website. weekends on cspan2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america story. on sunday book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for cspan2 comes in these television companies and more. including comcast. >> are you thinking this is just a community center? it is way more than that comcast is part of 1000 community centers to create wi-fi enabled so students from low-income families and get the tools they need to be ready for anythin comcast's along with these television companies support cspan2 as a public service. you describe yourself your latest book survival of the richest as a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology. but not a futurist what is the

difference between the two? >> futuristic is usually so when they come to to tell you what's going to happen in the future. ire have been right about that a lot so they call me a futurist. but what i really am as a present for a interested and in looking at and describing accurately what is happening right now. that is usually an easier way to know what is going to happen in the future. i don't usually talk about it. most futurists seem more like propagandists. fighting for the future that they want to see or positions their company and the best place or positions them as a consultant in the most needed place. you get people interested in the future by scaring them this is going to happen or that is going to happen. but if you are a present toast which is really more what i am a cultural anthropologist or sociologist looking at what is,

you end up freed to talk about things in other ways people don't. so for me when i realized i was this aol was buying time warner i don't remember that back in 1999. everyone was all excited the first big digital company is now going to buy time warner. the old media company this at the new synergy of old media new energy was coming and how great it was the "new york times" called me to write the piece on what was happening the op-ed and so i wrote this piece saying as i look at itin and as i understd it it looks to me like aol is cashing in its chips that the founder of aol grew this thing is much as he could add six ask subscriber rate is probably peeking he is using his inflated stock to buy a real company like time warner that has amusement parks and cable and movie libraries and all of that. it probably means we are now at

the peak of the.com bubble. they called me and said we cannot publish this. everyone t says it's the greatet thing and it means all the stuff is coming the new age is coming. i'm like i'm not a futurist i am looking at what is. what is, it looks to me like this is the end of the videogame you level up or cash out and i think he is cashing out and of course they did not publish it. but i turned out to be right not because i'm a futurist that's the difference. it wasn't predictive but more predictive by looking at what is rather than trying to guess. impact of using emerging digital technology would describe yourself as an optimist or a pessimist? >> neither. optimist or pessimist is funny the construction optimist or a pessimist i'm optimistic of how

this is going to turn out are pessimistic about how this is going to work out. i would say i am frustrated. i am hopeful but frustrated. i am always hopeful human beings are going to find a way out of the mess as they are in. but i'm really frustrated we are using technology on people. when using tech on people instead of giving technology to people with some faith in their ability to use them. that we are surrendering this a digital renaissance to the needs of the market. when i look at the people running the biggest media companiesun today it is as if ty think of themselves as the demigods who should be in charge of everything from covid and farming to society and education and politics. it's like wait a minute, to what end?it

what are your values? what ethics in a economics and anthropology classes did you take in college if any for you dropout in freshman year. i kind of look at it that way. >> this month in depth with this for two hours of talk about his book over the past 30 years per take us back to the early 1990s. take us back to siberia. what were your expectations at the time of this emerging net as it was known? >> it's interesting. i saw the internet the emerging internet. this was before the internet the emerging computer networks as part of a larger cultural phenomena. we had just been through -- we had cb radio which was the first citizen's immediate movement. at least in my lifetime.

cb radio had happened the television screens which have always been completely passive monitors we were using joysticks to move things around. we are playing pong. we had a fax machines we can start to send each other messages. people were walking around with these phones rather than having to be home to get a call. there is a new physics and chaos of math the new understandings of how the world work there was electronic music and kids throwing graves with nobody on the stage just this sort of entertainment out in the middle of a field. psychedelics were viable people were looking at reengineering their own cognitive apparatus willfully by themselves. and it seemed to me all of these things and the internet were a part of a new culture.

a new west coast kind of psychedelics cyber punk diy, wholek earth culture that might shake things up. and me, i was an east coast educated theater director. i loved theater i was an artsy person. but at the time i was really fed up with how elitist and expensive theater had come how predictable the plays were put everything had a beginning, middle and an end. i felt really stifled. and this internet thing wasn't surprising. i'm sure it like you i was raised in a world where people who like computers like little geek people l with pocket protectors in high school and the kids who turned in the hallways little rightht angles. there is a certain type. by the late '80s i was finding out my weirdest artsy asthma psychedelic friends from college

were going out to silicon valley to go work for apple and sun and intel and it was confusing why were the weird people working with computers? so i would out there and started covering it as a journalist and i saw this very different computer story. a very different technology which was these folks would be workingng intel during the day and going home to oakland in scraping the bugs off peyote cactus is in tripping at night and creating images that were being shown a grateful dead shows the next weekend. it was like something was happening that was different. the first book i wrote about this, siberia life in the trenches of hyperspace was really looking at all of these different threads ofe culture as part of the same new cultural assertion that we could redesign reality. and all of these different

things whether his fantasy role playing games people were scared it was sainted nesta but it really wasn't. dungeons & dragons were kids instead of watching a movie would create their own story together. it was this a choose your own adventure hypertext reality that no one was used to it yet. the idea you could read a story, text on a computer click on a word and choose where that takes you. [laughter] or you could open the drawer and look inside and go in your own pathway. that was veryhw new. and too many of us it seemed to be kind of been omen or precursor to the idea that we were going to move into a much more deliberate and interesting society. when it was much less passive much more of a choose your own adventure and spirituality, and

politics, and government, and education, and arts and all forms of humanrm activity. >> how did we get from that culture the cyber punk psychedelic culture, the moment you describe to survival of the richest the escape fantasies of tech billionaires? >> is a few ways to look at it. the last couple of pages of my book, siberia interestingly enough and i know these are book people siberia in my book was canceled by bantam doubleday dell b in 1992 because they thought the internet was going to be over by 1993 with the book was supposed to come out. i got thehe letter from the edir saying we think it's a passing fad. and you are too late on it. >> is that for him somewhere? >> what? they should frame it of god in the drawer with all the other rejectionsdo of the book. so it is funny. and by the time i was putting it

together i was three or four years in the making rather than one or two. by the time i was putting the finishing touches on the last draft for harper who ended up publishing it, wired magazine had just launched. wired magazine came along and told a very different story about what was happening on the internet.or what wired was saying is it yes this is a whole big thing but what this thing actually is, is good for business the internet is going to create more surface area on the market. thanks to the internet the nasdaq stock exchange would be able to grow exponentially on interrupted forever. i understand what they're saying they look at digital technology is like the ultimate derivative. but the way finance works is by going meta- moving one level above what's actually happening so there is a transaction between people and then you can

buy stock in that. youct are one level removed. now thanks to computers you don't just have to buy the stock you could buy a derivative which is one level removed from that or a derivative of a derivative and so on and so on and so on. or you can l lit colonialism so much territory on the planet but thanks to the internet we are going to get infinite real estate and infinite number of websites so markets can again expand onto new surface, new territory virtual territory. soso wired came and said it's interesting what is happening but what is happening is actually a financial phenomenon a business phenomenon. once a business people came in and this was my fear at the end of the book i said there is a window of opportunity for us to see this cultural phenomenon for what it is as a new experiment in the collective human imagination.on i knew a commons of ideas and unfolding of human culture. there are some folks who want to

enclose this comments as a business phenomenon and turn into something else to make it more about profit and exponential growth. i am not quite sure what that will do to the culture. turns out what it did is is it kind of kill the culture if you look at the early internet was about exploring the infinite possibilities of the connected culture. what is he connected human imagination do? what can we do what we are connected by these machines that we cannot do more totally alone? what happens only share the processing cycles and the giant collective projects? wheat flip that. once you are betting on the internet as a stock you are not looking at how you increase possibility you are looking how would you increase probability. think of it, once you bet on something what you want?

