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families so they can be rea for anything. >> comcast along with these television companies support c-span2 as a public service. >> author and professor douglas, you describe yourself in your latest survival of the richest, the impact of digital technology and not a futurist. what's the difference between the two? >> beatrice is usually someone you come to to tell you what's going to happen in the future. i have been right a lot so they call me a futurist but really i am a present test, more interested in looking in describing accurately what is 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, futurist seen or propagandist fighting for the future they want to see or

positions the company is in the best place for as a consultant the most needed place and get interested in the future by scaring them about this is going to happen or that but if you are present which is really more what i am, a cultural anthropologist or sociologist looking at what is, you end up freed to talk about ways that other people don't. for me when i realized this was fun aol was buying time warner, i don't remember if you remember this everyone was excited aol, the first big digital company now time warner, the old media company and it meant the new synergy, and how great it was and the new york times called me to write the piece on what was happening so i wrote this saying as i look at it and understand,

it looks like aol is cashing in, the founder of aol group is as much as he could and probably peaking at using inflation to buy a real company, amusement parks and libraries and all that and we are probably not at the peakak of the.com level and they say we can't publish this, everybody says is the greatest thing it means this is coming in amount of futurist, i'm just looking at what is and what is, it looks to me like the end of the videogame 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 am a futurist, that's the difference, it is predictive but more by looking

at what is rather than trying guess what's out there. >> when it comes to the impact of emerging digital technology, would you describe yourselfta as optimist or pessimist? >> neither. it's interesting, was optimistic about how this will work out or pessimistic about how it's going i would say i am frustrated, hopeful but frustrated. i'm always hopeful when beings will find a way out of the mess they are in but frustrated we usess technology on people. we use it on people instead of having technology with their ability to use them, we are surrendering this digital renaissance for the need of the

market when i look at the people running the biggest media companies today as if they think of themselves as demigods should be in charge of everything from covid and farming to society and education and politics and it's like wait a minute, to what end? what are your values? for classes did you take incl college if any before you drop out in freshman year? >> i saw emerging internet,

before the internet, emerging computer networks as part of a larger cultural phenomenon. we had just been through -- cb radio which is the first media movement in my lifetime, video happened the beginning of interactivity, only passive using joysticks to move things around, playing pong machines send each other messages and people walking around with phones rather than getting a call, mobile phones, they often of how the world works and electronic music and kids going

waves with debris on the stage, just entertainment in the middle of a field, a psychedelic survival where people were looking up reengineering their own cognitive apparatus and it seemed these things on the internet were part of a new culture, west coast psychedelic cyber diy old earth culture that might think shake things up. how predictable the place where, a beginning and middle and end. this internet thing was

surprising. i'm sure like you, i was raised in a world where people who liked computers were like geek people with pocket protectors and thehe kids who turned in the hallways, at little right angles, it was a certain type and by the late 80s i was finding out my weirdest most psychedelic friends from college are going out to silicon valley work for apple and sun and intel and it was confusing, why the weird people working with computers so i started covering it is a journalist and i saw different computer story, a different technology story which these folks were working at intel during the day and going home scraping the bugs off tripping at night and creating images being shown that shows the next weekend so it was like

something happening in the first book i learned about, life in the trenches of cyberspace looking at these different threads as part of the same culturale assertion we could red design realityer and all of thee things whether it was fantasy role-playing games where they were scared but it wasn't. choose where that takes you, opened the drawer and look inside and go in your own pathway, it was very new and too many of us, it seemed to be an

omen or cursor to the idea that going to move into a more deliberate society. >> the psychedelic culture, the moment describe two, survival of the richest fantasies of billionaires. >> the last couple of pages of my book, interestingly, i know these are people, my book was canceled in 1992 because they thought the internet was going to be over 1 by 1993 when the bk

was supposed to come out. i had a letter from the editor and we were too late on it. [laughter] >> is a letter from somewhere? america credit in a drawer with all the other rejections of the book so it's funny. by the time i was putting it together so three or four years in the making the last tractor who published it wired magazine just launched and wired magazine came along and told a different story but what was happening on the internet. a whole big thing but what it is is good for business, the internet is going to create more surface area on the market. thanks to the internet, the master stock exchange would grow

exponentially, uninterrupted forever. i understand what they were saying, they look at digital technology as the ultimate derivative of the way finance works is going meta, one level above i what happening between people and you can buy stock so you are one level removed. you don't just have to buy stock, you can buy a derivative, one level removed from that and so on and so on or you could look at colonialism, among swimmers on the internet but look at infinite real estate and websites so markets can expand onto new surface and territory so interesting what's happening but happening is a financial phenomenon, business phenomena

and one for came in a suit there is a window of opportunity sees this cultural phenomenon is what it is, a new experiment in the collective human imagination, the ideas unfolding of human culture but some folks want to enclose this has a business phenomena turn it into something else. what it can do to the culture and it turns out culture if you can look at the early internet about exploring infinite possibilities of connected culture, what does the connected human imagination do what can we do when we are connected when we can't do when we are totally alone? what happens when we share

processing cycles in the collective project? that. want to bet on the internet as a stock, you're not looking for how you increase possibility, you're looking for how you increase probability. the highest probability that will come true. you get on aol in the web whatever you get on in the highest probability of working so instead of using technology to increase possibility, we using technology on people to increase probability and you can see 1993, 94 n95 what we started to use were words like stickiness, the object of the game was to create a website that was sticky meaning they

couldn't leave and they had an ad for one of the companies that makes you website sticky that shows users stuck on piece of white paper as if it's a happy user because they are stuck on what you are doing. metric called eyeball hours and that was a number of honors human eyeball would spend looking at your monitor announcing living in the attentionn economy and people wo weren't paying attention were the enemies. after they came up with this is when we started to see all diagnoses of attention deficit disorder getting people to pay gbetter attention. i started to write about i wonder if a shortened attention span might be defense against the world where they create sticky websites and use every tool at their disposal.

