book festivals and more every sunday on c-span2 or anytime online at book tv.org, television for serious readers. >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's story and on sunday, book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors, funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more, including comcast. >> do you think this is just a community center? no, it's way more than that. >> comcast is partnering with a thousand community centers to create wi-fi enabled listeners students from low income families can g the tools they need to be rdy for anything. comcast along with these television companies support c-span2 as a public service. >> author and professor douglas

rushkoff, you describe yourself in your latest book, survival of the richest as a humanist who writes about the impacts of digital technologies, but not a futurist. what's the difference between the two? >> well, a futurist is usually someone they come to to tell you what's going to happen in the future, and i've been right about that a lot so they call me a futurist, but really what i am is a presentist. i'm more interested in looking at-- looking at and describing accurately what it happening right now and that's usually an easier way to know what's going to happen in the future, but i don't usually talk about it. i just-- most futurists they seem more like propagandists and they want to see their company in the best place or positioning them as a consultant in the most needed place and you get people interested in the future about scaring them, this is going to happen or that's going to happen about you--

but if you're a presentist, kind after cultural anthropologist or culturist, what is, you end up freed to talk about things in ways that other people don't. for me, when i realized i was a presentist was when aol was buying time warner. i don't know if you remember that, back in 1999. and everyone was all excited that aol, the first big digital company is now going to buy time warner, that the old media company and this meant the new synergy of old media, new media was coming and how great it was and the new york times called me to write the piece on what was happening, the op-ed. so i wrote this piece saying as i look at it and as i understand it, it looks to me like aol is cashing in its chips, steve case the founder of aol, grew it as much as he could, the subscriber rate is peaking and using his inflated

stock to buy a real company like time warner that has amusement parks and cable and movie libraries and all that and it probably means we are now at the peak of the dot-com bubble. and they called me and they said we can't publish this. everybody says this is the greatest thing and it means that all of this stuff is coming, and a new age is coming. i said i'm not a futurist. i'm looking at what is. what is, it looks to me like the end of the video game, you either level up or cash out and i think he's cashing out. of course, they didn't publish it, but i turned out to be right, but not because i'm a futurist, right? that's sort of the difference. it's predictive, but it's more predictive by looking at what is, rather than trying to guess what's out there. >> so, presentist, not futurist, but when it comes to the impact of emerging digital technologies, would you describe yourself as an

optimist or a pessimist? >> neither. again, an optimist or pessimist is funny, the construction is interesting. i'm optimistic how this is going to work out or pessimistic about how this is going to work out. i would say that i'm frustrated, right? i'm hopeful, but frustrated. i'm always hopeful that human beings are going to find a way out of the messes that they're in, but i'm frustrated that we're using technology on people, right? we're using tech on people instead of giving technologies to people with some faith in their ability to use them. that we're surrendering this digital renaissance to really to the needs of the market. when i look at the people running the biggest media companies today, it says if they think of themselves as these demi-gods who should be in charge of everything from, you know, covid and farming, to

society, and education, and politics, and it's like, wait a minute, to what end? you know? what are your values? what ethics and economics and anthropology questions did you take in college, if any, before you dropped out in freshman year? so i kind of look at it that way. >> douglas rushkoff is our guest in depth to talk about his books, some 20 books over the past 30 years. and take us back to the early 1990's to siberia. what were your expectation on this emerging net and it was known? >> it was interesting. i saw the internet. the emerging internet and this is before the internet. the emerging computer networks as part of a larger cultural phenomena. we had just been through, you

know-- we just had cb radio, even, which was kind of the first sort of citizen's media movement at least in my lifetime, you know, since ham radio, i guess. the cb radio had happened, fax machines, the beginning of interactivity, and the television screens which had been a passive monitor. we had joy sticks to move things around and fax machines to start to send each other messages and people were walking around with these phones rather than to have to be home to get a call, mobile phones. there were new physics and chaos math and understandings how the world works. there was electronic music and kids throwing raves with nobody on the stage, just sort of entertainment out in the middle of a field. there was a psychedelics revival people were looking at kind of reengineering their own cognitive apparatus willfully

by themselves and it seemed to me that all of these things and the internet were part of a new culture. a new, yeah, west coast kind of west coast psychedelic cyber punk diy, whole earth kind of culture that might shake things up. so and me, i mean, i was an east coast educated theater director. i was an artsy person, but at the time i was fed up how elitist and expensive theater had become, how predictable the plays were. everything had a beginning, a middle and an end. felt really stifled and this independent thing was surprising, you know? i'm sure like you, i was raised in a world who people like computers were like little geek people with pocket protectors and high school and the kids who turned in the hallways at little right angles, there was

a certain type and by the late '80s, i was kinding out that my weirdest, artsiest, psychedelic friends from college were going out to silicon valley to work for apple, sun, intel. it was confusing, why were the weird people working with computers so i went out there and started covering it, really, as a journalist and i saw this very different computer story. a very different technology story, those folks would be working at intel or northrup grummond during the day and going home to oakland and scraping the bugs off pay peote cactuses and grateful dead on the weekends. and something different was happening and the first book i wrote about this, siberia life in the trenches of hyper space was looking at all of the different threads of culture as

part of this same new cultural assertion that we could redesign reality, and, all of these different things, whether it was fantasy role playing games where kids were-- i know people were scared it wassatanist. and it was hyper text reality that no one was use today yet. the idea that you could read a story and text on a computer and click on a word and choose where that takes you? you know, with are you could, you know, open the drawer and look inside and go in your own pathway. that was very new and to many of us, it seemed to be an omen or a precursor to the idea that we were going to move into a much more deliberate and interesting society, one that

was much less passive and much more of a choose your own adventure in spirituality, in politics, in government, in education, in arts, in all forms of human activity. >> so how did we get from that culture, that cyber punk, psychedelic culture, that moment that you describe to survival of the richest, the escape fantasies of tech billionaires? >> it's funny, the last couple of pages of my book siberia, i know these are book people, siberia, my book, was canceled by bantom doubleday, bell 1992 they thought the internet would be over in 1993 when the book would come out. i've got the letter from the editor, we think that's a passing fad and you're too

late. >> is that framed somewhere? >> no, it's in a drawing with the rejections of the book. that's funny. by the time i was putting it together. it was three, four years in the a making rather than one or two. by the time i was putting the finishing touches on the last draft for harper who was publishing it. wired magazine just launched and wire magazine came along and told a very different story what was happening on the internet. what wired was saying, yes, this is a whole big thing, but what this thing actually is is good for business. that the internet is going to create more surface area on the market, that thanks to the internet, the nasdaq stock exchange would be able to grow exponentially, uninterrupted forever, right? and then i understand what they were saying. they looked at digital technology as like the ultimate derivative. the way finance works, really,

is by kind of going meta. moving one level above what's actually happening, so there's a transaction between people and then you can buy stock in that. so you're one level removed. now, thanks to computers, you don't just have to buy the stock, you can buy the driven derivative, one level beyond that, so on, so on. you can look at colonialism only so much area on the planet, thanks to the internet infinite real estate and websites so the markets can expand onto new surface, new territory, virtual territory and wired come in, it's interesting what's happening, but what is happening is actually a financial phenomenon, a business phenomenon. and once business people came in, and this was my fear at the end of that book, i said, you know, there's a window of opportunity for us to seize this cultural phenomenon as what it is, as a new experiment

in the collective human imagination and a new kind of commons of ideas and unfolding of human culture, but there's some folks who want to re-- who want to enclose this commons as a business phenomenon and turn it into something else, and to make it more about profit and exponential growth and i'm not quite sure what that will do to the culture. and it turns out, what it did was kind of killed the culture because if you can look at the early internet, it was about kind of exploring the infinite possibility of a connected culture. what does the connected human imagination do? you know, what can we do when we're connected by the machines that we can't do when we're totally alone? what happens when we share these processing cycles and these giant collective projects? we flipped that. once you're betting on the internet as a stock, you're not looking for how do you increase

