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latest book who writes about digital technology but not a futurist. >> a >> 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 what i am is a presentist. i'm more interested in looking at and 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. most futurists, they seem more like propagandaists, fighting for the positions they want it see or positions their company in the best place or positions them as a consultant in the most needed place. you get people interested in the future by scaring them, this is going to happen or that's going to happen, but if you're a presentist, which is

really more what i am, kind of a cultural anthropologist or a socialologist looking at what is, you end up really freed to talk about things in ways that other people don't. so 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, the old media company and this meant the new synergy of old media and new media was coming and how great it was and the new york times called me to write the piece, what was happening. so i wrote this piece, saying, well, as i look at it and as i understand it, it looks to me like aol is cashing in its chips, that steve case, the founder of aol he grew this thing as much as he could, his subscriber rate is probably peaking and buying using 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're now at the peak of the dot-com bubble and we can't publish this. everybody says this is the greatest thing and it means that all of this stuff is coming and the new age is coming and well, i'm not a futurist, i'm just looking at what is. and what is is that it looks to me like the end of a video game where you level up or cash out and i think he's cashing out and of course, they didn't publish it and turned out to be right, not because i'm a futurist, it's predictive, but 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 these emerging digital technologies, would you describe yourself as an optimist or a pessimist?

>> neither. an optimist or a pessimist, i'm optimistic how this is going to work out, and pessimistic how this is going to work out. i would say that i'm frustrated, right? and i'm hopeful, but frustrated. i'm always hopeful that human beings are going to find out a way out of the messes that we're in. and 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 for 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 classes did you take in college if any before you drop out in freshman year? so i kind of look at it that way. >> douglas rushkoff is our guest in depth for the next two hours to talk about his books, some 20 books for the past 20 years. take us back to early 1990's, siberia. what were your expectations at the time of this emerging nets as it's known? >> it's interesting, i saw the emerging internet and this is before the intra net before the emerging computer network as part of a larger cultural phenomena. we had just been through, you

know-- we just had cb radio even which is kind of the first citizen's media movement at least in my lifetime, you know, since ham radio, the cb radio, the fax machines, the beginning of interactivity, our television screens which had always been completely massive monitors, we were using joy sticks to move things around. we're playing pong. we had fax machines that we could start to send each other messages. people were walking around with these phones rather than having to be home to get a call, mobile phones. there were new physics and chaos math and new understandings of how the world worked. there was electronic music and kids throwing raves with nobody on the stage, just a sort of entertainment out in the middle of a field. there was psychedelics revival where 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 was an east coast educated theater director. i loved theater. i was an artsy person, but at the time i was fed up with how elitist and expensive theater had become, how everything had a beginning, middle and an end and i felt really stifled and this internet saying was surprising. i'm sure like you, i was raised in a world where people who like computers, they were geek people with pocket protectors and high schools and kids who turned in the hallways, like little right angles, there was

a certain typement by the late '80s, i was finding out my weirdest and artsy psychedelic friends from college were going out to silicon valley to work for apple, sun and intel. it's confusing, why were the weird period working with computers and i covered as an a journalist and i saw this very different computer story, a very different technology story, which was that these folks would be working at intel or northrop grumman during the day and scaping scraping off bugs from cactuses and something that was happening was different. the first book i wrote about this, siberia, life in the trenches of hyper space was really looking at all of these different threads of culture as part of the same new cultural

assertion, that we could redesign reality. and all of these different things, whether it was fantasy role playing games where kids were, i know people were scared it was satanist, it wasn't. dungeons and dragons, where kids instead of watching a movie would create their own story together. you know, it was the sort of choose your own adventure, hypertext reality. no one was used to, the idea that you could read a story on the computer and click on a word and choose where that takes you and open drawer and look inside and go on your own pathway, that was very new. to many of us it seemed to be kind of 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, to survival of the richest, the escaped fantasies of tech billionaires? i mean, there's a few ways to look at it, it's funny and the last couple of pages of my book siberia, i know these are book people, siberia, my book canceled in 1992 because they thought the internet was going to be over by 1993, when the book was supposed to come out, right? and i have no letter from the editor thinking we think it's a passing fad and we're too late on it. >> is that explained somewhere? >> what?

>> is that letter explained somewhere? >> no, i've got it in a drawer with the other rejections of the book. i was putting it together, year thee or two. and the last draft for harper, who purchased it, wired magazine came along and told a different story what was happening on the internet. wired was saying yes, this is a whole big thing, but what this thing is, it's 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 i understand what they were saying. they looked at digital technology as like the ultimate derivative. and 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 have to just buy the stock, you can buy the derivative, one level above that, so on and so on. you look at colonialism, only so much territory on the planet, but thanks to the internet, we're going to get infinite real estate number of websites so the markets can expand onto new territory, virtual territory, so wired came and said, 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. 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 knew kind of commons of ideas and unfolding of human culture, but there's some folks who want to re-- who want to turn this into something else to make it more about profit and exponential growth and i'm not quite sure what that will do to the culture. turns out what it did, it kind of killed the culture because if you can look at the early internet, it was about kind of exploring the infinite possibilities of a connected culture. what does a connected human imagination do? 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 all of 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 how do you increase possibility.

you're looking for how do you increase probability. think of it. once you bet on something. what do you want? the highest probability that your bet will come true. you bet on aol. you bet on compuserve, the web, whatever you bet on, you want that to have the highest probability of working. so instead of using technology to incrows creative possibility, we started using technology on people to increase their probability. this, you could see it 1993, '94, '95, what we started to use on the web were words like stickiness. the object of the game was to create a website that was sticky, meaning people would get to your website, but they couldn't leave. they even had an ad that helps to make your website sticky, showed users stick like on a

fly strip. as if that makes a happy user, stuck on what you're doing. we used a metric, eyeball hours, the number of hours that a human pieball would spend looking at your monitor. wired announced 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 came up with the word attention economy is when we start today seeing the diagnoses of attention deficit disorder and the prescription for getting people to pay better attention to these websites, where i started to write, well, i wonder if a shortened attention span might be a defense mechanism where they have sticky websites and using every tool in their disposal. there's a division at stanford called captology and human

behavior. 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 made. right? so, the mindset is a silicon valley belief that with more tech and more money they can solve for anyone. it's a 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. it's your own ip. it's without precedence. it's an urge to kind of neutralize the unknown by dominating it and deand mating it. and when you hear about self-sovereignty and progress and increasing choice. somehow starting over. you know, there's a-- it's funny, there's a place in california where a bunch of the tech bros want to build a new

perfect city that's renewable and uses the best energy and has computerized stacks for education and religion and traffic and autonomous-- 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 ex-nilo, from scratch. colonizers words pretend there's no humans there and start over completely. 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 then them as sort of one level above. mark zuckerberg wants to go to

the metaverse, and peter thiel, one level, one order of magnitude above everybody else. one wants to go to mars. that's really the mindset, it peaks in this almost eugenic idea called affective al truism. it's okay to be kind of an awful person now as long as you give some of the money back. and it's a utilitarianism on digital psychedelic steroids where they believe and 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. 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. let's just invest in our bit coin. let the people die and get the rockets to the next planets.

