>> you describe yourself in your book survival of the richest. a humanist that writes about the impact of digital technologies but not w a futurist. what is the difference between the two? >> futurist is somebody they come to to tell you what is going to happen. i've been right about that a lot. but really what i am is present. i'm more interested in looking at and describing accurately what is happening right now and that is usually an easier way to know what's going to happen in the future but i don't usually talk about it. most futurists seem like propagandists kind of fighting for the future they want to see or positions a cultural

anthropologist or sociologist you end up free to talk about things in ways other people don't. so for me when i realized i was present is when aol was buying time warner. i don't know if you remember that back in 1999. everyone was excited the first big digital company is going to buy time warner. the old media company. and this meant the synergy of old media and new media was coming and "the new york times" called me to write the piece on what was happening. so i wrote this piece saying as i lookoo at it and understand it it looks to me like it is cashing in its chips. the founder grew this thing as much as he could.

the subscriber rate is peaking and he is using his inflated stock to buy a real company like time warner that has an amusemet parks and cable and all that and it probably means we are now at the peak of the bubble. they said we can't publish this. everyone says that is the greatest thing and it means all this stuff is coming. i am not a futurist. i'm just looking out what is and to me it looks like the end of a videogame when you either level up or cash out and i think he'sa cashing out. of course they didn't publish it. i turned out to be right but not because i'm a futurist. it's predictive but it's more looking at what iski rather than trying to guess what's out there. when it comes to the impact of

the digital technologiesg wouldw you describe yourself as an optimist or a pessimist? >> neither. again an optimist or a pessimist it's funny. an optimist or pessimist, i am optimistic about how this is going a to work out or pessimisc about how this is going to work out. i would say i am frustrated. i am hopeful but frustrated. i'm hopeful they will find a way to get out of the messes they are in but i'm frustrated they are using technology on people. using it on people instead of getting technology to people with a base in their ability to use them, that they are surrendering this digital renaissance.

they think of themselves in charge of everything from i education to politics. to what end? what are your values. what economics and anthropology classes did you take in college if any before you dropped out in freshman year? so, i kind of look at it that way. >> our guest is with us the net two hours to talk about his book 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 as it was known? >> it's interesting. i saw the internet, the emerging internet. the emerging computer networks

as part of a larger cultural phenomenon. we had just been through, we had tv radio that is the first sort of citizens media movement at least in my lifetime since hand radio. it happened, fax machines, the beginning of the activity, television screens which had always been completely passive monitors. using joysticks to move things around. we had fax machines we could start to send each other messages. people were walking around with of these phones rather than having to be home to get a call. there were physics and chaos and a new understanding of how the worldwo works. there was electronic music and kids throwing wave is just a sort ofge entertainment in the middle of j the field. there was a psychedelics revival where people were looking at

kind of reengineering their cognitive apparatus. and it seemed all these things and the internet were part of a new culture, a west coast kind of psychedelic whole earth culture that might shake things up. i was an east coast educated theater director. at the time i was fed up with how elite it had become, how predictable the place where everything had b a beginning, middle and end. i felt really stifled and this internet thing was surprising. i'm sure like you, i was raised in a world where people who liked computers had a little pocket protectors and the kids

turned in the hallways, there was a type. by the late '80s i was finding out that my weirdest most psychedelic friends from college were going out to silicon valley to go work for apple and intel. it was confusing why were the weird people working with computers, so i started covering it as a journalist. and i saw this very different computer story. ofthese folks would be working t intel or northrop grumman, going home and scraping the bugs off cactuses and tripping at night and creating images that were being shown at the grateful dead shows the next weekend so something was happening that was different. the first book i wrote about

this, looking at the different threads of culture as a part of the same cultural assertion that we could redesign reality and all these different things whether kids were, i know people were scared, but it really wasn't. dungeons & dragons, instead of watching the movie the kids would created their own story together. it was a sort of choose your own adventure hypertext reality that no one was used too. the idea that you could read aa story and text on the computer and click on a word and choose where it takes you. you could open the drawer and look inside it and go in your own pathway. that was very new and too 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 that was much less passive and much more of a choose your own adventure andd spirituality and politics and government and education and art in all forms of human activity. >> so how did we get from that culture, that cyberpunk psychedelic culture in that moment thatre you described to survival of the richest of the escaped fantasies of tech billionaires? >> there's a few ways to look at it. in the last couple of pages interestingly enough and i know these are book people, siberia in my book was canceled by doubleday in 1992 because they felt the internet was going to be over by 1993 when the book was supposed to come out. i got a letter from the editor.

is that letter framed somewhere? >> i have it in a drawer with all the other projections of the book. it's funny, so by the time i was putting it together, three or four years in the making rather than one or two. by the time i was putting the finishing touches on the last draft for harper who ended up publishing it, they just launched. what this is is good for business. that the internet is going to create more surface area on the market. it would be able to grow exponentially, uninterrupted forever. i understand what they were saying, but they looked at digital technology as the

ultimate derivative. the way the finance works is by kind of going meta, moving one level above what is actually happening so there's a transaction between people and then you can buy stock in that. soio you are one level removed. thanks to computers you can buy a derivative, which is one level removed from that or the derivative of the derivative and so on or you can look at colonialism, so much territory on the planet. but thanks to the internet we are going to get real estate real estate so the markets expand onto new surface and territory. they said it's interesting that what is happening. but what is happening is a financial phenomenon. a business phenomenon. once business people came in and this was my fear at the end of that m book i said there is a window of opportunityf for us to see is this cultural phenomenon

is what it is as an experiment in the collective human imagination and the comment of ideas and kind of unfolding of human culture. but there are folks that want to turnrn this into something else and to make it more about profit and exponential growth. i amdi not quite sure what that will do to the culture. it turns out what it is kind of cure the culture because if you can look at the early internet was about kind of exploring the infinite possibilities of the culture, what does the connected human imagination new. what can we do when we are connected by these machines when we are totally alone and what happens when we share all these processing cycles? we flip to that.