the highest probability of your bet will come true you bet on aol,yo you bet on compuserve, yu bet on the web you whatever you bet on it you want to have the highester probability of workin. instead of using technology to increase creative possibility, we started using technology on people to increase their probability. you can see 1983, 94, 95. we started to use on the web or words like stickiness. [laughter] theng object of the game was to create a website that was sticky many people get to your website but they couldn't leave. they had an ad for one of the companies it helps to make your website sticky shows a user's uk on a piece of flypaper as if they were flies on ama fly stri. as if that is the happy user because they are stuck on what you're doing. we used a metric called eyeball hours. i bought ours was a number of hours a human eyeball would

spend looking at your monitor wired announced we were living in what they called the attention economy. people who were not paying attention were the enemy. it's interesting after they come up with the term attention economy is my started to see all of the diagnoses of attention deficit disorder and all the prescriptions for getting people to pay better attention to these websites where i started to write about how i wonder if a shortened attention span might be a defense mechanism against a world where they are creating sticky websites and using every tool at their disposal. behavioral finance, slot machine algorithms, there is a division of stanford called cap college he which is how do you capture human attention and modify human behavior online? that really for me was the turn whenfo people, especially people in the technology industry began to think of their users more the

weight of a heroin dealer thanks of the users how do we addict them and how do we control them? >> what is the mindset? >> the mindset is the idea. it is a few things the easiest way i can describe the mindset is thisre idea you can earn enoh money to insulate yourself and the damage you arers creating money and that way. or you can develop enough technology to correct for all the problems you created with the technology that you just made. so the mindset is a silicon valley relief that with more tech and more money they can sell for anything. it is a techno solution us 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'd tend to be afraid of women and nature and black people and indigenous people. they tend to want to own everything the object of the game is to see one's own contributions as unique it is your own ip it is without precedent. it is an urge to neutralize the unknown by dominating it de- animating it. when you hear them talk about self sovereignty and progress and increasing choice and somehow starting over. it's funny there's a place near california it is a bunch of the tech want to build a new city i knew perfect city they're going to live in. it is renewable and uses the best energy and computerized stacks for education and

religion and traffic and economy.y. it's the perfect thing. it is like going to mars are or going to the dark side of the moon moving to new zealand or alaska. the latin word as if from scratch. it's the colonizers are urged to get to a new territory. pretend there's no real life for humans there and then start over completely. and when you talk to these guys whether it's zuckerberg or mosque or vase owes, they all share the same understanding of human beings as the masses as a low and them as one level above it. .mark zuckerberg must go to the meta- verse elon musk wants to go to mars and peter talks about going from zero -- one. living one level one order of

magnitude above everybody else. that is the mindset at peaks in this almost new genic idea called effective altruism. where they believe it is okay to be kind of an awful person now as long to earn a lot of money and give some of the money back it is a weird jeremy benton in turn on digital psychedelic steroids. where they believe and this is how far the mindset goes it is tech worship. it is a hatred of the human of the body of everything earthly they think in the future there will be hundreds of trillions of post- human artificial intelligence spread throughout the galaxy. that we will launch these things may be part biology part digital part, silicon, whatever they are

there post- human entities all over the universe. and because there are so many of them there total happiness matters more than the happiness of the 8 billion human maggots that happen to be alive on the mother nest righte now. that's a very dangerous way to look the lives of the people to date matter less than this and future of trillions of a little robot consciousness. that is part of why i'm not a futurist. you can use math and logic and eugenics and a certain kind of scientific rigor to say that is true or they do matter more therefore let's invest in bitcoin, save ourselves what the people die and get the rockets to the next planet. but it is ignoring the present. i have much more faith in the realityth of the present 8 billn people alive today who actually

matter. and then we would make very different decisions if without the people who are alive today are what matters rather than the roebuck's in the fantasy future for a lots more on the mindset the book survival of the richest fantasies of tech billionaires it's the latest book 20 books over 30 years nonfiction and fiction books as well. were talk about all of them and end up this month and ask you to join the conversation to do that. for months or' in 27488200 for those living in eastern and central time zone (202)748-8201. if you are in the mountain or pacific time zone if you want to send us a text (202)748-8903. if you do please include your name and where you are from. and also in social media @booktv on all of our social media platforms quite in center questions and go ahead and start calling in. his folks are calling in you

talk about the mindset. what is team human i don't mean the podcast of the book with the concept of team human? >> is a long time ago for us on a panel with a guy name ray who is a brilliant guy or the chief scientist at google. and he was telling the story about how t evolution is reallya matter of information finding more complex homes. so information like the adam, than the molecules on that one celled organism and the real organism in human culture. but as computers become more complex capable of handwritten more complexity than human and human culture the information will migrate to them and they will prove to be our evolutionary successors. and once that happens human

beings have to pass the evolutionary torch to the robots to the artificial intelligence and accept ourit own inevitable replacement and extinction. i was so sad by that. i think human beings have qualities artificial intelligence is an things raised on the binary logix may never have it. human beings can live in the in between space between that yes and the note. a human being can sustain paradox over time without the need to resolve it. to one sort of answer or another. we can look at a problem as something to sustain rather than something to solve it. i remember i said a human being can watch a david lynch movie, not understand what it means and still experience that as pleasure. right? what is that human beings are special we deserve a place in the digital future. and he said your senate because

you're human. and i said okay, fine guilty. i am on team human. that is when the term came up i month team human guilty as charged i admit it, i am a human going to fight for the right for others of my species to have a place on this planet. but then the more i thought about the idea team human i realized it goes against the mindset to call humans a team. the mindset is about the sovereign individual. the man emperor zuckerberg thanks of himself as a gustus caesar. that is his goal. the single lord over everyone. the idea of team human is arguing being human is a team sport. evolution is not the story of the survival of the fittest individual. if you actually read the darwin if you read the book, read the

book what you will see his page after page this guy is marveling within the species and as it enters species of coordination of human beingss are an argument we are not of human beings are the most evolved species it is because we have evolved the most complex methods of collaborating a lot of these are very subtle. when you are in real life with another human being you seat whether the pupils are getting larger or smallerer as you speak of. are they taking you in or rejecting you? is there breathing synchronizing with yours? that my curt nod and motions with their head or micro negative emotions? you cannot see any of this on zoom or skype or any text message. so we are trying to conduct a very complex and difficult human