it's ignoring the presence. i have much more faith in the reality of the present. the eight billion alive today who actually matter. and then we would make very different decisions if we thought the people alive today are what matter rather than the robots in the fantasy future. >> for a lot more on the mindset, the book, it's douglas rushkoff's latest books, fiction and nonfiction as well and we're talking about them in depth this month. 202-748-8200 for those living in the eastern and central time zones. 202-748-8201 in the mountain or pacific time zones. if 202-748-8903 to send a text. please include your name and where you're from and also on social media it's @book tv on

our social media platforms. go ahead and send your questions in and 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, the concept of team human? >> the concept of team human came up a long time ago i was on a panel with a brilliant guy, one of the chief scientists at google. and he was telling the story about how evolution is really a matter of information finding more complex homes. so information like the atom, then the molecule and the one cell organism and human culture. 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 these binary logics may never have. human beings can live in the in between space and between the yes and the no. and can sustain paradox without the need to resolve it, without an answer one to another. a problem 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. what is that? 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 like it's an act of hubris. okay, fine. guilty. i'm on team human. that's when the term came up for me. i'm on team human, guilty. i'm going to fight for the right of 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 emporer, the zuckerberg who thinks of himself as augustus caesar over lord of everyone.

no, being human is a team sport. it's not the survival of the fittest, read the book, page after page, marvelling the way that species collaborate and cooperate tosy sure mutual survival within the species and as an intra-species coordination. if human beings are-- arguably we're not, if humans are the most evolved species, it's because we've evolved the complex methods of collaborating and cooperating with each other. a lot of them are very subtle. when you're in real life with another human being, you see whether their pupils are larger or smaller are they taking you in or rejecting you. is their breathing synchronizing with you. or making the micro-nod motions with your head or micro-negative motions.

you can't see any of this on zoom, skype or a tech message. so 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 brain to fire, or oxytocin in our blood. you can't help, but be suspicious of them. online the reverse effect in your body. your body says wait a minute, ne they say they agree with me, but i didn't get it in my body. team human is saying, wait a minute, we've got to reemploy and retrieve these great mems for working and being together. it's almost like putting the social back into socialism. i don't care about the ism, but 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 emerging technology fits into team human. this is mark zuckerberg from the meta connect 2023 event this week, previewing upcoming ai and artificial intelligence technologies. here is one of those technologies that he showed off. >> our industry over the coming decades. how do we unify the experiences. the physical that we have with this vibrant digital world to create something more coherent and anything better than we have today. now, in the future i think not too far from now you're going to walk into a room and there are going to be, as many who will grams of digital things for you to interact with as there are physical objects. think about all the things that are physically there that don't need to be physical things, the

paper, the media, the games, the art, your work station, any screen. all of these interactive holograms. 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're going to be there physically with some of your friends and others will be there digitally as avatars, halograms and feel just as present as anyone else. or you know, you'll walk into a meeting and you'll sit down at a table and you know, you'll be there with your-- there will be people there physically and digitally as halograms and sitting around the table with you are ai's embodied as halograms to help you get different stuff done, too. >> mr. rushkoff on that technology that he previewed. >> well, the interesting thing the word unify. the object of the game for him is to unify digital and digital

colonizing the world that we're in and unification that may be the problem. for me when he describes being, you know, hanging out with your friend and some of them are virtual, that makes me feel sad compared to when he says you can be in a meeting and some of the people in the meeting are virtual. that, i'm like, who cares, interesting, right? so for me, the technologies are really great for increasing our utility value, which i understand, since the industrial age, people have been measured in terms of their utility value. how much 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 real life, even if it seems easier on the surface, it never actually is. he says all of this stuff, all of these things that don't need to be physical things. well, 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 halograph virtual machine in into the room you have to send kids in the mines to get the rare earth minerals. and cobalt out and pollution in. silicon wafers and energy and solar panels throughout the wazoo. what he's describing is not less physical matter being used, but more physical matter being used to deny the human beings of the physical presence. the avatar is a great substitute. grandmas in the netherlands and the baby is in cleveland.

they can see each other. and that's beautiful, right? and someone is stuck in a hospital bed or is a paraplegic and now can have a virtual experience together, and a picnic they weren't able to get that, that's beautiful. but for people who can actually be together, the complexity of human relationship, the complexity of, say, just imagine the complexity of a mother nursing the baby, right? so we could get a virtual bottle and a virtual mother so she could be at work and-- you're going to be missing something and it's the virtual baby missing something from the virtually nursing baby is missing something from the mother then i would argue i'm missing something if you're not at my house watching the game with you, but it's your avatar on the couch watching the game, it's not the same. 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 we 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. i mean, and it's uncomfortable, right? you meet someone on the street. hey, doug, how are you? if i had the ray ban glasses, oh, that's doris, who is doris. door doris is the person-- you met in 1993. at the they will tell me the things and i will fake rapport with someone i didn't know. almost a dishonest relationship in my world. what really matters that i remembered that person's name and where-- if it was a sales connect, again, business then it's good we used to have constant contact and data bases and

someone calls you, the profile goes up. oh, how is your wife mabel, you know that because it came up on the computer screen. great, it's a fake business relationship trying to sell mattresses to macy's, but in the real world with this 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 i'm going to pick a restaurant. who paid to be in mark zuckerberg's world? the restaurant that didn't, pan that might be the best pizza restaurant on the block. >> and we're looking at plenty of calls for you, sir. this is jim in california. it's good morning still in

california. you're on with douglas rushkoff. jim, are you with us? threaten we'll try michael in broward county, florida. jim, hang on the line and we'll try to get to you. michael, go ahead. we'll work on those calls. let's try one more being i think we have julie on the line minneapolis, minnesota, like i said a lot of calls for you rotating if they're not there. julie minneapolis, go ahead. >> hi, i'm here and i'm glad to be here. i've heard, you know, i've heard mr. rushkoff say a number of things and they've fired me up. you, sir, are passionate, you're insightful, you have a great many opinions, 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. now, 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 something about we had an opportunity to take control of the digital age and instead we ceded it to business much as our universities ceded education to business. how do we retract that and say, no, we want it back. we're capable of doing this? >> julie, thanks for the call. yeah, it's great. that's really where i'm at, too, asking precisely that question. i think the first thing that 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 way the tech bros think of it. how do we get people to do this, 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 influence and change people? because i know how people would be better if they're doing this instead of that. so i 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 be a welcome, really, to socialize and care for each other and nurture each other and rather than compete with each other and 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. the first one, i'm calling it denaturalized power, but all i'm trying to do is help people recognize how many things in our world are social constructions and not conditions of nature. anything. money. these bills, this is not money, this is paper that we used to represent money in our society. when i go on cnn and i ask about ai and the unemployment problem. well, exactly why is unemployment a problem? when was employment invented, what was it for? what was the difference between people and work, and small businesses and forced to start doing wage labor instead of the kind of work that they used to do. so, it's really just challenging these underlying