once you are betting on the internet as a stock, you're not looking at how to increase possibility. you're looking at how to increase probability. once you bet on something, what do you want to? the highest probability that your bet will come true. you bet on aol, the web, you want it to have the highest probability. instead of using technology to increase creative possibility, we use the technologyy on people to increase their probability. and this you could see 1993, 94, 95. what we started to use on the web were things like stickiness. the object of the game was to create a website that was sticky meaning people would get to the website but they couldn't leave. they even had an ad for one of the companies that showed the users stuck on a piece of paper

as if they were a fly strip and if that is the happy user because they are stuck on what you're doing. we used a metric that was the number of hours a human eyeball would spend looking at your monitor. they announced we were looking at what they called the attention economy and people that were not paying attention with the enemies. after they came up with the attention of the economy is when we started to see all of the diagnoses of attention deficit disorder and all the prescriptions getting people to pay better attention to these websites where i started to write about how i wonder if a shortened attention span might be a defense mechanism against a world where they are creating sticky websites and using every tool at their disposal. behavioral finance. the slot machine algorithms. there is a division of stanford that's about how to capture

human attention and modify human behavior online. so, for me that was the turn when people especially in the technology industry begin to think about their users more the way a heroin user. how do we control them. >> what is the mindset? >> the easiest way to describe the mindset is the idea that you can earn enough money to insulate yourself from that image you're creating by earning money in that way. all the problems you created in thehe technology that you just made.

it's a kind of techno solution understanding of the world where human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. so they tend to be libertarian. theyey understand human relationships as purely a market phenomenon. they tend to be afraid of women and nature and indigenous people. they tend to want to own everything. the object of the game is to see one's own contributions as uniquebu and your own ideas without precedence. it's an urge to kind of neutralize the unknown by dominating it and d animating it. when you hear them talking about the self sovereignty and progress and increasing choice and somehow starting over, it's funny, there's a place near

california where a bunch of the tech grows want to build a new city, a perfect city they are going to live in. it's renewable and it uses the best energy and computerized stacks for education and religion and traffic and autonomous, it is the perfect thing. butig it's like going to mars or going to the dark side of the moon were moving to new zealand alaska. they need to do as if from scratch they need to begin. it's the urge to get to a new territory. pretend there's no real life for humans there and start over completely. when you talk to these guys they all share the same understandings off human beings as the masses, as low and then ssort off one level above.

they talk about going from zero to one, living one level, one order of magnitude above everything else. that's the mindset. it peaks in this almost eugenic idea called effective altruism where they believe that it's okay to be kind of an awful person now as long as you earn a lot of money and give some of the money back. it's kind of a weird utilitarianism on the digital psychedelic steroids where they believe, and this is how far the mindset goes. it is tech worship. the hatred of everything earthly that they think that in the future there will be hundreds of

trillions of artificial intelligence spread throughout the galaxy that will launch the states may be part of biology come apart to journal, part of silicon. whatever they are they are these post human entities all over the universe and because there's so many of them, their total happiness matters more than the 80 billion that happened to be alive right now. the lives of the people today matter lessth than this future f trillions of little robot consciousness. that is part of why i am 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 invest and save ourselves, let

the people die and get the rockets to the next. but it's ignoring the presence. i have much more faith in the reality of the present. the ed billion people alive today thate actually matter. and then we would make a very different decisions if we thought the w people that were alive today are what mattered rather than the robots into the fantasy future. for a lot more of the mindset, the book survival of the richest the state fantasies of tech billionaires. it's douglas rushkoff 20 books over 30 years nonfiction and fiction books as well. we are talking about all of them in depth this month and asking you to join the conversation. the phone lines are open to 027-48-8200 and for those living in the eastern and central time zones, (202)748-8201. in the mountain and pacific if you want to send a text (202)748-8903. if you do please include your

name and where you are from and also on the social media it is@booktv on all of our social media platforms. go ahead and send your questions and start calling in. so you talk about the mindset. i don't mean the podcast or the book but the concept. >> the concept came up a long time ago on a panel a brilliant guy one of the chief scientists at google he was telling the story about how evolution is a matter of finding more complex homes. so information like the molecule and the organism that human culture but as computers become more complex and capable of

handling more complexity, information will migrate to them and they will prove to be our evolutionary successors then they have to pass to the artificial intelligences and accept our own inevitable replacement and extinction. i was upset by that and said i think human beings have some qualities that artificial intelligence and things raised on these binary logics may never have. human beings can live in that in between space between the yes answer no. an human being can sustain paradox over time without the need to resolve it to one sort of answer or another. we can look at a problem as something to sustain rather than something to solve. remember i said a human being can watch a david lynch movie,

not understand what it means to still experience that as pleasure. what is that, that human beings are special and we deserve a place in the digital future. he said you're just saying that because you're human, like it was an act. and i said okay fine, guilty. i am on team human. i will admit it. i am a human and i'm going to fight for the right for others in my species to have a place on this planet. within the more i thought about it, i realized it goes against the mindset to call humans team. it's about the sovereign individual. the emperor who thinks of himself as augustus caesar that'ske his goal. the single lord over everyone.

