a little ledger and marx said if robinson crusoe did it for himself, what if we created a ledger for the whole country so we know how many people are doing this or that. you can't plan that out or you end up with people on the line to get toothpaste. markets are great for figuring out supply and demand, they are bad at figuring out how we share water, how do you deal with something like air? how do you deal with things that are best orchestrated as cummins, not communism but cummins. this is a river we all share responsibility for the river,

we are going to make rules what can happen in this river, how many fish you are allowed to take from this river and enforce those who violate those rules so there's enough fish or enough pasture or enough air or whatever it is for everybody to use, so some things, let's make markets for them and compete in capitalism, let's have people invest in the things they think are going to win but a lot of stuff doesn't really work in terms of the market sensibility. you need to create scarcity for the market to work around it and it's much harder to do that with stuff that should or at least could be in abundance. what we need is a multifaceted ecology of economic models that are different depending on what it is that we are trying to

share together. >> host: that's what is left in our discussion with douglas rushkoff. one of the questions we ask our authors on "in depth," our favorite books and books that you are reading right now. here is what douglas rushkoff said. robert wilson's cosmic trigger, confederacy of dunces, lewis mumford, techniques and civilization. to the lighthouse, to what he is currently reading. end times, and jim benzel's breaking to gather. in the context of this discussion we are having today. >> guest: >> guest: we got something out of the way, robert wilson's cosmic trigger is an interesting one with respect to the last conversation we were having.

he was a great counterculture writer and prankster and trickster, he was responsible, partly responsible for the church of discordia where every member is a pope. it was the early 1960s style of intentional disinformation being used to promote the abbie hoffman radical hippie psychology. he wrote this book cosmic trigger and what he is arguing is not that everything is true, but that we can all hold multiple perspectives at different times. ..t times and not take any one of them too seriously. you could see it from that perspective or look at it as similar or as a new age fantasy as the new age fantasy person, you can look at it as as a psychedelic person, all these different ways to look at things.

and it would've helped people today in the whole kind of conspiracy theories, qanon, and people looking for welcome what really happened here? well, rather than needing to grab onto one of them to know did this happen, is the 5g tower connected to the election booth, connected to the covid vaccine? wait a minute, to be able to tolerate not knowing, to be able to tolerate there's all these different, perspectives really shield you from the same kindse of people that use skeptical to gain power, use confusion and conspiracy and unknown and as ways of gaining power as well. i feel like a lot of these poor kids, the gamer date boys who were scooped into this kind of radical right mean wars ended up being the victims of their imagination, rather than being

able to harvest their own creativity. his book is really good for walking you through what he calls the chapel perilous which is the confusion, what's to come what's not toe come is everythg true, is nothing not true at how to get to the other side of that? he was really good at that. the other one is the book i just finished it last night is peter turchin book which is called -- what was someone called again? >> host: the path of political disintegration. >> guest: what the the books any really interesting and rigorous way, and it was nice to feel wrong. i'd love too be wrong and to get corrected, is that when these revolution period things happen when civilizations breakdown, it's not because the ric got so rich and the poor got so pr that the poor revolt. that's what i thought is

happening. it gets worse, the division wars, wealth gets worse and so may people in the tent villages then they will revolt. no, that's not what happens. what happens is that actually it's the creation of too many elites. not that there are millions of elites but there's so many elites that is not enough for the elites to all be elites. elite. they start competing with each other and that's what breaks things down. when there's too many elites, and i'm sure any of the listeners were angry at coastal elites are not, there's too many coastal elites. there's not enough for all this coast elite to compete. there's not enough, there's a lot of billionaires. oddly enough and this is research i'm doing for a guardian piece piece of wi thought basils and mask and zuckerberg, if you took the top five billionaires today that the total welfare wealth ane billionaires of jpmorgan and

carnegie and those guys they actually have less wealth the top five verses that top five, measured in dollars or percentage of the economy? >> guest: percentage of the economy. percentage of the economy. but there's more billionaires come the top 1000 billionaires have way, way, way more than everybody else. there's a large, larger billionaire class. still a tiny number of people compared to the whole population but it's spread out through a wider bunch of billionaires who are now all competing with each other forr scraps of billions that's what breaks things down kremlin to minneapolis, minnesota, this is steve the emailed in question. to what extent do you think america societal tendency to be less present its contributing to increased emotional and anxiety trends? >> guest: tremendously and