assumptions how things work. the second one, which is triggering agency. i'm trying to help people feel like they got more agency. more authority over what they're doing. 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? and the third one, if we're going to do that, once you have agency and you want to change things, you need other people. the third one was to resocialize people, to help people feel less afraid of each other, and 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, go to the home depot, buy a

minimum product drill and leave it and it won't recharge. what have you done? you throw it away. you send a kid into the save for the rare earth metal and used it ones and you've traded this carbon and throw it away and then it's sitting on a toxic waste heap where the kid is looking inside it. where what you could have done is walked down the block and knocked on bob's door and say, bob, can i borrow your drill. why are we so scared, we're going to owe something to bob because you have a barbecue, and if bob sees it you have the drill and expect you over. maybe you want bob there. if bob comes over the other neighbors are going to smell it. why did he invite bob not us? worse case you have a block-wide barbecue party. that's the nightmare. we ever to look at kind of why that is, and the last thing i

was looking at, it's kind of cultivating awe. it's really, what is that party and why are we so resistant to it? why are we resistant to the state of awe. when you have a state of awe, whether looking at a canyon or having a party with other people. you experience the world is bigger than yourself and it ends up having a response in your body, your immune system gets better and generous for days later. the experience of awe seems to be a natural important participant of human health and you don't get it with the vr goggles, you get it in communion with other people or nature or the expansiveness of reality. i'm looking at those, how do we help people feel less encumbered, less locked into 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. the first person to call in when we opened up the phone lines. thanks for waiting. >> thank you so much for taking my call. mr. rushkoff, my question is totally different than what you've been going on, but i see in your resume' that you went to hollywood, you were an 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 just like your comments on that, if you could, and your thoughts on movies today. your thoughts on movies in the past, the directors and movies that influenced you when you were younger. it's an area i'm veried from-- it's an area i'm very interested in, i'm a movie

buff. >> for real, you have novelists on. i was a theater director from the time i was 11 or 12 years old. i directed plays in junior high school, all the plays in high school. theater i went to princeton and did english and theater and cal arts and did theater and while i was at cal arts, i was going to drive across country. i was driving cross country with my best friend and he fell asleep at the wheel and we hit a tree and he was impaled and died. i haven't told this story publicly, book tv welcome. he died next to me and all of a sudden i was like, theater is so ethereal, it's a thing you had to be there. and i'm going to do films. the existential moment i'm going to do film because it's going to stay and be there, after i die, after these things. and so then i took film with sandy mchenry, sweet smell of

success, man in the white suit. james mangold did the wolverine movie, ford versus ferrari, a great director we worked there a lot. i making films and then like theater, jim, vin vendors, verner, bob fosse's cabaret and lenny, so, i liked -- my dinner with andre. right? so i liked kind of theater films, and that anthony gregory did. and i liked theatrical film and then, yeah, and then i got that brian depalma apprentice gig and i'm going to be his apprentice on a big movie and at the time it was like $50 million on a movie that was not thought out and it was a thin satire and 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 be a production of three penny opera and the cheapest seat was going to be 40 bucks. kind of a narco, kind of marxist, san francisco lefty mind thinker not going to pay $40 for the cheapest seat of three penny opera. i turned to the internet thinking the internet was going to be the people's medium. i want to get away from that commercial theater and go 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 movie i would say are the best, i mean, maybe i'm typical, but you know, kubrick and lynch have-- do things in movies that are--

kubrick do something in movies that is beyond what people realize is quite happening. you know, these-- he makes movies that are all about inviting multiple interpretation. it's as if the movie has a plot, but it doesn't 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, they are as much about yourself as the movie and i like what he does. i like 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 question. 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, that 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, but it works more like that it has a mythic level of experimental value, but what it means to you could be different every time you go through it. >> thanks for sharing that story about your friend and the accident. for viewers who don't know, you have a podcast over 300 episodes, team human podcasts and a book and why you haven't

shared that story publicly before? >> i don't know, when you share a story about the death of your friend, it feels a little like it's begging for sympathy, you know. and it's like a cheap shot, oh, you know, you're 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, there's back from my theater days, there was sense memory and if you have a scene where you have to cry or be upset or wherever it is in a play, what you do, you recall when you had a similar emotion and then think about that in order to activate that emotion in the scene. at least in the reversals, and i remember our teacher told us there's a rule it has to be from at least six years ago,

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

you know, whatever book you're reading, you know what i mean? it's a different thing than remote control media. so i kind of felt it was both safer and more appropriate to bring up the processing of trauma for people who write. for people who write and people who read. >> let me chart with more of those book people plenty waiting to chat with you. again in california, oscar, you're on with douglas rushkoff. >> hi. get to the question i want to ask. thank you for your books, by the way, as you know, they're great. how can we get -- how can we get this-- take an aspect of-- you have a way of expression how you know, there's a big picture. a big picture of things going on and it's great because i

like to take an aspect of that, for example, like capitalism, okay? capitalism, i mean, it's done a lot of great things, but a lot of people use it as a self-defining term, practically. granted it put us on the map, but you know, it-- how could you use like-- i believe that capitalism is great, it did a lot of good things, but people just strongly, you know, side with it, but they don't, they don't see how-- i've often believed that capitalism unchecked starts going bad and starts to do some damage like the big corporations and things like that. >> well, let's pick up on that, because that's a theme of several of mr. rushkoff's books.

