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 the great 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 one was if we are going to do that, once you have agency and want to change things, you need other people. the third was to help people

feel less afraid of each other. the great example i like to use is beginning to drill a hole in the wall and you don't have a drill. in america, most people would go to home depot and buy a drill and only use it once and leave it in the garage and then you throw it away. so you have used it once and created all this carbon, you throw it away and it sits on eight toxic waste area where someone looked or and try to find the recycle will parts inside it. what you could have done was gunned down to bob and said can i borrow your grill -- drill question mark -- drill? if bob sees it and let you the drill he will be expected to be

invited over? maybe you want bob to come over. the worst case you have a black-white arm acute already but that is the nightmare we have to look at why that is. the last thing i was looking at is what is the party and why are we resistant to it into the state of awe? if it is looking at a canyon or enjoying a party with people, it has a response in your body. your immune system gets better. it is a natural, important part of human health and you don't get it with the vr goggle. you get it in communion with other people or nature of the vastness of reality. i am really looking at how do we

help people feel less encumbered, locked in to sort out the status quo institutions and beliefs and more willing to move into that space between the one and zero where life actually happens. host: let me come back to jim in california. he was the first person who called in. caller: thank you for taking my call. i question is totally different than what you have been going on, but i see in your resume that you went to hollywood, you are an apprentice director with brian depalma on a nature movie which was a huge flop, and apparently it turned you off on movies and hollywood. i would just like your comments on that if you would and your thoughts on movies today and in the past. the directors and movies that

influenced you when you were younger. i am very interested. i am a movie buff. host: thanks for the call. douglas: that is beautiful. the real story, i was a theater director of the time i was 11 or 12 years old. i directed plays in junior high school and all the plays in high school. i went to princeton and did english and theater. i would to cal arts and did theater. i was driving across country with my best friend and he fell asleep at the wheel and we hit a tree and was impaled and died. he died to me and all of the sudden i was like theater is so serial, it dies -- is so ethereal, it dies.

it was that existential moment where i wanted to do film because it would stay after i died. then i took film at cal e. go over in movie and a great director. we used to work together their lot and i was making films than like theater so jim jarmusch werner and hartzog and i liked array and ramey. i liked that my dinner with andre. i like theater films and the films of anthony gregory did i like theatrical films and the brian de palma apprentice gig so i'm going to be his apprentice on this big movie and at the

time they were spending $50 million on a movie that was not sought out. it was just kind of the very thin satire and i did the new york part of it but when i went to l.a. to do the studio part i dropped out and return to theater at that point and then got tired of theater because i was supposed to do a production of the three penny opera and the cheapest he was going to be 40 bucks. it's kind of the narco-left a kind of thinker i'm not going to charge $40 for the cheapest seats of three0 penny opera whh is a marxist play but then i turn to the internet thinking the internet was going to be the people's media. i want to get away from all that commercial theater and i'm going to go to the internet which is a countercultural antibusiness approach human. it was for a moment.

it's going to be that alternative. in terms of the movies i would say are the best maybe i'm typical kubrick and and to do things in movies, cubic the something that is beyond what people realize it's quite happening.g. he makes movies that are all about inviting multiple interpretations. it's as iff the movie has a plot but it doesn't really have that plot that you could almost project anything onto that and not anything but many different things onto that plot as you want to. they are as much about yourself as a movie. i like what he a does. and like his hallways that imitateis mr. that he's really playing with illusion of reality. i like david's work because

again it's about opening questions and i find i'm annoyed with guys like and nothing against their films but i get annoyed with j.j. abrams christopher nolan style movies which do similar things always with an answer. you always figure it out and to me the beauty of film when it's working is it opens outward. the answer isn't the answer. there are many. it's an object. it works more like say torah or something that has a mythic 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 you have a podcast over 300 episodes of podcast in the least 20 books but i wonder why you think you have it shared that story before. >> i don't know when you share a story about your friend it's like begging for sympathy you know? it's like a cheap shot like oh you are talking about that sad thing and maybe also because i don't know, it takes a lot of years to move through trauma. i remember back in my theater days stanislavsky had this thing called since remember and since memory is if you have a scene where you have to cry or be upset or whatever it is in a play. what you do is you recall when you have a similar emotion and

think about that in order to activate that emotion in the scene. if you do that in the rehearsal but i remember there's a rule that have to be from a least six years ago otherwise you haven't processed the trauma in such a way that it'srw actually useful and it ends up being non-useful and i think maybe now whatever this is 30 years later i'm kind of distant enough from it that when it came up it didn't have the texture that made it feel an appropriate to bring to bear and also because for the audience. some of the audience, whoever's there, i'm thinking of what tv is t largely a lot of these peoe are book people and i don't get to talk to book people that much you know.