possibility. you're looking how do you increase probability. think of it. once you've bet on something, what do you want, the highest probability that your bet will come true. do you bet on aol. you bet on compuserve, on the web, whatever you bet on. you want that to have the highest probability of working. instead of using technology to increase creative possibility, we started using technology on people to increase their probability and this you could see it 1993, '94, '95, what we started to use on the web were words like stickiness, the idea-- the object of the game was to create a website that was sticky. meaning people would get to your website about you couldn't leave and they had an ad for one of the companies that helps you make your website sticky that showed users stuck on a piece of fly paper as if they were flies, you know, a fly strip, as if that's the happy user, right, because they're

stuck on what you're doing. we used a metric called eyeball hours. and that eyeball hours was a number of hours that a human eyeball would spend looking at your monitor. wired announced that we were living in what they called the attention economy and people who weren't paying attention were the enemies. it's interesting, after they accumulate up with the term attention economy is when we started to see all 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, well, i wonder if a shortened attention span might be a defense mechanism against a world where they're creating sticky websites and using every tool at their disposal. behavioral finance, the slot machine algorithms. there's a division at stanford called captology. how do you capture human

attention online. that's the term, especially when people in the technology industry began to think of their users more the way a heroin dealer thinks of the users. how do we addict them and how do we control them? >> so what is the mindset? >> well, the mindset is the idea. i mean, it's a few things. the easiest way that i can describe the mindset is this idea that you can earn enough money to insulate yourself from the damage you're creating by earning money in that way. or you can develop enough technology to correct for all the problems you created with the technology that you use -- that you just made. so the mindset is a silicon valley belief that with more tech and more money, they can solve for anything. it's kind of a techno solutionist understanding of

the world where human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. so they tend to be libertarian. they understand human relationships as purely a market phenomenon. there 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. your own ip. it's without precedence. it's an urge to kind of neutralize the unknown by dominating it and deand mating it. it's when you hear them talk about, you know, self-sovereignty and progress and increasing choice and somehow starting over. you know, there's a-- it's funny, there's a place near -- in california where a

bunch of the tech bros want to build a new perfect city they're going to live in, it's renewable and uses the best energy and has computerized stacks for education and religion and traffic and autonomous vehicles. it's the perfect thing. but it's like going to mars or going to the dark side of the moon or moving to new zealand or alaska. they need to do it, you know, the latin word would be exnelo. from scratch. colonizers urge to get to a new territory. pretend there are no humans there and start over completely and when you talk to these guys. whether it's, you know, zuckerberg or musk or thiel or bezos, they share the same understandings of human beings as the masses, as low and them as sort of within level above. you know, mark zuckerberg wants to go to the metaverse.

elon musk wants to go to mars. peter thiel talks about going zero to one, living one level, with unorder of magnitude above everybody else and that's really, that's the mindset. it really peaks in this almost eugenic idea called effective altruiusm where they believe that it's okay to be kind of an awful person now as long as you earn a lot of money and give some of the money back. it's a kind of a weird, you know, jeremy benson utilitarianism on psychedelic steroids. they believe -- this is how far the mindset goes, it's this tech worship, this hatred of the human, of the body, of everything earthly that they think that in the future there will be, you know, hundreds of trillions of post human artificial intelligences spread

throughout the galaxy that will launch these things. maybe part biology, part digital, part silicon, whatever they are, post human entities all over the universe. because there's so many of them, their total happiness matters more than the happiness of the eight billion kind of larva human maggots that happen to be alive on the mother nest right now and that's a very dangerous way to look, that the lives of the people today matter less than this future of trillions of little robot consciousnesses and that's 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's true, they do matter more, therefore, let's invest in bitcoin, let the people die, get the rockets to the next

planet, but it's ignoring the presence. but i have much more faith in the reality of presence, eight billion people alive today who actually matter and then we would make very different decisions if we thought the people who are alive today are what matter rather than the robots in the fantasy future. >> for much more on the mind set the book. "survival of the richest", it's douglas rushkoff books, over 20 years, fiction, nonfiction, and we're asking you to ask questions, the own lines are open. for eastern central 202-748-8201. in the mountain or pacific, time zones, if you want to send a text 202-748-8903. and send your name and where

you're from at social media and on book tv and social media platforms. start calling in, as folks are calling in, mr. rushkoff. so you talk about the mindset. what is team human? i don't mean the podcast or the book, what is the concept of team human? >> the concept of team human actually came up when i was-- it's a long time ago, i wan-- i was on a panel with a brilliant guy, one of the chief scientists at google. he was telling the story about how evolution is really a matter of information finding more complex homes. so information like the atom, and then the molecule, and then the one-celled organization and then the real organization, and then human culture, but as computers become more complex, capable of handling more complexity than humans and humans culture, then

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 intelligences and accept our own inevitable replacement and extinction and i was so upset by that. i said, i don't know, i think human beings have some qualities that artificial intelligences and things raised on binary logic may never have. human beings can live in that in between space, between the yes and the no. a human being can sustain paradox over time without the need to resolve is, to one sort of answer, or another. we can look at a problem as something to sustain, rather than something to solve. 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? the human beings are special and we deserve a place in the digital future and he said, oh, rushkoff, you're just saying that because you're human. right, like it was an act of hubris and i said, okay, fine, guilty, i'm on team human. that's when the term actually came up for me. i'm on team human, guilty as charge, i admit it, i'm a human and i'm going to fight for the right for other of my species to have a place on this planet. but then the more i thought about it, the idea of team human, i realized, you know, it goes against the mindset to call humans a team. the mindset is about the sovereign individual, right? the man emperor, the zuckerberg who thinks of himself as augustus caesar, that's his goal, over everyone. the argument of team human, no,

no, team human is a team sport. evolution is not the story of the survival of the fittest individual. if you actually read the darwin, read the book. we're book tv, read the book. page after page, the guy is marvels the way that species collaborate and cooperate to assure mutual survival, within the species and as intertra species coordination. so if human beings are-- and arguably we're not -- but if human beings are the most evolved species because we've evolved the most complex methods of collaborating and cooperating with each other and a lot of these are very subtle. a lot of them are when you're in real life with another human being, you see whether their pupils are getting larger or smaller as you speak, are they taking you in or rejecting you. is their breathing synchronizing with yours. making the micronod motions with their head or

micronegative motions. you can't see anything on zoom, skype or a text message. we're trying to conduct a very complex and difficult human society in a world that's not letting us get the social cues that we need for the mirror neurons in our brains for the oxytocin to go through our blood. if you're online and someone says they agree with you, but you don't get the biological feedback, you can't help, but be suspicious of them. every time someone agrees with you online, the reverse effect in your body happens. wait a minute, they said they agree with me, but i don't get it in my body. it generate mistrust. team human says wait a minute, we've got to reemploy and retrieve the great mechanisms or working and being together. almost like putting the social back into socialism. i don't really care about the ism, i care about people knowing their neighbors and

understanding that 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 technology fits into team human. this is mark zuckerberg from the meta 2020 event this week and previewing ai and artificial intelligence technologies. here is one of the technologies that he showed off. >> our industry over the coming decades is going to be how do we unify these experiences of the physical that we have with this vibrant digital world, to create something that's more coherent and just better than anything than we have today. in the future, i think not too far from now you're going to walk into a room and there are going to be, you know, as many halograms of digital things for you to interact with as they are physical objects. i mean, think about all the things that are physically there that don't actually need