>> for sure, the first book i wrote on capitalism, life, inc., how the world became a corporation and that got me on the colbert show, that's something in itself. i was looking at where does capitalism come from? where did the corporation come from? where did central currency come back and traced it back to the late middle ages. there was a growth of peer-to-peer economy, after the crusades, there's the marketplace that they learned to do from the bazaar and people were trading and they had a new middle class and women were taller at anytime than the late middle ages in that market than they were until the 1980's in england. it was a really successful thing, but the aristocracy got poorer as the middle class got wealthy. they came up with ideas, central currency, you're not allowed to have a transaction

unless you borrow money from the central, and the economy has to grow just to stay the same. it worked fine for colonialism. as long as there are new places and growing faster and faster, that works. the second one which i alluded to earlier, was the chartered monopoly, you're not allowed to do business in a particular industry unless you have a charter from the king. you had to have a monopoly charter to make shoes and everyone else who was a shoemaker had to be an employee for the shoe company. and that's come down to us today as corporate capitalism without question. even a nice president like biden, we need the economy to grow 3% every year. what does that have to do with feeding people. nothing. in some ways it's the opposite.

it's about balance sheets. it favors increasingly abstract economic instruments, it's why derivatives are valued more than stocks. this sort of 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 a sec. the new york stock exchange, abstraction of real market, which you could argue is an abstraction of the exchange of actual human need was consumed by its own abstracts. and tech billionaires who are looking at what's the next level of abstraction. we could think of the ai craze and digital craze, how do i go meta. how do i 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, right? this is jack welch, general electric style capitalism, he's the guy when he was head of ge he realized one day, hey, i make less money making and selling a washington machine to you than i do lending you the money to buy the washing machine. that's when he sold the productive aspects of ge and turned it into a financial services company. and it worked well until 2007-8 when the financial crisis happened and they had no more productive assets, but that's the tendency, you're right, that's the tendency of capitalism and why it works great to a point. it worked great for colonial empires and who are the people they're enslaving and what land

is taken away and dispossessing and labor and all that. and it still can work and there's more billion dollar forms of capitalism that we could use, but when i tell that story about the drill to people and i say, look, if everybody on the block, what if we're borrowing drills from one another, one or two lawn mowers on the block instead of every house having a lawn mower and we share the lawn mower because you only need it one or two hours a week and you don't have to spend as much money. someone invariably stands up at the end what about the lawn mower company, the people who work there, stock shares in retirement plan for the lawn mower company what do you do about them that's if, if i'm allowed to say it, backwardness of our society rather than the economy something that's

supposed to serve us, rather than us supposed to serve the economy. >> we're about an hour into our two-hour in depth interview with douglas rushkoff this morning. and a question coming from pearl city, hawaii, a good question halfway through our interview from kim. do we exist within a simulation and what tests could we devise to prove or disprove it? >> if we don't live in a digital simulation by, you know, 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, right? there's something else going on here. so one way or another we live in a simulation because we don't even see what's going on. look back at phenomenonology and all, we have sensory organs trying to create a picture of what's going on here, but that's all we get anyway, right? we are just sensory organs trying to process based on what we see. so, i don't think it reallily, finally, the question doesn't matter, but, no, i don't believe we are in you know, like in west world, one of the a million simulations that are being run by someone to figure out, you know, how society works. if we are iterating i would

think it's closer to karmic of civilizations over time than running simulation. >> on the sensory experience, a minute ago you were talking about the importance of experience of awe. and i want to go to your 1999 book, coercion, the experience of awe and spectacle and how you define spectacle. >> 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 a crowd and many of the features of awe are leveraged for a purpose. you know, so there's in between, right? like walking into a great cathedral, as a catholic person

and doing mass, and it's sort after combination, right? there was some architect dude who made this inspiration machine, you know, with the organ and the lights and the stained glass and the arches and all to generate an experience of awe. you go to a rave and they put the lights and the music at 120 beats a second and beautiful young people around dancing half dressed and all, you know, like as seen in the matrix, the rave that they have. there's in between, but for me, spectacle is really less about inviting true participation and more about stoking the rage of a crowd against a unified enemy. so in that the jets game, it's like, oh, well, the dolphins, let's get the dolphins, and then you can use that to sell

airline tickets, to sell steaks from outback. to do whatever you want. you take that war-like rage enthusiasm thing or against a particular racial group or whatever it might be, or against democrats or whoever. so secretary so spectacle for me is a more designed experience in order to focus the energy of the crowd onto a flamed enemy in most cases whereas awe is more about kind of breaking people out of their trap, the trap of the illusion of individuality and letting them experience themselves as part of something much, much larger. ... r.

do not mean that large thing for them. when i was playing, i was calling it seems human because it seems open enough that any person -- it is not team humanlike it's not keen humanlike against team squirrel, right? against team tree. it's just keen human as this, this is a way we experience our perspective on nature and everything else. so from coercion this sentence, thk of any great spectacle that's having three main facts. first, unify the crowd. second, stoke their passion, and third, speak at god or nature. help you understand that they're part of a bit more. >> well, speak as god or nature, you think of hitler speaking about himself as the father and all the people as his children,

or that you are, i mean it's interesting. i mean you look at, look at the twitter means that people like say elon musk of themselves within as gods. think about when even zuckerberg and must challenge ensure their to a mixed martial arts fight, as if they are kind of demagogues, that they inhabit silicon valley is like the mount olympus and now they're going to have a spectacle battle through media that we get to see the gods with each other. isaking as god or nature really just a defense, there's lot of, 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 connecteded to god. you are both universal and completely personal, where the person feels yoump are speaking just to them. there's apparently like a taylor swift has the ability to do that, right? but she's pretty benevolent about it. she's doing it with the message of empowerment and identification and all, but someone with her abilities could be doing it politically, could be doing it differently which is why again why i say we've got to be careful about how to get people to, like because then we are the same as those who are let's create a big rally were to get people to please and our god, or we get people to vote for our party or get people to

do this. there's that vulnerable moment that happens in the spectacle where people are like, oh, it's the same moment that happens when someone walks into one of the original shopping malls and you go, and they show it on tape and you can watch the videos of it. the person jaws open and eyes glaze over. it's at that moment that you can drop in really whatever you want, whatever brand, whatever party, whatever levitical ideology, whatever enemy. that's where, and you just see it. when they do that, they dropped it in and then they act as if and now we are meeting our destiny. now we are with the blood and the soil and the god, and 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 y listen to what they say, the cover of the 1999 book has a quote from senator bob casey on the front cover. remind folks who he was and why he ended up on the cover of your book. >> guest: bob kerrey, he was a senator from nebraska, right, who he actually lost his foot in the vietnam war, and he was kind of a presidential candidate and

then had kind of a scandal about a particular episode during the war, which still unclear exactly what happened but it was not good enough to cost him his bid there. but he was always nice to me and an artist and interesting, and he was actually the boyfriend of my neighbor when i lived in west village. back when you could live in the west village as a single barely working writer, you could get an apartment in the west village. she lived across the hall from me and he was her boyfriends i got to hang out with him a little bit and asked if he would do a blurb for the book. he did. he did a really funny one. his nobler originally, it wouldn't accept it at dr. ford's, was read this, or else. which is like perfect like the book is called coercion. get it? read it or else, what ended up on the cover is an affordable, americans are unaware of the power of words to intentionally

mislead the reader, listener or fewer. read this book and nobody gets hurt. >> guest: that's good. at least, they 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 and help them kind of build up, they built this big building kind of absorbed parsons and a bunch of things. he was controversial but very useful figure in bringing that place to its current standing. >> host: plenty of color still waiting. michael, broward county, florida. florida. you were on with douglas rushkoff. >> caller: yes. -- culture is biology and social contagion. in chatting with chatgpt the other day i discovered in trying to get some information about our governor desantis, that he's doinge exactly what the