book people sorry we go through life differently than other people. booker people understand how to engage with an idea or an emotion over an extended period of time. whatever book you are reading. you know what i mean? it's a different thing than remote control media so i kind of felt it was safer and more appropriate to bring up the processing of trauma for people who ride back and for people who write and for people who read. >> we will chat about many of those books. in california oscar you are on with douglas rushkoff. >> hi i'll get straight to the question i want to ask. thank you for your books by the way. it's really great. how can we get, how can we get

this aspect like you have a way of expressing the big picture, the big picture that's going on and it's great because i like to take an aspect of that. for example capitalism, okay? capitalism it's done a lot of great things but a lot of people use it as a self defining term practically. granted it put us on the map but you know i believe that capitalism is great and it did a lot of good things but people strongly side with it but they don't see, i often believe that capitalism unchecked starts

going bad and it starts doing damage like corporations and things like that. >> let's pick up on that because that's the theme in the rushkoff book. >> the first book i wrote on capitalism is called life and cow the world became a corporation how to take it back. they had me on the colbert show which is something in itself and i was really looking out where it is capitalism come from and where does the corporation come from and i traced it back to the late middle ages. there was the growth of a new peer-to-peer economy right after the crusade and there was a marketplace where they learn how to do it from the bizarre in a morris country. they brought a pack -- they brought it back and people were trading in the late middle ages until the 1980s in england.

it was a successful thing but the aristocracy got porous the middle class got woke the wealthy so they came up with two great ideas.t one was central currency that said you're not allowed to have a transaction unless you borrow money from the central treasury with interest. so now because the interest is built into the economy the economy have to row. it works fine for colonialism as long as their new places and the funds you can grow and keep growing and growing faster and faster that works in the second one as i alluded to earlier was the monopoly that said you aren't 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 everyone else who was a shoemaker had to be an employee for the shoe company. that has come down to us today as corporate capitalism that we don't even question even president biden talks about we have to have the gdp grow by

three to 5% every year. why do we need the economy to grow? what is it doing other than feeding people? nothing and in some ways it's the opposite. it's about balance sheets andsi what it does is it favors increasingly abstract economic humanness but it's derivatives are valued more than stock and this end-stage capitalism we live in a world where in 2013 the new york stock exchangeth ws purchased by it's derivative exchange. think about that. the new yorkrk stock exchange which is an abstraction of the real market which you could argue is itself an abstraction of the extremes of factual human needs was consumed by his own abstraction. this is the way it goes and that's why we end up in this world is tech toy mayors who are looking at what's the next level of obstruction. in some ways what we think of as

the ai craze in the digital craze is all about looking for how do i go abstract on reality itself in being one of the robots, being one of the derivatives, being one of those things because who wants to be a little humanist? this is jack welch general electric style capitalism. he's the guy when he was the head of ge he realized one day, i make less money making and selling a washing machine to you than i do lending you the money to buy the washing machine. so that's when he stole the productive asset from ge the making of the stuff in turn ge into a financial services company because the abstraction makes more money than the actual work. and it worked really well until 2007 or 2008 when a financial crisis happen and they had no more productive assets.

that's the tendency. you are right that the tendency of capitalism which is why it works great to appoint. it works great for a colonial empire camera not looking at what land is being taken away and what you'd does possessing in labor and all that. still can work and there's more balance forms of capitalism that we could use when i tell that story about the drill to people and i say look if everybody on the block were borrowing drills from each other we only had one or two lawnmowers on the block instead of every every house having their own lawnmower and we share the lawnmower. youw only need a lawnmower for two or three hours a week and it's much less as pollution and spending and you don't have to earn as much money and someone invariably gets up and says yeah but what about the lawnmower company and what about the people who work at the lawnmower company and the people of stock in their retirement plan with a

lawnmower company. going to dohe about them and that's the backwardness of starting with capitalism is the underlying premise of our society rather than thinking of economy something that serves us rather than us to serve the economy. >> we are an hour into a two-hour "in depth" show and a question coming in from hawaii perhaps a good question with your interview from 10 this is do we exist assimilation and what tests could we devise to prove or disprove it? >> if we don't live in aid 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 of this? they would say this is the illusion. there's something else going on here. one ways or another we live ina simulation because we don't even see what's going on. look back at hagel and phenomenology and all. we have sensory organs that are trying to create a picture of what is going on here but that's all we getf anyway. we are just sensory organs trying to office space what we see. iba don't think finally the question doesn't matter no i don't believe we are and a world

of a million simulations that are being run by someone to figure out how to society were? if we are iterating it's much closer to karmic iteration of civilizations over time than it would be running simulations. >> on the sensory experience you are talking about the importance of the experience of all. i want to go three or 1999 book coercion and talk about the difference between the experience of awe and the spectacle on how you define spectacle. >> spectacle is more like the nuremberg rally are these days an nfl football game where the energy of the crowd and many of the features of awe are

leveraged for a purpose. so there's in between like walking into a great cathedral as a catholic person and doing math in there. it's sort of a combination right? there were some architect dude who made this inspiration machine with an organ and the lights and the stained glass and the arches and all to generate and experience they off. you go to a rave and they put the lights in the music in 120 beats a second and beautiful young people around dancing half-dressed and all like a scene ines the matrix the raves that they have. it's in between but for me spectacle is really less about inviting giroud participation and more about stoking the rage