to be physical things, the paper, the media, the games, the art, your work station, any screen, all these interactive halograms. think about going and hanging out with your friends, you know, pretty soon i think we're going to be at a point where you'll be there physically with some of your friends and others there digitallies as avatars and halograms and feel just as present as everyone else or you know, you'll walk into a meeting and sit down at a table and you know, you'll be there with your-- there will be people there physically and people there digitally as halograms and sitting around the table with you are ai's embodied as halograms helping you get stuff done, too. >> mr. rushkoff, on that technology that he previewed. >> well, the interesting thing is the word unify. the object for the game for him is to unify the real world with the digital world so that

digital can continue kind of colonizing the world that we're in and it's that unification that may be the problem. so for me, when he describes being, you know, hanging out with your friends and some of them are virtual, that makes me feel sad compared to when he said you could be in a meeting and some of the people in the meeting are virtue. that, who cares, interesting, right? so for me, the technologies are rell great for increasing our utility value, which is-- i understand, and since the industrial age people have been measured in terms of their utility value. how much work can be done for how much money do we have to fly this person to this place to have the meeting. i get that. but the idea of not getting to meet in role life, even if it seems easier on the surface, it never actually is. he says all of this stuff, all of the things that don't need to be physical things. in order to get to the place

where you don't have the physical things, you need to have a lot more physical things involved. right? so in order to make the ai and the laser projecting holograph, virtual things, you've got to send kids in the mines in rare earth africa to make the thing. you've got to put factories around water to get cobalt ought and pollution in. silicon wafers and energy and solar panels up the wazoo. energy from the sun and what he's describing is not less physical matter being used, but more physical matter being used to deny the human beings of actual physical presence. the avatar is a great substitute. grandma is in the netherlands and the baby is in cleveland.

they can see each other. that's beautiful. someone is stuck in a hospital bed or a paraplegic can have an experience of togetherness in a picnic they wouldn't be able to get to. that's beautiful, but for people who could actually be together, the complexity of human relationship, the complexity of, say, just imagine the complexity of a mother nursing the baby. all right. so we could get a virtual bottle and the virtual mother so she could be at work and then turn and -- you're going to be missing something and it's the virtue baby is missing something from the virtually nursing baby is missing something from the mother, then i would argue that i'm missing something if you're not at my house watching the game with me, but if your avatar on the couch watching the game, it's not the same. that we're denying it. we're turning the game into, again, it's like work or the utility value of the game.

we've got the presence. the other thing that's interesting is these technologies as he describes them, it's like, you wear your glasses so you'll never be in the position of seeing someone on the street and not remembering what their name is. and it's uncomfortable, right? you meet someone on the street, hey, doug, how are you? i'm like-- if i had the ray ban glasses, oh, that's doris. hey, doris. and who is doris. >> you met in 1993 and-- i can fake rapport with a person i didn't know. which is again, it's moving me into bizarre, almost kind of a dishonest relationship with my world and it's wondering what mattered? what really matters that i remembered that person's name and is it-- if it was a sales connect, again, at business, then it's good we used to have constant

contact, data bases. someone calls you and the profile goes up and oh, how is your wife mabel. and you know that because it came up on the screen. it's a fake business relationship trying to sell mattresses to macy's. but in the real world to be burdened with a sense of data as part of our interaction? and then a world where who paid for the data? i'm walking down the street and going to pick a restaurant. who is paid toboggan in mark zuckerberg's reality world. and the restaurant who didn't pay is not going to, and that may be the best restaurant on the block. >> looking for your calls and questions and plenty of calls for you this morning. sir. this is jim in california. it's good morning still in california, jim.

you're on with douglas rushkoff. jim, are you with us? then we'll try michael in broward county, florida. jim, had a he think -- jim, hang onto line, we'll try to get to you. michael, go ahead. we'll work on those calls. let's try one more. i think julie on the line in minneapolis, a lot of calls so we can rotate through if you're not there. >> hi, i'm here and glad to be here. i've heard mr. rushkoff say a number of things and they've fired me up. you, sir, are passionate, you are insightful. you have a great many opinions, you have a great many questions and a lot of ideas which could be molded and discussed by people who agree with you and people who oppose you into

actual policies and means of achieving progress. my question is, you write books, you teach, you appear here. how do you actually get people involved and talking to one another? how do we? because i think i share some of those characteristics and some of your thoughts. how do we begin to -- i think at one point you said we had an opportunity to take control of the digital age and instead we ceded it to business much as our universities have ceded education to business. how do we retract that and say, now, we want it back, we're capable of doing this? >> julie, thanks for the call. >> that's great. that's where i'm at, too. asking precisely that question. i think the first thing i realized for me was that the construction of how do we get people to dot, dot, dot, is a

potentially hazardous construction in itself. that's sort of the way the tech bros think of us. how do we get people to do this? how do we get people to do that and once i'm thinking about getting people to do something, i'm putting myself in some superior place, right, and we get almost into television style, you know, influence. you become an influence peddler. how do we change society and change people? because i know how people would be better if they were doing this instead of that. so, i've tried to move away from that as the way i think about it, and rather thinking about it on how do i engender an environment in which people feel welcome to dot, dot, dot. so, you know, welcome really to socialize and care for each other and nurture each other, rather than compete with each other. and so, i broke that down, actually and this is probably going to be a next book, but i

broke it down into kind of four ways of sort of changing the environment or changing the register in which we're operating. you know, the first one is-- i'm calling it denaturalized power and all i'm trying to do is helping people recognize how many things in our world are social constructions and not conditions of nature, anything. you know, money. these bills, this is not money. these are-- this is paper that we use to represent money in our society. you know, i go on, you know, cnn or somewhere and they are asking me about ai and the unemployment problem. it's like, well, exactly why unemployment a problem? when was unemployment invented? what's it for? what's the difference between employment and work and when did people work for themselves and small businesses. when were they forced to start doing wage labor instead of the work they used to do. so, it's really challenging

underlying assumption of how things work and leads to the second one, which is triggering agency. i'm trying to help people feel like they've got more agency, more authority over what they're doing, now, for me that was the digital revolution did that for me when i realized that i could save a file, not just as a read only file that people looked at, but as a read, write file that other people could edit and why was so much of the world established as read only. television and money and religion, why isn't it up for discussion? why shouldn't it be up for discussion? the third one, if we're going to do that, once you have agency and you want to change things, you need other people. all right, so the third one was to resocialize people, to help people feel less afraid of each other. and the great example i like to use, if you need to drill a hole in the wall and you don't have a drill, in america, what most people will do is go to the home depot, buy a minimum

viable product drill. dryel the hole, leave it in the garage and leave it in the garage, it won't work again. you've put a kid in a cave for and used it once, created the carbon throw it away and it's sitting 0 on a toxic waste, where a kid is looking for recyclable parts in it. you could have walked over and asked bob, can i borrow your drill? why are we scared? you owe something to bob. and you're going to have a barbecue next week, and he lent you the drill and maybe he would want to be invited over. and the other neighbors smell it, and they'll think bob is

there, and the worst is you have a block wide barbecue. the last thing is cultivating awe. what is that party and why are we so resistant to it? why are we resistant to the state of all. whether it's looking at a canyon or enjoying a party with a bunch of other people you experience the world is bigger than yourself. and it ends up having, you know, it has a response in your body, your immune system gets better, you're more generous for days later so the experience of all seems to be a natural important part of human health and you don't get it with the vr goggles. you get it in communion with other people or nature or the expansiveness of reality. so, i'm really looking at those, how do we help people feel less encumbered, less locked in to, you know, sort of the status quo institutions and beliefs and more willing to,

again, move into that space between the one and the zero where life actually happens. >> let me come back to jim in california first person to call in as soon as we opened up the phone lines and i think he's there now. thank you for waiting. >> thank you for taking my call. my request he is-- my question is totally different. you went to hollywood, you were apprentice director with brian depalma on a major movie which was a huge flop and apparently it turned you off on movies and hollywood. i'd like your comments on that if you could, your thoughts on movies today and in the past. the directors and movies that influenced you when were you younger. it's an area i'm very interested in, i'm a movie buff. >> jim, thanks for the call. >> that's beautiful. you know, i was a-- i mean, the real story and this is book tv, we can talk for