behavior slot machine algorithms and how you capture human attention and modify human behavior online so for me that was the turn when people, especially people in the technology industry began to think of their users more of the heroin users think of it. so what is the mindset? the mindset is idea but it's a few things, the easiest way i could describe the mindset is idea that earn enough money insulate yourself the damage to create by earning money and that way or can develop enough technology to correct all the problems you created with the technology you just made so the

mindset is silicon valley believe with more tech and money, they can solve for anything. it's a techno solution is understanding of the world where human beings are the problem and technology is the solution so they tend to be libertarian, they understand human relationship as purely a market phenomenon. they tend to be afraid, women, nature and black people and indigenous people. they tend to want to own everything, the object is to see one's own contribution as unique, your own ip, without precedent. it is an urge to neutralize the unknown by dominating it and the emanating it. when you hear them talk about self sovereignty and progress

and increasing toys must somehow starting over, it's funny, there is a place in california where a bunch the tech pros want to build a new perfect city they are going to live in, it's renewable and it uses energy and computerized stacks for education and religion and traffic, the perfect thing but it's like going to mars or the dark side of the moon or moving to new zealand or alaska. they need to do it as if from scratch they need to begin this art to get to a new territory. ... this there and then start ovr completely. when you talk to these guys, whether it is zuckerberg or musk or bezos, they all share these

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

human, the body, of everything earthly that they think in the future there will be hundreds of they think in the future there will be hundreds of trillions of post human artificial intelligences spread throughout the gallery. because there are so many of them, their total happiness matters more than the happiness of the 8 billion human maggots that happen to be alive on the mother nest right now. the future of trillions of robot consciousness. that is pie -- why i am not a

futurist spirit if you can use this and a certain kind to say that is true. they doue matter more. rosave ourselves, let the people die get the rockets to the next climate. it is ignoring the president. i have much more faith in the reality of the present. they actually matter. then we would make very different decisions if we stopped the people alive today rather than the robots in the fantasy future. >> for much more on the mindset escape fantasies of technology billionaires, the latest book, 20 books, we are talking about all of them in depth this month and asking you to join the conversation. for those living in the eastern and central time zones and if

you're in the mountain or pacific time zones, if you want to send us a text (202)748-8903. if you do, please include your name and where you are from. also on social media it is apple tv on all of our social media platforms. send your questions and. you talkk about the mind set. what is team human. i don't mean the podcast or the book. the concept. >> the concept actually came up, it was a long time ago. i was on a panel. a grogan -- brilliant guy. he was telling the story about how evolution is really a matter of information finding more complex homes. information like the adam and

ulthen the molecule and the real organism of human culture but as humans become more complex, capable of handing more the information will migrate to them and they will prove to be our evolutionary successors. once that happens, human beings have to pass the evolutionary torch to the robots. the owned inevitable replacement. i think human beings have some qualities that artificial intelligences raised on these logics. human beings can live in that in between space between the yes in the know. sustaining paradox over time without the needs.

we can understand and look at a problem as something to sustain rather than something to solve. a human being can watch a david lynch movie, not understand what it means and still experience that us pleasure. what is that? human beings are special and we deserve a place in the digital future. you are just saying that because you are human. like it was an act. i said, okay, fine. i am on team human. guilty as charged. fighting for the right of other species to have a place on the planet. the more i thought about it the idea of team human, it goes against the mindset to call humans a team. the mindset is about the sovereign individual.

the man emperor. thinking of himself as the gustus caesar. that is his goal. the single lord over everyone. the idea that it they are arguing that being human is a team sport. not the story of the survival of the fittest individual. if you read the book, what you will see is page after page to ensure mutual survival. as an enter species coordination if human beings are the most evolved species, it is because we have evolved the most complex methods of collaborating and cooperating with each other. a lot of these are very subtle. when you are in real life with

another human being, you see whether their pupils are getting larger or smaller when they speak. is there breathing synchronizing with yours? are they making the micro nod motions with their head. you cannot see any of this on zoom or skype or on a text message. we are trying to conduct a human so society in a world that is not letting us get the social cues that we need to fire for the oxytocin to go through our blood. if you're all mine and someone says they agree with you but you don't get the biologic feedback you can't help but be suspicious of them. what happens is the reverse effect on your body. they say they agree with me but i did not get it in my body. it creates this.

we have to reemploy and retrieve this greatan mechanism for workg and being together. it's almost like putting the social back in socialism. i careia about people knowing their neighbors. understanding this whole human project is not about who gets to escape to their bunker but how do we do this together. >> i'm wondering how you think this emerging technology fits into team human. the mega connect 2023 union this week. reviewing ain artificial intelligence technology. >> our industry will be how do we unify these experiences. the physical that we have with this pilot digital world that is more coherent to better than anything we have today. >> in the future, not too far

from now, you will walk into a room and there will be as many holograms for you to interact with as there are physical objects. think about all the things that are physically there they don't actually need to be physical things. the media, the games, the art, your workstation, any screen and all of these interactive holograms. think about going in and hanging out with your friends. pretty soon we will be at the point where you will be there physically with some of your friends and others will be there digitally as avatars, holograms. and just as present as everyone else. >> you will be there, people there physically. there are people sitting there with you a bunch of ai to embody this hologram helping you get

different stuff done, to. >> on that technology that he previewed. >> the interesting thing is the word unified. unified the real world with the digital world. so they can continue kind of colonizing the world that we are in. it may be the problem. for me, when he describes hanging out with your friends and some of them are virtual, that makes me feel sad. i am like who cares. interesting, right. the technology is really great for increasing our utility value which as i understand. since the industrial age people have been measured in terms of their utility v value. how much money do a have to fly this person to this place at

this meeting. 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 of 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 thingsve involved. in order to make vai in the laser projecting holograph, it will create the virtual avatar on thero room. you have to send kids to get the rarest metals to make mistakes. you have to put huge factories around water to get cobalt out air pollution out and pollution and. you need energy and solar panels that get their energy from the sun. how was the solar panel made? what he is actually describing is not less physical matter being used more physical matter

being used at the deny that human beings of actual physical presence. you know, the avatar is a great substitute. grandma's in the netherlands and the babies in cleveland. they could see each other. as a paraplegic and now can have a virtual experience of togetherness. the complexity of the human relationship, the complexity of a mother nursing a baby so we could get a virtual bottle and the virtual mother so she could be at work. you are going to be missing something. virtual babies missing from the virtual nursing baby missing something from the mother that i

would argue i'm missing something if you're not at my house watching the game with me but it's your avatar on the couch. it is not the same. we are denying it. it is like work or the utility value of the game. we've got the presidents. the technology thate she describes, you wear your glasses so he will never be in the position of seeing someone on the street. and not remembering what their name is spirit oh, hey. okay. tell me all of those things and i can fake rapport with this person i did not know. a dishonest relationship with my

worlds. what really matters is that i remembered that person's name. if it was a sales connect then it is good. constant contact from databases. someone calls you and then their profile comes up. how isyo your wife and you know that because it came up on the computer screen. great. a fake business relationship trying to sell mattresses tore macy's. okay. but in the real world to be burdened by this sense of data as part of our interaction and then a world will pick the restaurant to be the virtual for the reality world.