santa's doing, check this out,, because it's basically just a semantics agent. it admits to the fact the responses it provides and the reason it is programmed that way is for the same reasons, he wants to avoid things that are potentially negative, say things that are just positive. what i'm talking about is if you look into anything having to do with racism or misogyny or homophobia, that's one thing i think you'll start a fad. people will be, you could say one thing and say the other and it would blow up. doesn't you i guess you're right. but here's a really exciting thing, your friends are rich. tell about success ptsd where it changes your brain, just like trauma does so to wreck an exact same way to be more -- reacting. there brains are causing a lot of what you're discussing which is interesting because herbert spencer started that in the 1860s which is like 30% of our

kids can't read because we teach it that way even if 100% of them can't read, we verify the medically that they can read but we teach to, not prevent the bell curve. as a start to catch the hair on the rabbit like on a pretend greyhound track we make sure we achieve a 30% failure and the state department has done for 50 years, they've done randomized education tests country to country. we have never had more than 30%. >> host: to break up a lot of topics here. let me let douglas rushkoff jumping up with 20 what to talk about? >> guest: i would say the embracing feature of this is sort of applying industrial age logic to our many social institutions. whatever metric you put on the wall is the 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 in this kit today, recorded teach att kid long division. and without anyio understandingf what's going on in that kids house? kids mother is moving from shelter to shelter and the father is a drunk and not even there and the kid is tied to contend with that. how do i take care of my mother? a challenge with that kid, the life challenge that kid eating with and that what the child needs to learn at that moment 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 education, not just education system but everything system. when we decided, in the thatcher era there's his famous story about how when you are trying to use incentives to get hospital to perform better, they said they would give moree money to

hospitals that reduced the amount of time peopleos spent in the emergency roomou waiting ro, and for them to get into beds as quickly as possible. so what they did, emergency room did was they took the wheels off the gurneys in order to call them beds. they lined the hallways with the gurneys, put people in those and declared them being in the room. but the time and energy it took to do that actually slowed the rate at which people got medical care. so in order to win the metric, the ended up reversing the thing. what i hear in, what i hear in this college concern is the way that we kind of -- caller's concern, oversimplify the whatever it is the thing we might actually want to accomplish.e

they kind bigger and more convoluted the bureaucracies get, very often the harder and harder it is to get back down to what it is that we want. the same with, , chatgpt fsoc, people have to realize i'm sure most of the 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 nothe being useds much. all the screaming media companies are not being watched as much because we're going outside. they need another thing. chatgpt is really just an advanced search engine right now. that's all were looking at. it takes your google results, kinds of -- kind of pushes them into something looks more like human speech, but it's wrong most of the time. it's not actually correct. it's just reverting everything

to the mean. it's's looking what's the most average answer to that question? and that doesn't offend anybody or doesn't say anything controversial or upsetting. so what's wrong and it's self-centered. so what 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: out to the beehive state next come ruth, st. george, utah, good morning. >> caller: i have a couple of points to go back to some of the things you would talk about earlier in the conversation. first, i have been, it's been a little over two h years and longtime 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. i don't care, low kids, teenage kids, adults, professionals, i want to seeen people trying and delivering something essential. it's great for my soul. >> host: ruth, thanks for that. try to now. i mean,. >> guest: i mean, i've been blessed to even drive through utah a few times. and 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 a rock for five minutes. it's the trickiest most, boy,

talk about off. yeah, utah, some parts of new mexico do that, too. it's amazing butpa yeah, it's s, the thing that amazes me about our state of disconnection is how quickly you reconnect. recalibrating to reality is almost instantaneous. if you don't have nature like she's describing, real world, 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 reconnection almost instantly. so it's interesting, for how long it took to the calibrate as come how much technology, how much engineering, how many billions or trillions of dollars were spent to get us in this all needte where we the ssris and you need to get

an app in order to cure you from app that you just use, you didn't get around this app and the meditation app to get you over the facebook app for the snapchat app. you just, you touch ground, put your feet on the ground and look at anothernd person. look at the shore, look at a cliff, brief any force, you know? look in the eyes of your dog or cat even. you get so quickly, it's so accessible, even in the force flyer haze that we're looking at today on the east coast. -- forest fire haze. so accessible that when i have hope inop the future, it's how quickly these bonds, the systems, quickly they restore when you give them half a chance. >> host: you were talking about creation a minutee ago. when you're creating your writing, i'm not tight but the podcasts and 80 views 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 bucks? >> guest: i i mean, i tend too about it the same way, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is i write notecards. i have ideas on notecards. i end up putting them on the wall, and what are called slugs, content areas and then content areas can you take into chapters, and then i ordered them so that each chapter flows as a kind of little structure. because of that i need to have a place where the book happens, you know, , a room, and office. because the book ends up being

kind of physically represented with the notecards, and i get so many years of experience with the notecards that i know how muchen 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 semanticall semantically. >> host: are the in that room with you right now? i guest: yeah, although haven't -- i wrote the end of survival of the riches in here. i have rearranged it since but the wall, my bookcase while was the wall where the book was written. and then i been trying to use a program that looks like notecards as a substitute and it doesn't quite organize the same way. i've got to feel the book as, i had to be kind of an physical

relationship to the ideas of the book. it's a bit like a chapel of memory or something because i know okay, these ideas are here and then it sort of in my head, it's located there in that chapter exact look at any book of the chapter and remember where the chapter was in the room where i was writing it from a chapel of memories. what was the hardest book for you to write? >> guest: interesting. this last book came right up because that has a memoir quality, all the stories in it. that's what agent told me or the best part of your book is up the rhetoric. it's a strict kind of telling all these kind of ridiculous fun stories about my experiences with these crazy billionaire people and their antics. so that when kind of came right out. the most researched book was "life inc." because of early look at, went to the yale library, looked at that each indian trading copy, charters.

that was pretty intense but the hardest? the hardest one was probably a graphic novel called alastair and adolf. and it's about the real but in my case somewhat fictionalized a cold war between alastair crowd crowley and adolf hitler at the end of world war ii. and three, the first three artists who are hired to work on the book, i do the writing, they do the art, they all had major life catastrophes, like illness and suicides and really awful, awful things. i was starting to get scared that you write about someone like alastair crowley and then there'se like, like bad juju in their order something dangerous happening. so i got really scared when i was writing that, that i was like touching energies that i shouldn't. and it was really i hard to do o