the idea arguing that it's a team sport. that evolution is not the story of the survival of the fittest individual. if you actually read the book, what you will see his page after page he is marveling at the way the species collaborate and corroborate to ensure survival. they do that within the species and as manager species coordination. if human beingsin are, and arguably we are not, but if human beings are the most it is becauses, we evolved the most complex methods of collaborating and cooperating with each other. a lot of these are very subtle. a lot of them are when you are in real life with another human being you see when their pupils are getting larger or smaller as you speak. are they taking you in or rejecting you? is the breathing synchronizing with yours? are they making motions with her

head or micro negative motions? you can't see any of this on zoom or skype or a text message. if so, we are trying to conduct a very complex and difficult society in a world that's not letting us get the social cues that we need to fire. if you're online and if someone says they agree with you but they don't get the biological feedback, you can't help but be suspicious of them. anytime someone agrees with you online, what happens is the reverse effect in your body. your body says wait a minute they say they agree with me but i didn't get it in my body. so it generates distrust rather than trust, so his team human is about saying wot to reemploy andrieve these great mechanisms for working and being together. it's almost like putting the social back into socialism.

i care about people knowing their neighbors and understanding that this whole human project isn't about who gets to escape to their bunker but how do we do this together. >> i wonder how you think this emerging technology fits in. this is mark zuckerberg from the connect 2023 event this week reviewing upcoming artificial intelligence technologies. here's one of those technologies. >> our industry over the coming decades is going to be how do we unify these experiencesar of the physical that we have with its vibrant digital world that isre more coherent and better than anything we have today? in the future i think not too far from now, you're going to walk into a room and others going to be holograms into digital things to interact with as there are physical objects.

think about all the things that are there that don't need to be physical things. the papers, the media, the games, the workstations, any screens and all these interactive holograms.ve think about going and hanging out with your friends. pretty soon i think we are going to be at the point where you will be there physically with some of your friends and others willil be there digitally as avatars, holograms and they will feel just as present as everyone else. or you will walk into a meeting and sit down at the table and you will be there with your -- there will be people that are there physically and sitting around the table with you is going to be a bunch of apis and body does holograms to get things done with you. >> on that technology that he previewed. >> the interesting thing is the word unify. the object of the game for him isfy to unify the real world wih

the digital world so the digital will continue kind of colonizing the world that we are in and it's the unification that may be the problem. for me when he describes hanging out with your friends into some of them are virtual, that makes me feel sad compared to when he says you could be in a meeting at a some of the people in the meeting are virtual. interesting, right? so for me the technologies are 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 and how much money do we have to fly this person to 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. all this stuff, all these things

that don't need to be physical things in order to get to the place where you g don't have the physical things to make the ai into the holograph whatever machine it is that's going to create the virtual avatar in the room you've got to send kids into the minds and put factories around water to get cobalt and pollution out. you've got to create you need solar panels and yes they get their energy from the sun but how is the solar panel made and where is it disposed? what he is describing is not less physical matter being used, but more physical matter being used to then deny that human beings of actual physical

presence. the avatar is a great substitute. they can see each other. that's beautiful. where if someone is stuck in a hospital bed or is a paraplegic and now can have a virtual experience that they wouldn't be able to get to, that's a beautiful. about for people who can be together, the complexity of human relationships, the complexity of just imagine the complexity of the mother nursing a babyne so we could get a virtl bottle the end of the virtual mother so she could be at work and then turn. you're going to be missing something. and it's a virtual missing something from them other than i would argue that i'm missing something if you are not at my house watching the game with me but it's your avatar on the couch.

it's not the same that we are denying it. we are turning the game intope again it's like work or the utility value. the other thing that is interesting is the technology described. you wear your glasses so you will never be in the position of seeing someone on the street and not remembering what their name is. it's uncomfortable. you meet someone on the street. if h i had the ray-ban glasses. it will tell me all those things and i can fake report with someone i didn't know which is moving to a bizarre almost kind of dishonest relationship and it's wondering what really mattered that i remember that person's name and if it was a

sales that's good. we used to have things like constant contact. someone calls you and then their profile comes up and how is your wife,ou mabel. you know that because it came up on the computer screen when they called you. it's a fake business relationship trying to sell matches to macy's. okay. but in the real world, to be burdened with a sort of sense of data as part of our interaction and then a world where who paid for the data, i'm going to pick a restaurant, who is paying to be in the virtual augmented reality world? the restaurants that didn't pay, not even going to exist. thate might be the best pizzera on the block. >> about 30 minutes into the two hour interview. it's our in-depth program. looking for your calls and questions and plenty for you this morning. this is jim in california.

it's a good morning still in california. you are on with douglas rushkoff. are you with us? we will try my goal in broward county florida. hang on the line and we will try to get to you. go ahead. >> we will work on those calls. i think we have julie on the line. minneapolis minnesota. julie, minneapolis, let's go. >> i am here. i've heard a number of things and they fired me up. you are passionate and insightful. you have a great many opinions and questions and a lot of ideas which could be molded and

discussed by people that agree with you and oppose you into actual policies and achieving progress. my question is you write books and teach here. how do you get people involved in talking to one another? i think i share some of those characteristics and some of your thoughts. how do we begin to come i think you said something at one point we had the opportunity to take control of the digital age and then much like the universities have ceded education to business. how do we retract that and say no, wet want it back. we are capable of doing this. >> thanks for the call. that's great. i'm asking precisely that question. i think the first thing i realize is the construction of

how we get people to is a potentially hazardous construction in itself. that is sort of the way they think of us. how do we get people to do this and that and once i am thinking about getting people to do something, i'm putting myself in a superior place and we get into almost like television style influence. you become an influence peddler. how do we influence society and change people? because i know how people would be better if they were doing this instead of that. so i try to move away from that is the way i think about it and rather than a 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 rather than

compete. i broke that down and that is probably going to be the next book but i broke it down into four ways of changing the environment or the register in which we are operating. the first one i'm calling it dean naturalized power but all i'm trying to do is help people recognize how many things in the world are so full of constructions and not nature. money, these bills this is what we used to represent money in our r society. when i go on cnn or somewhere and they are asking me about ai and the unemployment problem, it's like exactly why is unemployment problem? when was it invented, what was it for, what is the difference, where do people work for themselves in a small businesses, one where they forced to start doing the wage labor instead of the kind of things they use to do.