>> it is in our in-depth program plenty of calls for you this morning. this is jim. good morning. you are don't -- you are on with douglas. jim, are you with us? we will try by : broward county florida. michael, go ahead. we will work on those calls. let's try one more. minneapolis minnesota. you can keep rotating through them if they're not there. go ahead. >> iam here. i amm glad to be here. i have heard a number of things. they fired me up.

you, sir, are passionate. you are insightful. a great many opinions, a great many questions and day lot of ideas that could be molded and discussed by people who agree with you and oppose you into actual policies and means of achieving progress. now, my question is, you write books, you teach, you appear here, how do you actually get people involved in talking to one another. how do we? i think i shared some of your thoughts. how do we begin, i think you said something about we have an opportunity to take control of the digital age. such as universities andmu education. how do we retract that and say we want it back. we are capable of doing this.

>> thank you for the call. >> asking precisely that question. i think the first thing i realize for me was the construction of how do we get people to •-ellipsis.is a potentially hazardous construction in itself. that is the way the tech rose think of us. how do we get people to do that. getting people toth do somethini am putting something in a familiar place. getting almost two television style influence. how do we influence and change people.op i know people will be better if we are doing this instead of them. so, i triedie to move away from that. how do i engender an environment

when people feel welcome to •-ellipsis. the welcome to socialize and care and nurture each other and compete with each other. i broke that down and it will probably be a next book. i broke it down into four ways of sort of changing the environment or changing the register in which we are operating. i am calling it the naturalized power. all i am trying to do is help people recognize how many people in our world are self-destruction spirit money. these bills. this is not money, this is paper that we used to represent money in our society. i go on cnn or somewhere and they asking about ai in the problem.ent exactly why is unemployment a problem? when was unemployment invented?

what is the difference between employment ander work. when were they forced to start doing wage labor and said of the kind of work that they used to deal. it is really just challenging these underlying assumptions of how things work. w i am trying to help people feel like they've got more agency. more authority over what they are doing. for me, that was the digital revolution. i realize that i could change up not just as a read-only file that people looked at, but a rewrite file that other people ascould edit. why was so much of the world established as read-only. why is it not up for discussion? and then the third one was if we are going to do that, once you have agency and you want to change things, you need other people. the third was to breathe

socialize people. help them feel less afraid of each other. that the great example i like to use is if you need to drill a hole in the wall and you don't have a drill, in america what most people do is go and use it and then it will probably never work again. you need to throw it away. you sent a kid and to a cave. you throw it away. where some other kid will be lookingte at it trying to find e recycled parts inside of it. you could walk down the block. bob, can i bother your drill? why don't we do that? we will owe something to bob no.

why that is spirit the last was looking at is this cultivating all. it is really what is that party and why are we so resisted to it why are we resistant to the state? whether it is looking at a canyon or enjoying a party with a bunch of other people, you experience a world that is bigger than yourself. it ends up having, you know a response in your body, your immune system gets better. you are more generous. the experience seems to be a natural important part of human health. you do not get it with the vr goggles. you get it in communion with other people or nature or the

expansiveness of reality. i'm really looking at those. how do we help people in the status quo institutions and beliefs and more willing to again move into that space between the one and zero where life actually happens. >> let me go back to jim. i think that he is there right now. thankwh you for waiting. >> thank you for taking my call. my question is totally different than what you been going on. i see on your resume that you went on to hollywood. you were in apprentice. you were a major movie which was a huge flop and apparently turning you off on movies and hollywood. i would just like your comments on that if you could end your thoughts on movies today.

the directors of movies that influenced you when you were younger. >> that ise beautiful. their real story book tv, from the time i was 11 or 12 years old. i went to princeton and while i was at tell our joe's going to drive across country. i was driving across the country with my best friend. we headed tv and he was impaled and died next to me. i have not actually told this story publicly. book tv, welcome. he died next to me and all of a sudden i was like theater is so serial. it died. it disappeared. i decided i was going to do film

it was sort of an existential moment. i'm going to m do film because t will stay. it willlm be there. so then i took film. there is a wolverine movie. we work together there a lot. i like jim jordan --. i liked cabaret and lenny. so i liked my dinner with andre. i liked kind of theater films that anthony gregory did. i liked theatrical film. and then i got the apprentice gig so i will be his apprentice

on this big movie. and they are spending at the time like $50 million on a movie that was just not sought out. it was just kind of a very thin satire. i did the new york part of it but then when they did the studio part of that, i actually dropped out and returned to theater at that point and then got tired of theater because i was supposed to do a production of the repent -- threepenny opera in the cheapest seat was going to be 30 bucks. kind of a lefty san francisco kind of thing there. i'm not going to charge $40 for the cheapest seats of threepenny opera which is a marxist play which then, i turned to the internet thinking that the internet would be the people's medium. i wanted to get away from all that commercial theater. i will go to the internet which will be the county cultural

antibusiness procurement, i mean , it wast. for a moment. it will be that alternative. in terms of the movies that are the best, maybe i am typical. they do things in movies, i mean something in his movies that are beyond what people realize is quite happening. he makes movies that are all about inviting multiple oninterpretation. it is as if the movie has a plot but it does not really cap that plot. millions of things to talk about there is as much of that as the movie. i like what he does. >> in allusion and a reality.