society h in a world that is not letting us get the social cues that we need for that mirror neurons in our brains to fire for the oxytocin to go through our blood. if you are onlinee and someone says they agree with you that biological feedback. you cannot help but be suspicious of them. every time someone agrees with you in mind what happens is a reverse effect in your body. your body says wait a minute they said they agreed to buy did not get in my body. a generates a disk trust rather than trust team human is saying wait a minute we have got to reemploy and retrieve these great mechanisms for working and being together. it's almost like putting the social back into socialism but i don't care about the -ism i care about people knowing their neighbors in understanding this whole human project is not about who gets to escape to their bunker but how do we do this together? so i wonder how you think this

emerging technology is with team human mark zuckerberg from the medic connect 2023 invented this week previewing upcoming ai and artificial intelligence technologies. here's one of those technologies that he shut off. >> our industry over the coming decades is going to be how do we unify these experiences of the physical we have with the vibrant digital world to create something more coherent and better than anything we have today. now in the future it not too far from now you will walk into a roomom and there are going to be holograms and digital things to interact with as there are physical objects. think about all the things that are physically there that do not need to be physical things that paper, that media, the games, the art, the workstation, any screen, they will all be

interactive holograms. thinking of going and hanging out with your friends. pretty soon will be at a point you're going to be there physically with some of your friends. others will be there it digitaly as avatars, holograms they will feel just as a present as everyone else. or, you walk into a meeting and sit down at the table. you will be there -- make the people there physically people therehe digitally as holograms t also sitting on the table with you will be a bunch of ai who are embodied is holograms helping to get different stuff them too. host: on back technolo. 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, me the technologies are great for increasing your utility value which i understand. since the industrial age people have been measured in terms of their utility value. how much canan be work can be de through much money we have to have a specific place that the meeting and i get that but the idea of not getting to meet in real life even if it seems easier on the surface it never actually is. all this stuff, all these things that don't need to be physical things 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 laser projecting holograph whatever machine it is you have to create the virtual avatar in the room you have to send kids into the mind and average out to get their earth metal to make the thing. you have to put huge factories around water to get cobalt out. you have to create sullivan -- silicon wafers. how is a solar panel made in g worse it? what he is describing is not less physical matter being used but more physical matter being used to then deny the human being of actual physical presence. the avatar is a great substitute.re grandmas in the netherlands and the baby is in cleveland. they can see each other. that'' beautiful. or someone is stuck in a hospital bed or as a paraplegic

and now is having a virtual experience of togetherness at a picnic they wouldn't be able to get to. that's beautiful but for people who can actually be together the complexity of human relationships and the complexity of say just imagine the complexity of a mother nursing a baby. so he can get a virtual bottle and a virtual mother so she can be at work and you will be missing something. if the virtual baby is missing something from the virtually nursing baby missing something from them mother i would argue i'm missing something something if he weren't at my house watching the game with me your avatars onho the couch watching it's not the same and we are denying him and turning the game into again it's like work or the utility value of the game. the other thing that's interesting is theses technologies is like you wear your glasses so you'll never be

in a position of seeing someone on the street and not remembering what their need is. and it's uncomfortable. hey. how are you and i'm like if i had the and classes beau hey doris. since we met in 1993. so you tell me all these things than i can save rapport with this person i didn't know which isit moving into a bizarre almot a dishonest relationship with my world and wondering what mattered, what really matters that i remember that person's name and if it was a sales connected to business then it's good. please, do have things things like constant contact in these databases so someone calls you in their profile comes up in you go zero go how was your wife, mabel? you know that because it came up on the computer screen.

it's a big business relationship trying to sell to macy's. take that relationship but in thery real world to be burdened with this data as part of our interactions and then i world where who pays for the data? and walking down the street and i'm going to pick a restaurant taxes paying to be in mark zuckerberg's virtual augmented reality world? a restaurant that didn't pay isn't even going to existgm? in that might be the best. spend 30 minutes in their two-hour interview with douglas rushkoff are in that program looking for your calls and questions and plenty of calls for youth this morning sir. thisue is jim in california. good morning jim muir on with douglas rushkoff. jim are you with us?

we will try to michael and broward county florida. hang on the line gem and we will try to get to you. michael go ahead. we will work on his calls. i think we have julie on the line minneapolis minnesota. we have a lot of calls for you so we could rotate through them if airfare to julian minneapolis go ahead. >> hi i'm here. i'm glad to be here. i heard mr. rushkoff say a number things and it inspired me. you sir are in an impassioned and insightful and yet the great many opinions and the rate many questions and a lot of ideas which could be molded and discussed by people who opposed you into policies and means of achieving progress. now my question is you write write books in the teach-in you appear here how do you actually

get people involved in talking to one another and how do we because i think i share some of those characteristics and some of your thoughts. how do we begin to take a one point you said something about whatnk had an opportunity to tae control of the digital age and instead we ceded it to business such as university seated educations to business. how do we retract that and say now we want it back quickly or capable of doing this. >> julie thanks for the call. >> e it's great. that's where i'm at two in that question. first thing i realized for me was that the construction of how do we get people to. as a potentially hazardous construction itself. that's how the tech pros think of it.

how do we get people to do this and how do we get people to do that? and getting people to do something am putting myself in the superior place and we get into almost like television style implants. you become an influence peddler. how do we influence society and how do we change people because i know how people woulde be better if they did this or that. so i tried to move away from that as a way to think about it and rather thinking about it and how do i engender an environment in which people feel welcomed two. you are welcome to socialize and to care for each other and nurture each other rather than compete with each other so i broke that down actually. this is probably going to be my next book but i broke it down into four ways of changing the environment or changing the register in which we are operating.

the first one i call it the natural ice power. all i'm trying to do is help people recognize how many things in our world are social constructions and not conditions of nature or anything. money. these bills, this is not money. this is paper we used to represent money in our society. when i go on "cnn" and they asked me a eye in the unemployment problem. well exactly why is some employment of problem? when with employment invented in what was aboard what's the difference between employment at work and win where people forced to start doing wage labor instead of therc kinds of work that they used to do? it's just challenging these underlying assumptions of how things work which then leads to the second one which is the triggering agency. trying too help people feel like they have got more agency in

more 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 only as a read-only file but as a read and like father -- file that others could edit and why was so much of the world established as read-only and why isn't this up for discussion and why shouldn't it be up for discussion in the third one if we are going to do that want to have agency you want to change things you need other people. the third one is to re-socialize people of how people feel less afraid of each other. the great hample i like to use is you need to drill a hole in the wall and you don't have a drill in america what most people would do is go to the home depot by a drill and use it once a drill the hole and it will probably never work again because it won't be charged the concurrent away.

