talks about her memoir. everything happens for a reason. reflecting on being diagnosed with stage iv cancer. dave bowler sunday night at 8:0. you can listen to q&a and all of our podcasts on their free c-span now out. >> healthy democracy does not just look like this. it looks like this. where americans can see democracy at work. the republic thrives. get informed straight from the sources. unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. from the nation's capital to wherever you are. get the opinion that matters the most. your own. this is what democracy looks like. c-span power by cable. >> author and professor, you

describe yourself in i your latt book survival of the richest as an extremist who writes about the impact of digital technologies, but not a futurist what is the difference? >> well, usually someone they come to tell you what will happen in the future. i have been right about that a lot so they call me a futurist. i'm is up print -- present test. looking at what is happening right now. that is usually an easier way to know what will happen in the future. i don't usually talk about it. most futurist seemed like their propaganda asked fighting for the future that they want to see your positions their company and the best place or positions them as an consultant in the most needed place. you get people interested in the future by scaring them about this will happen or that will happen. but, if you are present, really

more what i'm, a cultural anthropologist or sociologist looking at what is, you end up really freedki to talk about things in ways that other peopld don't. for me, when i realized i was present was when aol was buying time warner. i don't know if you remember that back in 1999. everyone was excited that aol, the first digital company would now by time warner, the old media company and this meant the new synergy was coming and how y grateful it was in the new yok times called me to write the piece on what was happening, the op-ed so i wrote this piece saying as i look at it and as i understand it, it looks to me like aol is cashing in its chips the founder, he grew this is much as he could, the subscriber rate is probably peeking. he is using his inflated stock

to buy a real company like time warner that has amusement parks and cable. it probably means that we are now at the peak of the.com bubble. we cannot publish lists. everybody says that this is the greatest thing and it means that all of this stuff is coming in the new age is coming. i am not a futurist. i am just looking at what is. what looks like to me is this is at the end of the videogame when you either level up or cash out and i think he is cashing out. they didid not publish it, but i turned out to be right but not because i am a futurist. there is sort of a difference. it is predictive but more predictive that looking at what is it rather than trying to guess what is out there.im when it comes to the impact of these emerging digital technologies, would you describe yourself as an optimist or pessimist? >> neither.

optimist or pessimist is funny. it is interesting the construction. i'm optimistic about how this will work out are pessimistic about how this will work out. i would say that i am frustrated i am hopeful, but frustrated. i am always hopeful that human beings will find a way out of the messes that they are in. i am really frustrated that we are using technology on people. instead of giving technology to people with some faith in their ability to use them. surrendering this digital renaissance. to the needs of the market when i look at the people running the biggest media companies today. it is as if we think of them as the demigod who should be in charge of everything from covid

and farmingnd to so society and education and politics. wait a minute. to what end? what are your values? what ethics and economics and anthropology classes did you take in college, if any before you dropped out freshman year. so, i kind of look at it that way. >> our guest in this month's in-depth with us for the next two hours to talk about his book some 20 books over the past 30 years. take us back to the early 1990s . take us back to siberia. what were your expectations at the time of this emerging nest as it was known. >> it is interesting. i saw the internet, the emerging internet, this was before the internet. the emerging computer networks as part of a larger cultural phenomenon. we had just been through, you know, we just had cb radio, even

, which is sort of the first citizen media movement in my lifetime. the cb radio it happened. fax machines, the benner -- beginning of interactivity. our television screens which have always been completely passive monitors. we were using joysticks to move things around. we were playing pong. we had fax machines where we could start to send each other messages. people were walking around with these bones rather than being home to get a call. these mobile phones. there was new business and chaos method new understanding of how the math world worked. kids growing graves with nobody on the stage just sort of entertainment out inn the middle of a field. there were psychedelics that were bible where people were looking at reengineering their own cognitive apparatus willfully by themselves. 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 cyberpunk whole earth kind of culture that might shake things up. so, and, me, i mean, i was an east coast educated theater director. i love theater. i was a artsy person. at the time, i was really fed up with how elitist and expensive theater had become. how predictable the plays were. everything had a beginning, a middle and an end. this internet thing was surprising. you know, i'm sure like you, i was raised in a world where people who like computers are like little geek people with pocket protectors and the kids who turned in the hallways at little right angles. there was a certain type.

by the late '80s i was finding out that my weirdest artsy is most psychedelic friends from college were going out from siliconle valley to go work for apple and sun and intel. it was confusing. why were the weird people working with computers. so i went out there and started covering it really as a journalist. i saw this very different computer story. very different technology story. these folks would be working at intel or nordstrom during the day and going home to oakland and scraping the fuzz off coyote cactuses and tripping at night and creating images that were being shown at grateful dead shows the next weekend. so, it was like, something was happening that was different. the first book that i wrote about, this siberia, light in the trenches of hyperspace was really looking at all of these different threadst of culture s part of this same new cultural

officers there that we could redesign reality. all of these different things, whether it was fantasy role-playing games where kids were, i know kids were scared it was satan us. dungeons & dragons where kids instead of watching the movie kiwould create their own story together. sort of a choose your own adventure hypertext reality that no one was used to yet. the idea you could read a story and text on a computer and choose where that takes you, knowing your own pathway, that was very new. too many of us, it seemed to be kind of an omen or a precursor to the idea that we would move into a much more deliberate and interesting so society. one that was much less passive

and a choose your own adventure and spirituality, and politics, and government, and education, and arts. in all forms of human activity. >> how did we get from that culture that cyber psychedelic culture to survival of the richest, the escape fantasy of technology billionaires. >> there is a few ways to look at it. it's funny. the last couple of pages, interestingly enough, library, my book was canceled in 1992 because they thought the internet was going to be over by 1993 when the book was supposed to come out. i got a letter from the editor. we think it is a passing fad and you are too late on it. [laughter] >> what?