it is about opening questions. i find that i am annoyed with guys like nothing against their film, but i get annoyed with the jj abrams christopher nolan style of movies that do similar things, but always with an answer. you figure it out. to me, the beauty of film when it is working is it opens outward. the answer is not the answer. there are many. it is an object. don't tell them i said this, but it works more, it has a mythic level of experiential value, but what it means to you could be different every time you go

through it. >> thanks for sharing that story about your friend and the accident. for viewers that don't know, you have a podcast over 300 episodes you out 20 books. i just wonder why you have not shared that story publicly before. >> when you share stories, i don't know, it feels a little like it is begging for sympathy. it is like a cheap shot. oh, you're talking about that sadd thing. and may be also because, i don't know, it takes a lot of years to move through trauma. remember, back in my theater days, there was this thing called sense memory. sense memory is if you ever seen where you have to cry or be upset or whatever it is in a

play what you do as you recall when you've h had a similar motn and then you think about that in order to activate that emotion in the scene. at least you do that in the rehearsals. i remember our teacher told us it hasru to be at least six yeas ago otherwise you have not process the trauma in a way that useful.lly it ended up being non-useful. i think may be now whatever this is 30 years later i kind of and distant enough from it that when it came up it did not have the texture that made it feel inappropriate to bring to bear and also because of the audience i knowe some of the audience is there, but i'm thinking as book tv as a lot of these people are book people. i don't get to talk to book people that much.

book people are, sorry, we go through life differently than other people. book people understand how to engage with an idea or in a motion over an extended period of time. whatever book you are reading. you know, it is a different thing and remote control media. so i kind of felt that it was safer and more appropriate to bring up the processing of trauma for people who write. for people who write and people who read. >> chatting with more those book people. again in california, oscar, you are on. >> hi. the question that i want to ask. thank you for your book, by the way.

how can we get, how can we get to take an aspect, really expressing the big picture and it is good because i like to have an aspect of that. capitalism, it has done a lot of great things. a lot ofin people use it as self-justifying. it put us on the map. but, you know, i believe that capitalism is great. it did a lot of good things. but people just strongly, you know, side with it. i often have believe that capitalismpi unchecked starts

going bad and it starts doing some damage. big corporations and things like that. >> let's pick up on that. that is a theme of several of his books. >> yes. for sure. the first book i wrote was called life inc. how to take it back. it as something in itself. i was really looking at where it comes from. where the corporation comes from right after the crusade there was a. marketplace that they learned how to deal from the bazaar. they brought it back and people were trading and we had a new middle class. women were taller at any time in the late middle ages.

then they were until the 1980s in england. it was a very successful thing. they got poor as the middle class got wealthy. so they came up with two great ideas. one was central currency. you are not allowed to have this action. so, now, there is interest built into the economy. it has to grow just to stay the same. it worked fine for colonialism. as long as you can grow and keep growing faster and faster, that works. the second one which i alluded to earlier was a treasured monopolyon. saying you're not allowed to do business in a particular industry unless you have a charter from the king. you out to have a monopoly charter to make shoes and everyone else that was a shoemaker now had to be an employee for the shoe company. that has come down to us today is corporate capitalism that we do not even question. even a nice president like biden

talks about how we need 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 y actually beating people? nothing. in some ways, it is the opposite it is about balance sheets. it favors increasingly abstract economic instruments. it is 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 its derivatives exchange. think about that effect. it is an abstraction of the reao market which you could argue in itself is an abstraction. this is the way it goes. that is why we end up in this world with tech billionaires with what is the next level of

abstraction. in some ways what we could think of as the ai craze and digital craze is all about looking for how do i go meda. how do i go abstract on reality itself and be one of the robots. be one of the derivatives. be one of those things because who wants to be a little human. this is jack welch capitalism. he is 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 is when he sold the productive assets and turned ge into a financial services company. it makes it more money than actual work. it worked really well until the financial crisis.

they had no more productive assets. that is the tendency. you are right. that isnd why it works great to appoint garrett what is great for colonial empireses if you ae not looking for the people they are slaving on what land is being taken away what they had they are possessing it can still work. there is more balanced forms of capitalism. if everybody on the block, what if we are borrowing drills from each other. we share the lawnmower because you only need a lawnmower two or three hours t a week and that mh less production and pollution you don't have you earn as much money. somebody variably gets up at the end and says what about the lawnmower company. what about the people that have

stock shares in their retirement plan for the lawnmower company. what are you going to do about them? ds backwardness of the underlying premise of our society rather than thinking of the economy as something that will serve us rather than serving the economy. >> on in-depth. a question coming in from pearl city hawaii. this is from tim. do we exist with a simulation and what tests could we devise to prove or disprove it. >> we don't live in a digital simulation created by a martian graduate 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 that this is they would say that this is the illusion. something else going on here. one way or another we live in a simulation because we do not even see what is going on. look at the phenomenology had all. we have sensory organs that are trying to create a picture of what is going on here. that is all that we get anyway. we are just sensory organs trying to process what we see. i do not think it really, finally, the question does not matter, but, no, i do not

believe we are in westworld. one of a million simulations that are being run by someone to figure out, you know, how society works. i would think that it is much closer to comic iteration of civilizations over time. a minute ago you were talking about the importance of the experience. i want to go to your making 99 book away version. and talk about the experience and spectacle. >> spectacle is more like the rally or a trump rally or these days and nfl football game where the energy of a crowd and many

of the features are leveraged for a purpose. there is in between spirit like walking into a great cathedral as a catholic person in doing mass. sort of a combination. there was some architect dude that made this inspiration machine. the oregon and the whites and the stained glass and the arches to generate and experience. you go to a rave and they put the lights in the music and our 120 beats a second in our beautiful young peopleou around dancing half dressed and all. staying in the matrix the raves that they have. there is in between. for me, spectacle is relate less about inviting true

participation and more about stoking the rage of a crowd against a unified enemy. so, the jets game, it's like, oh , the dolphins. let's get the dolphins. then you can use that to sell airline tickets, stake from outback. you take it from the warlike rage as he has something. or against a particular racial group or whatever it may be. or against democrats or whoever. sos , a spectacle is more of a designed, for me anyway, a more designed experience to focus the energy of the crowd onto a named enemy, in most cases where as all is more about kind of breaking people out of there

trap, the trap of the illusion of individuality and letting them experience themselves as part of something much much larger. it is just a matter of name that large thing for them. don't say now you are in the army of this spirit that is why, you know, i was calling it team human. it seemed open enough that any person, you are on team human. it is just team human as this is the way we experienced our perspective on nature and everything else. >> from coercion, this sentence. think of any great spectac. first, unify the crowd. stoke their passion. speak as god or nature.