of the crowd against a unified entity. so the jets game it's like oh the dolphins and then you can use that to sell airline pickets, to sell stakes for outback and you can do whatever you want. you take that warlike enthusiasm against a particular racial group or whatever it might be or against democrats or who ever. so a spectacle is more a designed for me anyway a more designed experience in order to focus the energy of the crowd onto and name in most cases where as awe is more about kind of breaking people out of their

trap, their trap of the illusion of individuality and letting them experience themselves as part of something much, much larger. it's just a matter of don't name that large thing for them. don't say, now you are in the army of this or that group of that. that's why i was calling it team human because it seems open enough that any person, you are a team human but it's not team human like a squirrel. it's human as this is the way we experience our perspective on nature and everything else. >> from coercion think of any great spectacle that has three main acts first unify the crowd second go for their passion and third think as or nature. help me understand that third part a little bit more.

>> well when you speak of or nature you think of you know thinking about himself as the father and all the people asel s children or that you are, it's interesting. you look at, look at the twitter memes that people like say elon musk puts up of himself with him as. think about even zuckerberg's and musk were challenging each other to a mixed martial arts fight as if they are kind of demigods and they inhabit like silicon valley is paramount olympus and now they'll have a spectacle battle through media that we get to see the with each

other. speaking of or nature is really, it depends. the book on propaganda from the 50s i guess is really good. it's really good on this but it's having people identify you as the mother, as the father as connected to as your universal and completely personal for the person feels you are speaking just of them and apparently taylor swift has the ability to do that but she's benevolent about it. she's doing it with a message of empowerment and identification in all that someone with her abilities could be doing it politically, could be doing it differently which is why again why i say we have got to be careful about how do we get

people to -- because we are the samek? as those. that's great of big rally who where we get to people to believe in our qatar get people to vote for our party or get people to do this. there's a vulnerable moment that happens in the spectacle where people are like it's the same moment. it's happens when someone walks into the original shopping malls and you go -- and they show it on tape and watch videos of it. the person's job opens in their eyes glaze over. it'sov that moment that you can drop in whatever you want in whatever brand whatever party, whatever political ideology in whatever anime. and you just see it and when they do that they dropped that and then they act as if and now we are meeting our destiny together.

now wewe are in the blood in the soil in the forest and there's that in the rhetoric comes a certain assertion that this is the natural way, that this is more natural and that we are returning to some kind of barbarian masculine original authentic back to what weic reay are that it's a more natural open from mike got state of being that it's not. it's completely manipulated. >> why we listen to what they say the cover of the book has a cao fromom senator bob kerrey on the cover and remind folks why he ended up on the cover of your book.

>> bob kerrey as a senator from nebraska who actually lost his foot in the vietnam war and he was kind of ae presidential candidate and head kind of the scandal about a particular episode during the war which is still unclear exactly what happened but it was not good enough that cost him his bid there but he was always nice to me and an artist and he was actually the boyfriend of my neighbormy when i lived in the west village back when you could live in the west village as a single barely working writer and you could live in the west village and she lived across the hall from me and she should he was her boyfriend so i got to hang out with him and he would do a blurb from the book had he did a really funny one. his whole blurb d originally was read this or else which is like

perfect for the book that called coercion, get it? this or else in what ended up on the cover is an important book with clear warning to americans who are unaware of the power of words to intentionally mislead the reader them as there were fewer read this book. >> nobody gets hurt. it's like he he added to it so they would accept him on their yeah hece then became presidentf the new school in new york to help themol build up their building and absorb it. he was controversial but a useful figure in bringing that place to it's current standing. >> michael from broward county florida you're on with douglas rushkoff. say touching on culture as

biology and chatting with chat tv i discovered in trying to get some information about her governor desantis is doing exactly what desantis is doing and check this out because it's basicallyca the semantics engine it submits to the fact that the response it provides and the program that way is for the same reasons as he wants to avoid things that are potentially saying things that aren't as positive and if you look into anything having to do with racism or misogyny or phobia that's one thing and will be like it used to be you get to say one thing and then another. but here's thehe exciting thing for those who are richbu tell tm about success ptsd work changes your brain just like trauma does so you reckon the

same way more reacting. it's a lot of what you're discussing which is interesting and it started in 1860s. 30% of our kids can't read because we teach it that way even though 100% of them can read and weep there by medically thatth he can read. we pull the information faster to pressure we can achieve it and what the state department is done for 50 years they have done randomized tests from country to country. we have never had more than 30% stake you bring up a lot of topics. let him jump in on which one he wants to talk about. >> i would say the embracing feature of this is sort of applying industrialize logic to our many social institutions and

coming upp whatever metric you putut on the wall is the metric you are going to get, ride? that's what you are going to go for had they are necessarily reductive metrics. you bring the kid in in the trial, into a classroom and say we are going to teach this kid long division and without any understanding of what's going on in the kid's house. the kids mother is moving from shelter to shelter in the fathes is the not even there the kid is trying to contend with that how i take care of my mother? the challenge that kid is dealing with what that child needs to learn at that moment is not reflected in the assessment that they have gone on there long division at the end of the week. that's the problem with a one-size-fits-all not just education system everything system.