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. >> host: about 35 minutes left with douglas rushkoff. this is marshall, houston, texas. thanks awaiting. >> caller: thanks to -- think you very much. i'm interested in your role with research, particularly "life inc." book that you talked about.t. how muchh of the research and writing to the overlap each other? how much do youou need to do before you start writing? and also your role with agents. thank you very much try to my role with agents, like literary agents? >> caller: yes. >> guest: okay. so with "life inc." i like to

have all the research done before i start writing. tart wri. i will do a little bit of research to get to the stage, and the proposal is usually something that turns into a version of the introduction to the book. we would call it the research question. where did the corporation come from? how did they become the religion of our society? what can we do about it? i have done enough research to know. i was going to figure it out, but i do not know when i wrote the proposal that i would find the nature of the deal between the monarchs and the first charter monopoly, and what that was, and how it work.

i discovered things that were not understood before. that was real research, but once the research was done, i made my outline on the wall. i could see occasionally there would be a blank area. my process is, once i get that outline done, the only way i get through the book is going straight through you, and i justified it. i am digging the whole tunnel until i get to the light at the other end of the mind, and i have to go straight through it. the reader is going to have to go straight through it. i do not look back. if i look back, i have tried

that, retry to rewrite the book. the end of the book -- it is like combing someone with really long hair. you end up different at the front, if you have not gotten all the way down. i get to the end of the book and then i added. the only thing we hear that may happen, i realize it is much bigger. this is actually two chapters. occasionally, i will do research and say, i need to understand the story. i need to get more justification .

i either drop it or i tell the story in a different way. our relationship with agents is that we have a bunch of them. i started because i had written a screenplay. the screenplay had agent. the first literary agent through the back door and ended up doing -- i thought they had dropped me. the first agent was like, wait a minute. i got sued and had to give a bunch of money to this land and that one. seven i was with this agent and

that agent had a lot of issues. he was stealing money from a bunch of people. i went to william morris. my agent left morris. i stayed in the next agent wasn't so good, so i went with a science agent, who is a great literary agent. they ended up having an epstein association that i thought they were not fully acknowledging. i wanted to do more hollywood aims at that point. that agency -- i wanted to get things on the screen, so i ended up at the agency. i do not talk to my agent there that much, but she is really good. she is the one who told me, do not write another book like this.

reaching these people and say people again and again and again with these more polemic things. if you wantea to reach people yu got to tell stories. if i want to do nonfiction, tell nonfiction stories but at least tell stories in the literary medium, stories is how you engage, that's the narrative arc. that's what it 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. right? not just adding value to the distribution and the cover and the sales ofhe the book, but the editor should be my partner in, it's like a play. they really are the first audience. and boy, my editor tom mayer at norton witches were ended up as my publisher, i'm not going to

leave him unless god knows what happens. but no, use one who told me to write this book. he had read a couple of articles that i'd written doing stuff on medium and some of the articles were doing well and it did this article on the survival of the richest about these five billionaires i met who wanted advice on how to get out their doomsday bunkers and thatt article was that done really well. a year or two later i wrote about the covid crisis, how it felt like a lot of people were retreating animals adopting that billionaire mindset that inad going to retreat into the house with my 60-inch tv and my oculus glasses and get a private tutor and i can make this work out on the hamptons. i wrote that piece and that's when he called the exit doug, this is your next book, your to do this. i call the agent and i said this, the editor, should i do this? if you can do it in stories, you know, which was her thing, then sure, do it. it was a book that came from the

editor to me. i was writing for an audience of one and he would write and say this chapter, , but what about this and what about that? and to beut at the place where, it's a strange place to be, it took me tot get all to do it where i see the notes and critiques from the editor as gifts rather than as work, as ways to get in, plus if i trust him. as oh, my gosh this is helping me make this better. he is making me a better writer, to give up both the fear and the hubris to think some else doesn't know better than you is, or least as well as you, was really really, really good for me. so yeah, look at all these people as my partners in crime here. boy, feel so much better to come up with the book you know your people are a part of. it's a group project here so it just, and, of course, it's my whole team human thing that i'm finally living it.

>> host: if you want that story of meeting with the tech naires worried about their bunker itself douglas rushkoff began survival of the richest, gait and is at the tech billionaires come his latest book, 20 books over the past 30 years also a professor of media theory and digital economics at queens college in new york. we will go to new york. mike is waiting in new york. you were on with douglas rushkoff. >> caller: good afternoon. i have a question for the professor in terms of individual human nature. why has wherever it's been tried, , communism and socialism throughout the world, it's just been very ineffective and basically a miserable failure? but in terms of the self-appointed elite, tech billionaires, and so forth, i just want people to understand what complete hypocrites these people are zuckerberg, soros, gates, all the rest of them.

they are surrounded by highly trained armed bodyguards, and yet stable advocate for -- in terms of defending themselves, i just want people to understand that, you know, these theoretical systems of government, they don't work. and the people say it hasn't really been tried to the full extent it should be. free-market capitalism by far has been the most effective, and the constitutional republic we live in an america, by far the most effective way to govern and live in terms of economics. these tech billionaires are really disgusting. they are just made in hypocrisy, the entire way they live versus average person in america. >> host: gotcher point.

>> guest: capitalism has worked as long as when we get to periods of extreme success, we have major reformation, right? big regulation. so yeah, when things spun out of control you get franklin delano roosevelt and a wpa and g.i. bills, and educationil bills. you reform the thing. that's when capitalism works best is when you do that. and then you ended up in a situation where the realize they had to wear income tax rate went up like 80 or 90% during that that time in order to kind of bailout was happening. when capitalism works too well, when you automate it you end up extracting so much value that you make the people around you

poor. when uber and facebook and google are doing well, you see tech villages, you know, living around them. they end- up destroying markets to what they're calling creative destruction but is actually destructive destruction. they are storing more money, and then sure, you get could had our mark zuckerberg's as i'm going to get m back 95% of my money back to the places that i took it out. like, dude, if you'd made facebook 95% less extracted you would have to be trying to shove your money back into the systems that you decimated, these ecosystems and societies. i would argue that communism and socialism, the reason why i would say they haven't worked as because they are trying to do these things at scale. 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, right? me borrowing a drill from the neighbor instead of buying one at home depot. is that a crime, or is it okay rex and i understand the perspective that it is occurring because even though i don't need a drill, if i don't buy the drill then how will home depot grow? how will black & decker grow? how will that -- it's my responsive as a citizen in 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, as the only way. so when i look at like

socialism, i'm talking how to put the social back into it and the sort of minimize the is him, right? when you talk about communism i like community. i don't know if i like ism. it's interesting, marx, this is where i think he went a little off or landing or trust or someone in china exercise marks. he's got this great track where he writes about like robinson caruso and that robinson caruso had all these little like it becausele he needed to maximize his own efficiency. we said okay, he needs this many fishin a week and you'll spend this much time fishing and this much time collecting water and this much time making rope swing has this. he has little ledger, and marx said if robinson crusoe did it for himself, what if we created a ledger for like the whole country? so we normally people need to do