help me understand that third part a little bit more. >> speak as god or nature, you can think of, you know, hitler's speaking of himself as the father and all the people as his children that you are, i mean it's interesting. look at the twitter names that people say elon musk put up of themselves with them as, you know, god. think about when zuckerberg andr musk started challenging each other to a mixed martial arts fight as if they are kind of, you know, demigods that they inhabit silicon valley as their mount olympus. now theyan will have a spectacle battle through media that we get

to see the gods with each other. speaking of god or nature is really just, it depends. a book on propaganda from the 50 s i guess. it is really good, really good on this. it is having people identify you as the mother, as the father, as connected to god as your both universal and completely personal. whether a person feels you are speaking just to them. you know, apparently taylor swift has h the ability to do tt she is pretty benevolent about it. she is doing it with the message of empowerment and identification and all. someone with herit abilities cod be doing it politically. could be doing it differently.

i say, we've got to be careful about how to get people to blank because then we are the same. let's rally where we get people to believe in our god. getting people to vote for our party. there is out vulnerable moment that happens in the spectacle where people are like it is the same moment. it happens when someone walks into one of the original shopping malls. they show it on tape. they can t watch the videos of . the person's jaw opens in their eyes glaze over. that moment that you can drop in really whatever you want. whatever brand. whatever party, whatever political ideologies, whatever enemy. you just see it. when they do that, they drop that in and then they act as if and now we are meeting our destiny to gather.

now, the blood in the soil in the forest and the god. there is that rhetoric calming a certain assertion that this is the natural c way. we are returning to some kind of , you know, hagan barbarian masculine original authentic back to what we really are. it is a more natural open from my gut state of being. but it is not. it is completely manipulated. >> coercion. why we listen to what they say. the cover of the book has a quote from senator bob carey on the front cover. remind folks who he was and why he ended up on the cover of your

book. >> bob carey. he is a senator from nebraska. he actually lost his foot in the vietnam war. he was kind of a presidential candidate. has kind of a scandal about a particular episode during the war which is still unclear exactly what happened. it was not good enough to, you know, cost him his bid there. he was always nice to me. he was actually the boyfriend of i my neighbor when i lived in te west village. back when youil could live in te west village as a single barely working writer. she lived across the hall from me. i got to hang out with him a little bit. i asked if he would do a blurb for the book. he did a really funny one. his whole blurb originally. they would not accept it. read this or else.

which was perfect for the book called coercion. what ended up on the cover is an important book, a clear warning for americans unaware of the power of words to unintentionally miss read the leader listener or viewer. read this book and nobody gets hurt. [laughter] >> he sent it back. he added to it so they would accept him on their. becoming a president of the new school. kind of absorb persons in a bunch of things. he was controversial but a very useful figure in bringing that place to its current standing. >> this is michael. broward county, florida. you are on.

>> culture is biology and social contagion. i discovered in trying to get some information about governor desantis that doing exactly what desantis is doing because it aadmits to the fact that the response it provides and the research programmed that way is for the same reason. he wants to avoid things that are potentially negative. say things that are dispositive. if you look into anything having to do with racism or misogyny or homophobia, that is one thing that i think you will start a fad. you get to say one thing and say the other. here is a really exciting thing. tell them about success ptsd where it changes your brain. just like trauma does.

so you react in the same exact way to be self-interested. they are causing a lot of what you are discussing which is interesting because herbert spencer started that in the 1860s. we teach at that way even though 100% of them can. hewe verify them medically that they can read. we teach to help the bell curve not prevent the bell curve. we pull the information faster to be sure we achieved as the state department is done for 50 years. they have done randomized educational test country to country. we have never had more than 30%. >> you bring up a lot of topics. which one do you want to talk about. >> p.m. bracing feature of thisu is sort of applying industrial age of logic to our many social

institutions. coming up, whatever metric you put on the wall is the metric you will get. that is what you will go for. they are necessarily reductive metrics. so, you bring that kid in vitro. into a classroom and say we will teach this kid long division. without any understanding what is going on in that kid's house. the kids mother is moving from shelter to shelter and the father is a drunk and not even there. the kid is trying to contend with that. the challenge, the life challenge jacket is dealing with and what that child needs to learn about moment is not reflected in the assessment that they have done on their long division at the end of the week. that is the problem with a one sizeda fits all, not just education system, but everything

system. when we decide the stature air out there is this famous story about when they were trying to use incentives to get hospitals to perform better they said they would give more money to hospitals that reduce the amount of time people spent in the emergency room waiting room for them to get into 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 beds. they line the hallways and put people along those and declared them being in the room. the time and energy it took them to do that actually slowed the rate at which people had medical care. in order to win the metric, they ended up reversing. what i hear, what i hear in this caller's concern is the way that

we kind of, we institutionalized short term oversimplified values at thepl expense of whatever ths thing is that we may actually want to accomplish. kind of the bigger and more convoluted bureaucracies, very often be harder and harder it is to get back down to what it is that we want to. and the same with chat gpt. people have to realize i am sure most of the viewers do, it is hype right now. it really is hype. it is a stock market desperate for another big thing. zoom and all of these covid apps are not being used as much. all of the screaming media companies are not being watched as much because we are going outside. they need another thing. chat gpt is just really an advanced search engine right now

it takes your google results in kind of pushes them into something that looks more like human speech but it is wrong most of the time. it is not actually correct. it is just reverting everything. what is the most average answer to that question. and thatst does not offend anyby or does not say anything controversial or upsetting. it is wrong and it is self-centered. it is not what we think it is. it is just search right now. we can use on the future where these things are actually smart, but weot are not there. >> st. george utah. good morning. >> hi. i have a couple of points to go back to some of the things that we were talking about earlier in

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

it is different. right. you feel connected to the creation. just go there and get out of the car and stared a rock for five minutes. it is the trip he asked most, boy, utah, some parts of new mexico do that, too. amazing. the thing that amazes me about our state of disconnection is how quickly you reconnect. recalibrating to reality is almost instantaneous. if you don't have nature like she is describing, a real world, just find a friend and look in their eyes and take two or three breaths with them. it is almost unbearable if you have not done it in a while. it reconnects you almost

instantly. for how long it took to d calibrate us, how much technology, how much engineering how much billions of trillions of dollars were spent to get us in this state where we all need the ssris and you need to get a nap in order to cure you from the app that you just use. you will use a meditation app to get you over the facebook app in the snapchat app. you touch ground to put your feet on the ground and look at ananother person. look at the shore. look at a cliff. look in the eyes of your dog or cat even. you get it so quickly. it is so accessible. even the forest fire haze that we are looking at today on the east coast. it is so accessible that when i have hope in the future, it is how quickly these systems, how

quickly they restore when you give them half a chance. >> you are talking about creation a minute ago. when you are creating your writing, i'm not talking about the podcasts and interviews like this, but is there a place you go to think? what is your process for writing now 20 books? >> i mean, i tend to go about it the same way whether it is fiction or nonfiction. i write note cards. i have ideas on note cards. i end up putting them on the wall and what are called content areas and then content areas kind of mutate into chapters and then i ordered them so that each chapter flows as a structure.