he used it once and created all this carbon in your throat away and it's sitting on the toxic heap with some one else looking at trying to find a recyclable parts inside of there. weight could have done is walk down the block and not from bob star and said bob can i borrow your drill? why don't we do that? why are we so scared? we are going to owe something to bob because she'll have a barbecueil next week and you hae the barbecue and bob sees it and he'll expect to be invited over to the barbecue and then the others will see it and they'll say why didn't i invite bob and the others? worst-case scenarios the rv to party. that's a nightmare looking out why that is in the last thing i was looking at was this cold evading off. it's what is that party and why are we so resistant to a?

why you're reading resistant to the state of awe. when you have the state of all whether looking at a canyon or enjoying a party with a bunch of other people you experience the world has bigger than yourself and it ends up giving you a response in your body and your immune system gets better so the experience of awe seems to be a natural important part of human health and you don't get it with the vr goggles you get it in community with other people or nature. i'm looking at those how do we help people feel less encumbered and less lock dan to sort of the quo institutions in belief in being more willing to move into that space between the one in the zero where life actually happens. >> let me come back to jimmy california the first person to

to call innocent as we open up the phone lines and i think he's there now. jim, thanks for waiting. >> thank you very much forca taking my call. mr. rushkoff my question is different from what you've been going on but i seen your resume you went to hollywood and you are an apprentice director with brianar de palma on a major move which was a huge and apparently it turned you off on movies in hollywood. i would like your comments on that if you could enter thoughts on movies today and movies in the past. the directors and movies that influenced you when you were younger. it's an area i'm interested in and i'm a movie buff. >> thank you. >> that's beautiful. the real story and we can talk for really of note was fun. i was a theater director from the time i was 11 or 12 years old i wasdi directing plays andi directed in jr. high school and

all things theater. i went to princeton and did english and theater and i went to cal arts and did theater and while i was at cal arts i was going to drive across the country and i was driving across the country with my best friend and he fell asleep at the wheel and we hit a tree and he was impaled and died the next week. i haven't told this story publicly. booktv, welcome. he died next to me and all of a sudden i was like theaters so ethereal. dies and it disappears and it's a thing where he had to be here and i decided i'm going to do film because it was that existential moment. i'm going to do film because it's going to stay and it's going to be there after i die after these things. so i took film at cal arts man in the suit. i was with john james mangal in the wolverine movie and a great director.

we worked together they are a lot and i was making films like theater. i liked jim jarmusch been vendor werner hartzog bob fosse of cabaret and lenny. i liked dinner with andre. i like theater films and what anthony gregory did but i liked theatrical films and then i got that brian de palma at apprentice gig so i'm going to be his apprentice on this big movie and at the time it was like $50 million on movie that was just not thought out and just kind of a very thin satire. i did the new york part of it but then when i went to l.a. to do the studio part i actually dropped out and i returned to theater at that point and then

got tired of theateret because f i was supposed to do a production of the three penny opera and the cheapest he was going to be 4040 bucks. it's a narco-marxist left a san francisco kind of thinker. i'm not going to charge $40 for three penny opera which is the marxist play. i took to the internet thinking the internet was going to be the people's media. i want to get away from all that commercial theater. i'm going to go to the internet which is the countercultural antibusiness protohuman. it was for a moment. it's that alternative but in terms of the movie maybe i'm typical kubrick and they do things in movies kubrick does something that's beyond what people realize is happening.

he makes movies that are all about inviting multiple interpretations. it's as if the movie haspl a plt but it doesn't really have that plot and you can almost project anything onto that plot, not anything but many different things under that plot that you want to so there was much about yourself as a movie. i like what he does. i like his hallways that imitate escher and escher that he he plays with illusion and reality. i like david his work because again it's about opening questions and i find i'm annoyed with guys like nothing against their films but i get annoyed with the more 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 periods in object and it works more like, you know, don't tell them i said this it works more like a torah. it has a mythic level of experiential value but what it means to you could be different every time you go through i it. thanks for sharing that story about your friend in the accident. for viewers who don't know we have a podcast with over 300 episodes of podcasts and 20 books. i wonder why you think you haven't shared that story publicly before. >> when you sherry a story about this it's like it feels a little

bit like begging for sympathy you know? sits 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 ears to movet through trauma. i remember back in my theater days stanislavsky had a thing about sense memory and since memory is after a scene if you're sad or whatever it is in the 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. you can do that in the rehearsal but our teacher told us there's a rule that it have to be from a least six years ago otherwise you have a processha that trauma in such a way that it's useful and you'll end up being non-useful. iis think maybe now whatever ths

is 30 years later i'm kind of distant enough from it that when it came up he didn't have the texture that made it feel inappropriate to bring to bear and also because of the audience. some of the audiences, whoever's there. i'm thinking of booktv. a lot of these people are book people and i don't get to talk to both people that much. another author. the book people, we go through life differently than other people.. book people understand hower to engage with an idea or emotion over an extended period of time. whatever book you are breeding. you know what i mean? sits a different thing than remote control media so i felt

it was safer and moree appropriate to bring up the processing of trauma for people who ride back. they are people who write and people who read. >> plenty waiting to chat with you again in california oscar you are on with douglas rushkoff. >> hi. i want to get to the question i want to ask. thank you for your books by the way. they are great. how can we get, how can we get this aspect, like you have the way of expressing the big picture comes the big picture things going on and it's great because i like to take an aspect of that for example like capitalism, okay?

capitalism it does a lot great things but a lot of people use it as a self defining term practically. granted it put us on the map how can you use, i believe capitalism is great and it did a lot of good things that people strongly side with it but they don't see -- i often have believed that capitalism unchecked starts going bad and starts doing damage like the big corporations and things like that. >> let's pick up on that because that's a theme of several of the rushkoff books. >> yeah sure for the first book i wrote on capitalism is called "life, inc." how the world became a corporation how to take it back.

colbert shown the which is something in itself. i was really looking at where it is capitalism come from and where does the corporation come from, where does central currency come back and i trace it back to the middle ages. there is the growth of the new peer-to-peere economy right afr the crusades. there is a marketplace where they learned from the bizarre and more as countries but they brought apakan people were trading and we had a new class. until the 1980s and it was a really successful think that they have stalkers he got porous the middle-class got wealthy so they came up with two great ideas and one was central currency which is you aren't allowed to have a transaction lets you borrow money from the central treasury of interest so now because there's interest builds and the economy the economy have to grow to stay the

same period a works fine for colonialism. as long as their new places and 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. you're not allowed to do business with a particular industry must 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 of the shoea company. and that comes down to us today as corporate capitalism that we don't even question. even a nice present like wide and talks about but we bet that the gdp growth three to 5% every year. why do we need an economy to grow? what does that have to do with feeding people? nothing. in some ways it's the opposite, it's about the balance sheet and what it does is it favors the increasingly abstract economic instrument and it's why derivatives are valued more than

stocks at this end-stage capitalism we live in a world where in 2013 the new york stock exchange was purchased by it's derivative exchange. think about that. the new york stock exchange which is an obstruction of the real market which you could argue is itself an extraction of the exchange of human need consumed by it's own obstruction. this is the way it goes and that's why we end up in this world as tech leaners who are looking at what's the next level of extraction? in some ways what we can think of is the ai craze or the digital craze is all about looking for howan do i go abstrt on reality itself and be one of the robots and be one of the driven goods, the one of those things because he wants to be a little human?