>> no. i've got it h in a drawer with l the other objections of the book .... .... , it was three or four years in the making and by the time i was putting the famous touches, wired magazine had just launched and wired magazine came along an came along and triggered a very different story. guess this is a whole big thing about what this thing actually is, is good for business. the internet is going to create more surface area on the market. thanks to the internet the nasdaq stock exchange will be able to grow exponentially, on interrupted forever. i understand what they were saying. they look at digital technology as the ultimate derivative. the weight finance works is by going meta.

using one level above what's whathappened is a transaction between people and you can buy stock in that you are one level removed. now thanks to computers you don't just have to buy the stock you can buy the derivative which is one s level removed from that or derivative of a derivative and so on and so on and so on. or you can get colonialists up so much territory on the planet but thanks to the internet we are going to infinite real estate and infinite number of websites so markets can expand onto new surface, new territory, virtual territory. it is interesting what is happeningg but, what is happenig is a financial phenomenon a business phenomenon. and once a business people came in and this was my fear at the end of the book i said you know there is a window of opportunity for us to seize the cultural phenomenon as it is. i do experiment in the collective humanen imagination.

i knew comments of idea and unfolding of human culture. there are folks who want to enclose this as a business phenomena and turn it into something else tond make it more about profit and exponential growth and i am not quite sure what that will do to the culture. it turns out what it did was kind of killed the culture. if you look at the early internet was about exploring the infinite possibilities of a connected culture. what does the connected human imagination do? what can we dona when we are connected by the machines and what we can't do them w are totally alone? what happens we share all these processing cycles in these giant corrective projects? wheat flip that. consider betting on the internet as a stock you are not looking for how you increase possibility youe are looking at how you

increase probability. let's think about it once you bet on something what you want? the highest probability that your bet will come true you bet on aol you bet on compuserve, you bet on the web, whatever you bet on you point to have the highest probability of working. instead of using technology to increase created technology with start using technology on people to increase their probability. you can see in 1993, 94, 95. what we started to using the web were words like stickiness the object of the game was to create a website that was sticky meeting people would get to your website but they couldn't leave. they had an ad for one of the companies helps you make your website sticky this shows you us are stuck on a piece of flypaper like a fly strip as if that is the happy user. because they areat stuck on what you're doing.

use a metric called eyeball hours that was a number of hours the human eyeball would spend looking at your monitor announced we were living in what was called the attention economy and people who were not paying attention or the enemy.pl it's interesting after they came up with the term attention economy as we started see all the diagnoses of attention deficit disorder and all of the prescriptions for getting people to pay better attention to these websites.. i started to write about i wonder if a shortened attention span might be of mechanism against the world using sticky website and using every tool at their disposal. behavioral finance, the slot machine algorithms. there is a division at stanford which is about how you capture human attention and modify human behavior online. that for me was the turn

especially people in the technology industry began to think of their users more of a heroin dealer thanks of users how do we addict them and how do we control them? what is the mindset the mindset is the idea. there's a few things that easiest way i can describe the mindset is this idea that you can earn enough money to insulate yourself from the damage you are creating by earning money in that way. you can develop enough technology to correct for all thee problems you created with the technology that you just made. so the mindset is a silicon valley belief. with more tech and more money they can solve anything. it's a techno solution is understanding of the world where human beings are the problem and

technology is a solution. they tend to be libertarian. they understand human relationships purely a market phenomenon. they 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's contributions ase unique it yor own ip it is without precedence. it's an urge to neutralize the unknown by dominatingin its and reanimating it. when you hear them talk about self sovereignty and progress in increasing choice and somehow starting over. it's funny there is a place near california a bunch of the tech burros want to build a new city i knew perfect city they're going to live in it is renewable

and uses the best energy and computerized stocks for education and religion and traffic. it is the perfect thing but it is like going to mars are going to the dark side of the moon. i'm moving to new zealand or alaska. as if from scratch they need to begin at the colonizers urge to get to t a new territory. pretend there's no real way for humans there and then start over completely. and when you talk to these guys whether it's zuckerberg or mosque or basis, they all share the same understandings of human beings as the masses and low and them as one level above. mark zuckerberg wants to go to the meta- verse.rb elon musk wants to go to marge.

peter talks about 10 -- one. living a one level one order of magnitude above everybody else. and that is the mindset that really peaks in this almost eugenic idea called affective altruism. they believe it's okay to bid awful person now as long as you earn a lot of money and give some of the money back. it gives a weird materialism on steroids where they believe once is how far the mindset goes. it is tech worship. the hatred of the human, of the body, of everything earthly. in the future there will be hundreds of trillions of post human artificial intelligence spread throughout the galaxy.

part digital part silicon whatever they are there's post human entities all over the universe. there are so many of them there totalar happiness matters more than the happiness of the 8 billion human maggots that happen to be alive on the mother nest right now. that's a very dangerous way to look at the lives of people matter less then this future of trillions little robot consciousness. that's part of why i'm not a futurist. use math, logic, new gen x, and a certain kind of scientific rigor to say that is true. they do matter more therefore it let's invest in bitcoin, saved ourselves, let people die and get rockets to the next planet. but it is ignoring the present. i have much more faith in the

reality of the present the 8 billion people alive today who actually matter. wheat would make very different decisions if without the people who were alive today are what matter rather than the robots in the fantasy future is douglas latest book. nonfiction and fiction books as well. ask you to enjoy the i conversation for those living in eastern and central time zone (202)748-8201 in the mountain or pacific time zones. 2027488903. if you do please include your name aware you are from. and also in social media apple tv on all of our social media platforms.

go ahead and send your questions right start calling in as folks are calling in. you talk about the mindset. i don't mean the podcast or the book but the concept. the concept of team i human coms up a long time ago he was telling the story about how evolution is really a matter of information with more complex homes information like the adam and that molecule and the one celled organism and the real organism with human culture but as computers become more complex capable of handling more complexity than human and human culture information will migrate to them they will prove to be

our evolutionary successors. once that happens human beings have to pass the evolutionary torch to the robots to the artificial intelligence that accept their own inevitable replacement and extinction. i think human beings for artificial intelligence raised n these binary logics can sustain a paradox to one sort of answer or another. we look at a problem as something to sustain rather than something to solve. not understand what it means and still experience that as pleasure. what iss that?

human beings are special and we deserve a place in the digital future. and he said you are just saying that because you're human. like it was an act of hubris. i said okay fine, guilty i am on team human. but that is when the term came up for me. guilty as charged i admitted i am a human and fight for the right for others of my species to have a place on this planet. and then the more i thought about the idea team human i realized it goes against the mindsetin to call humans a team. the mindset is about sovereign individual. the man emperor. zuckerberg who thanks of himself as augustus caesar is his goal. the single lord over everyone. the idea team human is arguing being human as a team sport.

evolution is not the story of the survival of the fittest individual. if you read the darwin, read the book what you will see is page after page of this guy is a marveling at the waste species collaborate and cooperate for mutual survival within this species and the interest species coordination. so if human beings are common target we are not are the most evolved species it is because we have evolved the morse complex method of collaborating and cooperating with each other. and a lot of these are very subtle. when you are in real life with another human being you seat whetherse their pupils are gettg larger or smaller as they speak or are they taking you in or rejecting you? is there breathing synchronizing with yours or micro negative emotions are any on zoom or skype or text message.