so, because of that, i need to have a place where the book happens. a room. in office. because the book ends up being kind of physically represented with the note cards. i've had so many years ofom experience with the no cards that i know how much i have based on how many cards there are and how dense they are and how important the topics are on each one. so i can kind of feel the book more intuitively or somatically. .... .... my bookcase wall was te where the book was written.

i have been trying to use a program that is a substitute, but it does not quite organize the same way. i have to be in a physical relationship to the ideas. it is like a chapel of memory. they are it's located in the chapter so i can look at any chapter and i can look and remember the chapter and where was when i was riding it. always the hardest chapter that you wrote? >> interesting. this last book came right out because it had a memoir following it with all the stories in it. the best part of your books is not the rhetoricit's the stories. i end up telling these fun stories about my experiences with billionaire people and

their antics. that one came right out. the most researched book was light ink. i looked and went to the yale library and looked at charters of and that was pretty intense but the hardest, hardest month was probably the graphic novel called alastair and -- about the real but in my case somewhat fictionalized a cold war between alastair crowley and adolph history at the end of world warr ii. adolf at the end of world war ii. the 31st artist to her hard work on theti book. they all had major life catastrophes like illness in suicides in really things. i was starting to get scared and you know ride about somebody like alastair crowley and their

something dangerous happening. i got really scared when i was riding that that i was touching energies thatt i shouldn't and then it was just really hard to do, to be really faithful to the actual world war ii story and to tell that story as reality and history while also getting into these characters and the part that wasn't real and trying to distinguish between the two in a responsible way. that was the most harrowing riding experience i've had. thank five minutes left with douglas rushkoff. sid i'm interested in your robe with research particularly the life, ink. that you talked about. how much do you need to do before you start writing and

also your world with agents rethink you very much. >> agents, like literary agents? okay, so life, ink i like to have all the research done before i start writing, writing. i'll do a little bit of research to get to the proposal stage in the proposal is usually something that turns into a version of the introduction to the books of the proposal usuallyy gets me to work inc. academia we would call the research question. so for life, ink it was like where did this corporation come from and how did corporatism become the religion of our society than what the heck can we do about it? i had done enough research to know i was going to look at the charter and figure out what i

didn't know when i wrote the proposal 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 works. i discovered things that weren't understood before. so that was real research. want the research was done and i had all this stuff i would make my outline and i could see occasionally there would be a little blank area. i'm scared to ride all the way up to an area that i'm going to discover something that's going to undo from earlier. usually once i get that outline done the only way i get through the book is going straight through with blinders on. i justify it, that i'm putting on a miner's lamp and digging the hole tunnel of the book until i get to the light on the other end.th

i've got to go straight through it and i go straight through it because the reader is going to pretty much get the convention of the book unless it's a book. they will have the go straight through it so i do the same thing and i don't look back. because if i look back on and i've tried that trying to rewrite the book to the point you are rewriting it and at the end of the book it has much less attention than the front of the book. like calming someone with really long hair. you end up 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 going through it.. the only thing that might happen as i'm riding the book book is a realize of the chapters so much bigger than the other four or five chapters of my break it up into two. actually i could break this here and create two chapters. so for me it's that. the research, occasionally i

will do research going through the book and you know i need another story or don't understand what happened here. i'm going to go back and get morene justification. in the worst case i find out the justification pushes thing in another way and then i either drop it for tell that story in a different way. i had 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 and that screenplay had an agent and then there was a co-agent so i got my first literary agent sorted through the backdoor. i ended up, i thought they had dropped me. they hadn't called me in a long time and they gave up selling the book and i had a friend who said i will sell the book and that he sold it in the first

agent was like wait a minute, that's my book. it would have been a year since the first agent had called me or done anything and i got sued and i gave a bunch of money to this one and a bunch of money to that one. this agent and that agent turned out to have a lot of issues stealing money from a bunch of so i had william morris for while and then mike agent left william morris so do i stay or do i follow so i stayed in the next agent wasn't so good and then i went to a science agent namedt john buckman is a great literary agent but but ths whole agency ended up having an association where he i felt like they weren't fully acknowledging so i left and i wanted to do more hollywood things at that point in that agency was only just books and i wanted to get things on the screen and start playing their soy ended up that

creative artistry. i don't talk to my agent there that much but she's really good. she's the one who told me don't ride another book like this. he. she these people and the same people againin and again will be more polemic things and if you want to reach them if got to tell stories. if i want to do a nonfiction until nonfiction stories. least tell the stories in a literary medium of how to engage and that's what it is. i started doing that and she was right. so now, always i've seen might 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 s book. not just adding value in distribution and the cover and the sales of the book but the editor should be my partner will

like a drama in a play. they really are the first audience and boy are my editor tom mayor right ended up as my publisher, i wouldn't leave them unless knows what happens but he was the one who told me to ride hathis book. he had read a couple of articles that i had written and i was doing stuff on media and some of the articles were doing well on it. this article on the survival of these five billionaires i met who wanted advice on how to get out there bunkers in the article had done well. a year. or two later i wrote about the kobe crisis. i felt like a lot of people were retreating and adopting that billion or mindset. i retreated to my house with my 50-inch tv and my oculus glasses and i can make this work out. i wrote that piece and that's

when he called me and he said doug this is your next book. you have to do that and i called my agent and i asked her if i should do it and she said if you can do it in stories then sure. do it. so the book that came from the editor to me i was riding for an audience of one and what about this and what about that and to be at the place and it's a strange place to be and it took me getting old to do it where you see the notes and critiques from the editor as gifts rather than as work as ways to get and trust him as oh my gosh this guys helping me make this better. he's making me a better writer to give up the fear the hubris to think that someone else doesn't know better than you. were it least as well as you was a really good me so i look at ally these people as my partners in crime here.