so it is kind of challenging these underlining assumptions of how things work which leads to the second one that is triggering agency. i'm trying to help people feel like they have more agency and authority over what they are doing. for me that was the digital revolution when i realized i could save a file not just as a read only but one other people could edit. why was so much of the world established as read only? why isn't it up for discussion? why shouldn't it be up for discussion. the third one if we are going to do that if you have an agency, you need other people. so the third one was to socialize people, to help people feel less afraid of each other. the example i like to use if you need to drill a hole in the wall and you don't have a drill, what

most people would do is go to the home depot and use it wants to drill then it will probably never work again. then you throw it away. you've used it once and created all this carbon, you throw it away and then it is sitting where some other kid is going to be looking at it trying to find the recyclable parts inside of it. what you could have done is walk down the block and knocked on the stores and can i borrow your drill. why don't we do that? why are we so scared we are going to go something because you have a barbecue next week and if you have it and he sees it, you expect to be invited over? maybe you want him over there than the other neighbors are going to smell it and think wait a minute why did he invite bob and not us and worst case you have a block wide barbecue

party, but that's the nightmare right now. ..

called in. caller: thank you for taking my call. i question is totally different than what you have been going on, but i see in your resume that you went to hollywood, you are an apprentice director with brian depalma on a nature movie which was a huge flop, and apparently it turned you off on movies and hollywood. i would just like your comments on that if you would and your thoughts on movies today and in the past. the directors and movies that influenced you when you were younger. i am very interested. i am a movie buff. host: thanks for the call.

douglas: that is beautiful. the real story, i was a theater director of the time i was 11 or 12 years old. i directed plays in junior high school and all the plays in high school. i went to princeton and did english and theater. i would to cal arts and did theater. i was driving across country with my best friend and he fell asleep at the wheel and we hit a tree and was impaled and died. he died to me and all of the sudden i was like theater is so serial, it dies -- is so ethereal, it dies. it was that existential moment where i wanted to do film because it would stay after i

died. then i took film at cal arts and i was with james mangel who did the wolverine movie and then a great director we worked together a lot. i was making films like theater. i liked werner herzog, lenny, my dinner with -- i like theater films with anthony gregory. i like theatrical films and then i got the brian depalma apprentice gig and i will be his apprentice on this big movie and they were expending at the time it was $50 million on a movie that was just not thought out,

just kind of very satire. 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 got tired of theater because i was supposed to do a production of threepenny opera and the cheapest seat was going to be 40 bucks. it was a marxist lefty san francisco thinker, i'm not going to charge $40 for the cheapest seat for threepenny opera. then i turned to the internet thinking the internet would be the people's medium. i wanted to get away from commercial theater and i will go to the internet and go to the antibusiness, pro-human, it was for a moment. it will be that alternative. in terms of the movies, kubrick

and lynch do things in movies that is beyond what people realize is quite happening. these movies are all about inviting multiple interpretations. it is as if the movie has a plot but doesn't have the plot. you could almost project anything onto that. not anything but many different things onto that plot. there was much about yourself as the movie. i like what he does and his imitation that he is really playing with illusion and reality. i like david lynch's work. it is about opening questions.

i find i am annoyed with guys like nothing against their films, but i get annoyed with jj abrams, christopher nolan style movies which do similar things always with an answer. it is always that you figure it out. to me, the beauty of film when it is working, it opens outward. the answer isn't the answer, there are many. it is an object. it works or like that it has a mythic level of experiential value but what it means is you could be different every time you go through it. thanks -- host: thanks for

sharing that story about your friend. you have a podcast in the 20 books. i wonder why you think it is you haven't shared that story publicly for. douglas: i don't know, when you share a story about the death of your friend, it feels a little like it is begging for sympathy. it is like oh you are talking about that sad thing and maybe also because -- i don't know, it takes a lot of years to move through trauma. i remember back from my theater days, you have a scene if you have to cry or be upset or whatever it is in a play, what you do is recall when you've had a similar emotion and think about that in order to activate that emotion in the scene. at least you do it in the

rehearsals. i remember our teachers told us a rule that it has to be from at least six years ago, otherwise you haven't processed the trauma in ways that it is useful and could end up being non-useful. maybe now whatever it is 30 years later, i am kind of distance 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 audience whoever is there but i think about book tv and a lot of these people are book people and i don't get to talk to book people that much. another author, book people, we go through life differently than other people.