this is jack welch general electric style capitalism. he's the guy when he was 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 sold the productive aspect of ge the makingis of stuff and turn ge io a financial services company because the abstraction makes more money than actual work. and it worked really well until 2007 or 2008 when the financial crisis happen and they had no more production assets but that's the tendency you are right that the tendency of capitalism which is why it works great to appoint. worked great for the colonial empire if you aren't looking at what land is being taken away and the labor and all that. it still can work and there is more balance forms of capitalism

that we could use when i tell that story about the drill to people and i say look at everybody on the block if we borrowed jewels from each other really had one or two lamar's on the block instead of every house having their own lamar and we share the lawnmower. one need need they loanmart two or three errors a weekend there's less production and pollution in spending he don't have to earn as muchuc money. someone will say what about the lawnmower company and what about the people work at the loanmart company and the stock shares and what are you going to do aboutwn them? that the backwardness of starting with capitalism is the underlying premise of our society rather than thinking of the economy is something that's supposed to serve us rather than us to serve the economy. >> we are an hour into her to our in depth interview with

douglas rushkoff on "in depth" and the question coming in from pearl city hawaii have with your interview from tim who says do we exist within assimilation and put tests could we devise to prove or disprove a? the mac if we don't live in a digital simulation created by the 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 exists? they would say this is the illusion. there's something else going on here. so one way or another we live in

assimilation because we don't even see what's going on. look back at your 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 get anyway. we are just sensory organs trying to process based on what we see so i don't think finally the question doesn't matter no, i don't believe we are in like in westworld one of the million simulations that are being run by someone to figure out how society works. if we are iterating is much closer to karmic iteration of civilizations over time that would t be running simulations.

>> a minute ago you were talking about the importance of the experience of awe. ii want to go to your 1999 book coercion and talk about the difference between the experience of awe and the spectacle and how you define spectacle. >> yeahcl spectacle is more lika norm burg rally or 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 they are in between like walking into a great cathedral as a catholic person in doing that. it's a combination, right? there some architect dude who made this inspiration machine

with the organ and the lights and the stained glass and the arches and all to generate an experience of awe. you go to a rave and they put the lights and the music and 120 beats a second and beautiful young people around dancing half-dressed tunnel like that scene in the matrix and the raves that they have. there's in between but for me spectacle is really less about inviting chair participation and more about stoking the rage of the crowd against a unified enemy. so in the chess game is like oh will the dolphins, let's get the dolphins and then you can use that airline pickets and sell stake for outback. you can do whatever you want to

take out her like rage and enthusiasm setting or against a particular racial group or whatever it might be or against democrats or whoever. spectacle is more a designed for me anyway more designed experience in order to focus the energy of the crowd onto a main enemy in mostt cases, whereas ae is more about breaking people out of 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. now you were in the army at this work in the group of that. that's why when i was playing

for bed word i w was trying -- bedford i was calling it team human. but it's not team human like against teams squirrel. it's just team human because this is the way we experience our perspective on nature and everything else. >> from coercion think of any great spectacle as having three main acts first unify the crowd second stoke their passion and third speak of or nature. help me understand that third part a little more. >> well when you speak of l or nature you think of speaking about himself as the father and all that people as his children that you are, and it's interesting. you look at the twitter memes

that people like elon musk put up of himself with him as. think about even zuckerberg's and musk are challenging each other to a mixed martial arts fight as if they are demagogues that they in inhabit silicon valleys like their mount olympus and now they are going to have a spectacle battle through the media do we get to see the. speaking of or nature it depends. jacques a little book on propaganda from the 50s is really good on this but it's having people identify you as a mother, as the father connected to as you are both universal and

completely personal where the personal feels you are speaking just of them. apparently there's a taylor swift has the ability to do that she's benevolent about appears she's doing it with a message of empowerment and identification and all but someone with her abilities 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 blank because then we are the same as those who are let's create a big rally where we get to people to believe in our or get people to vote for our party or get people to do this. there's a orbital moment that happens in the spectacle where people are like it's the same moment and it's called growing

transfer and happens when someone walks into an original shopping mall and they show it on tape and watch the videos of it but the person's job opens in her eyes glaze over. the gruen effect that moment when you can drop in whatever brand you want and whatever party whatever political ideology whatever enemy. and you just see it and once you do that they dropped that and then they act as if, and now we are meeting our destiny together. now with the blood in the soil in the forest and the and in the rhetoric comes to certain assertion that this is the natural way, that this is more natural and weat are returning o some kind of 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's not. completely manipulated. >> the book from 1999 course and why we listen to what they say in the cover of the book has a quote from senator bob kerrey on the front cover. remind people who he was and why he ended up on the cover of your book. >> bob kerrey is a senator from nebraska who actually lost a split in the vietnam war. he was kind of a presidential candidate and had kind of a scandal about a particular episode during the war which is still unclear exactly what happened but it was not good

enough to cost him his bid there but he was always nice to me in an artist and he actually was the boyfriend of my neighbor when i looked in the west village. that's when you could live in the west village as a single barely working writer and get an apartment in the west village. she lived across the hall from me and she was his boyfriend so i got to hang out with him a little bit and he would do a blurb in the book. he did a really funny one and so blurb originally was read this or else which is like perfect for a book that's called coercion. >> what ended up on the covers and important book about a warning to americans who are unaware of the. power words to mislead the reader. read this book and know what he getsen heard. >> nobody gets hurt.

they sent it back and thank god he added to it so they would accept him on there. he then became president of an new school in new york for while and help them build up this building and absorb persons and a bunch of things. he was controversial but a very useful figure in bringing that place to it's current standing. >> the caller is waiting for you in broward county florida. you are on with douglas rushkoff. >> touching on cultures biology and social citation and chatting on chat gpt the other day discovered trying to get information about their governor desantis that he's doing exactly, because it's basically the semantics and he admits to the fact that the responses it

provides an the program or for the same reasons that he wants to avoid things that are potentially negative or saying things that arepo dispositive ad i'm talking about if you listen to anything having to do with racism and misogyny for phobia that's one thing is you get to say one thing and build it to say another your friends who are rich, it changes your brain like trauma does. so to be more adjusted unless were active herbert spencer started that in 1860s which is why 30% of our kids can't read because we don't teach it that way even though 100% can but we teach to the bell curve not to

prevent the bell curve. we pulled the information to assure we achieved a 30% failure and the state department has done for 50 years. they have done a randomized educational tests and we have never had more than 30%. >> allowed topics here. let douglas rushkoff jump in on which you want to talk about. >> the embracing feature of this is applying the industrial age to our many social institutions and coming up whatever metric you put on the wall is the metric that you're going to get. that's where you're going to to go for. and you bring the kid in you and the joe into classroom and you say we are going to teach this kid today long division.