we are 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 neurons and our brains to fire for the oxytocin to go through our blood if you are online and someone says they agree with you but you don't get the biological feedback you cannot help but be suspicious of them. every time someone agrees with you online what actually happens is the reverse effect in your body. that your body says wait a minute they say they agree with me but i did not get in my body. it generates a distant trust rather than trust team human is like saying wait a minute. we have got to reemploy and retrieve these great mechanisms for working and being together. it's almost like putting the social back into socialism i don't care about the -ism i care about people knowing their neighbors in understanding this whole human project is not about

who gets to escape to their bunker but how do we do this together. >> this emerging technology this is mark zuckerberg from connect 2023 event this week previewing upcoming ai in artificial intelligence technology. here's one of those technologies.. >> our industry over the coming decades is going to be how do we unify these experiences if the physical we have with the vibrant digitaln world more coherent and better than anything we have today. now in the future i think not too far from now you're going to walk into a room they're going to be as many holograms and digital things to interact with as there are physical objects. think about all the things that are physically though the don't need to be physical things.

the media, the games, the workstation, any screen. it's all interactive holograms. thinking about going and hanging out with your friends. pretty soon will be at a point shall be there physically with some of your friends others will be there digitally as avatars, holograms, and feel just as present as everyone else. ori walk into a meeting and sit down at a table and you will be there -- there but people there is sickly and digitally the be sitting on the table with you being a bunch of ai who are embodied as holograms that help you get different stuffed into. >> on that technology that you previewed. >> the interesting thing is unify the object of the game for him is to unify the real world with the digital world so digital can continue colonizing the world we are in.

it's the unification that may be the problem when he describes hanging out with your friends we could be in that meeting and some of the people in the meeting or virtual. interesting right? they are great for increasing our utility value. the industrial age i'm at work can be done for how much money. the idea of not getting to meet in real life all of this stuff all of the things that don't need to be physical things. for it to the place that

physical things we need to have a lot more physical things involved. inin order to make the ai and te in thelaser projecting holograph whatever machine it is that will create the virtual avatar in the room you've got to said kids to get the rare earth metals to make the things. to get cobalts out. i'm pollution in. silicon wafer unit energy, solar panels is actually describing is less a physical matter but more physical matter used to deny the human beings of actual physical presence. ramos in the netherlands that is

thbeautiful. someone is stuck in a hospital bed and is a paraplegic it is beautiful. people who could be together the complexity of human relationship the complexity of say the complexity of a mother nursing a baby. they could be at workan and in term missing something. it's a virtual baby is missing something i am missing something if you are not at my house watching the game but your appetite on the couch watching the game. it's not the same we are denying it. the work or utility value of the game without the presence. the other thing that is

interesting you will never be in the position of being on the streets and not remember what their name is. it is uncomfortable. hey doris. 1993 tell me all of those things i can fake rapport but this person i did not know. it's moving me into bizarre and a dishonest relationship with my world. i am wondered what mattered what really matters that i remember that person's name. i think it was a sales connect they call you there profile comes up.

that your wife mabel. when they call it great it's a fake a business relationship trying to sell mattresses to macy's but in the real world to be burdened with this sense of data of part of our interaction who date for the paid for the data like to pick a restaurant who has a page a bit mark zuckerberg is a virtual reality world? the restaurant is not in going to exist. that might be the best pizzeria on the block. >> at 30 minutes intro to our interview. it's our in-depth program looking for your calls looking for your questions plenty of calls for you this morning. this is jim in california good morning still in california. you are on.

jim are you with us? then we will try michael and broward county florida per jim hang on the line will try to get to you, michael go ahead. we will work on those calls us to write one more i think we have julie on the line minneapolis minnesota a lot of calls or you wouldn't keep rotating through if they're not there. julia minneapolis go-ahead. >> i am here. i havee heard him say a number f things. immigrate many opinions. you have questions. a complete molded and discussed the people who oppose you into policies and achieving progress.

now, i question as you write books, you teach, you appeared here. how do you actually get people involved in talking with each other question but how do we i share some of those characteristics. how do we i think at one point with education to business. how do we retract that. we want it back were capable of doing this. >> thank you for the call. >> great. asking processes that question. i think the first thing i realize for me how to get people to ... it potentially hazardous

construction in itself. that's why they think of us. how do we get people to think of this? how do we get people to do that? getting people until an a superior place. television style influence. you become an influence peddler. how do we influence society how we change people. i know people doing this instead of that. the way i think about it and rather thinking about it on how do i engender an environment in which people feel welcome to ... feel welcome to socialize and care for each other and nurture each other this is probably went to be next book. i broke it down into four ways

of changing the environment or changing the register in which we are operating. i'm calling to deep naturalized power. when things in our world and not conditions of nature. anythingio money. this is paper to represent money and our society. aboutt ai and the unemployment problem. what was it for? what's the difference train employment and work? over they forced to start wage labor and work that they do. its underlying assumptions of how things work. which leads to the second one

which is agency. more agency more authority of overwhat they are doing. that's the digital revolution i could save a file not just say read oil file but read it right file that other people could edit too. why was so much of the world established as read only? television, money, television why isn't it up for discussion question or question to be up for discussion? the third one is ever going to do that the third was to re- socialize people. the great example i like to use it as you need to drill a hole in the wall. you don't need a drill. in america go to the home depot by a minimum drill and drill the

hole even a garage probably never work again. it's going to be done a throw it away.an you put them in for the rare earth metal we create all the carbon, you throw it away sit it on toxic waste some other kids going to be looking at it find that recyclable parts inside of it. what you could have done is walk down the block and say bob can i borrow your drill? why don't we do that? or which owes something to bob because you don't have a barbecue next week and if you haven't he's going to expect to be invited over? maybe you want bob over there bob comes over they smell it and think why did he invite bob and not us? worst case you have a block wide a barbecue party. kind of why that is. the last thing were looking at

is cultivating. what is that and why are we so resistant to it? why are we resistance where they are looking at a canyon are looking a part of the other people the world is bigger than yourself. the immune system gets better you are more generous for days later. ana important part of human health. you don't get it what you get in communion with other people or nature and expansiveness. how do we help people feel less encumbered, less locked in. to our status quo institutions and beliefs.

between oneee and zero were life actually happens. as a first person: as soon as we open up the phone lines. jim, thanks for waiting for. >> thank you very much for taking my i call. my question is totally different than what you have been going on. i see in your resume you were an apprentice director on a major movie. which was a huge flop. like your comments on maps and your thoughts on movies today your thoughts on movies in the past. the directors and movies that influence you when you're younger. i'm very interested and i am i am amovie buff. >> thanks for the call. this book to beat we could talk to really have novelists on.