book people understand how to engage with an idea or emotion over an extended period of time. whatever book you are reading, it is a different thing than remote controlled media. i kind of felt it was both safer and more appropriate to bring up the processing of trauma or people who write and people who read. host: you chat with more of the people, plenty waiting. in california, oscar, you are on with douglas rushkoff. caller: i will get straight to the question i want to ask. thank you for your books, by the way, they are great. how can we get this aspect of,

do you have a way of expressing the big picture of things going on and it is great because i like to take an aspect of that. for example, capitalism, ok, it has done a lot of great things, but a lot of people use as a self defining term, practically. rented, it put us on the map, but how can you use -- i believe that capitalism is great. it did a lot of good things, but people just strongly side with it but they don't see -- i have often lived at capitalism unchecked starts going bad and starts doing damage, like the big corporation. host: let's pick up on that

because that is a theme of several of his books. douglas: for sure. first book i on capitalism was how the world became a corporation and how to take it back. that is the one that got me on the stephen colbert show. i was really looking at, where did capitalism come from? where did the corporation come from, central currency come from? i traced it back to the late ages. there was a growth of a new peer-to-peer economy. after the crusades there was a marketplace they learned how to do from the desire and they brought -- from the bazaar and they brought it back and we had a trading class. into that market until the 1980's. air stock or seek as the middle class got the feet, so they came up with two great ideas, one was

central currency. it said you are not allowed to have a transaction unless you borrow money from the central treasury at interest. so now because there is interest built into the economy, the economy has to grow just to stay the same. it looks fine for colonialism as long as you keep going faster and faster. the chartered monopoly said you have a monopoly charter to make shoes and everyone else was a shoemaker had to be an employee for the shoe company and that has come down to us as corporate capitalism that we don't question nice president like biden talks about we have to have the gdp to grow by 3% to 5% every year. why do we need it to grow, what does it mean to actually feeding

people, nothing. in some ways it is the opposite, it is about balance sheets. it favors increasingly abstract economic strengths. it is why derivatives are valued more than stocks. this end state capitalism where in 2013 the new york stock exchange was purchased by its derivatives exchange. the new york stock exchange, which is an abstraction of the real market you could argue it is an extraction of the exchange of actual human need, was consumed by its own extraction. this is the way it goes and that is why we end up in this world with tech billionaires looking at what is the next level of abstraction. we could think of the ai craze and digital craze is about looking for, how do i go meta

and extract on reality itself and be one of the robots, one of the derivatives, one of those things? because who wants to be a little newman. -- human. this is general electric style capitalism. the head of ge realized i make less money making and selling a washing machine to you than i do lending to the money to buy the washing machine. so that is when he stole the productive aspects and turned ge into a financial services company because the abstraction makes more money than the actual work. it worked well until 2008 when the financial crisis happened and they had productive assets. that is the tendency. you are right, that is the tendency of capitalism which is why it works great to a point.

it works great for colonial empires if you are not looking at what people is being enslaved and what land is being taken away and it still can work. there is more balance forms of capitalism that we could use. when i tell that story about the real -- grill to people, -- drill, what if we borrow from each other peer what if we have a couple lawnmowers and share. is that much less production and you have to earn as much money. someone variable gets up at the end and says what about the lawnmower company, what about the people who work at the lawnmower and have stock shares and retirement plans the lawnmower companies? what are you going to do about them. ? as the backwardness of starting as the underlying premise of our

society rather than taking the economy of something that is supposed to serve us rather than us preserving the -- serving the economy. host: we are into our douglas rushkoff discussion with douglas rushkoff -- we are into our discussion with douglas rushkoff . a question from hawaii, what test can we devise? douglas: if we don't live in a digital simulation baited by a merchant graduate student of the future, let's say we live in a jewish or christian or buddhist

reality, what would they say we are? what would they say this is? they would say this is the illusion, something else going on here. way or another we live in a simulation because we don't even see what is going on. we have sensory organs that are trying create a picture of what is going on here, but that is all we get anyway. we are just sensory organs trying to process based on what we see. finally, the question doesn't matter but no, i don't believe we are like in westworld, like a million simulations run by

someone to figure out how society works. if we are iterating, it is much closer to karmic iteration of civilizations over time then it would be running simulations. host: a minute ago you were talking about the importance of the experience of awe. i want to go to your book about coercion and talk about the spectacles and how you define spectacle. douglas: spectacle is more like a nuremberg rally or 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. there is in between, like

walking into the great cathedral as a catholic person and doing mass in their -- in there. some architect dude made this inspiration machine, with an organ and lights and stained glass and arches and all to generate and experience awe. go to a rave and they put the lights and music at 120 beats a second and beautiful, young people around dancing half dressed and all like a scene in the matrix, there is in between here but for me, spectacle is really less about inviting true participation and more about stoking the rage of a crowd against a unified enemy

democrats or whoever. the spectacle is more of a designed experience, in order to focus the energy onto a named enemy, enmeshed cases. the other is more about breaking people out of the trap, of the illusion of individuality and letting the next dance

themselves as part of something much larger. 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 against team squirrel or a team tree, it is team human and this is the way that we experience ra -- our perspective. think of any great spectacle. first, uni the crowd. third, speak as god or nature. help me understand that their part a little bit more. >> hitler's speaking about

himself as the father or that -- it is interesting. you look at the twitter means that people like elon musk put up of himself. with them as guides. look at zuckerberg and elon musk challenging each other to a mixed martial arts fight. as if they are demigods. they inhabit silicon valley, which is their mount olympus, and now they will have a spectacle battle through media that we get to see. speaking as god or nature, it depends. there is a book on propaganda

that is really good on this, but having people identify you as the mother, the father, as connected to god -- you are both universal and completely personal. the person feels that you are speaking just to then. apparently, taylor swift has the ability to do that, but she is pretty benevolent about it. the message of empowerment and identification, but someone with her abilities could be doing it politically, could be doing it that way. how do we get people to blank? then we are the same. there is a rally where we get

people to believe in our god or get people to vote for our party or do this. there is a vulnerable moment where people are like, -- it happens when someone walks into one of the original shopping malls. they show it on tape. you can watch the videos of it. their job opens and their eyes glaze over. that moment where you can drop in, whatever you want, whatever brand, whatever party or political ideology. when they drop that in, now we are meeting our destiny. with the blood and the soil --

in the rhetoric comes a certain assure ship -- a certain assertion that this is the natural way, that we are returning to some kind of pagan, barbarian, masculine, authentic map to what we are. it is a more natural, open, from my gut state of being. >> my we listen to what they say has a quote from bob carey on the front. remind of who he was 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 candidate. there was a scandal about a particular episode during the war. it is unclear what exactly happened, but he was always nice to me. he was actually the boyfriend of my neighbor, when i lived in the west village, back when you can live there as a barely working writer. she lives across the hall from me and he was her boyfriend. i got to hang out with him a little bit. he did a really funny one. i thought they were foolish. read this or else -- it is perfect because the book is called coercion. >> what ended up on the cover.