totally and may be its 99.9% .9% of it. it's funny, when you have -- a lot of us are raising kids who have one kind of sensory or nervous disorder of another, whether it's add or spectral or central processing or too much cortisol or whatever it is, , tt they're not calibrating. the easiest way to calibrate your kid is to bring them into bed with you, right? or sit with them, body to body, skin to skin. ideally it early enough that a still appropriate. but being with people, being on a team. being co-location. it's the surest way to calibrate to gain mental health. when you think about, if you think about our society as like addicted to technology and addicted b to money and addicted to this crazy stuff, this idea that well, just one more thing

and then, then i will try to do good for the world. i just need another $1000 in the bank and then i can start behaving ethically. if we are addicts and we need the 12 step program, right, we need the equivalent of a called anonymous for our addiction to these crazy things, what's the first thing you do? you go in a room with other people, right? you go to a meeting. that's the one requirement, you go to a meeting in a room and experienced fellowship every day. you find the others. that's what's on the back of my book team human come find the others. you find the others and be with them. absolutely. it's the lack of presence with each other that's making it harder for us to calibrate naturally, and making us actually actively more distrustful of each other. looking on twitter you don't know, you can't ever feel the positive, not truly. you can get a dopamine hit that

someone we tweeted me, someone like mike tweet, i get hit ofbo dopamine but you don't get oxytocin which is the actual bonding hormone. you don't, your neurons to fire, you have an agreement -- and organic extremes, of commuting, medical even communism. you don't have that come you don't feel part of the group. it's a very different kind of, it's much more like spectacle. we all agree we all look at this persons tweet. we've all given it the thumbs up because they are told us who the enemy is because they are mad at biden, matt at the u.s., mad at russia. we all do that. that's not thehe same thing. it's not the same internal state and it doesn't, no, it leads to the come we see all the data that the kids who are on twitter, instagram and snapchat and all those things.

instead of live copresent with one another or something terribly from everything from anorexia to tourette's, to the new tiktok acquired tourette's which is sort of a pneumatic kind of pseudo-tourette's. but it's a symptom they are cutting, they are killing themselves. this is, it's become a public health crisis and thing is you don't solve the with another app. app. that then, you know, the wellness app. you solve it with good old-fashioned, , i sound likee n old person, but it shouldn't be considered nostalgic, copresent, touch, being with other people. i think it should always stay in fashion. >> host: for book readers who may not know your social media presence, dooo you tweet, are yu on facebook, do you tiktok?

>> guest: no, i'm not. i have a twitter account and i will sendi a link to my podcast each week, and now i'm even considering stopping that. i used to participate back when it was little bit more conversation but now i will tweet like i'm going to be on c-span booktv today. if i get 50 likes for that and 30 of them are from bots pretending to be sex workers, there's this new kind of bought out there that it's some kind of a a scam at as guess you're supposed to want to hire them as either virtual or real strippers of some kind, or sex workers. what's the point? it's like such a low cesspool of crap and it so aggravating, did you see the kinds of conversations that are engendered there, that i don't,

i don't even want to do that. i post on linkdin which is a little less that way, a little more professional something, but no, i don't have a social media presence. i don't do social media activity. i have a blue sky account i haven't used yet. i have a mastodon account which is better because it's a federated version of a twitter that i wouldwh use, but i'm not finding a real need for it. i get so much e-mail that servicing the e-mail feels like as much time as want to spend looking at the screen. i am just learning, meeting my neighbors and find out about my count. there's only so much life left. i'm an adult. i just don't want to spend in there. >> host: i want to read when you publicly quit facebook in 2013 you wrote a calm about about it on cnn. you wrote facebook has never been merely a social platform

trick rather, it exploits our social interactions the wit a tupperware party does. facebook does not exist to help us make friends but to turn our network of connections brand preferences and activities over time, our social graphs into a commodity for others to exploit tragedy right. they would sell them. they would sell our social graphs. when i wrote that was a time when faced with decided that they could use you to advertise to your people, , whether not yu wanted it or not. it's like he does it i'm at today, they might broadcast that for money to your friends or to anyone who followed you, and more. look, douglas rushkoff likes starbucks, or whether you enter or not,r like gee, it was going crazy. but he got worse than that. the real function of facebook now is to take your past behavior, use that to put you in a statistical bucket, predict

which are likely to do in the future, and then make sure that you do that.do so if facebook looks at your past activity and decides through its algorithm that you are 80% likely to go on a diet in the next two weeks, your newsfeed will get filled with stories like, oh, , what happens if you're too fat? or if you eat that food what's going on in your bloodstream and all? a are not doing that in order to study specific diet product. what they're doing that for is to get that 80% accuracy up to 90% or 95%. those messages are directed at 20% of people who are going to choose to somethingng else, who were going to do something that wasn't consistent with her statistical profile. so the function of facebook and these other social networks in that regard is to autotune humanity to take the 20% that were going to do some novel strange and wonderful weird

human thing, who were going to be less predictable, less like the algorithm predicted them to be, and reduce that down. you don't want any people doing the weird thing. it's basically auto tuning the soul, , the witness, the independence out of humanity, and that's not an environment that you want to be spending time in. >> host: we have about five minutes left in a conversation. wanted to read this from another view in hawaii, karnik evs thanks for sharing your insight. brilliant, as a yoga therapist, activist and lover of history by which i do love the repetitive nature of the humans and agreed to stopping and breathing with the no human has profound powers. humans are disconnected from each other and themselves. how do you recommend we begin a world hate healing? >> guest: that's weird, you know i do yoga. i do yoga like three times a week with someone who teaches in

my neighborhood. a great teacher. and after s covid, or during cod she started doing it virtually, doing it on zoom. and because some of the people don't really want to go back to life in the room, so it's become zoom yoga. it's like a few months ago i did a zoom yoga, turned off the thing and for no reason, i started crying. i was just like, this sox. this so sucks. yes, i'm glad to move my body in that way and hear here voiw that -- but that wasn't, i didn't, i was doing yoga partly to be in the room with the other people doing it. and yes to brief the breadth and smelter smells and here there creaks of their knees and hips popping or whatever. but to be any room with other people and that that was gone. maybe i've got to find, she's

not going to do, i'm going to find another, i want to be in the room with other people even if it's not very good i want to be in a room with people. gosh, it's great we have had to make hawaii calls. i've enjoyed having a spiritual thing about hawaii. it's to find the others is, is a whole, that's my whole purpose, what it want to do with whatever i've got left is connect with other people. >> host: with about the two and half minutes we had left can you mention finding others is the last words of your book, team human. just a page or two before you write this and we start our conversation today about humanist and present his verses futuristic you write the future is less renowned than a verb. it's a thing that we do. i want to end with that come with your thoughts on that. >> guest: what i was trying to do, it's little bit robbed from god is a verb which is a great book, too. the idea that the future,

especially these tech pros and technologists and planners and institutions and everyone, they look at the future as okay, we are going to hire future to tell us what's in the future so we can prepare for it. so for the tech pros a look at the most likely most probable future from the algorithms and ai and assess disaster. climate change, economic unrest, electromagnetic pulse, nuclear war. the way i prepare for the future is building a bunker, getting a rocket ship and going to mars. the best i can do is predict the future and prepare and hang on for it. what i'm saying is no, the future is something that we are creating right now. you are making to future with the choices that you make. if you're preparing for future where the thing is going to happen, then you are way more likely upbringing that on what if we prepare for a future where people realized the neighbors are the friends, or people realize we're in this together, that mutual aid and togetherness

and connection and community and care and acknowledging nourishment and acknowledging the social reality, that that's the future that we want to create. we create the future by doing it, by enacting it. we are future with every action that we take now. so start the future today and you will like how the world turns out. >> host: author and professor douglas rushkoff has been a guest for the past two hours on "in depth" this morning. his latest book is survival of the richest, escape fantasies of the tech billionaires came out in 2022. 20 books, nonfiction and fiction over the past 30 years. thanks are talking about some of them with uss this morning. >> guest: thank you, thanks for what you do. this is an important gathering of people. >> host: appreciate it. >> nonfiction book lovers c-span is a number of podcasts for you. listen the best-selling nonfiction authors and

influential interviewers on the "after words" podcast. on q&a here wide-ranging conversations with the nonfiction authors and others for making things happen. booknotes+ episodes are a weekly hour-long conversations that feature fascinating authors of nonfiction books on a wide variety of topics. and the fdot books podcast take you behind the scenes of the nonfiction book publishing industry with insider interviews, industry updates and best-sellers list. find all of our podcast by downloading the free c-span now app over and you get your podcasts, and on a website c-span.org/podcasts. >> weekends on c-span2 or an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's stories, and on sundays booktv bngs you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes on these television companies and

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