real, you have novelists on. i was a theater director from the time i was 11, 12 years old. went to princeton and cal arts. i was going to drive across country with my best friend and he fell asleep at the wheel and we hit a tree and he was impaled and died next to me and i haven't actually told this story publicly, it's weird. book tv, welcome. he died next to me and all of a sudden, i was like, theater is so ethereal, it dies and i decided i'm going to do film, it's an existential moment, i'm doing film because it's going to be thereafter i die, after these things. >> and the sweet smell of

success, james mangold did the wolverine movie and ford versus ferrari and i was making films and then like theater, so i liked jim, verner herzog, bob fosse's cabaret and lenny. so, i liked my dinner with andre, so, i liked kind of theater films, that anthony gregory did. i liked theatrical film and then, yeah, then i got that brian depalma apprentice gig so i'm going to be his apprentice on this big movie and they are a spending, at the time, it was like $50 million on a movie that was just not thought out. it was a thin satire and i

was-- i did the new york part of it, but when they went to l.a. to do the studio part, i actually dropped out and returned to theater at that point and then got tired of theater because of how-- i was supposed to do a production of three penny opera and the cheapest seat was supposed to be $40, as a -- i'm not going to charge $40 for three penny opera which is a kind of marxist play and then i turned to the internet thinking the internet was going to be the people's medium. i want to get away from all of this commercial theater and i'm going to the internet which is going to be the counter cultural anti-business, pro human -- i mean, it was for a moment. it's going to be that alternative. in terms of the movies that i would say are the best, i mean, maybe i'm typical, but you know, kubrick and lynch do

things in movies-- kubrick does something in movies that's beyond what people realize is quite happening. he makes movies that are all about inviting multiple interpretation. it's as if the movie has a plot, but it doesn't really have that plot. that you could almost project anything, anything onto that plot. not anything, but many different things onto that plot as you want to. so, there is much about yourself as the movie and i like what he does. i like his-- the hallways that imitate a print that he's really playing with illusion and reality. i liked david lynch's 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 like the

more jj abrams, christopher nolan style movies which do similar things, but always with an answer. there's always that you figure it out and to me, the beauty of film, when it's working, is it opens you -- it opens outward. you know, that the answer isn't the answer. there's many. it's an object. it works more like, you know, don't tell them i said this, it works more like that it has a mythic level of experiential value, but what it means to you could be different every time you go through it. ... time you go through it. thanks -- host: thanks for sharing that story about your friend. you have a podcast in the 20

books. i wonder why you think it is you haven't shared that story publicly >> guest: because when you share story about the death of your friend, it feels like it is begging for sympathy. it's like a cheap shot, oh, you were 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 to my theater days, i think all since memory. you are supposed to come since memory is if you have a scene where he had to cry or be upset or whatever y it is in a play, what you do is you recall when you've had a similar emotion and think about that in order to activate that emotion in the scene, police you do in the rehearsals. i remember our teacher told us there's a a rule it has to bem

at least six years ago, otherwise you have processed the trauma or whatever in such way it is useful and it will end up being non-useful. maybe now whatever this is, 30 years later, i'm kind of distant enough from that when it came up it didn't have the texture that made it feel inappropriate to bring to bear. and also because of the audience. i know some of the audience is, whoever is in there, but i'm thinking of booktv is largely these are a a lot of these peope are bookpeople, and i don't get to talk to bookpeople that much. another author but book people, sorry, we go through life differently than other people. book people understand howpe to engage with an idea or an emotion over an extended time

period whenever book you're reading. you know what he means? it's a different thing than remote control media. i kind of felt it was both safer and more appropriate to bring up the processingia of trauma for people who write, for people right and people who read. >> host: let me chat with more of those book people, planning witty to check a good chat with you. in california, oscar you are on with douglas rushkoff. >> caller: i will get to the question i want to ask. thank you for your books by the way. they are great. how can we get this aspect of, taken aspect of, like you have a way of expressing the big

picture, the picture of things going on. it's great because i like to take aspect of that. for example, like 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 how can -- like i believe that capitalism is great. it did a lot of good things, but people strongly sideut with it t they don't, they don't see how, i have often believed that capitalism unchecked starts going bad and it starts doing some damage, like the big corporations and things like d that. >> host: lets pick up on that because that's the theme of several of his books. >> guest: for sure.

the first book about really on capitalism was called life inc. that's the one a copy on the stephen colbert show. something in itself. i was really looking at where did capitalism come from? where did the corporation come from? where did central cord to come from? i traced it back to middle ages. there was the growth of a new peer-to-peer economy, right after the crusades. there was a marketplace they learn how to do from the bazaar in the norse countries. they brought it back and people were trading and where new women class. women were taller at any time than they were until the 1980s in england. it was a successful thing but the aristocracy got for us to middle-class get wealthy so the came up with two great ideas. one was central currency that said you were not allowed to have transaction unless you

borrow money from the central treasury at interest. so now because there's interest built into the economy, the economy has to grow just to stay the same. it worked fine for globalism, as long as there's new places, as long as you can grow and keep growing and grow faster and faster, that works. the second one which i alluded to was the chartered monopoly that said you are not allowed to do business in a particular industry unless you have a charter from the king. you had to have a monopoly charter to make shoes, edward l it was a shoemaker now had to be an employee for the shoe company. that's come down to us today as corporate capitalism that we don't even question or even a nice president like biden talks about we got to have the gdp growth by three, 5% every year. why do we need the economy to grow? what does that have to do with actually feeding people? nothing. in some ways it's the opposite.

it's about balance sheets. what it does is it favors increasingly abstract economic instruments. it's why derivatives are valued more than stocks. this sort of in stage capitalism, we live in a world where in 2013 the new york stock exchange was purchased by its derivatives exchange. think about that a second. the new york stock exchange, which is an abstraction of the real market, which you could argue is itself an abstraction of thet exchange of actual human need, was consumed by its own abstraction. this is the way it goes and that's why we end up in this world with kind of tech billionaires who are looking at what's the next level of abstraction? in some ways what we could think of as the ai craze in the digital craze is all about looking for how do i go meta? had aye abstract on reality itself, and be one of the

robots, the one of the derivatives, be one of those things. to be a littletsse human?us this is jack welch gem 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 that i do linking you the money to buy the washing machine. that's when he sold the productive aspects of the assets and turned ge into a financial services company. because the abstraction makes more money than the actual work. right? it worked really well until about 2007-8 when the financial crisis happen and they had no more productive assets. that's the tendency. you're right that the tendency of capitalism which is why it works great to a point. it works great for colonial empires if you're not looking at

who are the people they are enslaving and what land is being taken away and what are you dispossessing and labor and all that. it still can work and there's more balanced forms of capitalism that we could use. but when i tell that story about the drill to people and a somewhat in february on the block, what if we are borrowing drill from each other are we only have one or two lawnmowers on the block instead every house having their own? we share the lawnmower because you only need a lawnmower to our three hours a week and it's that much less production and pollution and spending cup you don't have to earn as much money and all that. someone invariably gets up at the entrances yeah, but what about the lawnmower company? what about the people who work at the lawnmower -- what about people of stock shares in the retirement plans forir the lawn more companies? what are you going to do about them?la that is the ass backwardness of starting withs capitalism as a underlying premise of our society rather than thinking of

the economy is something that is supposed to serve as president as supposed to serve, to serve the economy. >> host: we are about an hour into our interview with douglas rushkoff on "in depth" and the question coming in from pearl city hawaii wraps a a good question halfway through her interview. this is from tim who said do we exist within the simulation, and what test could we devised to prove or disprovees it? >> guest: if we don't live in a digital simulation by, created by a martian graduate student of the future, right, let's say we live in a jewish or christian or buddhist reality, what would they say we are, right?