boy it feels so much better to come out with a book that you knowe your people are a part o. it's a group project so, end of course it's my old saying but i'm finally learning it. >> meeting with the pet billionaires worried about their bunkers, 20 books over 30 years and a professor of media series and digital economics at the college in new york. and mike is waiting in new york. you are on with douglas rushkoff. >> good afternoon. i have a question for the professor in terms of individual human nature. why has where brisbane tried communism and socialism throughout the world been very ineffective in a- miserable

failure?e, in terms of the self-appointed elites these billionaires -- tech billionaires and so forth i just want people listening to understand what hypocrites these people are. zuckerberg's gates and all the rest of them. they are surrounded by highly trained armed bodyguards and yet they will advocate for a man or woman in the united states in terms of defending themselves and so forth. i just want people to understand that. these theoretical systems of government, they don't work and then people say it hasn't really been tried to the full extent it should be. capitalism by far has been the most effective and the constitutional republic in america by far the most effective way to govern and live

according to economics. these tech billionaires they are just bathed and hypocrisy the entire way they live compared to the average person in america's. >> mike we got your point. douglas rushkoff. >> capitalism has worked as long as, when we get to periods of extreme excess we have major reformation. we have big regulation so yeah when things spun on the control we get ranked until no roosevelt as wpa and the g.i. bill and education bill. you reform the thing and that's when capitalism success is when you that. you ended up ins a situation tht they realized they had to wear

the income tax rate went up to 80 or 90% during that time and in order to bail out what was happening because when capitalism works too well when yous automate it by extractingo much value that you make the people around you poor. so when facebook and google are going well you see tent villages are living around them. they ended up destroying markets in their called creative destruction. its destructive destruction. they are scoring more money and sure you get to the place where mark zuckerberg says i'm going to get that 95% of my money back to the places that i took it out it. dude if you had make facebook 95 less extractive he would to show your money back into the systems and the ecosystems of society. i would argue communism and

socialism the reason why they haven't worked is because they are trying to do these things ought at scale. i'd like at scale as in itself the problem. when marx was riding about socialism what he really meant was how do we retrieve the social element of commerce. me borrowing a the drill from the neighbor instead of buying one at home depot. is that a crime or is it okay? i understand the perspective that it is a crime because even though i don't need a drill if i don't buy the drill then how will home depot grow and how will black & decker grow? it's my responsibility as a citizen and capitalism to promote the exponential growth of the economy. that's the part where it gets

off where we see it not just as a means to an end but as the end as the thing and the only way. when i look at socialism i'm talking how do you put the social back into it and minimize the-ism. when you talk about communism i like community and i don't know but i like-ism so much either because it's not something you could orchestrate so well from a public area. this is where marx went a little off he's got this great track where he writes about robinson caruso and robinson caruso had all these little ledges and he needed to maximize his own efficiency so he said okay he needs five fish per week so he'll spend this much time fishing and this much time

collecting water and this time making rope and he a little ledger. mark said if robinson caruso did it himself would if he created the ledger for the whole country so we know how many people need to do this and that. it's like dude you can't plan that out or you'll end up with people on the line to get toothpaste. there won't be enough. marx was good at figuring out abiah demanded things like that. really bad at d figuring out how do we share water? how doin you deal with something like air and how do you deal with things that are best orchestrated as communism and i don't mean communism, this is a river and we all share responsible he for the river. we are going to make rules about what can happen in this river and how many fish you are allowed to take from this river and we are going to enforce those who violate those rules so there is enough fish or enough

pasture were enough to air whatever is that everybody can use. so let's make markets for iphones and let's compete in capitalism but that people who they think will win. a lot of stuff doesn't really work in terms of the market sensibility. you need to create a scarcity of something in order for the market to work around it and it's much harder to do that with stuff that should or could be in abundance. 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. >> of humans left in our discussion with douglas rushkoff on "in depth." a discussion we have is their

favorite book i the book they are reading right now. on favor box -- john kennedy's pulitzer prize winner techniques in civilization, the torah, to the white house in terms of what he's currently reading and times and breaking together. which one or two of those books do you want to about in the context of the discussion we have been having? >> irony talked about torah so we got one out-of-the-way. robert olson's cosmic trigger is a really interesting once with respect to the last conversation we were having excess of what robert anton wilson was a great counter culture writer and trickster. he was responsible for or partly

responsible for the church of disgorge you where every member is opposed. it was the early 1960s style fictional disinformation that was being used to promote that abbie hoffman radical psychology. he wrote cosmic trigger and what he's arguing is that, not that everything is true but that we can all hold multiple perspectives at different times and not take any one of them to very seriously. you can look at a situation as the atheist scientist can see it from that perspective than you can look at it as a. you can look it as a new age fantasy person. you can look at as the psychedelic and all these different ways to look at things and it would have helped people today inin the whole conspiracy theory and qanon and people

looking at what really happened here. rather than needing to grab on of them is a 5g tower connected to the elections booth in the covid vaccine and wait a minute to be able to tolerate not knowing it to be able to tolerate all the different perspectives really does shield you from the same kinds of peopleth that use a spectacle to gain power and use confusion and conspiracy and unknowns as ways of gaining power as well. if you like a lot of these poor kids who were scooped in this kind of radical right meme ended up being the victim of their imagination rather than being able to harvest their own creativity. so this book is really good for

walking through what he calls the confusion and what's true and what's not true and everything is true nothing is true and how you get to the other side of that. he was really good at that. the other one is the book that i just finished last night, what was that one called again, and times, counter elite and the path of political disinformation. >> it was done in an interesting and rigorous way. and it was nice to feel wrong. i'd love to be wrong. when these revolution period things happen when civilizations breakdown it's not because the rich got so rich and the poor got so poor. that's what i thought was happening. it's worse. the division of worse force, the world gets worse and so many people are intent villages.

he's like that's not what happened. what happened is it's the creation of too many elite. not that there o are millions bt their are so many elite that there's not enough for the elite to be a leading and they start competing with each other and that's what breaks things down. they are too many elite and i'm not sure any of the listeners who are angry about it closed elites. there aren't enough of coastal elites to be consuming. their a lot of billionaires and ofof the enough this piece i'm riding now i thought bezos and zuckerberg's were the top five billionaires today that they had more total wealth than the five billionaires larkin and carnegie and those guys. they actually have less wealth the top five.