and without any understanding what's going on in the kid's house for the kids mother is moving from shelter to shelter in the father is a and not even there and the kid is trying to contend with that. how do i take care of my mother the challenge for that kid alive challenge that kid is dealing with and what that child needs to learn about mom and is not reflected in the assessment they have done on their long division at the end of the week. that's the problem with the one-size-fits-all not just education system everything system. when we decide and it's funny in the stature or there's this 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 spend in the emergency-room waiting room for them to get on to the

bed as quickly as possible. so what the emergency-room did was they took the wheels off of their gurneys in order to call them. they line 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 gotth medil care so in order to win the metric they ended up for bursting it but what i hear what i hear in his callers concerned is the way that we kind of institutionalizedd short-term oversimplified values at the expense of whatever the thing is that we might actually want to accomplish. and kind of the bigger and more convoluted bureaucracy to get very often a harder and harder just to get back down to what it is that we want.

and the same with chad gpt. people after realized and your viewers to chad gpt is hyped right now. it really is hyped. it's a stock market desperate for another big thing. zoom and all these covid apps are not being used as much. all of the streaming media companies are not being watch as much because we are going out there but they need another thing. chat gpt is just an advanced search engine right now. that's all we are looking at. it takes your local results and pushes them into something that looksnt more like human speech s wrong most of the time. not correct. it's reverting everything and looking at what's the most average answer to that question. and if it doesn't offend anybody or say anything controversial or

upsetting. it's wrong in itself centered so it's not what we think it is. just a search right now and yeah we can look at the future where these things are smart though we aren't there. >> thiss is ruth and utah. good morning. >> hi. i have a couple of points to go back to some of the things you were talking about earlier in the conversation to. first i've been a widow for a little over two years and a long time caregiver. so i live in this gorgeous area. my life is all about seeing things in real time and not virtually. i love live performance.

i don't care little kids, teenage kids, adults, professionals i see people trying in 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 drivee their utah the few times and if you haven't had the opportunity to do it, do it. it's different. you feel connected to the creation itself. just get out of the car and stare at iraq for five minutes. the trip is most, boy talk about off. some parts of new mexico do that too.

it's amazing but n it's so come the thing that amazes me about our state of disconnection is how quickly you reconnect and recalibrate it to reality is almost instantaneous if you don't have nature in the real world just find a friend and look in their eyes and take two or three breaths with them but it's almost unbearable if you haven't done in a while. he reconnects you almost instantly. it's interesting for how long it took to recalibrate us and how much technology and how many billions in chines of dollars were to get us into this state where we all need to open her eyes and get an app to cure you from the app you just use like you get a womb as app and then a

snapchat app. you touched ground and 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 your cat even. you get it so quickly and it's so accessible even where there's a forest fire haze and a it's so accessible that i have hope in the future and how quickly these bonds in the system and how quickly they are restored when you get them have a chance. >> you're talking about creation a minute ago. when you are creating a riding andd a podcast in interviews lie this but when you're a writing is there a place you go to create it and what is your process for writing your books?

>> i tend to go about it the same way whether it's fiction or nonfiction. i write notecards. i have ideas on notecards and i end up putting them on the wall and what are called sort of like content areas and then content areas kind of mutate into chapters and then i ordered them so that each chapter flows as the buy-back structure. so because of that i need to have a place where the book happens, a room,la 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 notecards that i know how much i have

based on how many cards there and how dense they are and how important topics are in each one so i can kind of feel the book more intuitively or semantically. >> are you in that room right now? >> yeah although i haven't, at the end of survival of the richest i was in here. i've rearranged it since but the wall, my bookcase wall was the wall where the book was written and then i was trying to use a program that looks like notecards as a substitute and it doesn't quite organize the same way. i've got to feel the book, i had to be in a physical relationship to the ideas of the book like a chapel of memories or something. i know these ideas are here and it's in my head that it's

located there in that chapter so i can look at any book and chapter in her room number where the chapter was in the room wireless. >> a chapel of memories. what was the hardest book for you to write? >> it's interesting. this last book came right out because it has a memoir quality. my agent told me m the best part of your book is not the rhetoric gets the story so ended up telling all these stories about my experiences with these billionaire people and their antics. that one kind of came right out. the most research a book was "life, inc.." i went to the gale library looked at charters and 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 it might be somewhat fictionalized were between alastair crowley and adolph hitler at the end of world war ii. the first three artists that were hired to work on the book. they all had major life catastrophes like galamison suicide and really things but are starting to get scared riding about someone like alastair crowley and someone like something dangerous happening. i got really scared when i was writing that that i was touching energy that i shouldn't and then it was hard to do to be really faithful to the actual world war ii story and to tell that story as a reality and is history will

also getting into these characters and the part that wasn't real and tried to distinguish between the two in what felt like a responsible way so that was the most harrowing writing experience i've had. >> this is marshall and houston, texas. thanks for waiting. >> thank you very much gentlemen. this is asc fascinating conversation. i'm interested in your role with researchch particularly the live and book you talked about. how much of the research and writing and do they overlap each other and how much do you need to do before you start writing and also your role with agents thank you very much. >> my role with agents like literary agent's? okay, so with "life, inc." i like to have all the research done before i start writing writing.

i will 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 too wet in academia we call the research question. so for "life, inc." it was word of the corporation come from and how did corporatism become their religion of our society and what the heck can we do about it? and i had done enough research to know if you look at the currency in the charter monopoly is going to figure it out but i didn't know when i wrote 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 monopolies and what that wasn't how it worked. i discovered things that weren't understood before so that was real research once the research

was done and i have allar the stuff i make my outline on the wall and i can see occasionally there will 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 earlier. once i get that outline done the only way i can get through the book is going straight through with a blind eye. i've justified it with i'm putting on the miner's lamp and digging the hole tunnel of the book until i get that light on the other end of the mind. i've got to go straight through to my go straight through it because the reader is going to pretty much look at the convention of the book unless it's a weird book they'll had to go straight through it so i do the same thing but i don't look back because if i look back and i tried that where you rewrite the book to the point where you rewrite it in continuing the end of the book has much less attention than the front of the

book. it's like combing someone with really long hair. you end up kind of it's 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 it going for it but the only thing weird that might happen as i'm riding the book as they realize the chapter so much bigger than the other four or five chapters might break it uper into two. you know i could break it here and create two chapters. so for me it's the research. occasionally i will do research and get two-thirds through the book and i say need another story. i don't understand what happened here and i'm going to go back and get more justification. the worst case i find out the justification pushes thing and in another way and then i either drop it for tila story in a different way. i to use it otherwise. my relationship with agents,

i've had a bunch of them. i started getting an agent because i had written a screenplay for somebody. that screenplay had an agent and then there was a co-agent so i got my first literary agent through the backdoor and into the doing the wrong date but i thought they had dropped me. they haven't called me for a long timepe and i gave up sellig the book and then i had a friend who is an agent and he said also also the book so he sold it in the first agent was like wait a minute, that's my book. it was a year before they had called me and had done anything and i got sued and had to give a bunch of money to this one in a bunch of money to that one. then this agent and that agent turned out to have a lot of issues. he was stealing money from a nch of people so i left him and went to william morris and i

had them for while my agent left william morris. do i stay or do i follow so i stayed the next agent wasn't so good and then i went to a science agent who is a great weary agent invisible 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 only just books and i've wanted to get things on the screen and start playing fair so it ended up at creative arts agencies. i don't talk to my agents there that much but she was really good. she's the one who told me don't write another book like this but you are reaching these people and the same people again and again with these more polemic things and if you want to tell stories.