what would they say this is, right? they would say this is the illusion, there something else going on here. so one way or another we live in the simulation because we don't even see what's going on. look back at phenomenology and all. we have sensory organs that are trying to create a picture of what is going on here but that's all we get anyway, right? we are just sensory organs trying to process based on what we see. i don't think really come finally the question does it matter? but no, don't believe we are in, like an westworld, one of a million simulations that are being run by someone to figure out how society works. if we are iterating i would

think it's much closer to karmic iteration of civilizations over time than it would be running simulations. >> host: on the sensory experience a minute ago you were talking about the importance of the experience of awe. i want to go to making 99 book coercion and talk about the difference tween the experience ofal awe and spectacle and how u define spectacle. >> guest: yeah, i mean spectacle is more like the nuremberg rally or a trump 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. you know? there is in between like walking into a great cathedral as a

catholic person and doing mass in there. i it's sort of a combination, right? there was 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 an experience of awe. you go to a rave and they put the lights in the music at 120 beats the second and beautiful young people around dancing half dressed and all, like in that seat in the matrix, sort of the rave that they have. there's in between but for me spectacle is really less about inviting to participation and more about stoking the rage of a crowd against a unified enemy. in the jets game it's like the

dolphins, let's get the dolphins. and then you can use airline tickets to sell stake for outback, do whatever you want, you take that warlike rage enthusiasm thing, or against a a particular racial group or whatever it might be, or against democrats or whoever. spectacle is more a design, for me anyway, , it is a more desigd experience in order to focus energy of the crowd onto a named enemy in most cases whereas awe is more about kind of breaking peoplehe out of the trap, the tp of the illusion of individuality and letting them experience themselves as part of something much, much larger. it's just a matter of then don't

end up large thing for them. don't say now you're in the army of this or that. that's why when i was playing, i was calling it team human because it seemed open enough that any person, you are on team human but is that team human like against team squirrel, right? or against team tree. it is just keen human as this is the way we experience our perspective on nature and everything else. >> host: so from coercion, this sentence. think of any great spectacle does trent as having treatment expert first unify the crowd come second still to passion, and third speak as god or nature. help me understand that third part a little bit more. >> guest: well, when you speak as god or nature you can think of hitler speaking about himself as the father and all the people as his children, or that you

are, it's interesting. you look at, look at the twitter means that people like say elon musk put up of themselves with them as, as guides your think about when, even zuckerberg and musk like challenge each other to a mixed martial arts fight, as if they are kind of demigods, that they inhabit silicon valley is like their mount olympus, and now they're going to have a spectacle battle through media that we get to see the gods with each other. i mean speaking as god w. or nae is really just, it depends. there's a lot of, a book on propaganda from the '50s i guess is really good on this,

but it's having people identify you as the mother, as the father, as connected to god, as you are both universal and completely personal, where the person feels you are speaking just to them. apparently like taylor swift has the ability to do that, right, she's pretty benevolent about it. she's doing it with the message of empowerment and identification and all, but someone with her abilities could be doing ithe politically, could be doing it differently, which is why again i always say we've got to be careful about how do we get people to, blank? because then we are the same as those who are let's create a big rally to get people to believe in our god or we get people to vote for our party, or we get

people to do this. there's that vulnerable moment that happens in the spectacle where people alike, all, it's the same moment that happens when someone walks into one of the original shopping malls and youu go oh. and they show it on tape your cute and watch the videos of it. the person job openings and eyes glaze over. it's at that moment that you can drop in really whatever you want, whatever brand, whatever party, whatever political ideology, whatever enemy. that's where, , and you see it. when they do that they drop that in, and then the act as if and now we are meeting our destiny together. now we are, with the blood and the soil in the forest and the god, there's that, in the rhetoric comes a certain

assertion that this is the natural way, that this is more natural, that we are returning to some kind of pagan barbarian, masculine, original, authentic back to what we really are, that it is a more natural open from my gut state of being. but it's not. it's completely manipulated. >> host: the book from 1999 coercion, why would why would listen to what they say. the cover of the 1999 book has a quote from senator bob kerrey on the front cover. remind folks who he was and why he ended up on the cover of your book. >> guest: bob kerrey. he's a senator from nebraska, right, who he actually lost his foot in the vietnam war, and he was kind of the presidential

candidate and then 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. it is always nice to me and an artist and interesting, and he would actually, the boyfriend of my neighbor when i lived in the west village. back when you could live in the west village as a single barely working writer, you get an apartment in the west village. she lived across the hallki from me and he was her boyfriend comes like ayf two night out wih a little bit. and asked if he would do a blurb for the book. he did. he did a really funny one. his homework originally, it wouldn't accept it and i thought they were foolish, was read this or else, which is like perfect for like the book is called coercion. yet it? read it are -- >> , what ended up a clear one is to americans are unaware of

the power of words to intentionally mislead the reader, listen or viewer. read this book and nobody gets hurt. >> guest: yeah. nobody gets that. but he sent it back and thank god he added to it so they would accept him on there, but yeah, it was a real gift. he then became president of the new school in new york for a while andes help them kind of build up, they built this big building kind of absorb parsons and a bunch of things. he was controversial but very useful figure in bringing that place to its current standing. >> host: this is michael, broward county, florida, you are on with douglas rushkoff. >> caller: yes. -- culture is biology and social contagion. and chatting with chatgpt the other day i discovered in trying to get some information about our governor desantis, he is doing exactly what the santa's s

doing a check the second because it is basically just semantics engine he admits to the fact responses it provides and the program that way is for the same reason -- if he wants to avoid things that are potentially negative, they think that or are just positive. what i'm talking about is if you look into anything having to do with racism or misogyny or homophobia, so that's onera thig i think you'll start affecting people will be like you said you could to sue and think it's any of and what blowup. i guess you're right. but here's the really exciting thing to mess with your friend stuart ridge. tell him about success ptsd what changes your brain just like trauma does subtract an exact same way to be more self interested, more reacting. their brains are morphy d causing a lot of what you're discussing which is interesting because herbert spencer started that in the 1860s which is

136% of her kids can't read, because we teach it that way it with a 100%, we verify them medically they can read. but we teach to the bell curve, not to prevent the bell curve. they start to catch the hair on the rabbit like like a pred greyhound track. we have to make sure we achieve the 30% felt and the state department has done for 50 years they've been randomized educational tests across the country. we've never had more than 30%, you bring up a lot of topics your let douglas rushkoff jump in which one you want to talk about? >> guest: the embracing feature of this is sort of applying industrial age logic to our many social institutions. and coming up, whatever metric you put on the wall is a metric that you're going to get, right? that's what you're going to go for. they are necessarily reductive

metrics. you bring the kid in in vitro, right, into a classroom and say we're going to teach at this kid, we're going to teach at this kid long division. and without any understanding of what's going on in that kids house? the kids a a mother is going m shelter to shelter and the father is a drunk and not even there and the kid is trying to contend with that. how do i take care of my mother? the challenge, , the life challenge that kid is eating with is not reflected in the assessment that they've done on the long division at the end of the week. that's the problem with the kind of one-size-fits-all, not just education system, but everything system. when we decided, funny, and the thatcher era there is this a mystery about how when they were trying to use incentives to get hospital to perform better, they

said they would give more money to hospitals that reduced the amount of time people spend in the emergency room waiting room, and for them to get on, into beds as quick as possible. so what the emergency room did was they took the wheels off their gurneys in order to call them beds. they lined the hallways with the gurneys, put people on those and declared them being in the room. by the time and energy it took to do that actually slowed the rate at which people got medical care. so in order to win the metric, the internet reversing the thing. what i hear in, what i hear in this call is concern is the way that we kind of, we institutionalize short-term oversimplified values atm, the expense of whatever the thing is that we might actually want to