>> measured in dollars or percentages of the economy? >> percentages of the economy. but there's more billionaires. the top 1000 billionaires have 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 through a whiter bunch of billionaires who were competing with each other for the scraps of millions. that sort of breaks things down. >> minneapolis minnesota steve immelt in the question, to what extent do you think america's societal tendencies to elect a president contributing to a emotional and anxiety trend? >> tremendouslydo and totally 99.9% of it. it's funny when you have come a lot of us have one kind of

sensory or a nervous disorder or another were spectrum are sensory processing or too much cortisol or whatever does that they are calibrating. the easiest way to calibrate your kids is to bring them to bed with you or sit with them body to body, skin to skin. ideally if they are little enough and is still appropriate to. being with people and being on a team, being co-location and copresence is the surest way to calibrate to gain mental health. if you think about our society is addicted to technology and addicted to money and addicted to stuff this idea that just one more thing and then i'll try to do good for the world. then i can start behaving that

way. if we are and we need the equivalent of alcohol anonymous or our addiction to these things what's the first thing you duplex cag owner room with other people. you go to a meeting. that's the one requirement. you go to a meeting in a room and experience fellowship every day. you find other. on the back of my book team human,, find others to newbie with them absolutely. it's our lack of presence with each other that's making it harder for us to f calibrate naturally and making us actually actively more distrustful of each other. if you look on twitter you can't ever feel the positives, not truly. you can get ael dopamine hit. someone liked my tweet and i get a hit of dopamine but you don't get oxytocin which is the

bonding hormone. you don't get your -- you don't give camaraderie and community. you don't feel part of the group. it's a very o different kind muh more physical. we all agree we look at this person's tweet and weaken and it the thumbs up. then we know who the enemy is because they are mad eyed and they are mad at the u.s. and they are mad at russia. it's not the same thing. it's not the same internal state and we see all the data and kids who are on you know twitter and instagram and snapchat and all those things instead of live copresence with one another and are suffering everything from

anorexia to anderson tik tok acquired which is a pseudo-but they are cutting. they are killing themselves. it's become a public health crisis and the thing is you don't solve it with another app. the wellness app. you solve it with good old-fashioned person-to-person consideredldn't be nostalgic, touch and being with other people. i think it should always stay in fashion. >> group book readers who may not know your social media presence do you tweet and are you on facebook or tik tok? >> no, i'm not. i have a twitter account and i will send a link to my podcast

each week and now i'm even considering stopping that. i used too participate back when i was more of the conversation but now i tweet like oh i'm going to be on c-span booktv today and if i get 50 likes for that in 30 of them are from bots pretending to be workers produces new bot out there like it's some kind of a scam and i guess you are supposed to want to hire them either virtual or real of some kind or sex workers. what's the point? it's a real cesspool and it's so aggravating and these are the kinds of conversations that are engendered their that i don't even want to do that. i go to linkedin which is look at less that way more professional.

no, i don't have a social media presence. i don't do social media activities. i have a blue sky account that i haven't used yet. i have a mastodon account of federated version of twitter that i would use but i'm not finding a real place for it. u i get so much e-mail that servicing the e-mail feels like as much time as i want to spend looking at l a screen. i'm just learning about my neighbors in finding out about myne town. there's only so much life left. >> i want to read when you quit facebook in 2013 he wrote a column about it on "cnn." he wrote facebook has never been nearly a social platform rather exploits our social interactions the way a tupperware party does. they spoke it doesn't exist and help us make friends but that turned our network activities

and social graphs into a commodity for others to exploit. >> right. they would sell it. i wrote that at a time when facebook decided that they could use you d to advertise to your your people. they are not you wanted it or not. so it's like if you set i'm at starbucks today they would broadcast that for money to your friends or anyone who follows you. look, rushkoff likes starbucks but it got worse than that. the real function of facebook now is to take your past behavior use that to put you in a physicalal bucket predict what you are likely to do in the future and then make sure that you do that. so facebook looks at your past activity in the sides on the

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

the thing those auto tuning the soul and the weirdness in the independent side of humanity. that's not environment you want to be in. >> we have five minutes left in our conversation and i wanted to read this from a viewer, carla who said thanks for sharingg yor insight. i do see the repetitive nature of human stopping and breathing with another human has profound power. humans are connected to attend themselvesch having recommend we began a world peace -- >> i do yoga. i do yoga three times a week with someone who teaches in my neighborhood, a great teacher and after covid or during covid she started doing it virtually doing it on zoom because some

people don't want to go back to live in the room so it's become zoom yoga into few months ago i was doing zoom yoga and i turned on the thing and i started crying for some reason afterwards. i was just like this. i'm glad to move my body in that way and hearve the voice but i s doing yoga partly to be in a room with the other people doing it and to feel their breath and smell their smells and hear the creeks of their knees or wherever but to be in a room with other people and that was gone. if she's not going to do it i'm going to find one. i need to be in a room with people. i need to be in a room with other people.

and it's great we had to hawaii calls. yeah gets to find others, that's my whole purpose for what i want to do with whatever have left. >> with a 2.5 minutes we have let the mentioned the last words of your book. just a page or two before you ride that we started our conversation about two minutes in pragmatists versus features. you ride -- write the future's lesson on the verb. i want to end with your thoughts on that. >> what i was trying to do with is a verb which is great. too. the idea that the future especially in tech pros and technologists and institutional as they have look at thehe piece as okay we are going to hire

people to tell us what's in the future so we can prepare for it. theor tech pros look at likely e most probable future from their algorithms in their ai. climate change, economic unrest nuclear war. so we prepare for that future and build a bunker and getting a rocketship and going to mars. that's the best i can do is predict the future and prepare and hang on foran it. the i'm saying is no, future is something that we are creating right now. you are makingis the future with the choices that you make. if you are preparing for future where that thing is going to happen then you are more likely of bringing that on. what if we prepare for future where your neighbors are your friends and people realize we are in this together, that mutual aid and togetherness in connection and community and care in acknowledging nourishment and acknowledging our social reality, that'ss the

future that we want to create. we create that future by doing it. we are featuring with every action that we take now. so -- so start featuring today and you will like how the world turns out. >> professor douglas rushkoff has been our guest for two hours on "in depth" this morning in his latest book is survival of the richest escape fantasies of the tech billing at the kmart in 2022, 20 books nonfiction and fiction over the last 30 years. thanks for talking about some of them with us thisu morning. >> thank you and thanks for what you do. this is an important gathering of people. >> appreciate it.