when we decided in the thatcher era versus there's a famous story about how when they were trying to use incentives to get hospitals to perform better they said they would give more money to hospitals that reduce the amount of time people in emergency rooms and waiting room for them to get onto a future bed as quickly as possible. so the emergency-room took the wheels off their gurneys in order to call them. they lined the hallways with the gurneys, people and those and declared them being in the room but the time and energy it took to do that actually slowed the rate for people to get medical care so in order to win the metric you ended up reversing the thing so what i fear -- what i hear in his callers concerned is the way that we kind of wheat

institutionalized short term oversimplified values at the expense of whatever the thing is we might actually want to accomplish. and the bigger and more convoluted the brockers he gets very often the harder and harder it is to get back down to what it is that we want. and the same with chat gpt. people have to realize is most of your viewers did chat gpt isn't hype right now. it's really hyped. the stock market desperate for another big thing. zoom and all the code that apps are not being used as much. all of the screaming media companies are being watched as much because they are going outside but they need another thing. chat gpt is just an advanced search and it right now. that's all they are looking at.

it takes your google results and pushes them into something that looks more like human speech but it's wrong most of the time. it's not actually correct. it's just reverting everything to the meme and looking at was the first average answer to that question and that doesn't offend there anyone or say anything controversial or up setting. it's wrong and it's so it's not what we think it is. it's just search right now in yeah we can use it in the future where these things are smart but we aren't there. >> this is ruth and st. george, utah. good morning. >> hi. i have a couple points to go back to some the things we are talking about earlier in the conversation. first i've been a widow for a

little over two years and a long time caregiver. i live in this gorgeous area so my life is all about experiencing things in real time not virtually. i love live performance. i don't care, little kids teenage kids and adults, professionals i see people trying and delivering something essential. it's great for my soul. >> ruth, thanks for that. >> yeah i mean i've been blessed to be able to even just drive through utah the few times and if you haven't had the opportunity to do it, do it. it's different.

you feel connected tou the creation and creation itself. get out of the car stare at iraq for five minutes. it's the trickiest and boy talk about awe. some parts of new mexico do that too. it's amazing but it's so the thing that amazes me about her state of disconnection is how quickly we reconnect and recalibrate to reality. it's almost instantaneous. if you don't have nature like she is describing like a real world just find a friend and look in their eyes and take two or three breaths with them and it's almost unbearable if you haven't done it in the wild. a reconnect to almost instantly so it's interesting. for how long it took to

recalibrate us and how much technology and engineering and how many billions are chileans of dollars were to get us in this state where only the ssri and you need to get an app in order to cure you from an asset you just use like you get a wellness app and the meditation at the gate over the snapchat app. you touch ground. you put your feet on the ground and look at another person look at the shore, look at a cliff breathe in the forest and look into the eyes of your dog or cat even. so accessible even if where the forest fire haze like we connect to an east coast. so accessible that when i have hope in the future it's how quickly these bonds, the systems how quickly they restore when

you give them have the chance. >> you are talking about creation a minute ago. you are creating your riding and not tidy about podcasts are interviews like this your writing. there place to go and what is your process for writing the book collects >> i tend to go about it the same way whether it's fiction or nonfiction. i write write notecards. i have ideas onct note cards ani end up putting them on the wall in what are called content areas in content areas mutate into chapters and i order them so that each chapter flows as a buyback structure.

because of that i need to have a place where the book happens, our room, and office because the book ends up being kind of physically representative with a note card and i've had so many years of experience with the note card that they know how much i have based on how many cards that are and how dense they are and how important the topics are on each one so i can kind of feel the book more intuitively or schematically. >> are they in that room with you right now? >> yeah although i haven't, i wrote the end of survival -- survival of the richest and it's the wall where it wasen written.

i've been trying to use a program that looks like notecards as a substitute and it doesn't organize the samee way. i've got to seal the book, i have to be in a physical relationship to the ideas of the book like a chapel of memory or something. so i know okay these ideas are here and it's in my head it's located there in that chapter. i remember where the chapter was in the room where i was writing it. the chapter of memories prequel was the hardest book for you to write wax. >> interesting. this book came right out because it had a memoir quality in their world the stories in it. the best part of the book is not the rhetoric gets the stories the way you tell of these fun stories about my experienceses with these billionaire people and their antics. that one came right out.