i was a theater director from the time is 11 or 12 years old i was directing plays. directed plays in junior high school and although with your high school theater. i went to princeton to english and theater and while i was there i was going to drive across country. i was driving across country with my best friend he was was impaledand died next to me. i've not actually told the story publicly it is weird but book tv welcome. he died next to me and all of a sudden i was like theater is so ethereal it dies, disappears you have to be there for i decided i'm going to do film it was that existential moments may want to do film because it's going to stay is going to be there after i die after these things. i took film sweet smell of success of man and the white

chute. the wolverine movie a great director. we work together there a lot. i was making films like theater. likes cabaret and i liked my dinner. i like theater film i like theatrical film of an apprentice gig. on this big a movie and then spending at the time was like $50 million on a movie that is not soughtat out. it was a very thin satire. i did the new york part of it we

went to l.a. to studio part i dropped out. and return to theater at that point and got tired of theater. i was supposed to do the threepenny opera the cheapest seat was going to be 40 bucks. i'm not going to charge $40 for the cheapest seat of threepenny opera then i turned to the internet thinking the internet was going to be the people's media. i want to get away from the commercial theater. i'm going to go to the internet which is the count i cultural and site business approach human it was for a moment it was going to be an alternative.

and do something with movies beyond a people realize is quite happening. he makes movies that are all about inviting multiple interpretation. the movie has a plot but it does not have that plopped you could you canalmost project anything o that plot. many different things onto that plot as you want too. there's much about your self as the movie. i like what he does i like the hallways that imitate. that he is really playing with illusion and reality. i like david lynch work it's about opening questions. nothing against their film but i get annoyed with the jj abrams,

christopher nolan style movies which do similar things but always with an answer. you figure it out. and to me the beauty of film it opens outward. the answer isn't the answer. it's an object. don't tell them i said this works more like has a level of experiential value. but what it means to you could be different every time you go through. >> think of assuring that story about your friend and the accidents. for viewers who do not know you have a podcast it's over three dirt episodes you've got 20 books. i justst wonder why you haven't shared that story publicly

before? >> 's when you share stories about the death of yourhe friend thatst feels a little bit like it's begging for f sympathy. it's like a cheap shot. you are talking about that sad thing. and maybe also it takes a lot of years to move through trauma. act for my theater days you are supposed sense memory is you have a scene at ray have to cry or be upset or whatever it is in a play. you recall would have a similar emotion and think about that in order to activate that emotion bybyn the scene you look fat ie rehearsals. i remember a teacher told us there is a rule has to be from at least six years ago. otherwise you have not process the trauma or whatever in such a

way it's actuallyce useful. you end up being non-ng useful. i think it may be now whatever this is 30 years later i am distant enough from its it did not have the texture that made it feel inappropriate to bring to bear and also the audience. some of the audience is whoever is there. i'm thinking as book tv a lot of these are book people. i don't get to talk to book people that much but book of people we go through life differently than other people. book people understand how to engage with an idea or in the amotion over an extended period of time. whatever book you are reading.

the different things than remote-control media. it was safer and more appropriateo the processing of trauma for people who writes. >> let me shop with more the book of people planning waiting to talk with you in california oscar you are on. >> hi. the question i want to ask thank you for your books by the way they are greats. all can we get take it aspect you have a way of expressing the bigg picture of things going on. and it's good because i like to

take it aspect of that. for example capitalism. it has done a lot of great things but a lot of people use it as a self defying term. granted it put us on the map. how can you use, i believe capitalism is great for did a lot of good things. people strongly side with it but they don't see -- capitalism unchecked or suing damage let's pick up on that. that's the theme of several of his books. >> for sure. the first book i wrote on

capitalism how the world became a corporation and how to take it back it's the one that got me on the colbert show which is something in itself. i was looking at where does capitalism come from? where did central currency come from and i traced it back to the late middle ages. there is the growth of. too. economy right after the crusades there was the marketplace they learn how to do from the bizarre country that brought it back people were trading we had a new middle class. women were taller at any time in the late middle ages in that market and they were until the 1980s. it was a really successful thing but the aristocracy got poor as the middle class got wealthy. so they came up with two great ideas. one centralgr currency that says you're not allowed to have a transaction unless you borrow moneyed from the central treasuy at interest.

so now, because it is interest built into the economy the economy has to grow to stay the same. it worked fine for colonialism as long as there are new places you can grow and keep growing and grow faster and faster, that works. the second one which i alluded to earlier was a chartered monopoly you are not allowed to do business in a particular industry you have to have a charter to make shoes and everyone else is a shoemaker had to be an employee for the shoe company. that has come down to us today is corporate capitalism we don't even question. a nice present like biden have said the gdp grow by three -- 5% every year. i don't need the economy to grow? what does it have his feeding people?wh nothing. in some ways it is the opposite. it is about balance sheets and what it does is it favors

increasingly abstract economic instruments. it's why derivatives are valued. this end-stage capitalism we live in the world were 2013 the new york stock exchange was purchased by its derivatives exchange. think about that a second for the new york stock exchange which is an abstraction of the real market which you could argue itself is an abstraction of the human need was consumed by your own extraction. this is the way it goes. this is why we end up in this world we are tech billionaires who are looking at what's the next level of abstraction? in some ways we could think of is the ai craze the digital craze is looking at how do i go meta? beat one of the robots.

eat one of those things. who wants to be a little human. he is the guy when he was the head of ge i make less money making and selling a washing machine to you than i do lending you the money to buy the washing machine. that is why his soul the productive aspects the making of stuff and turned ge into a financial services company because the extraction makes more money than the actual work. it works really well until the financial crisis happened they had no more productive assets. that is the tendency. that's the tendency of capitalism which works great to a point. for not looking at who are they are enslaving what land isop beg taken away or what are they

dispossessing and all of that. it can still work. there is more balanced forms of capitalism that we could use. but when i tell that story about the drilled two people and i save everyone on the black waterford borrowing thrills from o each other only have one or to lawnmowers on the block instead of every house having their own lawnmower. and we share the lawnmower because you only need a lawnmower two or three out of the week there's not much less production, pollution and spending you don't have to earn as much money all of that. someone and barely gets up at the end and says what about the lawnmower company? what about the people who work at the want what about the people who have stock shares when you going to do about them it that's the backwardness of started with capitalism is the underlying premise or something thisci going to serve us for thn us supposed to serve the

economy. >> we are about an hour into our interview. on in depth. the question coming in from pearl city, hawaii halfway through our interview. this is from tim who says do we exist within simulation. >> if we don't live in a digital simulation created by graduate student of the future let's say for buddhist reality. what did they say we are? what do they say we they would

say this is the illusion. there's something else going on here. one way or another we live in a simulation. we do not even see what is going on. you look back and we have sensory organs that are trying to create a picture of what is going on here. but that's all we get anyway. just sensory organs trying to process based on what we see. the question doesn't matter but no, i don't believe we are in a west world. a million simulations are being run by someone to figure out how society works. if we are generating it is much