intentionally misleading the listener, reader or viewer. read this book and nobody gets hurt. they send it back. >> he added to it so that they would accept him on there, but it was good. he then became president of the new school in new york for a while. a big building. he was controversial but a very useful figure in bringing that place to its current standing. >> this is michael. you are on with douglas rushkoff . >> and chatting with chatgpt, i

discovered some information about governor desantis. check this out. because it is basically a semantics engine it the same reason they do it. they say things that are positive. anything to do with racism, misogyny -- i guess you are right. but it really messes with your friends who are rich. it changes your brain so that you react in the exact same way, more quickly acting. they are causing a lot of what you are discussing.

we verify that they can lead, but they start to catch the rabbit and we pool the information. and for 50 years, they have done randomized tests. we have never had more than 30%. douglas: the embracing feature of this is applying logic to our many social institutions. whatever metric you put is the metric that you are going to get , right?

that is what you are going to go forward. they are necessarily rejected metrics. you bring them in, in vitro and say, we are going to teach this kid long division. without any understanding, what is going on in that kid's house? they are moving from shelter to shelter. how do i take care of my mother? the challenge of that kid, what the child needs to learn at that moment is reflected in the assessment that they have done at the end of the week. that is the problem with a one-size-fits-all education system and everything. and the thatcher era, there was a story about how when they were

trying to use incentives to get hospitals to perform better, they said they would give more money to hospitals that reduce the amount of time that people spent in the waiting room and for them to get beds as quickly as possible. what they did was they took the wheels of the gurneys and bind the hallways with the gurneys and declared them being in the room. the time and energy it took actually slow the rate at which people got medical care. in order to win the metric, they ended up reversing. what i hear in this caller's concern is the way that we institutionalize short-term, nuclear -- oversimplified values

. the bigger and more convoluted, very often the harder and harder it is to get back to what it is that we want. chatgpt -- people have to realize that chatgpt is hyped right now. it is a stock market desperate for another big thing. zoom and all these apps are not being used as much. all the media companies are not being watched as much. chatgpt is really just an advanced search engine right now. it pushes them into something that looks more like speech.

it is not actually correct. it is reverting everything to the mean. what is the most average answer to that question? so, it is wrong and self-centered. it is not what we think it is. these things are actually smart, but we are not there. host: ruth from st. george, utah. caller: hello. i have a couple points i want to go back to. it has been a little over two years. i live in this gorgeous area, so

it is all about experiencing things in real time, not virtually. i love live performance. teenage kids, adults, professional, i want to see people trying and delivering. it is great for my soul. douglas: i have been blessed a few times. if you don't have the -- if you have the opportunity to do it, do it. you feel connected to the creation. creation itself.

go there and stare at a rock for five minutes. it is the trip is -- utah, some parts of new mexico do that as well. it is amazing, but the thing that amazes me about our state of disconnection is how quick the ev connect, recalibrating to reality is almost instantaneous. find a friend, look in their eyes and take two or three breaths with them. it is almost unbearable, if you have not done it in a while. it reconnects you almost instantly. how long it took, how much engineering, how many billions or trillions of dollars in this

crazy state. you are going to get an wellness app and a meditation at to get you over the facebook or snapchat cap. you touch ground and put your feet on the ground and look at another person. look at a clip. breathe in a forest. look at the eyes of your dog or cat. you get it so quickly and it is so accessible. even in a forest fire hayes, it is so accessible. when i have hope in the future, it is how quickly they restore when you give them half a chance. host: when you are creating your

writing, when you are writing, is there a place you go to think? what is your process for writing? douglas: i tend to go about it the same way, whether it is fiction or nonfiction. i write no cards. i end up putting them on the wall. it is like content areas and then content areas mutate into chapters and then i order them so that each chapter flows as a structure. because of that, i need to have a place where the book happens.

a room, an office, because it ends up being physically represented with the no cards. i have had somebody years of experience with the no cards that i know how many i have. i know how important the topics are in each one. i feel it more intuitively. i have not -- i put the survival of the richest in here. my bookcase wall was the one where the book was written. i have been trying to use a program that is a substitute, but it does not quite organize the same way.

i have to be in a physical relationship to the ideas. it is like a chapel of memory. they are in my head and located there in the chapter. host: chapel of memories. what was the hardest book for you to write? douglas: this last book came right out. that is what my agent told me. it is the stories. i tell all these ridiculous, fun stories and their antics. that one came right out. the most researched book was like eight. i went to the yale library,

charters and the hardest one was probably a graphic novel. it is about the real but fictionalized of cold war between alastair crowley and adolf hitler. and three -- the first three artists who were hired to work on the book all had major life catastrophes like illness, suicide etc., and i was starting to get scared that you start writing about someone like alastair rally -- alastair crowley and there is something dangerous happening. i got really scared when i was writing that, that i was

touching energy that i should not. it was really hard to do and to tell that story as reality with history, while also getting into these characters and trying to distinguish in a responsible way. that was the most harrowing experience i had. caller: thank you very much, gentlemen. this is a fascinating conversation. i'm interested in your role about research. how much of the research and writing? do they overlap each other? also, your role with agents. thank you very much. douglas: with life, i like to