the most researched book with life ake. i really looked and looked to the yale library in the east india trading company and charters. that was pretty intense but the hardest? the hardest one was probably a graphic novel called alastair and adolph and it's about the real but in my case somewhat fictionalized a cold war between alastair crowley and adolph hitler at the end of world war ii in the first three artists were hired to work on the book. they all had major life catastrophes like illness and suicide and things and i was starting to get scared when you write about someone like alastair crowley and then there's like something dangerous

happening. i got really scared when i was writing that that i was touching energies that i shouldn't and then it was hard to do to be faithful to the world war ii story to tell that story as realitynd as history while also getting into these characters and the part that wasn't real and tried to distinguish between what felt like a responsible way so that was the most harrowing writing experience i've had. >> we are with douglas rushkoff this is houston texas. senate thank you very much gentlemen. this is aat fascinating conversation. i'm interested in your role with your research and in that book you talked about how much does the research in the writing overlap each other and how much do you have to do before you start writing in your role with

agents. thank you very much. >> my role with like literary agents? >> yes. >> i willa do a little bit of research to get to the proposal stage and the proposal is usually something that turns into a version of the introduction to the book so the proposal usually gets me to what in academia we call the research question but for "life, inc." it was where did the corporation come from and how did corporatism become the religion of our society and what the heck can we do about it? and i had done enough research to know looking at the charter monopoly in the currency and trying to figure out what i

didn't know when i world back the proposal that i was going to find that i was going to uncover the nature of the deal between the monarchs and the first charter monopoly and what that was and how it works. i discovered things that weren't understood before and that was real research, that once the research was done in the head office staff i make my outline on the wall and i could see occasionally there would be a blank area. i'm really scared to write all the way up to an area that i'm going to discover something that's going to undo what was done earlier. my process is usually once i get that outline done the only way i get to the book is going straight through with blinders on. i have justified it, and putting on a miner's lamp and taking the whole tunnel of the book until i get to life on the other end of the line. i've got to go straight through

to make go straight to it because the reader is going to pretty much less of the weird book they are going to have to go straight through it. i do the same thing and i don't look back because if i look back and i've tried that for you kind of rewrite the book to the point and the rewrite until he continued in the end of the book has less attention than the front of the book. it's like combing someone with really long hair. your. end up it's different at e front if you haven't gotten all the way down. i get to the very end of the book and then i edit it and i edit going through. the only thing where that might happen as i'mma writing the book as they realize the chapter so much bigger than the other four or five chapters that i break it up into. i could break this earring tree to chapters. so for me it's that. the research. occasionally i will do research

in the book and think i need another story or it don't understand what happened here. i'm going to go back and get more justification in the worst case i find out the justification pushes thing in another way and they either drop it or tell the story in a different way. you have to use it otherwise. my relationship with agents, a bunch of them. i started getting an agent because i had written a screenplay for somebody and that screenplay had an agent and there was a co-agent. i got my first literary agent through the backdoor and i thought they had dropped to me. they had called me in a long time and they gave up selling the book and i had a friend who is an agent and he said they'll sell the book and he said they'll sell it but the first

agent said wait a minute that's my book but it was like a year where he didn't call me or anything but i got sued in the head to give a bunch of money to this one of bunch of money to that one.d so then the stage and in that agent turned out to have a lot of issues. he was stealing money from bunch of people so i had them for while and do i stay or do i follow so i stayed in the best agent wasn't so good and then i went with an agent named john rockford was a great literary agent and the whole agency ended up having an epstein association that i felt like they were fully acknowledging so i left and i wanted to do more hollywood things at that point in the agency was just books and i wanted to get things on the screen and start playing there. i ended up that creative arts

and i don't talk to my agent there that much but she's like really good. she's the one who told me don't write another book like this. reaching the same people again and again which is a more polemic thing if you want to reach people you have to tell stories. if i want to do aa nonfiction of the nonfiction stories that wel tell stories in the literary medium on having gauge and that's the narrative art. i started doing that and she was right. now and always have seen my agent but even more so my editor is 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 adding value to the distribution and the cover and the sale of the book but the editor should be my partner.

it's like a drama into play. they really are the first audience and my editor tom mayor at norton where he ended up with my publisher. he was the one who told me to write this book. he had read a couple of articles that i had written in some of the articles were doing well and i did this article in the survival of the richest about these five billionairess i met who wanted advice on how to put out their due date bunkers in the article did well in a year or two later i wrote about the covid crisis and i felt like a lot of people were retreating in almost adopting that billionaire mindset. i'm going to retreat to my house with my 60-inch tv in my oculus classes and get a private tutor and i can make this work out on the hampton. i wrote that piece and that's

when he called me to doug this is your next book you have to do this. i calledk. the agent and the sad you should do this and she said if you can do it in stories than sure, do it. so there was a book that came from the editor to me. i was writing for an audience of one he would say this chapter but what o about this and what about that and to be at the place where it's a strange place to be. i see the notes and critiques from the editor as gifts rather than as work as ways to get in and to trust him as oh mike. this guy is helping me make this better. he's making me a better writer. to give up this year in the hubris to think that someone else doesn't know better than you. or it least as well as you was really good for me. i look at all these people as my partners in crime here and it

feels so much better to come out with a book that you know your people are part of. it's a group project and of course it's my whole team human saying that i'm finally living. >> meeting with the tech billionaires worried about their bunker and how it began survival of the richest his latest book in 20 books over the last 30 years and a professor of media theory and digital economics at being college in new york and we will go to new york. mikego is waiting in new york. you are on with douglas rushkoff. >> good afternoon. i have a question in terms of individual human nature. why wherever it's been tried communism socialism throughout the world has been very ineffective in a miserable failure in terms of the

self-appointed elites these tech billionaires andai so forth i jt want for the people listening to understand they are complete hypocrites zuckerberg's gates all of them. they are surrounded by highly trained armed bodyguards they will advocate for the average man or woman in the united states in terms of defending themselves and gun control and so forth. i just want people to understand that. these theoretical systems of government. they don't work in people as they oh it hasn't really been tried to the full extent that it should be capitalism by far is in the most effective and the constitutional republic we live in an america by far the most effective way to govern and live and in terms of economics.