this and that and this -- like dude, you can't plan out or going to end up with people on the line to get to space. it will not be enough. markets can be really good for figure out supply the net and all that, but they are really bad at figure out, like how do we share water. how do you deal with something like error, you know? how do you deal with things that are best orchestrated as as a commons. i don't mean communism. commons. 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 you 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 enoughfi air whatever it is for everybody to use. so some things, sure, let's make markets for the iphone to let's compete. let's have people invest in the

things they think are going to win. but a lot of stuff doesn't really work in terms of the sort of market sensibility. you need to create a scarcity of something in order for t the market to work around it, and it's much harder to do that with stuff that should release could be an abundance try . think what we need is a multifaceted, and ecology of economic models that are different depending on what it is that we trying to share together. >> host: about 20 minutes left in our discussion with douglas rushkoff on india. when the question would always ask her authors who come on "in depth" is her favorite books and also their books that the reading right now. here's what douglas rushkoff said to bot qstions. on favorite books robert wilson's cosmic trigger. john kennedy toole pulitzer prize winner confederacy. lewis mumford, techniques and

civilization. the torah. virginia woolf to the lighthouse, and ain terms of wht he's calmly reading, and times, and breaking together. which one or two of those books you want to talk about in the context of this discussion we d are having today? >> guest: well, i really talked about that so we got one out of thebo way. robert wilson's 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 writer and prankster and trickster. he was responsible for partly responsible for the church of discord you where every member is a a pope. it was sort of the early 1960s style of intentional disinformation that was being used to kind of promote that abbie hoffman radical hippie

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

to be able to tolerate not know it come to be able to tolerate that there's all these different perspectives, really does t shid you from the same kinds of people that use skeptical to gain power, , use confusion and conspiracy and unknown and as ways of gaining power as well. i feel like a lot of these poor kids, sort of the gamer geek boys who are then scooped into this kind of radical right mean wars ended up kind of being the victims of their imagination 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 to come what's not to? is everythingwh true? is nothing true? how to get together cited that. he was really good at that. the other one is the book i just

finished it last night is peter's book which is called dasher what was ellen called again? >> host: and at times elites in the path of disintegration. >> guest: it was really, whatat the book does in a really interesting and rigorous way, and it was nice to feel wrong. i love to be wrong and to get corrected. is that when these kind of revolution. things happen, when civilizations breakdown, it's not because the rich have so rich a poor counsel for that the poor revt. that's why that is happening. if it gets worse, the division of worse, wealth gets worse and submit people in the tent villages then they will revolt. no, that's not what happens to what happens is that actually it's the creation of too many elites. not that there's millions of elites but they're so many elites that there's not enough for the elites to all be elite.

and they start competing with each other and that's what breaks things down. when there's too many elites. and i'm sure any of the source or like anger at coastal elites of allah, there is too many calls to elites. there's for all these coastal elites to compete. there's not enough, there's lot the billionaires. oddly enough and this is research in doing for a guardian piece doing now, i thought that like basis and musk and secular, it took the top five billionaires today, that they had more total wealth than like the five billionaires of jpmorgan and carnegie and those guys. they actually have less wealth, the top five versus at top five. >> host: in dollars or percentage of the economy tragedy 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 company, , is still a tiny number of people compared to the whole population, but it's spread out to a wider bunch of billionaires who are now all competing with each other for the scraps, the scraps of billions and that sort of what breaks things down from what to minneapolis, minnesota, this is steve v and emailed question. to what extent do you think america's suicidal tendency to be less present is contributing to increased emotional and anxiety trends? >> guest: tremendously and totally and maybe it's a 99.9% of it. it's funny, when you have a lot of us are based as kids who have one kind of sensory or nervous disorder of another, whether it's add or spectrum sensory processing or too much o cortisl or whatever it is, that they're not calibrating. 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 t ideal is there little enough and that still appropriate but being with people, being on a team, being copresent, co-location. it's the surest way to calibrate, come to gain mental health. when you think about, if you think that our society as like addicted to technology and addicted to money and addicted to crazy stuff, this idea that it's one more thing and then, then i will try to do good for the world or i just did another $1000 and makeup then i can start behaving ethically. if we are addicts and we need the 12 step program, we need the equivalent of our collects anonymous for our addiction to these crazy things, what's the first thing to do? yuko and a a room with other

people, right? you don't do, 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 these others. that's up on the back of my book team human, find the others and be with them.m. absolutely. our lack of presence with each other that's making it harder for us to calibrate naturally, and make us actually more distrustful of each other. you're looking on twitter, you know, you can't ever feel the positive, not truly. you can get a dopamine hit. someone retweeted me, somewhat like my tweet, i get a hit of dopamine but you don't get oxytocin. which is the actual bonding hormone. you don't get, you have an organic experience of camaraderie, of fellowship, of community. not to call it even communism. you don't have that. you don't feel part of the group

pickets a very different kind of, it's much more like spectacle. we all agree we all look at this persons tweet come with all given the thumbs up because they have told us who the enemy is because they are mad at biden, they're mad at the u.s. they are mad at russia. we all do that. that's not the same thing. that's not the same internal state and it doesn't, no, it leads to come we see all the data. the kids who are on twitter and instagram instep jet and all those things, instead of live copresent with one another are suffering terribly fromsu everything from anorexia to tourette's, to a new tiktok acquired tourette's which is sort of magnetic kind of pseudo-tourette's, but it's a symptom they are cutting, the killing themselves.

this is how it's become a health crisis, and the thing is you don't solve it with another app that then the wellness app. you solve it with good old-fashioned i i sound like n old person but it shouldn't be considered nostalgic copresent, touch, being with other people is i think it should always stay in fashion. >> host: for book resuming a social media presence, do you tweet? are you on facebook? do you tiktok? >> guest: 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 to participate back when it was a little bit more of the conversation, but now i will tweet come like i'm going to be on c-span booktv today.