have all the research done before i start writing. 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. if you really want to reach people, you have to tell stories. but at least tell stories in the literary medium, stories of how you engage. so i started doing that. she was right. and now and always, i have seen my agent, but more so my editor as my partner in the project. i do not want to sell to a publishing company that has an editor that is not adding value to the book. not just the distribution, the cover and the sales of the book, but they should be my partner. they really are the first

audience, and i'm not going to leave him unless god knows what happened, but he was the one who told me to write this book. he wrote a couple articles. i did this article on the survival of the richest who wanted advice on how to get out there doomsday bunkers. a year or two later, i wrote about the covid crisis, how i felt many people were retreating and adapting that billionaire mindset. i can make this work. i both at peace and that is when he called me and said, this is your next book. you have to do this. i called the agent and i said, the editors that i should do this.

so it was actually a book that came from the editor to me. i was writing audience of one, but what about this and that. and to be anyplace -- it is a strange place to be. i see the notes and critiques from the editor as gifts, rather than as word, as ways to get in. this guy is helping me make this better. he is making me a better writer. to think that someone else does not know better than or at least as well as you -- it was really good for me. i look at all these people as my partners in crime here. it feels better to come out with a book that you know that your people are a part of.

of course, i am finally living it. host: it is his latest book. also a professor of media theory and digital economics in new york. and we will go to new york. mike is waiting. you are on with douglas rushkoff . caller: good afternoon. i have a question for the professor. why -- it has been very ineffective and paste miserable failure, but details of the self-appointed uv, i just want the people listening to understand what complete

hypocrites these people are. they are surrounded by highly trained, armed bodyguard. i just want people to understand that. there are these forms of government that do not work. free-market capitalism has been the most effective. by five, the most effective way to govern and live, in terms of economics. these technology news -- it is disgusting. they are believed in hypocrisy,

the entire way that they live. host: i think we got your point. douglas: capitalism has worked, as long as we get period of success, we have major reclamation. big regulation. when things spun out of control, a wpa and a g.i. bill, and an education bill. that is when capitalism works best is when you do that. income tax rate went up 80% to 90% during that time. when capitalism works too well,

you end up extracting so much value that you make the people around you poor. when huber, facebook and google are doing well -- they end up destroying markets. but it is actually destructive. they are storing more money. he did to the place where mark zuckerberg says, going to give act 5% of my money to places that i took it out. you made facebook less extracted -- if you had made facebook less extracted, he would not have the money back into the ecosystems and societies you decimated. i would argue that the reason why it has not worked is because they are trying to do the same at scale.

i look at scale as the problem. when marx was writing about socialism, he was saying, how do we retrieve the social element of commerce and exchange? need borrowing a drill from the neighboring by at home to. is that a crime or is it ok? i understand the perspective that it is a crime. even though i do not need a drill, if i do not by the drill, how little black and decker grow? it is my responsibility. that is the point where it gets off. not just as a means to an end.

when i look at socialism, i'm talking about how you put the social back into it. when you talk about communism, i like community. it is not something that you can orchestrate so well. this is where i think he went a little bit off and trying to exercise. he has this great track when he writes about robinson crusoe. that he had all these little measures. he needed to maximize his own efficiency. he's going to spend this much time fishing and this much time collecting water and making road. and marx said, if robinson crusoe did it for himself, what

if we created a ledger for the whole country, so you know how many people need to do this and that. you cannot plan that out. markets can be good for figuring out supply and demand. they are bad at discovering how we share water. how do we deal with something like air? how do they best orchestrate? this is a river and we all share responsibility for the river. how many fish are you allowed to take from the river? we are going to force those who violate so that there is enough fish, pasture, air for everybody to use. let's compete in capitalism.

but a lot of stuff does not really work in terms of market sensibility. you need to create a scarcity of something for the market to work around it. it is much harder to do that. 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. host: one of the questions we always ask is about their favorite books in the books that they are beating right now. onavorite books, john

kennedy's tools, lewis mumford's techniques and civilizatn. virginia woolf's to the white house. breaking together. what books do you want to talk about in this discussion today? douglas: i already talked about one. let's see. that is an interesting one. with respect to the last conversation we were having, it was a great counterculture writer. he was responsible or partly responsible for the church of discord. it was the early 1960's style of

intentional disinformation to promote that medical, hippie psychology. what he is arguing is that we can all hold perspectives at different times and not take any one of them too seriously. you could see it from that perspective or look at it as similar or as a new age fantasy person or a psychedelic person. there are different ways to look at things. it would have helped people today come in the whole conspiracy theories, qanon and people looking at what really happened. did this happen?

is it connected to the covid vaccine? to be able to tolerate not knowing, to be able to tolerate that there are different perspective, it shields you from the same kinds of people that use skeptical. -- use spectacle. i feel like a lot of these poor kids who were scooped into a medical right medium ended up being the victims of their imagination rather than being able to harvest their own creativity. this book is really good for walking through chapter parentless. what is true or not true?

how are you going to get to the other side of that? the other one is the book that i finished last night. it was called -- what was it called again? host: the path of political disintegration. douglas: what that book does in a rigorous way is -- it was nice to feel wrong. i love getting corrected. when these revolution. -- when civilizations break down, it is not because the rich 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 is, it is the creation of too many elite.