these tech billionaires are just really disgusting. they are bathedis in hypocrisy, the entire way they live versus the average person in america. >> my, got your point. douglas rushkoff? >> capitalism has worked as long as will make it to. if extreme excess we have major reformation. big regulation so yeah when things run out of control you get a franklin delano roosevelt and wpa and the g.i. bill and education bill. you reform the thing and that's when capitalism works best. it's when you do that. you ended up in the situation because they realized they had to.

in the income tax rate went up to 80 or 90% during that time in order to bail out what was happening. when capitalism works too well, when you automate it you end up extracting so much value that you make the people around you poor so when uber and facebook and google are doing well you see tent villages living around them. so they end up destroying markets in what they are calling creative destruction but it's destructive distraction. they are storing more money and sure you get to the place now where mark zuckerberg said d i'm going to give back 95% of my money back to the places that i take it out dude if you had made facebook 95% last extract of you would have to be shoving your money back into the systems i he decimated, these ecosystems and society. i would argue that communism and socialism the reason why i would

say they haven't worked as because they are trying to do these things at scale. when i look at scale as is itself a problem like when marx was riding 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? sanders stand the perspective that it's a crime because even though i don't need a drill if i don't buy the drill than how will home depot grow and how would & dicker grow and it's my responsibility as a citizen and capitalism to promote the exponential growth of the economy. that's the part where it gets

off, where receipt not just as a means to an end but as the end is the only way. when i look at socialism i'm talking, how do you put the social back into it and to minimize the-ism? when you talk about communism i like community. i don't know that i like an-ism so much either because it's not something you can orchestrate so well from a politburo. marx marks and this is where i think he went a little off or lenin or trotsky were someone in trying to exercise marcy has this great track where he writes about robinson caruso and that robinson caruso had all these little ledgers because he needed to maximize his own efficiency so he said okay he needs to fish and he'll spend this much time fishing and so much time

collecting water and this much time making rope and he had a little ledger. marx said that robinson caruso did it for himself what if we created a ledger for the whole country so we know how many people need to do this and that ande it's like dude you can't plan thatt out here or you'll ed up with people in line to get toothpaste. it's good for figuring out supply and demand in all of that but they are really bad at figuring out how do we share water? have you deal with something like eric? how do you deal with things that are best orchestrated as common. i don't mean communism but but s is a river we all share responsibility for the river and will make rules about what can happen in this river and how many fish you areh allowed to take from this river and we will enforce those who violate those rules so there's enough fish for

enough pastures or enough error whatever it is for everybody to use. some things sure let's make rock -- markets for iphones and let's compete and in capitalism let's have people invest in the things that they think are going to wind but a lot of stuff doesn't really work in terms of this sort of market sensibility. you need to create a scarcity of something in order for the market to work around it and it's much harder to do that with stuff that should a release could be in abundance but i think what we need is a multifaceted ecology of economic models that are different depending ont what it is that e are trying to share together. 20 minutes left in our discussion with rushkoff on "in depth" and when the questions questions that we ask authors when they come on "in depth" their favorite book in the book they are reading right now and

herehe is what's douglas rushkof said to both questions our favorite book john kennedy's tools pulitzer prize winner mumford techniques and civilization that to, virginia woolf to the white house in terms of what he's currently reading and times and jim bindle's breaking together. which one or two of those books you want to talk about in the context of this discussion we are having today? >> iyer talked about tore so we got one other way. cosmic trigger is an interesting and one with respect to that last conversation we were having. he was a great countercultur writer and trickster and he was responsible or partly responsible for the church of

discarded where every member is a pope. it was the early 1960s style of intentional disinformation that was being used to promote that abbie hoffman radical psychology but he wrote this book cosmic trigger what is arguing is not that everything is true that we can all hold multiple perspectives at different times cannot take any one of them very seriously. you can look at a situation as an atheist scientists and see it from that perspective then you can look at it as a you could look at it as a new age fantasy person. you can look at it as a psychedelic person and all these different ways to look at things. it would have helped people today in the whole conspiracy theory qanon and people

looking for what really happened here. rather than needing to grab onto one of them to know this happened and is the five jeep tower connected to the covid vaccine? wait a minute to be able to tolerate not knowing it to be able to tolerate that there's all these different perspectives really does she'll view from the same kindst of people that use spectacle to gain power, to use confusion and conspiracy and unknowns as ways of gaining power as u well. i feel like a lot of these poor kids the gamer boys that were scooped into this kind of radical right meme war ended that kind of being the victims of their imaginations rather than being able to harvest their own creativity. this book is really good for