whether i want to tell fiction or non-stories -- fiction or nonfiction stories that tell the story of how you engage. that's what it is so i started doing that and she was right. and now and always acting my age and 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 adding value distribution and the cover and the sale of the book but the editor should be my partner in like a drama to her play. they really are the first audience and my editor tom mayor at norton which is where he ended up with my publisher, i'm not going to leave them and let knows what happened. .. articles.

i did this article on the survival of the richest who wanted advice on how to get out there doomsday bunkers. a year or two later, i wrote about the covid crisis, how i felt many people were retreating and adapting that billionaire mindset. tutor and i can make this work out on the hamptons. i wrote that piece, and that's when he called me and said that this is your next book. you have to do this. i call the agent and editor, you should do this. if you can do it in stories, then sure, do it. so it was actually a book that came from the editor to me. i was writing for an audience of one and. but what about this and what about that?

said to be at the place -- and it's a strange place to be, it took me old to do it -- i see the notes and critiques from the editor as gifts rather than work, as ways to get in because i trust him. all my gosh, this guy is helping me make this better. he's making me a better writer. to give up the hubris to think somebody doesn't know better than you is, at least as well as you, was really good for me so 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 is a group project and it's my whole team but i'm finally living it. >> host: if you want that story, it's how douglas begins survival of the riches fantasies

of the tech billionaires, the latest book of the past 30 years also a professor of media theory and digital economics at queens college in new york. mike is waiting in my -- new york. i have a question in terms of individual human nature. why is communism and socialism throughout the world really ineffective and a mellow suitable failure but in terms of these b self-appointed elite, th billionaires, i want the people listening to understand what complete hypocrites these people, they are surrounded by highly trained bodyguards and advocate in the united states in

terms of defending themselves. i just want people to understand that in these theoretical systems of government they don't work and then people say it hasn't really been tried, but to an extent it should be. capitalism by far has been the most effective and in the public we live in in america, by far the most effective way to govern but these tech billionaires are just bathed in hypocrisy in the entire way they live versus the average person in america. >> host: mike, got your point. capitalism has worked as long as when we get to periods of

extreme excess, we have major reformation, big regulation. so yes, when things spun out of control, you get franklin delano roosevelt and wpa and gi bills and education bills. you reform the thing and that is when capitalism works best is when you do that. you end up in a situation because they realize they had to. in order to kind of bail out what was happening because 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 facebook and google are doing well, you see villages

living around them and they end up destroying markets. it's actually kind of destructive destruction. they are scoring more money and then you get to the place now where mark zuckerberg says i'm going to get back 95% of my money to the places i took out. dude, if you made 95% less extracted, you wouldn't be having to try to shove your money back into the systems that you decimated, these ecosystems and societies. now i would argue communism and socialism, the reason i would say they haven't worked is because they are trying to do these things at scale. i look at scale as is it solve thee problem. when marx was writing about socialism what he really meant is how do we return, how do we

retrieve the social element of commerce and exchange? borrowing a drill from the neighbor instead of buying one at home depot, is that a crime or is it okay, and i understand the perspective that it is a crime because even though i don't need a drill, if i don't buy the drill, how will home depot grow, how will that, it's my responsibility as a citizen and capitalism to promote the exponential growth of the economy and that's the part where it gets off where we see it not just as a means to an end but as the end, as the only way. so when i look at socialism, i'm talking how do you but the social back into it and the sort of minimizing. when you talk about communism, i like community.

i don't know if i like it so much because it's not so much you can orchestrate so much. he went a little off and someone trying to exercise marx he's got this great chapter he writes about robinson caruso he had all these little ledgers to maximize his own efficiency so he said okay he needs five fish per week so you will spend this much and he hasas a little ledger and max said if 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, you can't plan that out or you will end up on the line and there won't be enough soak in the market to be

good for figuring out supply and demand and all that, but they are really bad at figuring out how do we share water, how do you deal with something like air, how do you deal with things that are best orchestrated as a river. weon all share responsibility fr the river. how many fish you are allowed to take from the river, and we are going to enforce those two violated those rules so that there's enough fish or enough pasture or air or whatever it is for anybody to use, so some things, sure let's make markets for them, iphones, and let's compete. a lot of stuff doesn't really work in terms of the market

sensibility. you need to create a scarcity of something for the marketea to work. it could be in abundance, so i think 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. one of the questions we always ask our authors who come on in-depthre the books they are reading rightow. here is whatha douglas said. the favorite books johnennedy tools pulitzer prize winner confederacy, lewis mumford techniques and civilization, virginia woolf's to the lighthouse and in terms of what he's currently reading.

end times and jen then goals breaking together, which one of those books do you want to talk about in the context of this discussion we have been having today? >> we got one out of the way where every member is a pope. they were the early 1960s style intentional disinformation that was being used to promote that psychology that he wrote this book and what he's arguing

is not that everything is true but that we can all hold multiple perspectives at the same time and not to take any of them very seriously. so we can look at a situation like an atheist scientist and see it from that perspective you can look at it as a cynic and as a new age fantasy person and as a psychedelic person. there's all these different ways to look at things. it would have helped people today in the whole kind of conspiracy theories and acumen on cue is the 5g tower connected to the covid vaccine and wait a minute, to be able to tolerate not knowing, to tolerate that there's these different perspectives does shield you

from the same kind of people you gain power and use confusion and conspiracy and unknown as ways of gaining power as well and i feel like a lot of these kids scooped into this kind of radical war ended up kind of being the victims of their imagination rather than being able to kind of harvest their own creativity. so this book is really good for walking you through the confusion of what's true and what's not true and how do you kind of get to the other side of that. he was really good at that. the other one is the book i just kind of finished it last night is what was that one called again, and time counter elites

and the path of political disintegration. >> what that book it does in ann interesting way is to show it was nice to feel wrong. i love to get corrected, is that when these kind of revolution. things happen when the civilizations break down, it's not because the rich got so rich and the poor got so poothat the poor revolt. that's what i thought was happening. if it gets worse so many people in the villages then will revolt. that's not what happens. what happens is it's the creation of too many elites not that there's millions but there's so many that there's not enough to all be elite and they start competing with each other and that's what breaks c things down when there'sd too many and