closer to karmic iteration of civilizations over time that it would be running simulations. on the sensory experience a minute ago you were time at the importance of the w experience. talk about the experience and spectacle. >> yes, spectacle is morecl like nuremberg rally or a trump rally or nfl football game where the energy of the crowd and many features or leverage for a purpose. there is in between like walking into a great cathedral as a catholic person doing a mass in

there. it's a combination. as an architect dude but the inspiration machine with an oregon, the light, and the arches and all to generate an experience of all. you go to a rave he put the lights in music at 100 beats per second period dancing half addressedan in the scene in the matrix. but for me the spectacle is less about true participation and more about and the jets game is like the dolphins let's get the dolphins. and then that you can use such a

self airline tickets to sell steak for outback. just do whatever you want. you take that warlike rage enthusiasm thing. oregon super tisch killer racial group or whatever it might be. or against democrats or whoever a spectacle is more of a designed experience in order to focus the energy of the crowd onto a name enemy in most cases. where as all is more about breaking people out of the trap of the illusion of individuality and letting them experience themselves as part of something much much larger. then don't name that large thing for them.

do not say now you are in the army of this. for a group of that. when i was calling team human because it seemed open enough, you are on team human but is not team human like against team squirrel or team tree. it's team human as this is the way we experience our perspective on nature and everything else. think of any great speacle three main acts first unify the crowd second. their passion and third speak as god or nature. but that third part owner more? works you speak of god or nature hitler speaking about himself as th' father and all the people as his children. that you are -- you look at the

twitter means that people like elon musk put up of themselves. with them as gods. even zuckerberg and musk are challenging each other to mixed martial arts fight as if they are demigods that they inhabit silicon valley and now they're going have a spectacle battle through the media that we get to see with each other. speaking as god or nature it .epends the book on propaganda from the 50s is really good on this.

it's having people identify you as the mother, the father is connected to god. you are both universal and completely personal with a person feels you are speaking just to them. apparently taylor swift has the ability to do that. but she is pretty benevolent about it. she's doing it with the message of empowerment and identification and all. buteo some went with her ability could be doing it politically could be doing it differently which again why i say we got to be careful how do we get people to blanca? and we are the same as those let's create a bigger relic we get people to believe in our god they will for our party of the get people to do this. there's the vulnerable moment in

the spectacle it's the same moment what happens when someone walks into the original shopping malls and they show it on tape you can watch the videos of it. the person's jaw opens in their eyes glaze over. it is in that moment you can drop in whatever you want to whatever brand whatever party, whatever political ideology whatever enemy. you just see it. they drop that in on then they act as if, and now it's as if we are meeting our destiny together. we are with the blood and the soil in the forest there is in the rhetoric comes a certain

assertion this is the natural way. we are returning to some kind of pagan barbarian masculine original authentic back to what we really are we are open from my gut state of being but it is not spirit is completely manipulated. what might be listen to what they say the cover senator bob care on the front cover. and why he ended up on the cover of your book. >> he was a senator from nebraska who actually lost his foot in the vietnam war. he was kind of a presidential candidates had a scandal about

an episode during the war which is still unclear exactly. it was not good enough costume has been there. he was always nice to me an artist and interesting and he was actually the boyfriend of my neighbor lived in the west village back when you could live in the west village a single barely working writer you get apartment in the west village. she lived across the hall from me i got to hang out with him a little bit. and us if you do a blurb for the book. he did a really funny one is whole blurb i would not accept it without their foolish. read this or else. it's called coercion, get it? read this or else. >> what ended up on the car it's important book a clear warning to americans who are unaware that reader, listener or viewer read this book and nobody gets

hurt. quickset is good. >> they sent it back and added to it so they would accept them on there. it was a real gift. he became president of the new school in new york for a while and help them build up, build this big building. he was controversial but a very useful figure in bringing that place to its current standing. >> of color still waiting for you culture is a biology and social contagion and chatting with chatgpt the other day i discovered some information about governor desantis. he is doing exactly what desantis is doing and check this

out. maybe it's just the semantics fact theince to the responses it provides. on the recent program that way is he wants to avoid things that are potentially and say things anything having to do with misogyny or homophobia going to start a fad when you are right butgh here's the really exciting thing to mess with your friends who areit rich tell about succes ptsd or changes your brain. sleep react in the same way to be self-interested. a lot of what you're discussing is interesting because herbert spencer started out in the 1860s which is why 30% of the kids cannot read we teach at that way even though one 100% of them can

we read we verify it medically they can read. as a start to test the hair and rabbit on a per 10 greyhound we pull the information to achieve the failure as a state department has done for 50 years they've done randomized educational tests country to country. we've never had more than 30%. >> you bring up a lot of topics let's let douglas jump in which one you and talk about? >> embracing feature of this. it's applying logic to our many social institutions. on coming up with whatever metric you come up on the wall going totric you are get. that is what you're going to go for. they are necessarily reductive metrics. so you bring the kid in, in

vitro. into the classroom we are going to teach this kid long division. without any understanding what's going on in that kid's house? the kids mothers moving from shelter to shelter the father is drunk and not even there the kids are trying to contend with that. had i take care of my mother question at the child of that kid the life challenge with the child needs to learn at that moment is not reflected in the assessment they have done on their long division at the end of the week. that is the problem with the one-size-fits-all and not just education system but everything the system. there is a famous story when they were trying to use incentives to get hospitals to perform betterse they said they would give more money to

hospitals that reduce the amount of time people spent in the emergency waiting room. to get into beds as quickly as possible. take the wheels off their gurneys in order to call them beds they line the halls and put people on thosese declared them being in the room. the time and energy it took to do that actually slowed thehe re at which people got medical care. in order to win thear metric thy ended up reversing the thing. what i hear in this callers concern is we institutionalize short-termrm over simplified of values at the expense of whatever we might actually want to accomplish. in the bigger and more convoluted the bureaucracies get

the harder and harder it is to down to what it is that we want. the same with chatgpt is not. chatgpt isha type it really is hyper. it's a stock market desperate for another big thing. zoom in all these covid apps are not being used as much. all of the screaming media companies and not being watched as much because we are going outside they need another thing. chatgpt is an advanced search while right now. that is all we are looking at. it takes your google results and pushes them into something more like human speech. but it is wrong most of the time it's not actually correct. it is reverting everything what

is the most average answer to that question. that does not offend anybody or doesn't say anything controversial or upsetting. it is wrong and self-centered. it is not what we think it is. on the future were these things are actually smart. but we are not there. this is ruth at st. george, utah good morning. >> hi. i have couple of points to go back to what you're talking to earlier in the conversation. first it's been a little over two years long time caregiver. i live in this gorgeous area. my life is all about experiencing things in real time anot virtually.

and i love live performance. i don't care, little kids, teenagers, adult professionals trying and delivering something essential. it's great for my soul. >> thanks for that. >> yes. i have been blessed to even drive through utah a few times. if you haven't had the opportunity to do it, do it. it is different. you feel connected to the creation itself. just go there, get out of the car and stared iraq for five minutes. it's the trip used, talk about.

some partsh of new mexico do tht too. it is amazing butut yet the stae of disconnection is how quickly you reconnect. recalibrating is almost instantaneous. you are describing a real world just find a friend and look in their eyes and a take two or the breaths with them. it is almost unbearable if you have.done in a wild. it reconnects you almost instantly. for how long it took to de- calibrate us. how much technology, how much engineering coming billions or trillions of dollars were spent to get us in this crazy state or we all need the ssri i needed to

get up to kure from the app you just use like you're going to get a wellness app to gaia over the facebook app in the step snapchatapp. you touch the ground read in a forest. the eyes of your dog or cat even. you got it so quickly it is so accessible even the forest fire haze 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 get them have a chance for your talk about creation a minute ago. when you are creating your writing podcast interviews like this but when you are writing is there a place you go what is

your process for writing? >> i tend to go about at the same way whether it is fiction or nonfiction. i write note cards. i have ideas on note cards. i end up putting themtt on the wall and what are called slugs. content areas and content areas mutate intoon chapters and i orr them so each chapter flows as a five act structure. so because of that i need to have a place for the buck bookhappens a room, an office. the book ends up being physically represented with a

note card. i've had so many rules of experience with the note card hi know how much i have it based on how many cards there are a part of the topics are in each one. so i can feel the book more intuitively or cinematically. >> are you in that room right now? >> yes although i have not read the end of the survival of the richest in here. but by bookcase wall is where the book was written. i have been trying to use a program that looks like note cards as a substitute. does not quite organize the same way. got to feel the book it is a

chapel of a memory or something. these ideas are here. that chapter. i look at any book there is a chapter and i remember where the chapter was in the room i was writing a pair. >> a chapel of memories was the hardest book for you to write? >> interesting. this last book came right out because it has a memoir quality with stories in it that's what my agent told me. is not the rhetoric it's the story so end up telling all these ridiculous and fun stories about my experiences at this crazy billionaire people and their antics. that one came right out. the most researched book i looked at the library look at the east india trading company and charters that was pretty

intense. the hardest one was probably a graphic novel. it was about the real but in my case somewhat fictionalized occult war between aleister crowley and adolf hitler at the end of world war ii. the first threers artists who ae hired to work on the book they have all had a major life catastrophes like illness, suicide really awful awful things. earning to get scared you write about someone like aleister crowley then there's been juju in there. or there is something dangerous happening. so i got really scared when i was writing that i was touching energies that i shouldn't. and then it was just really hard to do to be faithful to the

actual world war ii story and to tell that story as reality as history while also getting into the characters in the part that wasn't real and trying to distinguish between the two what felt like a responsible way. the most harrowing writing expensive had progressed just about 35 minutes left. this is a marshall from houston, texas thanks for waiting for. >> thank you very much a gentleman. this is a fascinating conversation. i am interested in your role with research particularly the life inc. book that you talked about. how much of the research and writing to the overlap each other? how much do you need to do before you start o writing? and also your role with agents, thank you very much. >> might roll with agents like literary agents? okay. with life inc. i like to have

all the research done before i start writing writing. i will do a little bit of research to do the proposal stage. and the proposal is usually something that turns into i a version of introduction to the book. so the proposal usually gets me to it academia it would call the question. it was aware of the corporation come from? how did corporatism but, the religion of our society and what dhec can we do about it? i've done enough research i was going to look at the charter monopoly is going to figure out. but i did not know what i wrote the proposal but is going to uncover the nature of the deal between the monarchs on the first charter monopoly. what that wasn't how it worked. in the had discovered things

that were not understood before. that was real research but once the research wasth done and i hd all of the stuff i make my outline on the wall i can see occasionally there will be aee little blank area but i'm really scared to write all the way up to an area i'm going to discover something this going to undo what was earlier. my process is usually once i get the outline done the only way i get to the book is going straight through with blinders on. i put on a miner's lamp and digging the whole tunnel of the book until i get to the lights on the other end of the mind pretty gotcha go straight through. that's the convention of a book unless it's a weird book they are going to have to go straight through. i kind of did the same thing if i look back i've tried that we rewrite the book to the point

you continued then you rewrite it until you continue. the end of the book is much less attention on the front of the book. it's combing it's different at the front if you have not gotten all the way down. i get to the very end of the book and then i edit and then i edit going through. i think a weird that might happen as i'm writing the book as i realize that chapter so much bigger than the other four or five chapters i break it up into two. i could break this to entreat to chapters. for me the research i occasionally wrote two thirds of the way through the book and i need another story i don't understand what happened here i'm going to go back and get more justification worst case i find out the justification pushes things in another way and i drop it right tell the story

in a different way and i have to use it otherwise. my relationship with agents i've had a bunch of them. i started getting an agent because i got a screenplay for somebody. that screenplay had an agent then there was a co- agent i got my first literary agent through the back door. top eight drop me they hadn't called me in a long time i thought they gave up selling the book and then i had a friend who had an agent set i'll sell the book and then he sold it in the first agent was like wait a minute that's my book but it was like a year since a first agent or call me or done anything i got sued and i had to get a bunch of money to this one and a bunch of money to that and is immediate virus. that agents went to william

morris i had them for a while and then my agent left do i stay or do ior follow? and what the science agents who was a great literary agents. the whole agency ended up having it epstein association i felt like they were not fully a kind of left and it wanted to do more hollywood things at that point and that agency was just books and i wanted to get things on the screen and start playing there. i ended up at a creative art agency. help talked to my agent that much but she is really good. she told me do not write another book like this. you are reaching these people and the same people again and again.

if you really want to reach people you've got to sell stories. tilt nonfiction stories that's in the literary medium it's how you engage it's the narrative art and what it is. so i started doing that and she was right. i know i am always mesh back up seeing my agent but my editor as my partner in the project i do not want to sell to a publishing company that hasn't editor adding value to the book. not just an invite to the distribution uncover it's like a in a play that tom mayer at norton. i ended up as my publisher i'm not going to leave him unless god knows what happens.

he was on the told me too write this book he read a couple of articles that i had written and some the articles were doing well on the survival of the richest on the five billionaires who want advice on how to get out there a year or two later i wrote about the covid crisis a lot of people retreating from a 60-inch tv in my classes and get a private tutor and i can make this work out. i wrote that piece he called me and said doug this is your next book you have to doo this i called the agent if you can do it in stories then sure, do it. it was a book that came from the editor to me. i was writing for an audience of

one or what about this, what about that? to be at a place that is a strange place to be it took me to the old to do it to see the note entry critiques from the editor as gifts rather than work. he is making me a better writer to give up the hubris that someone does know better thann you or at least as well as you was really, really good for me. i look at all these people as my partners in crime here. boy you feel so much better to come out with a book if you know your people are a part of. it's a group project and of course it's my whole team human thing. i'm finally living it.