accomplish. kind of the bigger and more convolute the bureaucracies get, often harder and harder itd is o get back down t to what it is, what it is that we want. the same with chatgpt is not. people have to realize i'm sure most of your viewers do, chatgpt is hype right now. it really is hype. it's a stock market desperate for another big thing, right? zoom and all these, all the covid apps are not being used as much. all of the screening meaty copies of not being watched as much because we're going outside. they need anothertc thing. chatgpt is really just an advanced search engine right now. that's all we're looking at. it takes your google results and kinds of pushes them into something that looks more like human speech, but it is wrong most of the time period it's not actually correct. it's just reverting everything

to the mean. it's looking what's the most average answer to that question? and q that doesn't offend anyboy who doesn't say anything controversial or upsetting. so it's wrong and it's self-centered. so it's not what we think it is. it's just search right now. and yeah, we can use on a future where these things are actually smart, , but we are not there. >> host: this is ruth, st. george, utah. good morning. >> caller: i have a couple of points to go back to some of the things you weres talking about earlier in the conversation. the first, long time caregiver and so i live in this gorgeous area, so my life is all about experiencing things in real

time, not virtually. i love live performance. little kids, teenage kids, adults, professionals, i want to see people trying and delivering something essential. it's great for my soul. >> guest: yeah, i mean, i've been blessed to be able to even just drive through utah a few times. if you haven't had the opportunity to do it, do it. it's different, right? you feel, you feel connected to the creation, creation itself. just go there, get out of the car and stare at iraq for five minutes.

it's the trickiest most -- boy, talk about awe. utah, some parts of new mexico do that, too. it's amazing buto yeah, it's s, the thing that amazes me of our state of disconnection is how quickly you reconnect. recalibrating to reality is almost instantaneous. if you don't have nature like she is describing, a, just find a friend and look in their eyes and take two or three breaths with them. it's almost unbearable if you haven't done in a while. it reconnects you almost instantly. so it's interesting. for how long it took to the calibrate is, how much technology, how much ingenuity, how many billions or trillions of dollars were spent to get us in this crazy state we all need the ssris and you need to get

an app in order to cure you from the app that you just use. you're going to get a wellness app and the meditation avenue to get you over the facebook app and the snapchat app. you just, you touch ground, you put your feet on the ground and look at another person can look at the shore, look at a cliff, breathe in a forest, you know? look in the eyes of your dog or cat even. you did it so quickly, it's so accessible. even in the forest fire hayes that we look at today on the east coast, it still, it's so accessible that when i have hope in the future, it's how quickly these bonds, these systems, quickly they restore when you give them half a chance, you were talking about creation a minute ago. when you're creating your writing and in that document podcasts and interviews like

this but when you're writing, is there a place you go to create to think? what is your process for writing now 20 books? >> guest: i mean, i tend to go about it the same way, whether it is fiction or nonfiction, is i write notecards. i have ideas onn note cards. i end up putting them on the wall, what are called slugs, sort of like content areas and thenke content areas can't mutae into chapters, and then, then i order them so that each chapter flows as a kind of little 5x structure. so 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 represented with the notecards, 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 are and how dense they are and how important the topics are in each one. so i can kind of feel the book more intuitively, or semantically. >> host: are we in that room with you right now? >> guest: yeah, although i haven't -- deadeye -- i wrote the end of survival of the richest in here, yet. i mean i have rearranged it since but the wall that was -- the wall where the book was written. and that i been trying to use a program that sort of looks like notecards as a substitute, and it doesn't quite organize the same way. i've got to feel the book as,

have to be kind of physical relationship to the ideas of the book. it's like a like a chaper something. because an okay, these ideas are here, and then it is in my head, it's located there in that chapter. so i can look at any book and chapter in the member where the chapter was in the room where i was writing it, a chapel of memories. what was the hardest book for you tof write? >> guest: interesting. this last book came right out because it has a memoir, all the stories in it. that's as for my ancient ce best part of your book is that the rhetoric, it's the stories. i end up telling all these ridiculous, fun stories about my expenses with these crazy billionaire people and their antics. so that one kind of came right out. the most researched book was life inc. because of early look, i went to the yale library, look at dutch east india trading

company, charters. that was pretty intense, but hardest, the hardest one was probably a graphic novel called alister and adolph. and it's about the real but in my case somewhat fictionalized a cold war between alister crowley and adolph hitler, the end of world war ii. three, the first three artists who were hired to work on the book, i get raycom media, they all had major life catastrophes. likeph illness in suicides and really awful, awful things. and i'm starting to get scared come to write about someone like alister crowley in the marriage like bad jujuu in their order something dangerousta happening. so that i got really scared when i was writingre that, that i was like touching energies that i shouldn't pick and it was y

hard to do to be really faithful to the actual world war ii story and to tell that story as reality, as history while also getting into these characters in the part that wasn't real and trying to distinguish between the two in what felt like a responsible way. so that was the most harrowing writing experience i've had, about 35 minutes h left with douglas rushkoff. this is marshall, houston, texas. thanks for waiting, thank you very much. this is ay fascinating conversation. interested in your role with research, particularly that life inc. book you talked about, how much of the research and writing to the overlap each other? how much do need to do before you start writing? and also your wall with agents here thank you very much try to my role with agents, like literary agents? >> caller: yes. >> guest: 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 too the proposl stage, and the proposal is usually something that turns into a version of theua introduction to the book pics of the proposal usually gets me to what in academia we would call the research question. so for "life inc." it is what of the corporation come from and how did corporatism become the religion of our society and what the heck can we do about it? and diet done enough research to know, i was going to look at central car to come look at the charter monopoly, i was go to figure out, but i did know when i wrote the proposal that i was going to find, that is really going to uncover the nature of the deal between the monarchs and the first charter monopoly, and what that wason and how it worked.

i discovered things that were not understood before. so that was, and that was real research. but once the research was done and i had all the stuff, i make my outline on the wall and i can see occasionally there would be a little blank area but i'm really scared to write all the way up to an area i'm going to discover something that's going to undo what was earlier. my process is usually once i get that outline done, the only way i get through the book is going straight through with kind of blinders on. i justify it that an kind of putting on a mindless lamp and digging the hole tunnel of the book until i get to light on the other end of the mine. i've got to go straight through it and they go straight through it because the reader is going to pretty much, the convention of the book unless it is a weird book, they will have to go straight through it. i can do the same thing at a don't look back. if i i look back, and i've tried

that where you rewrite the book to the point you at and continue, and rewrite it until you continue, then the end of the boat 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 the victory into the book and then i edit. i added concert. anything with that might happen as embodied the book as i realize a chapter is so much bigger than other five chapters that i break it up into two. this is actually i could break this year and create two chapters. it's hard for me it is that, the research, , occasionally i willo research, two-thirds of the way through the book and say i did another store why i don't really understand what happened, i'm going to go back and get more justification. worse case i find out the

justification pushes things in another way and then either drop it or tell a story in a different way. i have to use it otherwise. my relationship with agents has been, i got a bunch of them, you know? i started getting an agent because i had written a screenplay for somebody. that screenplay had an agent, and then there was like a co-agent. i got my my first literary agent sort of through the back door. and ended up doing -- i thought they had kind of drop me. they had not called in a long time, they gave up some the book, and then had a friend who was an agent and he said i will sell the book. he sold of the first page it was like wait a minute, that's my book. what is like a year since a first agent had called me or do anything. i got sued and had to give like a bunch of money to this one and a bunch of money to that one. that was media virus. then i was with this agent of

the net agent turned out to really have a lot of issues. he was stealing money from a bunch of people. so i left him and went to william morris. i had them for a while and then my agent left william morris. do i stay or do i follow? so i stayed in the next agent wasn't so good. then it went with the site pages and john brockman was a great literary agent. my digital agency ended up kind of having an epstein association that it felt like they were not fully acknowledging. so i kind of left and also wanted to do more hollywood things, and that agency was only, really just books and i wanted to get things on the screen and start playing very. so i ended up at creative artists agency. i don't talk to my agent there that much but she's like really good. she's the one who a told me dont write another book like this, you are going, reaching these

people and the same people again and again and again with these kind of more polemic things. if you really want to reach people you to tell stories. if i want to do nonfiction, tell nonfiction stories but at least tell stories that that's in the literary medium, the story is how you engage, that's the narrative arc, that's what it is. is. i started doing that and she was right. so now, and now and always i've seen my agent, but even more so my editor as my partner in the project. i don't want to sell to a publishing company that has an editor that is not adding value to the book. not just adding value to the distribution and the cover and the sales of the book, but the editor should be my partner income is like a play. they really are the first audience. and boy, i editor tom mayer at norton which is what ended up

with my publisher, i'm not going to leave them unless god knows what happens, but no, he was one who told me to write this book. he had read a couple of articles that i had written doing stuff on medium and some of the articles were doing well, added to this article on the survival richest about these five billionaires i met who wanted advice on how to get out their doomsday bunkers and that article had done really well at the year or two later i wrote about the covidt crisis, how i felt like a lot of people were retreating animals adopting that millionaire mindset of ongoing to retreat into my house with my 60-inch tv and my oculus classes and get a private tutor, and i can make this workout on the hamptons. i wrote that piece and that's when he called it said doug, this is your next book, you have to do this. i call the said the editor said i should do this. if youou could get in stories, which was her thing, then sure, do it. so is actually a book i came

from the editor to me. i was writing for an audience of one and he would write and say this chapter, what about this and what about that? and to bee at the place, it is a strange place to be, it took me to get old to do it where i see the notes and critiques from the editor as giftshe rather than as work, as ways to get in because i trust him. as oh, my gosh this guys helping me make this better. he is making mee a better write, to give up the fear and the hubris to thank the some else doesn't know better than you is, at least as well as you, was really good for me.e. i look at all these people as my partners in crime here. boy, i feel so much better to come up with the book that you know your people are a part of. it's a group project. and it plays, of course, is my

whole team human thing but i'm finally living yet, if you're what that story meeting with the tech billionaires worried about their bunker, et cetera douglas rushkoff began survival of the richest. it's his latest book. 20 books over the past 30 30, also a professor of media through an digital economics at queens college in new york. we will go to new york. mike is waiting. you are on with douglas rushkoff. >> caller: good afternoon. i have a question for the professor, in terms of individual human nature. why has wherever it is been tried communism and socialism throughout the world has been very ineffective and basically a miserable failure, but in terms of these self-appointed elite, these tech billionaires, and so forth, i just want the people listening to understand that what complete hypocrites these people are zuckerberg, soros,,

gates, all the rest of them. they are surrounded by highly trained armed bodyguards, and yet they will advocate for the average man or woman and the united states in terms of defending themselves, gun control and so forth. i just want people to understand that. you know, these theoretical -- pages, they don't work and then people say it hasn't really been tried to full extent it should be. free market capitalism by far has been the most effective, and the constitution republic were living in america. by far the most effective way to govern and live come in terms of economics. but these tech billionaires is really disgusting. they are based in hypocrisy, the entire way they live versus the average person iney america.

>> host: mike, gotcher point. try to capitalism has worked as long as we get to treat of extreme success, we have major reformation, right? big regulation. so yeah, when things spun out of control, you get a franklin delano roosevelt and the wpa and g.i. bill, and an education bill. you reform the thing that's when capitalism works best is when you do that. you ended up any situation because they realize they have to or income tax rate went up to like 80 or 90% during that time in order to kind of bailout what was happening because when capitalism works too well, when you automate it, you end up extracting soyo much value that

you make the people around you poor. so when uber in facebook and google are doing well, you see tent villages, people living around them. they end up destroying markets what they're calling. creative distraction but it's actually destructive distraction. they are storing more money and then sure, you get to the place that were mark zuckerberg says i'm going to get back 95% of my money back to the places that i took it out. dude, if you had made facebook many 5% less extracted you would not have to be trying to shove your money back into the systems that youok decimated, these ecosystems and societies. i would argue that communism and socialism, the reason why i would say to haven't worked as because they are trying to do these things at scale. i look at scale as is itself the

problem. like when marx was writing about socialism, what he really meant was how do we return, how do we retrieve the social element of commerce and exchange? we borrowing a girl from the neighbor instead of buying one atm 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, and how will home depot grow? how will black & & decker grow? how will that come it's my responsibility as a citizen in capitalism to promote the exponential growth of the economy. that's the part where it gets off, when we see it not just as a means to an end, but as the end, as the thing, as the only way. so when you look at like

socialism, i'm talking how do you putut the social back into t and the sort of minimize the is the-ism. you talk about communism, i like community, i don't like is in some much needed because at that something you can orchestrate so well from a politburo. it's interesting, works in december i think he went a little off or land or trotsky or someone in turn exercise marks, he's got this great tract when e he writes about like robertson caruso and that robinson crusoe had all these alleges because he needed to maximize his own efficiency counsel he said okay, he needs this much per weeks we will spend this time' fishing ad spend this much time collecting water in this much time making ropes so we has of this. has a little edge you. marx said oh, if robinson crusoe did it for himself, what if a created a larger like the whole

country so we know how many people need to do this and that and this? duty, you can't find that out we would end up with people on the line to get toothpaste. there will not be enough. some markets can be really good for figuring out supply demand and all that, but they are really bad at figuring out like how do we share water? how to deal with something like air, you know? how do you deal with things that are best orchestrated as a commons. i don't mean communism. this is a river we all share responsibility for the river. we are going to make rules about what can happen in this river, how many fish are allowed to take from this river and were going to enforce those who violate those rules so that there's enough fish or enough pasture or enough air or whatever is for everybody to use. use. so some things sure, let's make markets for within or iphone templates compete.

in capitalism, let's have people invest in the things they think will win. 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. it's much harder to do that with stuff that should released could be in abundance. i think what we need is a multifaceted, and ecology of economic models that are different depending on what it is that we're trying to share together from about 20 minutes left in our discussion with douglas rushkoff this morning on "in depth." one of the question arose as our office to come on "in depth" is their favorite books and also their books that the reading right now. here's whatt douglas rushkoff said to both questionsn favorite books in robert anton wilson's cosmic trigger john kennedy, tools come prize-winning confederacy.

techniques and civilization, the tour. virginia woolf, and the terms of what is called a reading, in the times and breaking together. which one or two of those books you want to talk about in the context of this discussion we have been having today? >> guest: well, i already talked about torrents we got one out of the way. let'se. see, cosmic trigger is a really interesting one with respect to the last conversation we were having. because what he was a great kind of counterculture write a prankster and trickster. he w responsible or partly responsible for the church of discord yet where every member is a pope. it was sort of the early 1960s style of intentional disinformation that was being used to promote that abbie

hoffman radical hippie psychology. what about this book cosmic trigger and what his argument is that not that everything is true but that we can all hold multiple perspectives at different times and not to take any one of them to very seriously. seek a look at a situation as an atheist scientist and see it from that perspective. you can look at it as the senate. you can look at it as a new age fantasy person here you can look at it as a psychedelic person. there's all these different ways to look at things. it would've helped people today in the whole kind of conspiracy theories and qanon and people looking for what really happened here? well, rather than needing to grab onto one of them to know did this happen, is the 5g tower connected to the election booth

connected to the covid vaccine? wait a minute. to be able to tolerate not knowing, to be able to tolerate that there's all these different perspectives really does shield you from theld same kinds the people that you skeptical to gain power use confusion and conspiracy and unknown as ways of gaining power as well. i feel like a lot of these poor kids sort of the gamer boys who were then scooped into kind of radical right meme wars and that kind of being the victims of their imaginations rather than being able to really harvest their own creativity. his book is really good for walking you through what he calls the chapel perilous which is the confusion, what's true, what's not true? is nothing true and how to get to the other side of that? it was really good at that.

the other one is the book i just finished it last night is that what was our called again? >> host: the path of political disintegration. >> guest: it was really, what the book does in a really interesting and rigorous way, and it was nice to feel wrong. i loved to be wrong and to get corrected, is that when these revolution period things happen when civilizations breakdown, it's not because the rich get so rich and the poor got so poor that thehe poor revolt if tht i thought is happening. if it gets worse, the division of worse, wealthy gets worse as we people in the tent villages then they will revolt. no, that's not what happens. what happens is that actually it's the creation of too many elites. not that there's millions of elite but also so many elis not enough for the elites to all the elite.

they start competing with b each other and that's what breaks things down. when there's too many elites, and i'm sure any of the listeners were like angry at coastal elites and all that, there's too many coastal elites. there's not enough for all these coastal elites. there's just not enough, t of billionaires. oddly b enough, this is a reseah i'm doing for a guardian piece that i'm writing right now, i thought that like basils and musk and zuckerberg, if he took the top five billionaires today, that they had more total wealth come like the five billionaires of jpmorgan and carnegie and those guys. they actually have less wealth the top five verses that top five, as measured in dollars or percentage of the economy? >> guest: percentage of the economy. percentage of the economy. but there's more billionaires. the top thousand billionaires have way, way, way more than anybody else. so there's a larger billionaire

class. still a tiny number off people compared to the whole population, but it's spread out through a wider bunch of billionaires who are now all competing with each other for scraps of billions. and that's sort of what breaks things down, to minneapolis, minnesota, steve via email in question. to what extent do you think societal tendency to be less present is contributing to increased emotional and anxietyy trends? >> guest: tremendously and totally and maybe 99.9% of it. it's funny, when you have -- a lot of us are raising kids who have one kind of sensory or nervous disorder of another, whether itry is add or spectrum sensory processing or too much cortisol or whatever it is, after not calibrating, hence the

easiest way to calibrate your kids is to bring them into bed with you, right? or sit with them, body to body, skin to skin ideally if their little enough and distill appropriate, being with people. being on a a team, the present, call location. it is the surest way to calibrate, to regain mental health. when you think about, if you think about our society as like addicted to technology, and addicted to money and addicted to this crazy stuff, this idea that will just one more thing and then, then i will try to do good for the world. i just need another $1000 in the bank and then i can start behaving ethically. if we are addicts and we need the 12 step program, right, we need the equivalent of alcoholics anonymous for our addiction to these crazy things, what's the first thing you do? you go in a room with other

people, right? you go to a meeting. that's the one requirement, you go to a meeting in the room and experienced fellowship every day. you find the others. that's what on the back of my book team to win. you find others and be with them. absolutely. it's our lack of presence with each other that's make it harder for us to calibrate naturally, and making us actually actively more distrustful of each other. you look on twitter, you don't know, you can ever feel the positive naturally. you can get it dopamine hit. someone retweeted me, someone like my tweet but you don't get the dopamine. you don't get your computer have an up gornick -- and organic expense of camaraderie, a fellowship, of community not to call even communism. you don't have that. you don't feelot part of the

group. it's a very different kind of -- like spectacle. right? would we all agree we all ls persons tweet. we've all given it the thumbsso up because they tod us who the enemy is because they are met at biden. they are met at the u.s. they are mad at russia. we all do that. that's not the same thing. that's not the same interval state, and it doesn't know. it leads, we see all the data. the kids who are on twitter and instagram and snapchat and all those things, instead of live copresent with one another are suffering terribly from everything from anorexia to tourette's. .. -- it is a symptom.

they are killing themselves. it is becoming a public health crisis. you do not solve it with another app. the wellness app. he sold it with good, old-fashioned -- i sound like an old person. but it should not be considered nostalgic, being with other people -- it should always stay in fashion. for -- host: for book readers do not know your social media presence, are you on facebook? do >> not. i have a twitter account and i will send a link to my podcast each week and now i'm even considering topping that. participate was more of a conversation but now i'll tweet going to be on c-span book

tv today and if i get 50 likes for that and 30 are both pretending to be workers, there's a new bought like it's a scam you're supposed to want to hire them as virtual or real strippers are so kind, why? a cesspool aggravating. see the conversations engendered there, i don't want to do that. i posted on linkedin which is a little less that way but i don't have a social media presence activity. i have a skype account i haven't used yet, i have amassed on account which is a federated version of twitter i would use

but i don't find a need for it. i have a use for e-mail and am just learning meaning my neighbors and finding out about my town and there's so much more. >> i want to read when you publicly quit a book, he wrote facebook has never been duly a tupperware partyty does. his mother do for others. >> they would seldom and there was a time when facebook decided

they could use you to advertise to your people whether or not you wanted it or not so many podcasts that but it got worse. the real function of facebook now is take your past behavior and put you in as his statistical bucket and predict what you're likely to do in the futureur and make sure you do that. his facebook looks at your past activity and decides you are 80% likely to go on a diet in the next two weeks, your newsfeed will be filled with stories like what happens if you're too fat

or if you eat bad food, was going on in your bloodstream? they're not trying to sell a specific diet product, they are getting the 80% accuracy up to 90 or 95%. they are directed at 20% of the people who will choose to do something20 else or something tt wasn't with her profile so it is to autotune he merely less predictable and less like the algorithm predicted them to be and reduce that. basically all tuning the witness and independence of community and it's not an environment you want to spend time in.

>> we have about five that is left in conversation, carla says thanks for sharing your insight and your therapist and see repetitive nature of humans, stopping and breathing with another human has profound powers. let's disconnect from each other, how dore you recommend te a a feeling? >> i do yoga like three times a week with someone who teaches in my neighborhood and after covid or during, she started doing it virtually zoom and some of the people that want toso go back so it's become zoom yoga. a few months ago i did a zoom

yoga in the started crying. i'm glad to move my body in that way but i was doing yoga partly to be in the room with the others doing it and hear the creeks knees or popping but to be in a room with other people and got was gone, maybe -- i want to be in a room with people even if it's not good great we had to hawaii calls. it's to find the others is my

whole purpose, connect with other people. >> with the two enactments we have left, you mentioned find others, a page or two before you wrote this and we started today about present versus futurist, the future is less unknown, it's a thing that we do. do, god is a to verb which is great, to the idea that the future especially technologists and planners, who will hire people are so we can prepare for the future. the tech pros look at the probable algorithms and a.i., climate change or nuclear war so

the way to prepare is getting a rocketship and going to mars. the best i can do is predict the future and prepare and hang on. ti'm saying future is something we are creating right now. you're making the future with the choices you make and if you prepare for a future where that will happen in your way more likely of bringing got on. what if we prepare for future for people realize we're in this together, mutual aid in connection and community and acknowledging nourishment and social reality, what's the future we want to create by connecting it. we are featuring with every action we take now so start

today and you will like how the world turns out. >> douglas has been theou guest for us the last two hours. his latest book is the survival of the richest, tech billionaires came out in 2022. nonfiction and fiction for 30 years. thank you for talking about some of them with us this morning thanks, this is an important gathering of people. >> appreciate it. >> we are asking you what books you think america. >> you can join in submitting your book will go to c-span.org -- books are shipped america.

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