i'm sure any of the listeners that are angry at coastal elites, there's too many there's not enough for all these. there's a lot of billionaires. oddly enough and this is the research i'm doing for the peace now that i thought that if you took the top five billionaires today that they had more total wealth than the five billionaires of j.p. morgan and carnegie and those guys. they have less wealth, the top five verses that top five. >> in dollars or percentage of the economy? >> percentage of the economy. but there's more. the top thousand billionaires haveth way, way more than everybody else, so there's a larger billionaire class. it's still a tiny number of people compared to the whole population but it's spread out

to a wide bunch of billionaires that are competing with each other for the scraps of billions and that is what breaks things down. >> minneapolis minnesota this is steve on an e-mailed question to what extent do you think that america's societal tendency to be less present is contributing to increased emotional and anxiety trends. 99.9% of it it's funny when you have a lot of us are raised with kids who have one kind of sensory or nervous disorder of another or too much cortisol or whatever it is that they are not calibrating and the easiest way to calibrate is to bring them into bed with you or sit with them. a body to body, skin to skin

ideally if they are little enough and it's still appropriate, but being with people, being on a team, on a presence, co-location. it's the surest way to calibrate to gain total health. addicted to technology and money and this crazy stuff which is one more thing and then i will try to do good for the world. i need another hundred thousand dollars in the bank then i can start behaving. if we are addicts and we need the 12 step program and a equivalence of alcoholics anonymous for our addiction to these crazy things, what's the first thing you do? you go in a room with other people. you go to a meeting. that is the one requirement, you go to a meeting in a room and experience fellowship every day

you find the others, that is what is on the back of the book. you find the others and be with them, absolutely. it's our lack of presence with each other that is making it harder to calibrate naturally. and making us more distrustful of eachh other. looking at twitter, you don't know, you can't ever feel the positive, not truly. you can get a dopamine hit. someone likes my tweet i get a hit of dopamine but you don't get oxytocin. not to call it, you don't have that, you don't feel part of the group. we all agree we look at this

person's tweet and we've given it the thumbs up because they've told us who thehe enemy is becae they are mad at biden and the u.s. and russia. we all do that. that's not the same thing. it's not the same internal state and we see all the data the kids who are on twitter and snapchat and all these things. they are supplementing terribly from everything from anorexia to tourette's. there's a new tick-tock acquired tourette's but it's a symptom they i are cutting, killing themselves. it's become a public health crisis. the thing is you don't solve it with another app, the wellness

app. you solve it with a good old-fashioned, i sound like an old person, but it shouldn't be considered nostalgic being with other people. i think it should always stay in fashion for those who may not know your social media presence, are you on facebook, tick-tock >> i send a podcast each week and now i'm even considering stopping that. i use to participate when it was a little bit more of a conversation but now like i'm going to be on c-span book tv today and if i get 50 likes for that, and 30 of them are from

bots pretending to be sex workers, there's this new kind out there that it's like some kind of a scam and i guess you're supposed to want to hire them either as virtual or real strippers of some kind or sex workers, what's the point and it is a the aggravation, the kind of conversations that are engendered there that i don't even want to t do that. i have a bluee sky account i haven't used yet there is a federated version that i would use, but i'm not finding a need for it. i get so much e-mail that it

feels like as much time as i want to spend looking at the screen and i just meeting my neighbors and finding out who's here, there's only so much life left. i'm an adult i don't want to there.t >> when you publicly quit facebook you wrote a column about it on cnn that it's never been h a social platform rathert exploits the social interaction the way a tupperware party does. facebook doesn't exist to make friends but to turn our network of connections brand preferences and activities over time social graphs into a commodity for others to exploit. >> it was a time that facebook decided they could use you to advertise to your people whether or not you wanted it. so if you said i'm at starbucks

today, they might podcast that for money to your friends or everyone that follows you and more. what are you when there were not. but it got worsere than that. the real function of facebook now is to take your past behavior, use that to put you in a statistical bucket and predict what you're likely to do in the future and then make sure that you do that. so if facebook looks at your test activity and does 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 what happened if you're too fat or if you need to bad food, what's going on in your bloodstream. they are not doing that in order to sell a specific diet product. what they are doingng that for s

to get that 80% accuracy up to 90% or 95%. they are directed at 20% of people who are going to choose to do something else and something that wasn't consistent with other statistical profiles of the function of facebook and these other social networks in that regard is to autotune humanity to take the 20% over some novel strains, wonderful human thing but the less predictable, less like the algorithm predicted them to be and reduce that down. don't want any people doing the weird things, so it's basically although tuning the independents out of humanity. and that is not an environment that you want to be spending time in. >> with about five minutes left, did want to read this from another viewer in hawaii who said thank you for sharing your insight. as a yogaa therapist, actor, lover of history and language i

do see stopping and breathing had another profound in power. humans are disconnected fromm each other and themselves. how do you recommend we begin a world of healing? >> i do yoga like three times a week with someone who teaches in my neighborhood and after covid or during covid, she started doing it in virtually. because some of the people don't want to go back to live in the rooms it's become like zoom yoga and a few months ago i started crying afterwards. i was just like this sucks.

like yes i'm glad to move in that way and i was doing it partly to be in the room with other people doing it and to breathe and smell their smells and hear the creeks and their knees popping and whatever but to be in the room with other people and that that was gone. i want to be in a room with people. i'm going to be in the room with other people. it'st great that we had two calls. i've always had a spiritual. it's to find the others as my whole purpose whatever i want to do is whatever i'vey got left. >> in the two and a half minutes we have left you mentioned finding the others is the last word of your book.

a page or two before you write this and we started the conversation today about humanists and you write the future is less a malm than a verb, it is a thing we do. i want to end with your thoughts on that. >> what i was trying to do with a little bit, the idea that the future for technologists and planners and everyone they look at the future and say okay we will hire them to tell us what is in the future so we can prepare for it. so theyan look at the most likey and probable future from their algorithms and it's a disaster, economic unrest, building a bunker, getting adi rocketship d going to mars. the best i can do is predict the

future and prepare and hang on for it. and what i am saying is no. the future is something we are creating right now. youre are making the future with the choices you make and if you are preparing for a future where that is going to happen, then you are way more likely of bringing that on. what if we prepare for a future where people realize their neighbors are their friends, that we are in this together, that mutual aid and togetherness and connection and community and care and acknowledging the social reality that's the future we want to create and we create that by doing it, by enacting it it's with every action we take now so starts today and you will like how the world turns out. >> author and professor, our guest the past two hours on morning.this

his latest book is survival of the richest, the eight fantasies of the tech billionaires came out in 2022, 20 books, nonfiction and fiction over the past 30 years. thanks for talking about some of them with us today. >> thanks for what you do. this is an important gathering of people. appreciate it.