walking through what he calls the chapel perilous which is the confusion and what's true and what's not true. it's everything churn is nothing true and how you get to the other side of that. he was really good at that. the other one and the book i just finished last night is peter church's book which was what was that called again? >> and times, elites power elites in the path the. >> when these revolutionary period things happen when civilizations breakdown it's not because the rich got so rich and the poor got so poor that the poor are revolted and that's why th was happening. wealth gets worse and so many people are in tent villages. he's like that's not what happened. whatat happens is actually it's

the creation of too many elites. not that they are millions of elites but so many elites that there's not enough for the elites to all the elites and they start competing with each other and that's what breaks things down. when there are too many elites and i'm sure any of the listener' who are angry at coastal elites, there are too many coastal elites and their aren't enough for all of these coastal elites. their a lot of billionaires and oddly enough this is a research for guardian piece i'm riding now i thought bezos musk and zuckerberg's that they had more total wealth than the fivehe billionaires of jpmorgan and carnegie and those guys. they actually have less wealth the top five verses that top five. >> in dollars or percentage of

the economy? >> percentage of the economy. percentage of the economy they are more billionaires for the top thousand billionaires have way, way more than everybody else. so there's a larger billionaire craft and it's still a tiny number of people compared to the wholest population it's spread t through wider bunch of billionaires who are all competing with each other for the scraps and that's what breaks things down. minneapolis minnesota this is steve in an e-mail questioned to what extent do you t think america's societal tendency is contributing to increased emotional and anxiety trends? >> tremendously totally and may be 99.9% of it. it's funny when you have a lot

of kids have one kind of sensory or a nervous disorder whether it's add or spectrum or sensory processing or too much cortisol or whatever does that they are calibrating. theev i easiest way to calibrate your kid is to bring them into bed with you. sit with them body to body, skin to skin. ideally if they are a little enough it's appropriate that being with people and being on a team being a co-location. it's the surest way to calibrate to gain mental health. when you think about our society as like addicted to technology and addicted to money and addicted to stuff this idea just one more thing and then i'll try to do good for the world. i'll put another i i thousand dollars in the bank and then i can start behaving ethically.

if we are and we need the 12 step program and we need the equivalent of alcoholic into the venom -- alcoholics anonymous what's that thing you do going to room with other people. you go to a meeting. that's the one requirement, you go to a meeting in a room and experience fellowship every day. you find the other. you find the others and be with them. absolutely it's our lack of presence with each other that's making it harder for us to celebrate -- calibrate and to make us more distrustful of each other. look on twitter you can't ever feel the positive not truly. you can get aa dopamine hit. someone like mike tweet and i get ahead of dopamine but you don't get oxytocin which is the actual bonding hormone. you don't get your merit -- your

neurons don't fire and you don't have an organic experience of camaraderie and fellowship and community. you don't have that and you don't feel part of the group. it's a very different kind. it's much more like spectacle. we all agree we look at this person and give them a thumbs up because they told us who the enemy is because they are mad at aiden, they are mad at the u.s. and they are mad at russia. we all do that. that's not the same thing. it's not the same if internal state and it leads do we see the data kids who are on twitter and instagram and snapchat and all those things instead of a co-presents with one another are suffering everything from anorexia to and there's a new

take dock of acquired which is a pseudo-but a symptom. they are killing themselves. it has become a public health crisis andnd the thing is you don't solve it with another app. the wellness app. you solve it with good old-fashioned and i sound like an old person but it shouldn't be considered the celtic. touch, being with other people should always stay in fashion. >> for book readers who may not know your social media presence do youde tweet and are you on facebook and take dock? >> you know, i'm not. i have a twitter account and i will send a link to my podcast each week and now i'm even

considering stopping that. i used to have a little bit more of a conversation but now i will tweet like i'm going to be on c-span booktv today and if i get 50 likes for that than 30 of them are from bots pretending to be sex workers there's a new kind of lot out there like they are some kind of a scam where you are so posed to want to hire them is either virtual or real strippers of some kind l or sex workers. what's the point? it such a cesspool and it's so aggravating and you can see the kinds of conversations that are engendered their that i don't even want to do that. i post on linden which is little bit less like that in a little bit more professional no, i

don't have the social media presence. i don't do social media activities. i have a blue sky account that i haven't useded yet he i have a mastodon account which is kind of a federated version of twitter that i would use. 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 i want to spend looking at the screen and i'm just learning and meeting my neighbors in finding of out about my town. there's only so much life left. i'm in adults that don't want to spend it in there. >> i want to read when you publicly quit facebook in 2013-year-old call about it on "cnn." he wrote facebook has never been merely a social platform rather if social interaction the way a tupperware party does. facebook turnsup our network commissioned brand preferences and activities over time our

social graphs into commodity for others to exploit. >> right. they would sell them. when i wrote that it was a time when facebook decided they could use you to advertise to your people whether or not you wanted it or not. it's like if he said oh i'm at starbucks today they might broadcast that for more money to your friends or to everyone who follows you and more. rushkoff like starbucks. but it's worse than that. the real function of facebook now is to take your past behavior use that to put you in a statistical bucket predicts what you're likely to do in the future and make sure that you do that. so if facebook looks at your past activities and decides through the algorithm that you

are 80% likely to go on a diet in the next two weeks your newsfeed will be filled with stories like oh what happens if you are too or if you eat bad food what's going on in your bloodstream and all. they are not doing that in order to sell you a specific diet product. what they are doing that for is to get that 80% accuracy up to 90% or 95%. those messages are direct messages. 20% of people who are going to choose to do something else, who are going to do something that wasn't consistent with their physical profile so the function of facebook and these other social map -- networks in that regard is to auto-tune humanity and to take the 20% that we are going to do some novel strange wonderful human thing and going to be less predictable less like the algorithm and reduce that down. you don't want any people doing

weird things so it's auto tuning the soul, the, the independents of humanity. that's not an environment if you want a steady clinic.. we have five minutes left in our conversation i wanted to read this for another viewer in hawaii carla who said thanks for sharing your insight. as a yoga therapist after of history and language idc the repetitive nature of human chess stopping and breathing with another human has profound proper humans are disconnected from each other and themselves. how do you recommend we began? >> it's weird you know i do yoga. i do yoga three times a week witha someone who teaches in my neighborhood a great teacher and after covid or during covid she started doing it virtually doing it on zoom and some of the

people don't want to go back to live in the room so it's become new yoga and to few months ago is this zoom you then i turned off the thing and i started crying afterwards. i was just like this. guess yes i'm glad to move my body and that way but i was doing yoga to be in the room with the other people doing it and to breathe their breath and smell their smells and hear the creaking of their knees or whatever but to be in a room with other people and that was gone.as i'm want to be in a room with other people even if it's not as good i want to be in a room with other people. great that we had to hawaii

calls. it's defined the others and that's my whole purpose in what i want to do and with whatever i've got left. >> what about the 2.5 minutes we have left you mentioned finding others is the last word of your book team human at pager before you write that we start our conversation about humanist and presence versus futurist for you you write that features lesson now that i've are. the thing that we do but i want to and with that in your thoughts on that. >> what i was trying to do from is a verb which is a great book to the idea that the future especially these technologists and planners and institutionalizedd okay we are going to hire people to tell us

what's in the future so we can prepare for it. for the tech rose they look at the most likely probable future from the algorithm in ai and it's a disaster. climate change, economic unrest nuclear war so the way i prepare for that features building a bunker or getting a rocketship or going to mars. that's the best i can do to the future and prepare and hang on for it. what i'm saying is no future something we are creating right now. you are making the future with the choices that you make and preparing for a future where that thing is going to happen you were way more likely to bring that on. what if we prepare for a future wheree people realize their neighbors or their friends and people realize we are in this together in mutual aid and togetherness in connection and community and care and technology nurse meant in acknowledging social reality that that's the future that we

want to create. we create that future by doing it, by enacting it. we are featuring with every action that we take now. so start featuring today and you will like how the world turns out. >> author professor rushkoff has been art guests for the past tours in his latest book is survival of the richest they came out in 2022, 20 books nonfiction and fiction over the past 30 years or thanks for talking about some of them with us this morning. said thank you and thanks for right you do. it's important and unimportant gathering of people. >> appreciate it.

we were trying to do something that moved that you could set up on the stage and i could brief you and you would not know. i know you are thinking she's going to take it off now, right? [laughter] and i wish that were true. my mask was in a car -- a cardboard box in the headquarters of ci and it turning green. so it also had to be fast on an fast had to be able to put it on in the dark in a parking lot with no lights and no mirror and then if somebody was after you had to be able to take it off, squish it down into nothing and put it in your arm. these rudabeh requirements. it took us almost 10 years to come up with the first one.

the first one turned me into an man. so that's pretty good. i grew up in a suit and tie. i looked all right so i went into my office director and he said oh my god this is just so good, so good. he went to show to the director of the cia and he liked it and he said we are going to take it to the white house and i said whoa. i can't walk into the white house pretending to be a man. it looks great, guess the secret service give them 30 seconds with me and they are going to arrest me. so i said let's jeff: me another woman and as we ended up doing. we did take it to the white house. to do get to the white house and george h.w. bush was the president. i wore the mask into his office.

the names, judge webster on the far right. john sununu and the next one is bob gates. the next one is brent scowcroft george h.w.. i took the president's folder of pictures to him in disguise because we had done stuff with him. he had been a director of the cia. wait until you see what we have got now and he's looking arou my chair for a bag. yet i'm wearing it. i'm just going to take it off and show it to you and he said don't take it off yet. he got up came over and walked around it is looking and he didn't even know what he was looking for. u.s. is looking hard and couldn't see anything. he sat back down and he said okay, take it off. so i did my thing which by the way is called today that tom cruise peel. [laughter] i'm a modest woman. i'm not going to go aft it

could have another name. it's my honor to introduce the nobel prize-winning economist doctors joseph stiglitz. doctors at 19 was chairman of the council of economic advisers under president clinton, chief economist of the world bank and has been named by time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.