>> a story of meeting the tech billionaires worried about their bunker is how he begins survival of the richest. of the tech billionaires it's his latest book 20 books over the past 30 years. a professor of media theory and digital economics. we will go to new york mike is waiting yes you're on with douglas. i have terms of individual human nature. they tried communism and socialism throughout the world has been very ineffective basically a miserable failure. in terms of these self-appointed elites the tech billionaires and so forth. i just so people to listen and to understand what complete hypocrites zuckerberg, all of the rest of them.

they are surrounded by highly trained bodyguards. the advocate for the average man or woman in the united states in terms of defending themselves and gun control and so forth. i just want people to understand these theoretical systems of government. they just don't work and people will say it has not been tried. the full extent that it should be. capitalism by far is been the most effective and at constitution public we live in in america by far the most effective way to govern and live.e and in terms of economics. these tech billionaires is just really disgusting. they are bathed in hypocrisy the entire way they live. chris mike, got your points.

capitalism has worked as long as when we get to periods of extreme excess we have major reformation.n. big regulation so yes, when things spun out of control you get franklin delano roosevelt and wpa and the g.i. bill. and the education bills. you reform. edison capitalism works best is when you do that. you ended up in a situation because they realize they had too. the income tax rate went up 80 or 90% during that time in order to bail out what was happening. because when capitalism works too well, when you automate you end up extracting so much value that you make the people around

you poorer. so when cooper, facebook, google are doing well you see tented villages living around them. until the end up destroying markets. with they are calling creative destruction but it's actually destructive destruction. they are scoring more money and then ensure you get to the place now or mark zuckerberg says i'm going to get back 95% of my money back to the places i took it out. but dude, if you made facebook 95% less this abstract if you would not be trying to shove your money back into the systems you decimated these ecosystems in society. >> i would argue communism and socialism, the reason why i would say they haven't worked as they have not tried to do these things at scale. i look at scale is itself the problem? when marx was writing about

socialism what you really meant was how do we return estimate how do we retrieve the social element of commerce and exchange? me borrowing a drill from the neighbor instead of buying one at home depot. is that a crime? or is it okay? and i understand the perspective it is a crime. 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? it is my responsibility as a citizen and capitalism to promote the exponential growth of the economy. that is the part where it gets off. we see it not just as a means to an end but as the end. the thing, the only way. what i look at socialism how do you put the social back into it?

and minimize the -ism? you talk about communism or i like to be ditzy. i don't know that i like is him so much either but it's not something you could orchestrate so well when what is interesting you went a little off or someone ain trying to exercise marx he's got this great track where he writes about robinson caruso. that robinson caruso had all of these ledgers because he needed to maximize his own efficiencies so he said okay he needs five fish for a week he's going to spend this much time fishing and spend this much time collecting water. this much time making a rope. and so we had a little ledger and marx said if robinson caruso did it for his self what if we created a ledger for the whole country? so we know how many people need

to do this it's like do you cannot plan that out you're going end up with people on the lines get toothpaste and is not going to be enough. markets can be really good for figure out supply and demand in all of that but they are really bad at figuring out how do we share water? how do we deal with something like air? how do we deal with things that are best orchestrated as a commons not communism but 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 aree allowedo take from this river and we are going to enforce those who violate those rules so there's enough fish or enough pastor or enough air or what ever it is for everybody to use. let's make a mark markets for them for the iphones and let's compete. and capitalism let's people invest in the things i think thk are going to win.

but a lot of stuff really doesn't work in terms of the market sensibility. you need to create a scarcity of something in order for the market to work around it. it's much harder to do stuff that showed or at least could be in abundance. i think what we need is a multifaceted ecology of economic models that are different depending on what it is we are trying to share together. >> about 20 minutes left in our discussion on in-depth. one of the questions we always ask our authors to come on in depth is their favorite books and also the books they're reading right now. here's what douglas said to both questions on favorite books the cosmicrier. jon kennedy, lewis mumford techniques and civilization the

torah, virginia woolf to the white house and in terms of what reading and a times and breaking together. which one or two of those books you want to talk about in the context of thisoo discussion wee having today? >> we got one out of the way. let's do the cosmic trigger is a really interesting one. with respect to that last conversation we were having. because is a great countercultural wte and prankster and trickster. he was responsible are partly responsible for the church of fodiscord at work every member. since the early 1960s style of intentional disinformation that was being used for the abbie hoffman radical hippy

psychology. but he wrote this book cosmic trigger what he is arguing is not that everything is true that we can all hold multiple perspectives at different times and not to take any one of them very seriously. you can look at a situation as may be a scientist can see from that perspective if you can look at it as cynic. a new age fantasy person you can look at it as a psychedelic person. there are all of these different ways to look at things. it would have helped people today in the conspiracy theories, queuing on and people looking for what really happened here? rather than needing to grab onto one of them to know did this happen is the 5g tower connected to the election both connected to the covered vaccine? wait a minute.

to be able to tolerate not knowing to tolerate their different perspectives. it really does shield you from the same kinds of things you expect to gain power, use confusion and conspiracy and unknown as ways of getting power as well. for like a lot of these poor kids who were scooped into this radical wars ended up being the victimsms of their imagination rather than being able to harvest their own creativity. this book is really good for walking through the chapel perilous which is the confusion. what's true, what's not true is nothing true and how to get to the other side of that? he was really good at that. the other one is the book i just finished it last night.

peter's book which is called, also called again? the counter elites and the path of political disintegration. >> what that book does in a doesn't reallyinteresting and r. i love to be wrong and get corrected. when these revolution. -- when civilizations break down, it is not because theich got so rich and the poor got so poor that the poor revolt. 70 people are in the villages and they will revolt. that is not what happens. what happens it's the creation of too many elites not to that there's millions of others but there's so many elites that there's not enough to all be elite and they start competing with each othert

and that's what breaks things down. when there's too many elites and i'm sure any of the listeners that are angry at coastal elites and all that, there's too many. there's not enough. there's a lot of billionaires. there is research for a piece i'm doing right now if you took the top five billionaires today that they had more total wealth for in the five billionaires at a j.p. morgan and carnegie and those guys. they actually have less then the top five. >> in dollars or percentage of the economy? >> percentage of the economy. but the top thousand billionaires have way more than everybody else, so there is a larger billionaire class.

it's still a tiny number of people compared to the whole population, but it's spread out through billionaires competing with each other for the scraps and that's sort of what breaks things down. to what extent do you think america is a societal tendency to be less present is contributing to increased emotional and anxiety trends? >> tremendously and totally may be 99.9% of it. it's funny when you have a lot of us are raised with kids who have one kind of sensory or nervous a disorder or another whether it's add or spectrum processing or too much cortisol or whatever it is that they are not calibrating.

the easiest way is to bring them into bed with you or sit them skin to skin ideally if they are little enough that it's still appropriate. abeing with people, being on a team, copresidents, co-location is the surest way to calibrate and gain mental health. if you think about our society as addicted to technology and money and crazy stuff this idea then i will try to do good for the world. then i can start behaving. if we are addicts and we need the 12 step program, we need the equivalent of alcoholics anonymous for our addiction to these crazy things, what is the first thingng you do, you go ina room with other people. you go to a meeting.

that is the one requirement you go to a meeting in a room and experience fellowship every day. you find the others. that's what's on the back of my book. you find the others and to be with them absolutely. it's our lack of presence with each other that's making it harder to calibrate naturally and making us actively more distrustful of each other. looking on twitter, you don't know, you can't ever feel the nopositive. you can get a dopamine hit. somebody tweeted me, i get a hit of dopamine but you don't get oxytocin which is the actual bonding hormone. you don't get your neurons fired, you don't have an organic experience of come artery, fellowship, community, not to call it even -- you don't feel part of the group.

it's much more like spectacle. when you all agree we all look at this person's tweet and have given it a thumbs up because they've told us who the enemy is because they are mad at biden and the u.s. and russia. that's not the same thing and we see all the data of kids on twitter and instagram and snap chat and all those things instead of why they are suffering terribly from everything from anorexia to tourette's. a new tick-tock acquired tourette's, which is a sort of pseudo- tourette's but it's a symptom they are cutting they are killing themselves. this is not, it's become a

public health crisis and you don't solve it with another app that then the wellness app you sold it with a good old-fashioned -- i sound like an old person but it shouldn't be considered nostalgic copresidents being with other people. i think it should always stay in fashion. >> for a book readers thatt may not know your social media presence, do you tweet, or you on facebook, do you? >> no, i'm not. i have a twitter account and i willll send a link to my podcast each week, and now i'm even considering stopping that. i use to participate when it was a little more of a conversation, but now a tweet, 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 box pretending to be sex workers, there's this new kind of bought out there that's some kind of a scam and i guess you're supposed to want to hire them as either virtual or real strippers of some kind or sex workers, what's the point? it's such a little cesspool and it's so aggravating and to see the kind of conversations that are engendered there, i don't even want to do that. so i am on linkedin that is a little bit less, but no i don't have a social media presence. i don't do the social media activity. i have a blue sky account i haven't used yet and a kind of federated version of twitter that i would use, but i'm not

finding the real need for it. i get n so much e-mail that is servicing the e-mail feels like as much time as i want to spend looking at the screen and i'm just learning, meeting my neighbors and finding out about my town. there is only so much left. i am an adult and i don't want to spend it there. >> i want to read when you publicly quit facebook in 2013 you wrote a column about it on the cnn. you wrote facebook has never been merely a social platform. rather it exploits our social interactions the way a tupperware party does. facebook doesn't exist to help us make friends but to turn our network of connections and activities over time from our social grasp into a commodity for others to exploit. >> right. they would sell them. and when i wrote that it was a when facebook decided that they could use you to advertise

whether or not you wanted. so it's like if you said i'm at starbucks today they might broadcast about to your friends and everyone who follows you. it got worse than not. now it's to take your past behavior and use that to put you in a statistical bucket and predict what you are likely to do in the future and then make sure that you do that. you are likely to go on a diet in the next two weeks. your feed will get filled with stories like what happens if you are too fat or if you need to bad food, what's going on in your bloodstream and all.

they are not doing that in order to sell you a specific diet product. what they are doing 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 are going to do something that wasn't consistent with their statistical profile. so the function of facebook and these other networks in that regard is to autotune the humanity to take the 20% we are going to do some novel, strange, wonderful, weird human thing and be less predictable, less like the algorithm addicted to them them tobe and reduce that down. you don't want any people doing the weird thing. so it's auto tuning the independence out of humanity and that's not an environment you want to be spending time in. >> we have about five minutes left in the conversation. wanted to read this from another

reviewer in hawaii that said thank you for sharing your insight.t. as a yoga therapist, actor, lover of history and language i do see the repetitive nature of human and agree stopping and breathing with another human has profound powers. humans are disconnected with each other and themselves. how do you recommend we begin world healing? >> i do yoga. i do yoga like three times a week with someone who teaches in my neighborhood, a great teacher. after covid or during covid, she started doing it virtually, doing it on zoom because some of the people don't want to go back to live in the room so it's become zoom yoga and a few months ago i was crying

afterwards. to hear the creaks of their needs or whatever, but to be in a room with other people and that was gone. ii want to be in a room with people and it's gosh good that we head to hawaii calls. i've always had a spiritual feeling about hawaii. it's to find the others is that is my whole purpose, but i want to do with whatever i've got

left. >> in the two and a half minutes we have left, you mentioned the last words of your book. a page or two before you write this and we started our conversation today about humanists versus futurists and you write the future is less a noun than a verb. it's a thing we do. i want to end with that, with your thoughts on that. >> what i was trying to do is the idea that the future especially these technologists and planners and institutionalists and everyone we hire people to tell us what's in the future so we can prepare for it. so they look at the most likely future from their algorithms and it's a disaster. climate change, economic unrest, nuclear war. the way that i prepare for that

is building a bunker, getting a rocket ship, going to mars. the best i can do is predict the future and prepare and hang on for it. what i'm saying is no. the future is something we are creating right now. you are making the future with the choices you make. if you are preparing for a future where that thing is going to happen, then you are way more likely of bringing that on. but if we prepare for a future where people realize their neighbors are their friends and that we are in this together? that mutual aid and togetherness and connection and community and care and acknowledging nourishment and the social reality that that's the future that we want to create. we create the future by doing it and enacting it. we are future ring with every ay action we take now so start today and you will like how the world turns out.

>> author and professor douglas rushkoff has been our guest. his latest book is "survival of the richest of the tech billionaires," came out in 2022. the 20 books, nonfiction and fiction over the past 20 years. thank you for talking about some of them with us this morning. >> thank you and thanks for what you do. this is an important, an important gathering people.

>> we believe here or right here or way out in the middle of anywhere you should have access to past reliable internet. that's why we are leading the way. >> along with of these companies supporting c-span2 as a public service. it's great to be with you to talk about your new book. >> i'm very excited. thanks for reminding me.