and if i get 50 likes for that, and 30 of them are from bots pretended to be sex workers come there's this new kind of bought outdi there that it's like thers some kind of a scam and a gaseous post to want to hire them as either virtual or real strippers of some kind or sex workers, what's the point? it's like such a little cesspool of crap, and is so aggravating. and did see the kinds of conversations that are engendered there, that i don't, i don't even want to do that. i post on t linked in which is little bit less that way. it's a bit more professional something but no, i don't have a social media presence. i don't to social media activity. i have a blue sky account i haven't used yet. i have a mastodon account which is better because it's kind of a federated version of a twitter that i would use but i'm not

finding a real need for it. i get so much e-mail that servicing the e-mail feels like as much time as want to spend looking at the screen. i'm just learning meeting my neighbors and funny at the about my count and who is here. there's only so much life left. i'm an adult or i just don't want to spend it there. >> host: i i want to read when you publicly quoted facebook in the thick with facebook you want to call aboutui on cnn. n you both facebook has never bn merely a n social platform. rather, and exploits are social interaction the way a tupperware party does. facebook does not exist to help us make friends but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activity over time, are social graphs into a commodity for others too exploi. >> guest: right. they would sell them. they would sell our social grasp it when i wrote that was a time when facebook decided that they

could use you to advertise to your people, whether not you wanted it or not. so what's like if you said i'm a starbucks today, they might broadcast that for money to your friends but everyone who follows you, and more. look, douglas rushkoff like starbucks, whether you enter or not, like gee, it was going crazy. but it got worse than that. the real function of facebook now is to take your past behavior, use to put you in a statistical bucket, predict which are likely to do in the future and then make sure that you do that. so if facebook looks at your past activity and decides to its algorithms that you are 80% likely to go on on a diet ine next two weeks, your newsfeed what get filled with stories like him all, what happens if you're too fat? or if you eat bad thing, what's

going on in your bloodstream at all. they are not doing that in order to sell you a specific diet product. what they are doing that for is to get that 80% accuracy up to 90% or 95%. those messages are directed at the 20% of people who are going to choose to do something else, who were going to do something that was inconsistent with thehe statistical profile. so the function of facebook and his other social networks in that regard is to autotune humanity to take the 20% who were going to do some novel, strange, wonderful, weird human things were going to be less predictable, linus likes out with them predicted them to be and reduce that down. you do what any people doing the weird thing. it's basically auto tuning the soul, the weirdness, the independents out of humanity. and that's not in a vibrant you to be spending time in. >> host: we have about five

minutes left in her conversation. did want to read this from another view into wife, carla, is thanks for sharing your insight. brilliant as a yoga therapist, actor, lover of his family which i do see the repetitive nature of humans and agree come just stopping of breathing with another human has profound powers. humans are disconnected from each other and themselves. how do you recommend we begin a world hate healing? >> guest: that's weird. you know, i do yoga. people, turn off the tv, he's one of them. i do yoga like 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 of the people don't really want to go back to life in the room, so it's become zoom yoga. it's like, a few months ago i did a zoom yoga, actually turn

off the thing and no reason, i started crying afterwards. i was just like, this sucks. this so sucks. it's like yes, i'm glad to move my body in that way and your voice and no but that wasn't, i was, didn't realize i was doing yoga partly to be in the room with the other people doing it. and yes to breathe the breadth and smell the smells and hear their creeks other knees and popping or whatever. but to be an a room with other people, and that that was gone. maybe i've got to find come she's according to come i want to find another, i want to be in a room with other people. even if it's not come to be as good of what to be around other people. gosh, it's great that we have had to back hawaii calls. i've always had a spiritual thing about hawaii. it's to find the others is the whole, that's my whole purpose.

what i want to do is with what i've got left is connect with other people. >> host: with about the two and half minutes we have left you mention finding the others is the last words of your book, teen human. just a page or two before you write this and we start our conversation to about humanist and present test versus futurist. the right to future is less a noun than ever. it's the thing that we do. i want to end with that come with your thoughts on that. >> guest: what offended you, it's all a bit god is a verb, which is a great book, too. the idea thatt the future, especially these tech pros and technologist template and institution was unable to look at the future as okay, we are going higher people in future to tell us what's in the future so we can prepare for it. for the tech pros the look of the most likely most probable future from the algorithms and the ai and the says daschle it's a disaster. climate change, economic unrest,

electromagnetic pulse, nuclear war. the where i prepare for the future is building a bunker, getting in rocketship and go to mars. the best itt can do is addictedo future and prepare and hang on for it. what i'm saying is no, the future something that we are creating right now. you're making f the future with the choices that you make. if you're preparing for future with the thing is going to happen, then you are way more likely of bringing that on. what if prepare for the future were people realize the neighbors are the friends, where people realize we're in this together, that mutual aid and togetherness and connection and community and care and acknowledging nourishment and acknowledging the social reality, that that's the future that we want to create if we create the future by doing it, by enacting it. we are future with every action that we take now. so start today and you will like

how the world turns out. >> host: author and professor douglas rushkoff has been our guest for the past two hours on "in depth" this morning. his latest book is survival of the richest, escape fantasies of the tech billionaires, came out in 2022. 20 books, nonfiction and fiction over the past 30 years. thanks for talking up some of them with us this morning. >> guest: thank you, thanks for what you do. this is important, andmportant gathering of peopl >> host: appreciate it. >> the senate retur ler today at 3 p.m. eastern. debate continues on t nomination of former maryland governor and former democratic presidential canda martin o'malley to be commissior of the social sury administration with a 5:30 p.m. vote to to cfi it. later the senate may take up leslation providing aid to ukraine and israel as well a tougher for security enforcement at the southern border i the deal is reached. lawmakers plan to vot o an extension of faa programs t march eight. the set to expire at the end of

this month. watch live cere of the senate c-span2 and reminder you can watch all o our congressional coverage with our free vidt c-span now online at c-span.org. >> my name is mark. on a curator in a book and special collections division of the library of congress. we have here, spain's common sense, the first edition that was printed in of 1776 in philadelphia. it's a 47 page pamphlet in which thomas paine who was a recent immigrant to the colonies argued for separation from great britain. up until this time americans consider themselves to be part of great britain and they were subjects to the king. and even though there was only

been some battles between the american colonies and great britain, most americans wanted reconciliation. this pamphlet changed their attitudes towards the monarchy and the abuses of great britain towards the american colonies. and encourage them or persuaded them to establish a new government. it's divided into four parts. the first is on the history of government. the second part deals with monarchy, and hereditary succession. the third part deals with the current state of american affairs. and the fourth part talks about the ability of america to govern itself and to form a navy that would be, that could challenge the royal navy.

this this is a first editioni don't know exactly how many copies were printed in the first edition. there were several editions printed very quickly because it was a very popular pamphlet. there have been estimates of around 75,000 to 100,000 printed within the first few months. eventually, i have seen figures that suggest that the were around half a million copies printed in total. at the time the colonies were considered about two and half million inhabitants and that makes this the best-selling book and all of american history. they would've purchased this pamphlet from local booksellers or the printer in terms of the technical production, it uses probably handmade paper that was created on racks, chain line

type paper. and it would've been issued without its binding as a pamphlet. people were expected to bind their own books at the time. this particular book or pamphlet is part of our american imprints collection. with this collection the american imprints collection, we try to document the early printing history of the united states and preserve that for posterity. >> ..

book such as america about next week and she's going to intellectual peace. every saturday american history tepee documents america stories and on sundays tv brings the latest nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including while the world has changed. fast reliable internet connection is something no one can live without so while is there for our customers with marked liability, value and choice. no more than ever, it starts with great internet. >> wow along with these television companies support c-span2 is a public service.

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