there are so many elite that there is not enough for the elite to all be elite. they start competing with each other and that is what breaks things down. i'm sure that there are too many. there are not enough. there are a lot of billionaires. i thought that when bezos and musk and zuckerberg -- i thought that they had more total wealth than the five billionaires, carnegie and those guys. they actually had less wealth. but there are more billionaires. the top ones have way more than

everybody else. there is a larger billionaire class. still a tiny number of people compared to the population, but it spread out through a bunch of wider billionaires competing against each other for scraps of billions. that is what breaks things down. host: to what extent do you think that america's societal tendency is contributing to anxiety trends? douglas: tremendously and totally. it is funny. when you have -- a lot of us are raising kids who have sensory disorders or sensory processing,

too much corso or whatever it is. the easiest way to calibrate your kids is to bring them to bed with you or sit with them. body to body, skin to skin, if they are little enough and it is still appropriate. but coal location -- it is the surest way to calibrate, to gain help. if you think about our society as being addicted to technology, addicted to money and this crazy stuff, this idea that just one more thing, then i will try to do good for the world. i just need another $1000 and then i can behave ethically. 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 thing you do? you go into a room with other people. you go to a meeting. you experience fellowship every day. find the others. absolutely. it is our lack of presence with each other that is making it harder for us to calibrate naturally and making us naturally more distressful. you cannot ever feel the positive, not truly. you can get a dopamine hit. somebody tweeted, i get a hit of dopamine but not oxytocin, which is the actual bonding chemical. you do not have an organic experience of camaraderie or

fellowship. you do not have that. you not feel part of the group. it is a very different kind of group. it is much more spectacle. look at this person's tweet. we all gave it a thumbs up. they are my -- they are mad at biden or russia. we all do that. is not the same thing. and it leads -- kids who are on twitter, instagram and snapchat, instead of being with one another are suffering terribly. everything from interacts yeah to to read and -- it is a

symptom. they are killing themselves. it is becoming a public health crisis. you do not solve it with another app. the wellness app. he sold it with good, old-fashioned -- i sound like an old person. but it should not be considered nostalgic, being with other people -- it should always stay in fashion. for -- host: for book readers do not know your social media presence, are you on facebook? do you tiktok? douglas: i am not. i have a twitter account, and i will send a link to my podcast each week. now i am considering stopping that. i used to participate when it was more conversational.

but i will say, i will be a book tv today. if i get 50 likes for that and 30 of them are from bots pretending to be sex workers. there is a new bot out there that is a scam. people look at them as virtual or real strippers of some kind. but what is the point? such a little cesspool and it is so aggravating. to see the conversations engendered there -- i do not even want to do that. it is a little bit more professional, but i do not have any social media presence. i do not do social media. i have a blue sky account i have not used yet.

i have a mastodon account, which is a federated version of twitter that i use, but i'm not finding a real need for it. i get so much email that servicing the email feels like as much time as i want to been looking at a screen. i meeting my neighbors and finding out about the town. there is only so much life left. i do not want to spend it in there. host: you publicly quit facebook and he wrote a column about it. he wrote, facebook has never been merely a social platform. it exploits our actions the way that tupperware parties do. it turns our network of connections, our social graphs come into a commodity for others to exploit. douglas: they would sell our

social graphs. when i wrote that was when facebook decided they could use you to advertise. they broadcast that for money to your friends or anyone who follows you and more. whether you enter or not, they were going crazy, but it got worse than that. you have to take your past behavior and use that to put you in a bucket. forget what you are likely to do in the future and make sure that you do that. facebook looks at your past activities and decides that you are 80% likely to go on a diet in the next two weeks. your newsfeed will get filled with stories like, what happens

if you are too fat or did you eat that food? what is going on in your bloodstream? what they are doing that for is to get that 80% accuracy after 90%. they are directed at 20% of people who choose to do something else, who are going to choose to do something that is not -- they take the 20% who are going to do some novel chemistry, wonderful beard and human thing. they will be less like the algorithm predicted them to be and reduce it down. it is basically auto tuning the soul, the weirdness and independent out of humanity.

that is not an environment that you want to spend time in. host: about five minutes left in our conversation. carla says, thank you for sharing your insight. i do see the repetitive nature of humans and agree. humans are disconnected from each other and themselves. how do you recommend we begin a world hearing? douglas: i do yoga. i do yoga three times a week with someone who teaches in my neighborhood. after covid or during covid, she started doing it virtually, doing it on zoom. some of the people do not want to go back, so it has become

zoom yoga. a few months ago, i started crying afterwards. i was just like, this sucks. yes, i'm glad to move my body in that way, but i was doing yoga with the other people doing it. but to be in a room with other people -- that was gone. i want to be in a room with people. it is great that we had two hawaii calls. i've always had a spiritual thing about hawaii.

to find others -- that is my whole purpose, but i want to do with whatever i have left. host: you mentioned find the others are the last words of the book in team human. we started our conversation today about being present versus future. peace in the future is less a noun than a verb. i went to and with your thoughts on that. douglas: i was trying to rob from god is a verb, which is a great book as well. the future, especially these planners and institutionalists -- they look at the future as, we will hire people to tell us what is in the future so we can repair for it. look at the most probable

future. nuclear war -- the way i prepare for the future is building a bunker, getting a rocketship, going to mars. the best i can do is predict the future, prepare and hang on for it. i'm saying no, the future is something that we are creating right now. you are making the future with the choices that you make. you are way more likely of bringing that on. what if we prepare for a future where people realize that their neighbors are their friends? that mutual aid and togetherness, connection and community, and care, acknowledging nourishment and acknowledging the social reality -- that is the future that we want to create. we create that future by enacting it. we are future and with every

action that we take now. start featuring today and he will like how the world turns out. host: douglas rushkoff has been our guest for the past two hours. his latest book came out in 2022. thank you for talking about some of them this morning. douglas: