Julian

And it's pretty alarming that they're having this conversation very matter of factly with you, even if you are describing yourself as the entertainment in 2017. This is before COVID before the rise of AI, before this. That is wild.

Douglas Rushkoff

And these are people who would rather have. With robots or teenagers than women, right?

Julian

Wait. Wait a second. Please explain that.

Douglas Rushkoff

These are people who want to build sex robots. These are people.

Julian

The people you were talking to.

Douglas Rushkoff

This is. This is.

Julian

They said this.

Douglas Rushkoff

This is who they are. These are the Epstein kinds of people. These are talking about the culture that we're talking about, right? The culture that we're looking at, the billionaire tech bro culture. What are their values? What do they want? How many wives do they want? Who do they want the wives to be? How much power do they want those people to have?

Julian

Can you put the camera on, Doug? Real fast, Steve? Let me just write this down on my band. Was that one of them?

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh, one of the. Is that on the camera?

Julian

It's not on the camera. You're on camera right now. Yeah, yeah. You couldn't see it on that, but let's make sure that's edited. Was that one of them?

Douglas Rushkoff

If you want to know if I.

Julian

It's off record.

Douglas Rushkoff

That's one of them.

Julian

God damn it, bro. God damn it. That's so up.

Douglas Rushkoff

But that's this.

Julian

That's so up.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

Doug, I see you joined the club of Rome. What's going on there?

Douglas Rushkoff

Isn't that cool? They asked me. Yeah. Club of Rome. We club. We go clubbing. No, Club of Rome. It was this thing they started in, like, 1970, 71. They wrote this thing called the Limits to Growth. And it was this way early, like before people really knew about pollution and climate and all that, saying if capitalism keeps growing like this, there might not be enough planet to support what's happening, you know? And they basically predicted all this stuff that was going to come down the pike, you know, by 20, 20, 10, whatever. And then 20, 2010 comes and it's like, way worse.

Julian

Way worse than they said.

Douglas Rushkoff

Way, way worse.

Julian

Now, wasn't there. Aren't they based on, like, Malthusian economics in the sense that they think the population will grow too fast for us to have sustenance? Enough sustenance growing at the same rate?

Douglas Rushkoff

Yes and no. I mean, it's. I mean, Malthus went. Went worse than that. I mean, he went to total, total collapse. But yeah, the belief is that. That, you know, in theoretical systems like capitalism or mathematics, you can keep growing something forever. But that the, the belief is that the planet has a fixed amount of matter on it, you know.

Julian

Right.

Douglas Rushkoff

Then it can only support so much that it's like one giant flower pot.

Julian

Right.

Douglas Rushkoff

And you can only grow so much stuff on it before you, you crash it.

Julian

Sure. How do you get invited into.

Douglas Rushkoff

That was weird. You know, I think I was, I, I. Either there's one. I have one of two hypotheses because now that I'm in, I've seen some of the emails that they send out like about finding new members and in those emails they're saying things like find people that you wouldn't normally think to be here. You know, atypical people who have, you know, different media followings. And so I might have been part of that campaign. I feel more likely I'm part of that one than part of the one. If I'm trusted, you know, scholars of environment. But no, I don't. I did. I mean that's partly that book that, that, that book Survival of the Richest, about the billionaires. Because this, this was a book that really laid out the, the. What is this kind of awful mindset that leads people to want to just grow exponentially forever?

Julian

Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

And why wouldn't that work? You know, why is the only thing in nature that grows exponentially forever is cancer and it kills its host. So sort of I was writing about that and I think they're like, oh, this is, this is a good new way of expressing what they've been trying to express.

Julian

You know, hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge, huge help. Thank you.

Douglas Rushkoff

And, and, and from a different perspective, not of oh, we have to deny ourselves things, but rather let's get into the greeny fun of life rather than worrying about growing more.

Julian

Now what is the invite like though? Did they just like a man in a black hat come knock on your door and be like Douglas Cop, you've

Douglas Rushkoff

been, you've been selected. They're like, it's, it's mostly, I mean, Club Rome. They're not, it's not like they have money in buildings and it's not like Bilderberg. It's more like, you know, a woman who was a former assistant to a UN person emails and says, you know, would you be interested.

Julian

Is it in code like John. What was John Kiraku's code like? The knights. I went the knights and fields and poppies and whatever in seeds and got it all. And it's like, all right, so I gotta go to the dumpster.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, it's like, there's no. It's not like a secretive society. Everybody who's in it, their names on the website, and they're all like, so

Julian

I can go in. They'll let me just like walk in.

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, there's no in.

Julian

There's no in.

Douglas Rushkoff

There's no place.

Julian

I feel like that's what someone on the inside would say.

Douglas Rushkoff

I wish there was a place. No, I mean, so far for me, it's been email. It's been email. No. And they had zooms, you know, but it'll be like, there's someone in India. There's people in Africa. They're. They're around. And they're mostly people who used to be in politics. Like. Like the ex minister of this or the X1 of that. Or people who've written books on the climate and the economy. But they're. It's not like I've been to things that. Way more interesting than way more interesting. Yeah. Or been invited. I got invited to that Hereticon thing. That would have been way more.

Julian

Oh, the Peter Thiel.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

Down in South America.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. But it was like. No, it wasn't. It was in. It was in New Orleans, not quite South America. Yeah, New Orleans. Yeah. Close. Closer to there. To South America than New York.

Julian

But can we pull up the schedule for that again? Deep. The Hereticon schedule I was just talking about.

Douglas Rushkoff

I emailed it because I didn't go then because it was like right smack in the early, worst Covid time. And I was like wife and kid. I didn't want to be exposing people to stuff, but I would have gone. It just was sort of an exciting idea. But that's like more secret.

Julian

That's seems very secret. I just. You know, Doug, when you look at stuff like this and you. You like me and Deef and everyone listening pretty much right now, and you're not a part of these worlds and you don't really understand it. You read things and all the different types of subject matters they're going through throughout the day and then the types of people who are attending and you're like, this seems a little. A little odd.

Douglas Rushkoff

Exactly. That one. Like, the goal is immortality. Right? I mean, fuck, that's like.

Julian

That was psychedelic. Tea party Trist. Burlesque.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

Cyborg.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

Could a human be an ape?

Douglas Rushkoff

Exactly. Where. Where the Club of Rome would be more like encouraging better water policy in the southern states of. Of India.

Julian

Right.

Douglas Rushkoff

You know, it's. It's and it's. It's really sweet, you know, that the, the, like the ultimate version of the kind of, you know, Eurozone do Gooder. Let's collaborate. International cooperation. And. And now all they're really trying to do is, from what I can tell is really more almost like promotion, publicity of green. Good stuff.

Julian

Club of rums.

Douglas Rushkoff

Trying to do that. Yeah, it's not like. Yeah, it's not like Bilderberg kind of. There's no.

Julian

Have you ever been to Bilderberg?

Douglas Rushkoff

No, but I've heard about it.

Julian

All right, that's good. Yeah, that's good. That's a check mark.

Douglas Rushkoff

Go. Marshall McLuhan, the great media theorist. Original. He went to build a berg.

Julian

Great. God damn it.

Douglas Rushkoff

He was there.

Julian

They get all the goats. Why?

Douglas Rushkoff

I know, in the 60s, but. Yeah. No, they haven't.

Julian

What have you heard about it?

Douglas Rushkoff

I met a guy, I was at a. I was at a conference and I was sitting next to a guy who was apparently a former president of Switzerland, which I thought was like, really big deal, but it turns out they have like a different president every year. They just like pick them from some giant group. Yeah.

Julian

Really?

Douglas Rushkoff

They don't elect the president. It's like, picked from like one of their parliamentary people. So he kept saying it's not a big deal. And I said, yeah, but, you know, shit. And he goes, yeah, what would you like to know? And I said, tell me if you ever been the Bilderberg Group. What is that? Whatever. And he goes, ah, it's all has beens.

Julian

Oh, it's all has been?

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, it's all like people who used to run things and used to be. I said, yeah, but there's ex presidents in there. And he goes, yeah, ex presidents.

Julian

When was this conversation with him?

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh, my God. 2005. Six around.

Julian

Interesting. Yeah, the guest list this year had some pretty active people in there.

Douglas Rushkoff

That's what I think. If they got that, do they have the tech people coming now?

Julian

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had. They had Teal. They had Karp.

Douglas Rushkoff

There you go.

Julian

Like Fareed Zakaria from Media. They had the current head of MI6, like, seems like they're up a little bit. Right?

Douglas Rushkoff

They're back.

Julian

Yeah. So something's going on there. But you know when, when you, when you join something, like a club of Rome or something like that, I think where people at home look at these organizations and, and go like, all right, what the fuck? It's more because they're thinking to themselves, all right, why is it all these people from all these different countries got a lot of good diversity in these groups, for sure, minus the, I guess, like, class diversity. But, you know, all these different people who weren't elected in any of these countries get together to discuss, like, what policies should be around the world and stuff. You could see why people run wild

Douglas Rushkoff

if they did that. Yeah. But you'd have to think, where is there a group of a few hundred people who've, a lot of them have touched government or academics, actually actively thinking about how are we going to stop this train from going off a cliff? In other words, if. If. I mean, maybe you don't. Some people don't believe that humans have any impact on the environment or the climate, but some of us believe that there's, like, microplastics in the ocean. Some of us believe the water table is threatened. And those of us who do would love for us to have alternatives to that. And if we don't see, if we see, okay, you know, I would normally want to say, okay, my government could maybe do some of that. And then when I see, oh, well, they really hate solar and they really hate wind, they're discontinuing all that, they're really pushing oil. Then I think, oh, well, maybe it would be good to have a bunch of us promoting these ideas publicly or doing. Getting some research funded that could actually show, oh, look, the ocean's getting really hot.

Julian

Yeah, I think this is. And this is what makes all these conversations hard, because this exists on either side of the spectrum. With any of them, whether we're talking fossil fuels, whether we're talking some domestic political issue or whatever, you'll get research done, but it's always funded by a group that wants a certain outcome. So you guys want an outcome. And then like I had Randall Carlson in that seat a few weeks ago, who has the opposite view on climate change. I've had people from both ends of that here who would probably want to fund something that has the opposite outcome. And it just ends up being a bunch of studies with a bunch of numbers run by a bunch of people in a bunch of places that we don't see. And then everyone looks at it and goes, well, they say that and I say that. And it's hard to make sense of it.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right.

Julian

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Douglas Rushkoff

Well, that's why you got to look at who's behind what, right? So usually, I mean, this is an argument I don't have to make. Usually when you look at the people who are funding the science that the environment is not at all threatened are usually big companies that are pouring stuff into rivers or taking Native American lands and building chip factories. Usually the people that are funding the studies to figure out if how the ocean is doing are people involved more in civics organizations, kind of more humanitarian, whatever people, right? I mean, what, you know, someone like me, I guess. I guess at best someone a conspiracy theorist would just see me as a useful idiot. That I'm someone who, you know, bought into the fantasy that, you know, immune diseases are going up or that our food supply has gotten kind of screwed up. You know, there's. There are easy things you can do though. Like it's not any college. Any college chemistry class could look at the amount of vitamins in a plate of broccoli today and compare that to what we knew was in broccoli 50 years ago.

Julian

Oh, you're right about that.

Douglas Rushkoff

It's not there.

Julian

Oh, it's nuts.

Douglas Rushkoff

The, the, the minerals aren't there.

Julian

It's not.

Douglas Rushkoff

Why aren't. Then you can go, why aren't the minerals there? And again, you could disagree. You could say the topsoil seems to be screwed up. You can go to South Dakota and talk to the, where I've been and talk to the farmers there and they can say, well, you know, our soil is getting kind of eroded out there.

Julian

And talked.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, well, I was at a university there doing a talk, talk to a college there and I was talking about climate and all. A bunch of kids came up who were the children of farmers there telling me, you don't know the half of it.

Julian

Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

And saying how they're trying to do no till agriculture to try to preserve the soil and try and use it to people. Like when you, when you. So it turns out the soil is not just dirt, right? That soil is this living matrix and there's mycelia, like these little strands and living things. Soil is this living, you know, it's more like a sponge than it is dirt. And if you, when you turn it over in order to make it easy to get more seeds and plants and stuff in it, if you use big gross agricultural machines, you break the soil matrix, you kind of kill the soil and it gets all dry, turns more like sand. Then you got to pour more chemicals on it so something grows. So you go to Monsanto or Genentech or someone, you pour all this crap, you get this kind of steroid growth things, but they don't have the nutrients in it. And then the topsoil gets worse and worse and worse and it gets closer to like the Sahara or something.

Julian

Yeah. And Monsanto obviously has our best interest in mind for sure, right.

Douglas Rushkoff

They don't right now. And, and it's fine. And they're allowed to have their opinion. But Monsanto makes hundreds of millions of dollars, right. And they spend, like the Koch brothers and a lot of other giant corporations spend real money on what you're saying to say the environment is fine, there are no microplastics. And even if there are microplastics in placentas of people everywhere in the world, in Bangladesh, we'll learn to adapt. We'll go to Amgen, we'll do things. Don't worry, we'll have selective reduction of your wombs. We'll do all those things. And they've got hundreds of millions of

Julian

dollars reduction of our wombs.

Douglas Rushkoff

You know, whatever you make, it's like seven babies. So that you can see which ones have the problems and then get rid of. You know, it's your basic eugenics. But they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars doing that. I joined Club of Rome, and they asked me, can I please donate $500 a year to be a member, to Pay. So the 200 people in it, or whatever it is, pay $500 each to fund the whole thing.

Julian

The whole club.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, because that's.

Julian

Duh.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right.

Julian

So why don't you just call up Pete? I feel like he's got that on the ashtray.

Douglas Rushkoff

Because Pete. He does, but Pete doesn't like this thing.

Julian

Pete's.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, Pete's the opposite. Pete believes that we are Satanists because what he says, and this is the interesting.

Julian

He believes Club of Rome are Satanists.

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, anybody.

Julian

That's the pot calling the kettle fucking black.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, well, he says. He thinks, well, Greta Thunberg could be the Antichrist. He says. Right. I mean, it's. Poor little thing. But. But the idea is he believes that the object of the game here is for a few humans to be Christlike and transcend to the next level.

Julian

And what happens to all of us,

Douglas Rushkoff

it kind of doesn't matter, but. Right. As long as a few of us transcend, they've leveled up. That's why his book is called from 0 to 1. That you want to exist one order of magnitude above the. We're the larval stage. Right? We're the larva, and they're the ones that sprout the wings. And if we larva are busy saying, hey, Peter, you can't shouldn't have a trillion dollars. You should only have a few billion. We want some resources here. We're going to spread some shit around and. And we're going to give some money to people in Africa so they don't die of Ebola and that Ebola doesn't come here and kill us too, and all that, he would say, no, what you're doing by. By taking his trillions away, by reducing his ability to accumulate trillions, we're like dragging him back down into the. He was just about to get ascendant money.

Julian

That's how he's measuring it.

Douglas Rushkoff

Money in tech. That's how you do it.

Julian

You know, Doug, I'm a very, very moderate guy, and I think it's very conducive to being able to do this job. And so in doing it, I talk to fellow moderate people, and then I also talk to people who want to give an issue or a lot of different issues maybe on One spectrum or the other. And I'm always trying to see, like, well, could you see it this way? Or devil's advocate see it that way or whatever. And to me, I mean, I just. I guess it would be way too simple of a solution. But a perfect world for me would be guys like you going into meetings, you know, that we can all get the minutes on out here, or see with guys at, I don't know, fucking ExxonMobil or something like that, you know, and being able to say, like, okay, I think this. I think this. Let's go there.

Douglas Rushkoff

I've tried that one. Well, there was a time before I was as out of the closet as a. Whatever the hell I am. Psychedelic hippie, psychedelic thinker.

Julian

You had to come out of the closet for that?

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, I mean, before it became. I was a little bit. Actually, I kind of started out like that. I started out in the rave scene, as my first books were on rave, so it was known. But. But I wrote. I wrote some books on sort of the. The. The business of technology, saying how the. The. In the original.com era, how these companies were gonna. Themselves over by going for growth and losing community and losing the kind of. The real spirit of.

Julian

You were ahead of the curve.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, I was like, yeah, 95, 96. I was like, oh, no, this is the wrong way. Go back, go back. So they would invite me in. I mean, this is the reason I have money. I mean, not. I don't have Joe Rogan money, but I have money to pay for my podcast, you know, I know that's the sad thing. I can afford.

Julian

I think a lot of us don't have Joe Rogan.

Douglas Rushkoff

I know, but you at least have a profitable. I have money to. I have money to pay for my podcast. It's a kind of funny thing that's success, but, you know, but it's in a weird way, if you're doing it, the podcast for the. For the, you know, to help the world, whatever, then it's fine as long as I can fund it somehow. I'm teaching whatever, but. But they would invite me to do talks and things. I've talked like, you know, Pepsi and big companies and. And Uber, Facebook, Google. And I feel like they invite me partly as entertainment or to check a box in a way, you know, we can almost. I used to think it was like. I used to call myself an intellectual dominatrix.

Julian

Intellectual dominatrix.

Douglas Rushkoff

Like, thank you, sir. May I have another? Like, I'll tell them about how are you fucking up the children. You Know the minds of the children with your social media. And why are you using an algorithm on a 10 year old to make them, you know, questions. Bad stuff.

Julian

You're being bad.

Douglas Rushkoff

You're being bad. And then I realized that in some ways having me there, it kind of helped them feel that was their, that was their penance.

Julian

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. That was their penance. Right, enough pulling up. Eyes Wide. Shut up. This isn't what the initiation of Club of Rome looked like, Right.

Douglas Rushkoff

Sadly, it was a zoom.

Julian

And they, they weren't wearing masks and shit.

Douglas Rushkoff

No. But there was three or four of the new ones there and they welcomed us. And their little, you know, the little icon, they go, no, there's a icon. Have you ever used Zoom?

Julian

I don't use Zoom ever.

Douglas Rushkoff

But you know what it is?

Julian

Probably not, no.

Douglas Rushkoff

It's. You talk to other people on the computer with it.

Julian

Oh, I know what zoom is. Yeah, yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

And then they can hit little buttons to like make applause or hearts or whatever, and you get a little applause from each other.

Julian

That invented in 68, if they were still alive would be like, what the has happened to us? We've fallen so far.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, no, they, they, I mean, it was sweet. I mean the sad thing is in, in 68, 71, whenever, when they came out with that thing, it was so widely ridiculed. Just like, you know, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring. It's. People didn't, they didn't understand that the kind of. The whole planet is one big system that you can't just do something in

Julian

one place and have it not right.

Douglas Rushkoff

Impact other things.

Julian

Right. Now you were saying early on in our conversation, you were mentioning how there were a lot of different types of predictions that people associated with Club of Rome made and say the early 70s that then ended up being correct, but also worse than they said by say 2000 2010. What are, what are some of those things?

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh, the annual temperature increase, the condition of the ocean is salinization, the ph of the ocean, ocean temperature, the size of north and south poles, the rising water, the spread of certain diseases. And it's interesting because you can look at those metrics, then you can talk to like one of the, the, you know, like a real pro tech utopian kind of guy and they'll say, well, yeah, but to actually look at the annual rate of death from such and such diseases, that's down.

Julian

Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

You know, there's certain metrics that you can say, I mean, I can walk around New York and there's Way less chance of me getting killed than when I, when I was a kid. In spite of that, Trump says it's the worst. And there's blood in the streets.

Julian

It's not like it was in the 70s.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, US cities are safe and they're getting safer all the time. I mean, there's medical stuff we can do. I mean, our cancer rates are high, but our chemotherapies are better. There's a lot of things, they're better. I think we've got better chemo.

Julian

I think we got better at that.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, I think there's like, there's chemos that don't even make people, you know, as awful you can be on chemo. It would just be awful.

Julian

How many years have we had chemo? What? I never even looked this up. Was it 50, 60 years maybe? Something like that? We can check it defa from off. I apologize. But like, you know, it's such a nasty thing and obviously it's a nasty disease, but you gotta wonder. 80 years, it's even longer. 9th of August, 1942 at Yale University when the physicians first did it. So I guess it probably went more mainstream in the next 10, 20 years after that. But either way, it's like, you gotta think they got some better than that, that they're just not releasing. I, I really wonder that because it's like, look at all the, look at all the, the scientific achievements we've done since 1942. You're telling me like one of the number human beings. We, we're still using the same kind of treatment, even if it's more improved.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, well, the, the, I mean, not to get whatever New Agey or even Robert Kennedy on you, but there's other ways, you know, there's other ways. There's, that's part of why we're so concerned about rainforest going away, is that there's a lot of plants and things in the rainforest that we don't know how to use that some people there do and that the people there will tell you. And we don't know they have, we don't. I only know 5,000, you know, plants here. We're still learning more. We're talking, you know, we're talking to more plants to find out what they do and what they can treat and the way that they treat them. I mean, it's just a different holistic, kind of. I don't know what to call it. Any word you use is, gets like energetic, whatever.

Julian

No, I know what you mean. We've talked about it with different People on the show, like, there's a phrase they have down there in, in the Amazon where they're like, there's a SAP for that instead of an app for that.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right.

Julian

You know what I mean? Because I, I would imagine you spent some time down there. I only went down there for two weeks one time. But like, you talk to the people who have lived there all their life and are healthy as an ox and everything, and they go through, oh, you can use this for that or that for this. And they'll just take it off, bandage a wound real quick. You're like, something's going on there.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right? Or, and there's stuff, I mean, and this is where, you know, scientists, bless their hearts, they're sometimes slow on the uptake. Like the gut biome wasn't acknowledged till really recently. And there's more of them than there are of us. You know, it's like, well, now we're just coming to understand the jet lag is more your gut biome than you. Because there's all these bacteria, they're so photosensitive or circadian. And you go, and the bacteria are like, wait a minute. That's what's doing it. A lot of it.

Julian

Yeah, pull up that. I haven't seen that. Can we pull up that research? That's cool. Yeah. I get bad jet, like if I can't go to the hotel and take like a 90 minute nap after, like, you know, maybe like a flight to Italy or something like that, like, I'm fucked for a couple days. Yeah, could be the gut, Microsoft, whole

Douglas Rushkoff

lot of stuff though. I mean, our emotions, I mean, they're looking at almost, you know, all this different stuff.

Julian

Jet lag doesn't just disrupt your sleep, it confuses your gut bacteria. Here it is. When you cross time zones, your microbiome loses its natural rhythm. This microbial jet lag triggers dysbiosis and imbalance of bacteria, often increasing microbes associated with obesity and inflammation. That second inflammation makes so much sense.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

Oh my God.

Douglas Rushkoff

Inflammation's everything. And now we're finding, I mean, all these diseases that we're calling autoimmune diseases. You know, a lot of them were tracing back to like a response to a bacteria that we didn't know how to deal with. Or you get all this dysbiosis and you're sitting there with the wrong bacteria and you're.

Julian

That's right.

Douglas Rushkoff

I mean, wrong is a strong word, but wrong bacteria for the human metabolism in your belly all the time. Eventually, you know, you're, you're some gland or whatever is going to try to kick in, fight that thing.

Julian

Yeah. And it's. I think I heard Dr. Amond say this once, and it always stuck with me. He's like, the really shitty thing is, like, when you walk down the street and you walk past all these great restaurants that are usually run by great people running a great business, trying to give you great food through no fault of their own, they're all trying to kill you because of all the. In. In the food. Specifically here in America.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

Like, we just got back from Italy again, and, like, you know, you can't eat into gluttony there and not gain weight. But it's amazing when you go there for a week or whatever and you have a good time. You around, you eat whatever you want. Maybe you gain a little weight, but you feel amazing every day. You're like, how does that. If I ate this in America, I'd be. I get worse hangovers from food than I do from alcohol.

Douglas Rushkoff

It's wild. Those kids, I'll tell you, those farm kids in South Dakota, they came to me and they said when they realized that all this stuff was right, was they eat the same foods at college and they eat at home, but when they're in college, they get fat and they feel sick. It's the same exact thing, same portions. And they're like, oh. Because the shit they're getting is packaged on trucks from the worst pink meat

Julian

whatever factories I found out at college. I never looked into this, but a couple people had told me the first year when I was at school where we all ate out of, like, the cafeteria there, that the food there, they would naturally pack with laxatives. And then it made sense to me because I was all. I mean, I. All the time. In general, I'm pretty healthy. But, like, in an unhealthy way, I was all the time freshman year, and I'm like, oh, it just must be the partying.

Douglas Rushkoff

God, they used to do that to soldiers. I know that in the army. I didn't know they would do that in college.

Julian

They did that to soldiers to make them.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. Peter.

Julian

Keep their food, though. You know what I mean?

Douglas Rushkoff

Like, so they're gonna wrap the out in the.

Julian

I mean, but, like, they're already rationing food. They're not getting enough. You.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, but they're not getting fiber. Yeah.

Julian

Oh, that's true. Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

I don't know. They stop.

Julian

Those MREs aren't great. Yeah. But, you know, you obviously been talking about some of the people you know, but Some of your backstory is kind of cool because you alluded to it already. You came up in, like, the cyberpunk movement and everything.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

You liked raves and things like that. How'd you end up, like, writing about, like, the future of, like, dystopian tech? Like, how did that become, like, ooh, this is my focus. Here's how I'm going to predict stuff. And as we said earlier, like, you've predicted it, I guess partly by being

Douglas Rushkoff

more utopian about it. I mean, I was a theater kid originally. I was directing theater.

Julian

No kidding.

Douglas Rushkoff

And I got really sick of theater, partly because I got tired of working with actors. I was just like, if you want to get a psychotherapist, just go do that. You know, let's work on a play here. Not your childhood trauma or whatever. And I understand they're using their sense memory or whatever. It's like, you do that at home. Learn the lines and the. In the play. Can we just try that for once? Just.

Julian

You're preaching to his choir.

Douglas Rushkoff

But there was that and also that the audiences were, like, so frigging elite. It was, like, so expensive. I was doing plays in California and even at the time was like, 60, $70 to see a play called Three Penny Opera right about, you know, so I'm this little lefty Marxist kid doing, you know, plays for rich, you know, rich, rich kind of, you know, blue hairs. And. And I was like, oh, this is not going to work. And just as that was happening, the Internet was. Was. It was before the Internet. Computers were starting, and my most psychedelic friends from college, I went to Princeton in. Right here in New Jersey.

Julian

It's a little flex right there.

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, no, it's actually a shame.

Julian

Shame.

Douglas Rushkoff

I think of it as shame. What do you think? Like, elitist, you know?

Julian

Okay, I respect that.

Douglas Rushkoff

You know what I mean? It's like, oh, and it's so hoity there. And. And when I went, it was like, Southern rock, Confederate flag kind of, oh,

Julian

south again kind of stuff.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. In a rich thing.

Julian

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Douglas Rushkoff

12 psychedelic people at Princeton when I was there. And that this is like Reagan young Republican era. It was a dark time. We, we were, we were, but we were, we were married tripsters and like three or four of them were calling me and saying that they were moving to California to become like, to be computer programmers. And I'm like, computer. Like the people I knew as computer programmers were like pocket protector wearing, you know, geek guys from high school. And I'm like, why are Grateful Deadheads and psychedelic people and Brian Eno listeners and all these weird, the weirdest, most psychedelic people I know going there to do that. So I went out to San Francisco and started spending time with them. And they're like working at intel and Northrop Grumman and Apple and whatever during the day and at night they're going to Oakland and scraping the peyote buds off cactuses and tripping balls. At night. Yeah, rendering like fractals on Sun Micro and then projecting the fractals at raves and dead shows and all. And I was like, oh, fuck something's happening here. Right. So I got really interested in the crossover between psychedelic culture and cyber culture and realizing that these psychedelic heads of San Francisco were taking a. Originally a war technology, you know, computers, and turning it into a consciousness expansion weird ass thing. They're all consciousness expansion. Yeah, like, you know, brain machines and fractals and. And 120 beat per minute music to imitate the fetal heart rate. I mean, a rave was originally meant as a spiritual union of like a thousand people in a field and have them dance. It was kind of like the original Burning Man.

Julian

Right.

Douglas Rushkoff

Thing. It would modeled on what was called the. The acid tests, which were these psychedelic parties they had. And Ken Kesey and Grateful Dead. They'd go in a barn and have weird music and trip. So with all these kids taking a drug like ecstasy, trying to commune together and talk to the aliens or elevate. It was real sweet, optimistic, silly, but very pro human.

Julian

Very pro human?

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. Very heart based. You know. We're going to use the technology to realize a new collective human organism. And I was excited by what they were doing and then.

Julian

Human. A human organism.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Human grounded dancing. It's us, you know, is in sync together. There was something with a large group of people dancing together where you're not. No longer. It used to be when you went to a dance, you went. Maybe today too, you went to find a girl, right. And try to pick somebody up or. Or it was like. And. And they were. Clubs were very coke, kind of coke and alcohol oriented. You know, am I rich enough? Am I hot enough? Who am I going home with? It was very strategic. And the rave was. You're just D. With everybody at once in one big. And you're on E. So you really.

Julian

Yeah, that's got.

Douglas Rushkoff

You're thinking different about. About. About love and society.

Julian

Had you ever done that before ecstasy before you went out and did raves in California? Yeah, yeah, yeah, when I was 10.

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, it wasn't.

Julian

He's like 12. Sorry.

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, no, but we did ask. I mean we were doing acid at college. Acid was the. Was the easy thing to get at that. The easiest thing of the things. And I did ecstasy a little bit before that. I was more of an acid person.

Julian

What, what about acid? Like, what about it? Drew it Drew it to you.

Douglas Rushkoff

I feel like it asks nothing of you. It has nothing to you of the psychedelics? I mean there are some. Even acid is just like, this is you. Here you are. Yeah, this is it, you know, almost more like a mirror. You're gonna get whatever. Wherever you're. Wherever you're. You're set and saying, this is it. It's like, mushrooms are like, connect to the earth. The earth planet needs you. We're weeping, we're. We're. Have compassion. You know, ecstasy is love. You have to, you know, open your heart. There are these sort of agendas to them. And I always felt that acid was just like

Julian

right in front of you.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right.

Julian

Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

Here you are.

Julian

Interesting. Here you did acid. It's never did acid. It's interesting psychedelics, but not.

Douglas Rushkoff

It's an interesting one. But anyway, so I'm meeting those people and I'm starting to write articles about what they're doing.

Julian

Are you still in college at this point or is this right after you leave?

Douglas Rushkoff

After college, I went to college. I went to grad school, I went to CalArts, California School of the Arts in theater, and I went to American Film Institute and film.

Julian

Oh, wow.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. I didn't like film, though, in the end. I like theater because it's live film. Kept feeling like each stage of the process in film, you're getting further and further away from the life of it. Interesting editing and compromise and all that. And with a play, it's like every night it's.

Julian

Live it.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, yeah. Every night it's new and it feels like, you know, I used to say it's like directing a play. It's kind of like. Like brushing a woman's hair. Like you. Because you run the whole thing and they say, oh, it's not working right there. So how do we get through? You know, until you get the whole. And then by the end, you can see the whole two hour thing.

Julian

Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

You've made it work so it feels natural.

Julian

Steve here has written multiple movie scripts. And then also a play that's still continuing its run soon at a new theater. Yeah. Sacco and Vanzetti are dead. It's a satire of Sacco and Vanzetti. Yeah, you'd like it.

Douglas Rushkoff

As I'm gonna watch it, I'm gonna

Julian

go, yeah, but like, how do you feel about that description of the.

Douglas Rushkoff

I like that. About the woman's hair brushing it. Like you're getting the knots out so that it's nice and smooth. Right. You find out where everything connects to everything else. You know, it's like, is it. Until you're there and then you go, we're going to have to change this in order for that to work, you know, Whereas with a movie you don't. You can fake it, you can make it all fit, but You've never really. You don't really do it. I mean, it's just, it's just a different.

Julian

No, I, I think it's. I think it's a great way to point it out too. And I think that it really depends who's making it. Like, if you are, I mean, you'll see, like Tarantino will do a lot of these long dialogue scenes, right. And you'll read about some of them after. And there's two different ways it happen. Either one is like, they have to cut a lot together and they're filming it over seven days or something like that. And others, maybe they film it over seven days. But he lets. He just does take after take and a lot breathes.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right. Where you're Christopher Guest. And those movies he does. Those are the sort of improvised movies or. What was that thing. It was that really sad, horrible thing on, like, Netflix where they shot these giant scenes about this kid that kills somebody.

Julian

Oh, adolescence.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

We talk about.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. I mean, and the, the, the, the tour de force, I guess, of that is they did these like 15 minute scenes. They just play them out and you're like. They really took to work to get the whole thing. It's not just a shot, it's to be there. But anyway, I got sick of theater because of the elitism of it and all. And then the Internet was happening, so I went and started writing these stories about virtual reality and, and the new, like, hacker clubs and, you know, hacker clubs, you know, like people getting together and just hacking, making games, sharing things. It was all communal. Everything was free. You made software, but it was called shareware. You'd make software and put it on a disc and like, go on your bus or your high school and share it with other people. The idea was, how are we all gonna communicate? So the, the early Internet was like a rave.

Julian

Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

And that you made it free. It was diy. And we're all just trying to build technologies to promote this sort of new human thing. And so as I was exploring that and doing journalism about companies that were giving. They were all giving drug test warnings to their employees because they needed psychedelic people to do. They all knew they had psychedelic heads building their stuff because psychedelic people were used to imagining realities. Like we're used to hallucinating things that didn't exist. And there was no Internet. There wasn't. You had to imagine, what would hyperspace look like? What is hypertext? How do you navigate these realms? What would an interface look like to let people surf through information? So it was it was that. So then I became friends with Timothy Leary, who maybe you're. Oh, yeah, people don't know. He was a 1960s Harvard professor who gave graduate students acid in these parties and gotten all this trouble. And he became like the high priest of LSD, you know, Nixon's public enemy number one in. In 1970, we.

Julian

Yeah, we've had a few people on talk about.

Douglas Rushkoff

There was another guy called Terence McKenna I was friends with. He was into more, you know, mushrooms and DMT and all. And they. And there was a big magazine called Mondo 2000.

Julian

Mondo 2000?

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, that was.

Julian

They afraid of Y2K over there?

Douglas Rushkoff

No, no, it was before. People worried about that one. But yeah, so there was a psychedelic culture that was mixed with the Internet culture. So I was kind of part of that hope. But they saw me because I'm this like New York Ivy League educated journalist dude. They saw me as the cynic. The cynic, yeah. So I'm writing these articles, right? I'm writing these articles that my New York people and the magazines I'm writing them for think that I'm like this crazy west coast utopian and the people who are living it are like, why are you being so mean and negative about everything we're doing? And it's kind of funny because that meant, to me, it meant I was doing the right job, right? I'm. I'm. I'm I'm just saying what if, what if, what if? And if nothing else. I mean, I used to get my book, my first book on the Internet. I wrote it in 1991 and it got canceled in 1992 because my publisher thought the Internet would be over by 1993.

Julian

Isn't that. How many people were like this? This is the biggest, like, joke ever.

Douglas Rushkoff

CB Radio. They say it. It's like cb in the letter. They said, yeah, it's gonna be like CB radio. And we looked and that lasted about 18 months. And it's not in the right timescale for a book.

Julian

I know hindsight's 20 20. I understand it's that way with everything, but that is one I look at and I go, you mean to tell me that a bunch of really smart people were looking at something where people around the world would be able to just plug in a computer and connect to, you know, someone in Montana could hypothetically connect to someone in Paris for the first time ever, and that wasn't going to be used or mass adopted? I don't. What were the big arguments back then

Douglas Rushkoff

where that it didn't make. Didn't make money. They did a study in 1994. I don't think you can find it. They where they found out that the average Internet connected home was watching nine hours less television a week. And that's when they went, oh, fuck, this sucks. Because the Internet had no ads. The Internet had no way to make money back then.

Julian

They didn't think when you went put

Douglas Rushkoff

ads on there, they did. But you had to sign an agreement when you went on the Internet saying you wouldn't use it for commercial purposes because it was all paid for by the government and universities. It was a research thing.

Julian

Yeah. Invented or some.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, I mean originally. And then they turned it over to the public, but as an educational kind of a thing, not as I remember when the first ads went up, I mean, there was. There was a few moments and that's when I realized, oh, this is going. It's going to go the wrong way. Funny. This guy, Mark Andreessen, he's this big famous guy now, now billionaire. Whatever he took. There was this something called Mozilla, one of the first web browsers. And he did a version of Mozilla, which was a public free shareware app. He did a version called Netscape. And he did Netscape as a private company. And they did an IPO and made a zillion dollars. The day that Netscape had its IPO was the same day that Jerry Garcia, the guitarist of the Grateful Dead, died. And I always thought that it's like, oh, this is the moment that we're gonna really leave the 60s part of the Internet behind and move into this other thing.

Julian

That's interesting.

Douglas Rushkoff

And it was right around then we started to do ads and all that. When I started to say, oh, we've got a choice here. We can either go this sort of Wired magazine, business direction with the Net, but it's going to be a problem because if we do. And this was where I was very present. I mean, this is where I deserve my whatever. If I get it, I'm giving it to you. Thank you. That if we go down that road, instead of giving technology to people to let them realize a wild new collective, creative, possible human existence, we're going to be using technology on people to increase their predictability. Right. Once you're betting on a technology, you don't want the wildest possibilities to happen. Once you're betting on something, what do you want? The highest probability of your outcome. So we use technology on people to control their behavior.

Julian

We become the product.

Douglas Rushkoff

We became the product.

Julian

Holy Shit. What a call.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. And it was again, I was like, don't do it. And I wrote about, in the end of this book called Coercion, why we listen to what they say. I said, we're taking all the techniques of 20th century advertising. We're about to port it into this new landscape. Only the new landscape is not made of the real world. At least in the real world, you have the real world and advertisements in it. Now we're going to construct a world where the very landscape is fabricated to be an advertisement, to be mind control. And I don't know if human beings will be able to maintain their coherence if they're living in that.

Julian

Now, when you say maintain their coherence, what do you mean?

Douglas Rushkoff

Love each other in the end. Yeah.

Julian

That's kind of where I thought you were.

Douglas Rushkoff

They're gonna do everything.

Julian

We see it now.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. Because if everything is a one or zero, yes or no before or an after, and if. Or then we're essentially disconnected. There's no more continuity. It's like, you know, it's at 400 and, you know, 44,000 hertz, but it's still.

Julian

And you can train minds, you know, you can. You can slowly. It's not like it's like boiling a frog. It's not like you suddenly blare someone and light them on fire with gasoline. I mean, they could do that, too, if someone's that unaware. But, like, that's not really how it's done on. It's one piece and then two pieces and then three pieces and then four and then five. And suddenly, whatever the issue is, you know, the opposite end of that will be something you don't see. And I've tested, Like, I'm one of these people. I love to test my algorithms over time. So I'll go do, like, crazy shit on there and be like, okay, I've had a bunch of. I've had a bunch of tweets about people talking about Roe v. Wade. And a lot of the people talking about are the people who are like. Like, against this being overturned or something. Now I'm gonna go to. I'm gonna start at this person's page who's really pro life, scroll through all their tweets, see how it changes my algorithm. Like, a few tweets on there, see what I see the next. And you can literally see, like, the robot shift. And I'm like, oh, my God. If I were reading this all day, I would agree with this 100. If I were reading this all day, I'd agree. That is not. We have never had anything even remotely close to that in humanity. And it does. You know, it feels like we haven't made. I don't want to be a cynic on it, but it feels like we haven't made any real progress on learning how to deal with that.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right. I mean, because we never really did. I mean, it's funny, in the old days, media literacy used to be being able to deconstruct the advertisement on tv.

Julian

Right.

Douglas Rushkoff

That's what they taught us about, you know, that the advertiser is not your friend. They want you to buy something. They don't want you to be satisfied. I mean, and that was sort of an easy landscape. I used to say, like, you know, the. Who's the best customer for a blue jeans commercial? Right. Is it because the blue jeans commercial basically says all of them one way or another, buy these jeans and you will get laid?

Julian

Right, Right.

Douglas Rushkoff

So who's the ideal customer for that? Is it someone who's sitting on a couch with his girlfriend? No, it's someone who's sitting on the couch alone with potato chips. You don't. You want the person not to be getting laid, otherwise they won't. Won't buy the jeans. So the advertisers don't want us getting laid. That means they're not our friends. It's sort of the simplest way to

Julian

think it, like from a group think scenario, in the sense that it's not. What you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is that it's not like there's one person at the top of a company saying, we need to fuck all these people over. It's more like, oh, this type of ad worked. And then that team reports to that team in the company that says, this worked because these are the people buying it. And then that team reports to another team who handles that and says, therefore we're going to do more of this because they're trying to get profitability. And the end result is they're convincing people not to fuck.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right? Right. Or making them just making them pathetic. And now there's algorithms doing it using techniques that we don't even know for reasons we don't even know, we don't even care. They're just like, oh, look, this worked on dog. Why don't you try it on yours? Oh, it's working on my guy. I'll try it on her. If I adapt it like that, it seems to work better on her. Oh, try that too. And there are Millions of them, all sharing, oh, this works. This works. And it's not. It's for what they're going to do. Whatever we program them to do. Right. Get him to buy this thing by whatever means necessary. They don't care what it's doing to our. To our. Our psyche or anything else. Which is why, I mean, now it's funny, this week in New York, that's called the Summer of Lud. You heard of this? It's a lot. You know what Luddites are?

Julian

Yeah. People.

Douglas Rushkoff

They're not against technology. Bloodites are people. People who don't want technology to be used.

Julian

Like the Amish.

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, no, they can be modern. I mean, you can be a Luddite using cell phones and Chad. I mean, but they have the same Amish or Amish sensibility that let's only adopt a technology once we understand that it's not hurting us. Right, Right. But the Luddite distinction was technologies that distance us from each other. Each other, technologies that make us hate each other, and it make it more difficult for us to work together.

Julian

Right.

Douglas Rushkoff

Are against us. Technologies that bring us together are good. Technologies that are used to hurt people and disempower people are bad. Technologies that empower people are good. So that was the thing, but it's Luddite. It's this week in New York, and it's really interesting to see. There's all these kids who.

Julian

Who.

Douglas Rushkoff

It's a movement that started, like, around five years ago in high schools that these kids are. They turn in their smartphones for flip phones. They're not using phones at all. They're, like, hanging out during. During breaks and, like, reading, walking in nature. And I saw this girl speaking on a panel, it was just yesterday. And she's like, well, the weird thing. The weirdest thing about giving up my smartphone because she's only got a flip phone now. She's. She was walking in New York a year or so ago, and she got lost. And she said her first feeling on getting lost was, oh, no, I'm lost. But then all of a sudden, the city changed, and the whole city became this labyrinth of possibility that she could go anywhere. And she realized that getting lost was the best feeling she ever had. I used to do that when I was a kid. I'd get on my bike and go to a neighborhood I don't know, and you try to get lost. Cost.

Julian

I've always. And. And it's an easy observation to spot now when you talk to people for a long time. But to me, the generation or the subset of generations born between 1990 and 1998 are the most interesting people to talk to in the current digital age, which I'm in smack in the middle of that. And so, Steve, because we are the last people who, in the context of growing up, in some way knew the world where there wasn't staring at the phone. You went outside and played. You didn't have GPS everywhere. And then I say, like, because the iPhone came out in 07, it started to catch on, like real adoption in like 08. So, like, think about that. 1998, you're 10 years old at that point. You've had 10 years where you're an infant and a kid and a child grown up, right, and playing. And then after that you. It's hard to put into words. It's very hard to explain in words. And I'm definitely not going to do a good job. But when I'm talking to a kid born in 2000, 2001, there's a difference. Oh, yeah, there is a real difference on, like, not even necessarily like, worldview, but how they look at the world, if that makes sense. You know what I mean? And, you know, we haven't even talked about, like, Cove and what that did for development and stuff. We can get into that later. But these are the kinds of things, I don't know if we're going to understand the downstream effect of what I'm talking about on society and like, what that generation does as it comes of age and continues to get a more powerful place in society. We're not going to know that for 30, 40 years.

Douglas Rushkoff

The effects. And given those effects, they might not be in a position to find out.

Julian

Yeah, yeah, well, that's, that's the dark view.

Douglas Rushkoff

But I mean something else at the same time. I mean, I mean, I'm living in the East Village now and I feel like it's partly because of. It's partly nihilism. But they are out. Gen Z is out on the street every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday night.

Julian

We're locked up in high school, right?

Douglas Rushkoff

They're out. I mean, and not that it's necessarily good. They are drinking, they're smoking, they're fucking.

Julian

I hope.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, I hope they're. They. All the stats say they're not fucking, but they look to me like they're good. They're, they're. And the guys, the guys. There's this like Gen Z guy type now, which, which is sort of like a 1970s porn look. I don't know if you've seen this they got like a mustache and a mullet and they're buttoned on shirt and the chains and stuff. And I'm like, whatever that is. Good, good they're doing.

Julian

They're just like. Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

There's like effort, you know, I, it's like, it's. I was always depressed when I would see like kids out in the Village on a. On a Saturday night and the girl is like dressed to the T and the guy's just like jeans and T shirt and it's like. But now there's just like. Guys are trying. You know what I mean? There's like a thing. It just feels like, you know, it's like when you see those 70s movies and the guys have those shirts with the things and it's like we used to laugh at it because I was, I was, was in, in high school in the 70s. But I kind of admire it now, you know, the. Just that attention that, that I want to look good. I want to feel sexy.

Julian

It's good to see that, that like again, a generation that was like locked up during really formative years is interested in going out and experiencing the world. And I don't think sociologically we have ever seen a generation like Gen Z. They got a little bit of everything. Everything there, you know what I mean? They got on. I'm talking on the spectrums of like, you can go from like people that are furries to people that like Nick Fuentes and everything in between is really, really strange in that generation.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right. But they're, they're interesting. They're interesting. And I am seeing like. So I'm thinking when this, you know, Summer of Lud that they're doing in Tompkins Square Park. I mean, I'm looking around. I mean, I had.

Julian

Can we pull this up? Thief.

Douglas Rushkoff

Summer of Love Ludd. God knows how much they're going to be online with it. Right. Because it's the summer.

Julian

Someone's taking a video, I'm sure. Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

But they. Some students of mine did a. I mean, this is the kind of thing they're doing. They did a curse on Palantir.

Julian

Love that.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right. And they have a zine.

Julian

They have a zine.

Douglas Rushkoff

A zine. They made a little zine that they're handing out.

Julian

They're doing like spells and.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. Which is a spell, a collective spell to like curse pallet here. It's really funny.

Julian

Yeah, look at this. That even looks like very late 60s Woodstocky. You know, I can like feel a Jimi Hendrix guitar in the background. It's the summer of Ludd. In New York City. This is from Dr. Philip Fisher with one new special protest. Ludd. From June 28th through July 5th, Tompkins Square park hosts lectures and demonstrations, free lunch included, spanning everything from a Luddite history lesson to the perils of Luddite riz and dating apps. I take up the Luddite revival in my forthcoming book. I expected to become as consequential social movement this century as it was in the 1800s. And a warning of the economic turmoil set to unfold over the next few years. You can already hear it in the booing by college graduates across the country. Loud and clear.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right now when people are doing their. Their graduation speeches, the Tech Bros. Or the college presidents, whenever they mention AI, everybody boos. Now that is just. It's really. That's the same thing as Club of Rome. Just Club of Rome is like student government doing it. It's like the boring ex government Y. Oh. I think the way to solve this is we're gonna publish a white paper that shows the thing. And I'm like, but that's part of why they have me. Because they know it's like white paper papers. Oh, it's very sweet. But nobody's gonna read your white paper. And if they do read your right, they're just gonna stick it in Claude. I'd read it anyway.

Julian

That's right.

Douglas Rushkoff

But this like Summer of Ludd. But the, the. The. The beauty of a. A $10,000 a year budgeted Club of Rome that's trying to figure out what's going on is that the smart kids who are at something like that when they're doing their speeches and their lectures and their working groups and all, they're informed by that stuff.

Julian

Right?

Douglas Rushkoff

So they can say, here's why we don't want an AI company deciding how the land is used in our town.

Julian

Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

And that's a big thing because they are. They're being given authority over the water. And it's like. And I get it, we. I wonder why, why someone would want that. Because if you're being paid by an AI Company, if that's where your stock is, then you want that AI company to do well. Well, even if some kids of a different race in some southern town are going to suffer, it's like it's their problem.

Julian

They're not to see it.

Douglas Rushkoff

Especially. It's over there.

Julian

It's over there. I don't gotta look at it. I just look at this thought.

Douglas Rushkoff

But it's interesting. We used to only do this stuff to people on reservations.

Julian

You know, yeah, at least we gave them casinos, though. You know, these people are just getting. And no water.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right? So no water, no casino.

Julian

And. And Doug, it's. We can go to that now because it's obviously it's a soup du jour that not, not casinos, but the data centers thing and stuff like that that you're talking about because it's a soup du jour topic right now because you see so many of them popping up out of nowhere. And like, two things I understand. Anytime any new technology has ever come out, human race has always had a subset of people that are very, very afraid of it and doomer it. And then, you know, we turn out okay. Doesn't mean that every single time it's going to turn out fucking okay. And also this time with AI, this is the first time we're building technology that may be able to think for itself and not think, which is certainly new territory. So it is a new normal in that way. Or in normal, if you want to say. The second thing is, I understand that you want, like, even looking at it from an American centric standpoint, you want to be at the front of the race and at the forefront of the world and be able to win and have the best tech. I get that. And in theory, I'm cool with like, if someone's going to do really well with it, if we can do the best, great, great. But to me, when you do that at the expense of thinking about all your people at a time where the wealth gap is at unbelievable, unprecedented levels, every chart can back that on that. And when you do it with companies that have proven time and time again to not care about fellow humanity, whether it be everything from Google to Palantir or whatever, who's going to be the tenants at these places? Yeah, I think everyone out there, including myself, who's like, hey, let's slow down with this and let the people have a say in this matter, certainly has a good argument. What do you think?

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, it was Sam Altman that went to government and said, oh, that's. We're in a race with China. You know, and that was why we got to deregulate this stuff, because we're in a race with China. But the thing I would have said to him is, you know, since when has being first necessarily been the best America? We were the first at having social media. Look how good that did for us. You know, China was second in social media, but they went, look, we're going to do this another way. I Mean in Chinese, tick tock, as you know, is like, oh, the programs get educated.

Julian

It's like the one good benefit of communism. They're like, we can turn this off at 9:00'. Clock. And you watch math videos, right?

Douglas Rushkoff

And what's it, what's it optimized for? It's optimized for that. And, and to say that that is totalitarian, to not have kids, kids watching God knows what at night, Kardashians at night is not totalitarianism. That's raising children. So there's the first mover advantage. I kind of question. The interesting thing is you're right, that when we say, oh, we got writing now, and the ancient Greeks, when they got writing, Aristotle was going, oh, no, people are going to lose their memories. They were talking about their worry about what will the impact be of the technology. And some people say, we're going to get books and be smart. And other people said, no, we're going to lose our memory. And maybe both happen. With AI You've got, you're right. You've got your doomers and your utopians. Your utopians saying, oh, because of AI, we're going to be China. We're going to be able to upload our brain to the cloud so that when the planet goes, we'll have artificial beings, they're going to have robot sex slaves. It's going to all be beautiful. And you have other people saying, oh, no, when AI comes, we're all going to be programmed into oblivion. We're going to do that. I don't care about. This sounds radical and maybe I don't care about what's going to happen because the ends don't justify the means. I care about what are we doing right now. If you're taking water away from a black child in Alabama in order to feed your data servers, it's not right. If you're sending a kid in the Congo into a mine at gunpoint to get the, get the cobalt to make the thing, then the soul of the thing is corrupted from the outset. So.

Julian

The soul of the thing.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, if you can. I know it sounds religious or something, but I believe if you, I mean, and this, you know, this is where the academics actually help, Right? My professor thing. I'm a professor at cuny. All right. There was this guy, Albert Camus.

Julian

Camus, right.

Douglas Rushkoff

He was a see. Yeah, but he wrote in theater people. You see, the theater guy. The theater guy knows theater people rule. That's a virtual. Yeah, we do. Theater people are smart. When you, you can't do theater without learning the history of everything. It's like so funny. Well, at least directors and writers, you have to read everything. But this guy Camus, so he was friends with the French existentialists, like friends with Sartre and all the Marxists and all that. And they were all happy about communism. Oh, it's great. Yay. And then the communists started to make gulags and prison camps and all that. And guys like Sartre and the intellectual left, they said, look, you know, this is part of revolution that in order to get to the communist utopia, a little pain on the way.

Julian

Just going to 30 million, got a die.

Douglas Rushkoff

Stuff that happens.

Julian

Right?

Douglas Rushkoff

And it's part of the process because we got so off course. And Camus said, dudes, this doesn't make sense. This doesn't make sense. He's like, if you're not doing this in the moment, you're not doing it. Nothing. No amount of. No amount of supposed good on the other side is worth doing the thing in the moment. So even if you tell me, like, as an effective altruist, they're the new ones who have this belief that the tech bros that, oh, you have to let this one baby die. So these tens of millions of babies live in the future because they're going to have A.I. no, no, you will. You will. The only morality you can have is in the moment itself, in the encounter with the other people in that moment. And part of faith, and this is, you know, Christian or anything, part of faith is believing that doing the right thing in this moment will fractal trickle out to the everything. So no AI I think AI is cool. I think AI is cool. It's a cool thing. It's a cool thing. But the idea that we've got to sacrifice the environment or. If you don't believe in the environment, children. If you don't believe in the children, water. If you don't believe in water, a town's authority over its own land. You know, there's something you don't. There's a way to deploy this, you know, Deploy it. Yeah, well, it's military, you know, Military. Love that. There's a way to deploy.

Julian

Yeah, you. That's. That's.

Douglas Rushkoff

We can shivers up decamp and deploy in ways that don't necessarily hurt people.

Julian

All right, so you taught this effective altruism thing, though.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

Is a really interesting argument for sure. And. And yeah, I think a lot of the guys who have argued that are cringe and.

Douglas Rushkoff

And Right.

Julian

A lot of times happen also be sociopaths. We can talk about Stan Altman in a little bit. But like, you seen the show, the Last of Us you ever watched.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, I didn't like that they made the mushrooms, the bad guys. But yeah, other than that.

Julian

You know, other than that. But, you know, spoiler alert out there. So Skip the next 30 seconds if you haven't seen it. But there's one point in the show where Pedro Pascal has to make a decision where the girl Ellie in the show may have a cure, but for this disease that's ravaged humanity and rendered many, most of the population dead and continues to do so and has been going on for a lot of years in the show. And she may have the cure because she's actually immune, but in order to find that out, they have to kill her to make, you know, some sort of, you know, something that can. That can be passed on to other humans to make them immune and maybe end it. And Pedro Pascal says that and then kills all 40 people in the hospital and rescues Ellie and takes her home. Did he make the right decision doing that?

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially because it's fiction, right?

Julian

All right. If it was true, did he make the right decision?

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, if it was true. If it was true. There is no if it was true in the end.

Julian

That feels like a cop out.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, no, there actually is not. Because again, does reality. You can set something up, like a prisoner's dilemma situation, say, okay, you're in a prison and here's the game, and this is the. That it's a setup. So I guess if you say a setup, okay, there's a trolley, you know, and the trolley, you know, do you run over the one person in order to save the people in the trolley? Do you send the trolley off the cliff? And whatever. Those are hard moments, right? And what you're going to do in those moments is probably follow what your heart is telling you to do rather than logic and which do you think

Julian

is the right answer? Or both.

Douglas Rushkoff

The heart. I mean, doing what the heart's saying in that moment. We know Pedro Pascal has what Buber would call an I thou relationship with that girl. He sees her as a human being, right? And these other people in that hospital have dehumanized her, right? And he sees them as dehumanized agents of. They're gonna. And you could say, oh, my God, you're gonna kill 40 people to save one. And it's like, it's my person. I mean, now I'm. I'm. Personally, I'm more of a pacifist. I would probably

Julian

he would have talked him down to death.

Douglas Rushkoff

I would have been a little bit more. I mean, you. I don't know. I would try to talk them down, but, you know, God forgive you. Forgive you for what you're doing. And. And you have to understand that what you're. It's not actually going to work because of what you're doing. This is not in the long term. This is not the solution to the real problem.

Julian

Now, I'm not saying that you'd be as good with a gun as Pedro Pascal was in there. Certainly had some great aim, hitting everyone and mowing him down.

Douglas Rushkoff

I took a gun lesson once, and the guy t me at the end

Julian

said you were good.

Douglas Rushkoff

He said you're a regular John Wick.

Julian

That's fucking great. Okay, but let's say you are still with a gun, but in. But yeah, his name was Anthony, but if you. Let's say you were good with it. All right? You have your.22. You got ultimate reloads and everything right

Douglas Rushkoff

up next to him, right.

Julian

You're trying to piece him to death across that hospital on the first security guard who might be a Russian guy or something. So go yourself.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

Okay.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

In that moment, though, this is one of those things where it's like, if you truly are someone who's like, I see. I see that girl as a human being, you don't think you'd be like, well, it. This piece ain't working.

Douglas Rushkoff

I don't know. I don't see.

Julian

That's a good answer.

Douglas Rushkoff

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I feel like I. I mean, someone was. Was gonna attack my daughter or something. I feel like I've got the. The instinct to shoot somebody in the head or do whatever, you know? I mean, in the end, I'm an animal. I got teeth. I got nails.

Julian

That's right.

Douglas Rushkoff

Got throwing stars and nunchucks.

Julian

That's right. And you got nunchucks, too.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. I mean, they've got the rubber ones because I kept hitting myself in the back of the head. Without the wood ones, I could not be trusted. They're hard. You truly try to really Bruce Lee with those things.

Julian

Oh, my God. Yeah. No, I. I stick with the gun.

Douglas Rushkoff

I got him. I got him in high school. I still have them somewhere.

Julian

Okay. All right. Let's not take those out.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

I feel I. I believe you with the.22.

Douglas Rushkoff

I feel like you got to be. Apparently the guy said, you got to be really up close with the.22.

Julian

Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

It doesn't have Stopping power is what they say.

Julian

No stopping power on that. We can have the gun people in the comments way in there. But you know, when you're talking about these people who are talking about these things and like the Sam Altmans and stuff, I get really concerned when you hear what's his name, Mo Gadot, I think Deep, who used to be a really high up guy at Google. I think he was on diary of a CEO's podcast, I want to say, recently. Yeah, okay. Where he mentioned. And he's got this documentary coming out and I saw this clip on Twitter from that podcast where he was saying that Sam Altman's quoted in the documentaries, I guess saying with like a straight face going, yeah, AI is probably going to end humanity, but we're going to have a lot of fun making cool shit on the way.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, he did say that. He's like only like 80% chance according to him, I think that it ends us.

Julian

But like, what do you see why people out there look at this and go, who the fuck are you, pal? Like you're the guy holding your finger on the trigger of this thing. And that's how you look at it. Like no one elected you to do that.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, well, the way he would put it as well, humanity was going to end anyway sooner or later. That.

Julian

Okay, what gives him that idea sooner or later? When is that?

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, you know, because this plot, the sun burns out or whatever.

Julian

Yeah. And maybe like a million years.

Douglas Rushkoff

Maybe we got off the planet by

Julian

then and maybe we get off the planet by then. So who died and elected him?

Douglas Rushkoff

And if I was going to, to going to bet on anyone getting off the planet kind of thing, I would think it's like the, the Kogi, you know, the, they're the ones who do ayahuasca in, in Colombia or the, the Buddhists or something, you know, that will get there through like Monroe Institute astral projection out of body. That I just think. Yeah, I think the way I would think an interdimensional travel feels to me more probable than making spaceships that let us go through the universe and not get irradiated and destroy every sperm in our body.

Julian

Let's play it this way then. Let's not think in the lifespan of say like an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos who's trying to do this stuff. And let's say we're not the immortal generation.

Douglas Rushkoff

10,000 years.

Julian

Okay.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, I think there's things that could happen in 10,000 years. There's ways off, but I think the ways off are not going to involve like solid rocket fuel and metal 10,000 years.

Julian

It won't. It'll be something way beyond that. But you don't think it would be the ability for us to literally physically go off. I feel like we'd have that at 10,000 years.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, but I think it'll be more like quantum folding space quantum. You know what I mean? Like it'll be something some weirdest. I could tell you we're friends with like, like the Google. Google. Google figured out Google was like experimenting with the very beginnings of proto quantum of types type computers. And one of its proto quantum computers solved this math equation that was supposed to take like 100,000 years to solve. And they were trying to figure out how did it do this. And the only way they can understand it is that the computer got the answer from an adjacent reality. Right? From an adjacent reality where the problem had been solved.

Julian

Can we Google this to get an adjacent reality?

Douglas Rushkoff

Right. So it's like, like those are the. That's if you're going to. You want to travel first class, you know, it feels like it's going to be. It's going to be shit like that. That's. That we don't quite understand yet. You know, closer to stuff that we're playing with. Remote viewing and esp and what are aliens and what's going on and why are those things moving around? You know, sort of like 3D to 4D. 1C. You, you, you. If you lived in flat space, you wouldn't understand what's going on on the other side of the page. On the other side of the plane. How did you get there? How'd you pop up there? It's like, oh, well, you don't get it. We're in three. We actually are in 3D.

Julian

You're thinking like Philip K. Dick.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, more of that kind of stuff. And some of the stuff we've done is as magical as that. And usually the people who figure those kinds of things out get like the Teslas, you know. And who was that guy that was like balancing rocks and stuff using. This guy did these giant experiments.

Julian

Claude Van Damme?

Douglas Rushkoff

No, no. This guy balanced rocks and things and he understood how the pyramids were made. And it was all about, you know, reversing the, you know, magnetism and gravity and they could never. And when his things fell, they couldn't get him back up. They didn't know how to do it. Even with cranes and all that shit. There's just. I feel like the, the I'll see

Julian

deep's looking for that right now. Deep did pull up what you were talking about, though, a second ago, Douglas, just so people can get that.

Douglas Rushkoff

Google's quantum AI team, right?

Julian

Yeah. Google's quantum comp computer experiments have sparked intense discussions about parallel realities in the multiverse. While the computers are simply running highly complex math algorithms, the unprecedented speeds have led some physicists to theorize that the computational workloads are being distributed across alternate realities or dimensions. So the Willow chip and the multiverse. I love the fucking multiverse chip. And the multiverse hypothesis. The breakthrough. Google's Quantum AI team introduced Willow, a 105 qubit processor capable of completing completing a random circuit sampling, benchmarking task in just five minutes. Traditional supercomputers would theoretically take ten septillion years to complete the same task. The adjacent reality theory. Because the computations explore such a massive number of quantum states so quickly, Hermit Naveen, former head of Google's quantum AI team, and other theorists have suggested this performance aligns the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics. The idea proposes the quantum computations actually unfold across parallel reality, meaning the computer is tapping into multiple versions of reality. Find a solution. So, Douglas, this actually isn't that crazy. It's crazy, but this reminds me of something. So an old friend of mine, this guy, Marcelo Cabrera, I remind me to check, just make sure he's cool with me saying his name. Thief. But I remember, I want to say it was early January 2018. I'm going for a walk with him in Central Park. Like midday. It was. It was snowy out. I'm wearing, you know, I was a very, very. I worked on Wall street at the time where I was making about 65k a year. And I had to wear a Joseph A. Bank suit and pretend it was something better. So I'm, like, wearing these shitty shoes. They're getting wet. I'm freezing. But Marcelo's the kind of guy that, you know, if I could describe him in a cartoon way, he's the kind of guy that maybe sometimes would get a call from someone that says, be at this bench at, you know, 1205 tomorrow. And when he's there, they pick him up, they put a bag over his head, dropped, drive him six hours away. He solves some computer computational thing somewhere. They hand him a bag of money, they put the bag back on his head, drive him back to the bench, and that's that really sharp guy. And so we were talking about the whole blockchain revolution at the time, because people were just tossing blockchain as a Keyword on everything. This is right when the crypto market was, like, starting to crash right after the first big boom there in 2017. And he was like, this blockchain stuff, you know, it's interesting, but if you get to the quantum, the quantum goes way beyond it. And he was explaining, I don't remember, 6, 8, 48, whatever it was, but he was blowing my mind, explaining how we could be in a reality where a country has already had quantum and has already effectively hacked all this stuff and therefore hacked reality. And we're not even living in the space that we think we're living in anymore, because something is actually controlling the world and it might not even be a country. Shreya could be like some unelected government.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right.

Julian

And I just remember sitting there going, wow, we've lost him. Like, he's crazy. And then I saw some of the stuff play out and I'm like, maybe he's not crazy.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right. I mean, it's a matter of figuring out what it is. So there's this guy, Nick Land, who's like a real darling of the far right. Guys like Peter Thiel and Muscular. They love Nick Land. He's this theorist and he says. Says that capitalism itself is a strange attractor from the future, drawing us toward it. That capitalism is like this living thing and that it's inevitable that we're going to go into there. And that's why they're promoting these kind of racist, hierarchical things, because it's like they want to be the ultimate capitalists.

Julian

You think it's racist, what they're proposing?

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. Well, this. It's the kind of survival of the fittest, eugenic thing. Yeah. In the end, it's. It's.

Julian

You think that's their intention or you

Douglas Rushkoff

think it's more like part of it.

Julian

You think it's just a downstream part of it.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. Part of being.

Julian

Doesn't that assume, then, that if we assume that that's a part of. And trust me, I'm no fan of Peter Teal and guys who think in any genics. But if we're assuming that what they're doing is racist, we're therefore assuming that. Therefore there are races that are less superior to other races. Like, I don't buy into that at all in their model, but what's to. Have they ever said that?

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, in so many words. In so many words. I mean, and you. And it's partly. I mean, if you're raised under apartheid in South Africa, you know, and when you're a kid, your parents you know, lock the downstairs and put a cage on the steps before you go up to the bedrooms at night to keep out black people. You know, who you're actually afraid are going to come and storm when you got a helicopter in the courtyard of the house to escape. When you lose control of this place, I think you do get indoctrinated in certain things. You know, it's tricky, right? Can I. Can I pee? You can just keep running it.

Julian

No, we're good. All right, we're good. Take your time. All right, we're back now. So you're trying to get more muscles, you're saying. I see the veins popping right there.

Douglas Rushkoff

I'm trying. I'm trying. No, my doctor said he wants me

Julian

to get to 140 once you get to 1 4. What are you.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right now I'm up to 136. I'm on a good day.

Julian

136. Okay.

Douglas Rushkoff

136.

Julian

It's easy to add on muscle when you get into the flow of things. You know what I mean? You like lifting?

Douglas Rushkoff

No, I. What I'm liking is. And I think I can develop a whole thing. I'm sure someone has. I'm liking, like, pull ups and dips and push ups and then push ups with weights. There's something about the non. I don't like the clunk. There's something about the clunk that's just like. But if I can find ways to. And I'm liking these. I got these giant rubber bands. I kind of like in that feeling better than others. And it. It. And I've got really. This guy, he actually lives out here, was showing me, like, if you do them really slow.

Julian

Oh, yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

It's like. It's brutal, but it, like, they're great. And I feel like way less. You know, I'm over 60. I don't want to, like, rip a ligament or do whatever.

Julian

Right.

Douglas Rushkoff

You know, and doing. Doing, like, less weight or these kind of these. These. These stretchy things or even functional weights, like kettlebells and things.

Julian

I was just gonna ask. So you do some kettlebells. They're amazing.

Douglas Rushkoff

That's little dumbbells. And it's like. Oh, it's a whole different thing.

Julian

Yeah. Deep. Got me back into kettlebells last year. I used to do a lot when I was younger and then got away from it. But like. Oh, my God. It's. I mean, that's how it's meant to be, because it is com. It. It's a combination of a lot of things, depending on how you do your workout. Like, if you're working in sets, then that can be a little closer to dumbbells and stuff like that. But it's like functional training, athleticism, high intensity training. Training. And also like strength training and weight training right at the same time. It's. It's unbelievable how much better and more athletic you feel. Like it's helped me on the heavy bag a ton.

Douglas Rushkoff

Like punching a bag.

Julian

Oh, yeah. Yes. I. I love boxing, but, like, my movement on the bag since going back to kettlebells has improved dramatically. I'd say it's good stuff. Yeah, definitely keep hitting that.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, I do that. I do yoga and I do a lot of yoga.

Julian

You do a lot of yoga? Yoga is amazing for you.

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, it's also for core.

Julian

Core, you know, absolutely huge difference between abs and core. You gotta have a right. Yeah, you gotta have a strong core to be able to do anything really athletic. For sure.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. And it's another. Duh. You know, like when you find your

Julian

core, you're like, oh, there it is.

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh, I get it. Yeah. And then it's like core, your core is everywhere. You know, when you're lifting something with your hand, it's like your core is there.

Julian

But back to what we were saying, but before the break, so you were talking about some. So, yeah, alternate universe. So these other guys, you're saying, like the teals of the world, they're. They have.

Douglas Rushkoff

There's not that many of them, but.

Julian

Yeah, yeah, there's not that many. And I. And I think that's the problem. George Carlin, I always say that he had this famous line, it's a big club and you ain't in it. Amazing observation. But like I always say, it's a small club and you ain't in it. Like, it's a very, very tight club. And so these guys who are looking at it like they can transcend. I want to come back to that in a minute. But like, you know, you're saying it's at the expense of everyone else and they just don't care. So you were raising the point. And this is interesting because I was having a conversation, my friend Ty Martin about this the other day. It's very hard to think about, but like that ultra capitalism view, right, where someone could be a trillionaire and stuff like that, and then just, you know, let everything lie where it is, including, like, if people. That means people die off because it's too much wintertime. Oh, fuck it. That's how it's supposed to be. I disagree with That I don't think it should be like that. While I look at all economic systems and I objectively say like, yes, capitalism has been the best system proven over time over the other ones. It doesn't, I always say it doesn't mean it's perfect. That also doesn't mean you throw the whole thing out. So I was talking with Ty about like, yeah, I don't really see a good need for someone to be a trillionaire. But at the same time, to require someone to not be a trillionaire would require a governing body to come in and determine that when you get to a certain level of wealth, you're not allowed to have more. Which means they could then use the slippery slope and set that objective right anywhere.

Douglas Rushkoff

Like in the, like in the Reagan era, Right.

Julian

How so? In the Reagan era?

Douglas Rushkoff

The Reagan era, anything you made over like a million dollars was taxed like 80%.

Julian

Oh yeah, Eisenhower was like 90 or something.

Douglas Rushkoff

And Reagan we look back at as if he was, you know, some horrible conservative. And it's like, no, the tax policy policy, then they prevented that. They really said once you had over a million, few million dollars, why did you need more? And they looked at it. It's not beneficial to the country, to the nation for one person to take that much of its currency and store it away. So taking a trillion dollars of value and taking it off the table, it doesn't make for a good poker game.

Julian

Yeah, you know, there's something about these guys and I, you know, I've never known any of those dudes personally, not sure I really want to, but like there's some crossing point that happens some day or maybe it happens slowly like a boiling frog where they separate themselves.

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, they lose. And we've then I wrote about those. There are studies. I mean, when you have a billion dollars, you have less empathy for other people.

Julian

You wrote about that?

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, yeah, there's, there's studies, I quoted them in the, in the last book book that once you have that kind of money, it's either because of what you had to do along the way or, and some people theorize it's because you need a kind of sociopathic type personality to get there to begin with. Now the thing about capitalism that I would say is who says we should only have one economic system for all places at all times? It's like I could say marriage is good, marriage is cool, but is it the best thing for 11 year olds who are, is it 14 year olds, 70 year olds? Does everyone have to get married? Is that the Only system of romance that we have. No, there's others. So, like, capitalism is really good if you're trying to grow an economy, it's not really great. If you're an economy that's kind of fully grown and is worried about how are we going to manage remaining resources. Resources. That's when you might want a commons. And we've had different kinds of economy. Late medieval Europe had a commons. You can use a commons to organize fisheries or a pasture that a lot of different cows are going to use. There's all these different other kinds of things, other kinds of money systems that you can use. Sometimes you want expensive money that's loaned out by a central bank at interest. So all the money we use we got to pay back to the banker more than we borrowed. So our economy has to grow just to keep the bank in business. Sure, that's fine for the Goldman Sachs economy, but are there any others? And could they coexist? Could we have an economy of our little town, how it works? Like we're going to share one lawnmower on our block.

Julian

Yes, exactly.

Douglas Rushkoff

Great point. So there are a bunch of different things. So it's like capitalism's great. Among other things.

Julian

Yeah, I. So there's a deeper conversation there and I'm not trying to get off it, I'm trying to relate it to something else too. So I'm not copping out from that. But I remember he said it way more eloquently than I can remember it. But like Sebastian Younger when he wrote the book, Tribe really explored, like how humanity began in a way, in the sense that we existed in these mathematically smaller groups to where Dunbar groups or whatever. Yeah, yeah, I think so. Where, basically, and I'm not even sure he intended to do this, but he showed that elements of libertarianism and socialism can work below a certain number. And so now you look at it like, think of America. We got 330, 340 million people here. Then think of a smaller country. It's got a million people or something like that. That's not how Tribes worked back in the day. There were a hundred people, 200 people. Everyone knew each other, they knew what it was. So the idea that some government and some capital and in some city of said country, whether it's a million people or 340 million people, that's not how humans were evolved technically, which I'm not saying we shouldn't be now, but what I am saying is we have to understand collectively that that's not our natural state. So however we're going to coexist together and create opportunities for people. Needs to be like. Actually, I don't know if the term is like, like studied or whatever, but you can't just assume. We'll figure it out.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right, Exactly. That's what. That's where this idea of something called anarcho syndicalism.

Julian

Anarcho syndicalism, right.

Douglas Rushkoff

It's like anarchism, but syndicated. So the idea is you have these small communities like kibbutzes and towns that do stuff together. And most human beings really only focus on the few hundred people that are in their thing. But all these little things are networking with each other. And there are some people that help them communicate. But it's like, we're really good. Oh, we make, you know, we make shoes in our community. That's what we do and whatever. And that one over there, they make beds and that one over there, they do farming. And we all trade with each other. So you have a community of people. I mean, something I started saying to people when they're talking about alienation and the. All these big problems. And I'll say, you know what. If you start with think. What are the. Do you know the first Name of the 20 people who are closest to you when you're sleeping at night? The people who are physically like when you're sleeping in this. This. This apartment?

Julian

I know 10.

Douglas Rushkoff

You know, 10 of them. Right. So 10. Because that's. That's your people. Who's closest to your body when you're sleeping at night.

Julian

Interesting.

Douglas Rushkoff

They're the people who are protecting you. You. Right. But they're your. And it's like, wow. And I thought about that and it's like in my building, I know like five or six of the ones, but those are, you know, then we're all sleeping together at night and I don't even know who they are. Right through those walls. And it's like that's your tribe. Whether you realize it or not, they're in proximity. And maybe not your only tribe, but that's kind of where it starts. Organismically. If you believe that there's like electromagnetic fields and our hearts and you know. Know that you're breathing and co metabolizing with other people. They're your first unit of. Of.

Julian

But we have a war thought of this not though now, Douglas, because like right when we were on that break right there, I was texting someone in Hawaii. Yeah, right. Like she's nowhere near here.

Douglas Rushkoff

But that's what we rave.

Julian

That's who you're talking with.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, that was the whole rave thing. It's like, oh, my God. We're creating a new neural network of human beings across the planet. We're gonna be Gaia's brain.

Julian

Gaia's brain. Jesus Christ.

Douglas Rushkoff

Remember the Gaia hypothesis? It was this again around club of Rome, 1970s,'80s.

Julian

A guy, James, Clubs of Rome.

Douglas Rushkoff

James Lovelock. Yeah. Well, they just invited me. I only learned about them, you know.

Julian

Oh, you didn't know about them?

Douglas Rushkoff

I mean, I knew that they existed, but I just knew the initial report.

Julian

I don't like that the Club of Rome is an enrollment Rome. I'm very sketched out by that point.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. I wonder, what does Rome have to do with them anyway?

Julian

Well, they started in Rome.

Douglas Rushkoff

They did.

Julian

Which is the greatest city on Earth.

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh. Because they did like a meeting or something in Rome.

Julian

I guess they did a meeting in Rome and now they're in Switzerland with Klaus Schwab.

Douglas Rushkoff

And I'm like, no, are they.

Julian

I don't think you're supposed to notice here.

Douglas Rushkoff

I don't think it is. Klaus Schwab is the guy who wants to.

Julian

That's in Switzerland. Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, no, Kush. Schwab is World bank and that kind of stuff.

Julian

Or.

Douglas Rushkoff

Or World Economic Forum. Huh? No, that's dark.

Julian

Okay. All right.

Douglas Rushkoff

That's a very different thing. Club of Rome are like environmentalist. This guy is like. Is like. Is like AOC on cocaine.

Julian

I'm having fun.

Douglas Rushkoff

That guy. It's a different thing.

Julian

Yeah, but like.

Douglas Rushkoff

But I think, I mean, if I found out Club of Rome was evil, I'd. I'd want to.

Julian

You're going to shine a light on.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, but I'll shine the light. I will shine the light.

Julian

All right, good.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, but they're not. No, they're like little policy wonks.

Julian

Sweet.

Douglas Rushkoff

Like educators really thinking, how do we promote. But it's interesting, and I get it, that people who are concerned about the well being of the planet and its people are the enemies of those who want us to disregard the planet and its people.

Julian

Now, here's the dark argument here. And I could see this being a scenario where people are in it and don't even know it, by the way. Unless it's two sides playing against the middle while acting like they're playing against each other. Because there's forces at work that use group think as a weapon to where they could be like, oh, Doug Rushkoff, he's done research on this, this and that. He's a great guy. He'll never know this because he just wants to do his research. We'll invite him to do this. So he'll come over here and say this. And then this other group over here is like, Guy X thinks the opposite of Doug Rushkoff. He's. He believes in actually all the. He said, we'll pull him in here, they'll fight about it, write a bunch of papers and everything, and then everyone will fight about it in the streets while we all do the real out here and take over the world. I wonder about that sometimes.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, you know, I mean, I'm. I'm a bad target for that because I'm. I'm. I'm just like, think and ask questions and explore. So I'm not like. Yeah, I take it as a positive sign that that side, if you want to call it that, is into my message of, like, heart and humans and all. But interestingly enough, Steve Bannon was asking me to be on War Room a bunch of times. Right.

Julian

He don't like me too much.

Douglas Rushkoff

I don't think he doesn't.

Julian

What was he asking you about War Room?

Douglas Rushkoff

He wanted me to be on War Room to talk about my book, Team Human, that. I'm arguing that, you know, Human, it was sort of against the technocracy, but she's against that, too. You know, he's against. He doesn't like those guys. Yeah, he's like, for True Maga. Against. He doesn't like. He didn't like Doge and. And those things because, again, it was the. The AI billionaires running things. He was, you know, the populist.

Julian

He's a guy I'm very sketched out by. I don't believe anything he said.

Douglas Rushkoff

And that's why I didn't want to go on it in the end, because I think. Not just that, not just that. He's probably smarter than me on some level.

Julian

Oh, he's a genius.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. You know what I mean? That. I felt like I probably would end up getting just used.

Julian

Yeah, no, I think that's a good thought, man. Because he has been everywhere all at once for the last last four and a half decades. And one place, two place, three place, four. Okay, five places, six places, seven places, eight industries, nine at some point. That's not a coincidence. And I can't sit here and say for sure, this thing or that thing, but, like, my friend Henry Abbott, you know, he. He did some amazing research on this years ago and not got no credit for it at the time, but, like, he was tracing out a lot of Bannon's life and like the people he interacted with and the banks and the finance and this and that. He, he's like. This is a spy kind of.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, he's an interesting guy. I mean he was, I mean, talk about, you know, the Club of Rome type. He was a CEO of the Biosphere project. Now Biosphere, which was this, they made this fake greenhouse Earth. It was the most weird ass environmental experiment thing. So he's doing that. He was like, he like owns like Seinfeld or something.

Julian

Well, he. So what he did is he came and he did a financing round on Seinfeld. So now since then, like back when he did in like 1991 or something, whatever it was, we can check it. He's paid a royalty on every episode.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right.

Julian

It's insane.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right? I mean, so he's done. He's interesting. Interesting cat, but you're right.

Julian

Steve Bannon served as the CEO of Biosphere 2 in 1993 and 94. Bought brought in by billionaire Ed Bass to cut costs and restructure the failing ecological project in Oracle, Arizona. His tumultuous Ultra's 17 month tenure involves sweeping management changes, aggressive lawsuits and significant alterations to the scientific mission. Bannon was hired as an investment banker and consultant to manage the facilities Floundering finances. He quickly ousted the original management of the project's founder, John Allen. Fearing Bannon's management would jeopardize the crew's safety, two former biospherians broke into the facility in April 1994 to expose the situation.

Douglas Rushkoff

Let me tell you this, we want to throw coincidence.

Julian

Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

In April 1994, I was at Timothy Leary's house when the two people, the two people who broke into it came to Timothy Leary's house and talked to Timothy about this act. And they were, they did it also because they thought the people in the Biosphere were going to run out of oxygen. And they went and they broke the actual glass of the biosphere to let oxygen in and undermine the experiment. Because the whole idea was that Biosphere was a closed environment that could we have plants and people live together and make oxygen. Like it's almost like an experimental Mars dome or something. They just couldn't do it. Yeah, people were just dying in there and so they went and broke them. But I was at Timothy Leary's house the night that they came and then they were at his house in LA and then drove to the biosphere and did that like the next day.

Julian

Were you doing psychedelics or something at the time or just chilling and they just walked in?

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, it Wasn't on psychedelics. It's not like you go to Timothy Harry's house. It's not like everybody's just, you know. Yeah, went in Rome. Back to Rome. Back to Rome. No, we were not.

Julian

Okay. All right. So you remember this very clearly when they came over.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, but it was. That's so funny. April 94.

Julian

That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. And that. And. And again, you look at a career like his, and that's another guy where I go, both sides against the middle. I remember there was an article that, for the life of me, I cannot fucking find. I swear to God, it's been pulled off the Internet. But back when Bannon was named the chairman of the campaign for Trump in summer 2016, when they fired Paul Manafort. So this is like, maybe early August 2016, there was an article on him, and I can't remember if it came out right then or if they reprinted it from, like, a year before. And. And I want to say, like, the photographic memory saying it was in something like Bloomberg Business Week, but I'm not sure. And basically, the author of the article was given full access to Steve Bannon to just shadow him for, like, a couple days or whatever in Washington, D.C. where he's got the townhouse, where, I guess now he does all these years later, the war room and stuff. At the time, he's the head of Breitbart. And so Bannon has this big party with all these, you know, D.C. acolytes and everything. The authority is walking around with him. And Bannon's give him a tour of his place, and they go to some. I don't know, like, the fireplace or something, and they're looking at some pictures. I don't remember what they're looking at, but the guy turns to Ben and he goes, what do you believe? Like, what do you. Is amazing question, like, what is your political philosophy? And he goes, I'm a Leninist. And the author's like, wait, like Lenin, like the Bolshevik? You're a conservative influence? Like, what the fuck? That doesn't make any sense. He goes, no, no, no. Not the actual solutions of the policy. Is like, a Bolshevik, but I'm a Leninist in the sense that he burned it down, right? I want to burn it all down. And that's all he said. And the author was just like, well, that's. That seems. And to me, I remember clocking that, going, that's interesting.

Douglas Rushkoff

Now you get it. So that's why he would want January 6th. That's why he'd be in the war room for that. Because it's just. Just tear it down. And what would be if you're not left or right, if you just tear it down, who's more likely to do more tearing it down, you know, Biden, Kamala or Trump? Of course Trump. There's more just. It's more incendiary.

Julian

I disagree with that and I'll tell you why. Yeah, I think it's both. I make no distinction. Biden Harris is a passive, destructive. Donald Trump has more aggressive destruction. Meaning, like, he'll tell you that he wants to do this and rip it down. Whereas Biden Harris will tell you there's no such thing as a gender in some fucking memo that they put out.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right.

Julian

And I think both.

Douglas Rushkoff

But they're not terror. They're. But they're. They're. Biden and Harris are institutionalists, though. They're trying to prop up the system.

Julian

Right. And they're propping up systems that destroy

Douglas Rushkoff

things, of course, but the. That if you're going to tear it down, down, you're not going to go to the people who are building. Biden and Harris are more like.

Julian

But you don't think institutions have torn down society.

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh, they're like World bank and all those things. Yeah, it's. World bank was colonialism by another tool. It's like, okay, instead of going to those places with armies and enslaving your people, you're going to borrow money from us and you're never going to be able to pay it back back. So you're going to open your markets to us and we're going to put our big agar there and do all that. Right. It was the same. It's the same stuff. The only difference, I would argue is that at least in government constitutions, there are ways of recalling things. There are ways for people to intervene, to vote in ones who are not going to do those things. Things. Whereas if you really do have a monarchy, like Musk or Teal want they want. Yeah, yeah.

Julian

They want a monarchy.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Julian

I mean, I'm the president of Peter Thiel Hate Club, but, like, he wants a monarchy. I don't know that one.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, yeah. Look, can we pull that up?

Julian

Teal likes monarchy.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, yeah. That was. What, what, what? Nick Land. And, and who's the other one that they like? I'm Curtis Yarvin. That's what they're all about.

Julian

See how that makes no sense, though, with. How do I want to say this? Like, quote unquote, libertarian conservative politics that Peter Thiel Claims to love. If that is the case, it does.

Douglas Rushkoff

If you think we are in a might makes right universe, might makes right. Whoever's the strongest wins. We're all just fighting all the time. We have these laws, but the laws aren't real anyway because the people who control the laws, we are just the strongest people with the biggest guns. So if that's what's happening anyway, then just have the most mightiest person be in charge and get over all this bullshit. Democracy, voting, you know, we're just going through the motions. Democracy is just there to convince people that they're living in something other than might makes right when they're not. And they would say the happiest.

Julian

Oh, shit, I don't remember that at all. But goddamn, you're cooking. In his 2014 book, Zero to One, Peter Thiel declared monarchy as the best form of government. I read that book twice.

Douglas Rushkoff

His ideas, I remember that. But that's argue that capitalism and democracy is diverge. A shift he traced to the expansion of voting rights. His ideal society, wealth based and male dominated. Yeah.

Julian

Oh, that's fascinating.

Douglas Rushkoff

And there you go. The libertarian, he embodies at times to a cartoonish degree the contradictions of the libertarian movement. You're perfect. You see, See, you're, you're a good study there. Yeah. But champion of entrepreneurial freedom. He also praises monopolies.

Julian

Right, wow. So you're right, the monopolies thing, that's like. I remember when I just looked at Peter Thiel, like as a businessman and didn't know all the shit he did and everything, and I read 0 to 1, I'm like, wow, this guy's a genius. Not to say I agreed with all of it, but I'm like, whoa. The way you can see why he was so successful, which I don't think you should ever underestimate your enemy. He's a brilliant guy, but like, you know, then you see what, like some of it obviously came out in that book and I'm forgetting it. But then you see like actions taken and what, what he might want. And you're like, this isn't, this is a world that leaves so many people behind. And you know, maybe he really is Malthusian. And he's like, you know what? Fuck it. A lot of people are going to die because they need to.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right? He is Malthusian. He does believe in the limits to growth. Actually, the right wing extremists, the, like the Koch brothers and Thiel and Musk and those guys, they believe more in the limits to growth. Growth than Club of Rome does. The difference is the right wing guys like those guys believe that because of the limits to growth, there's not enough for everybody.

Julian

Then why.

Douglas Rushkoff

So we've got to let those millions and billions die.

Julian

Why does Musk argue that people need to have kids way more than he is at the forefront of that movement? And like we do have a birth rate problem in America now for sure.

Douglas Rushkoff

Depends if you. It's a problem. Problem. It's a problem. Well, partly it's economic expansion. They want more customers. Although now they're realizing Sam Altman's realizing future of customers are not human. Their future customers are going to be AIs. How does an AI pay you in crypto? In other words, if think about this way, you're a billionaire sitting in your house and you don't interact with people except your servants and your and your family. Right. So you're up there, the Hill. Yeah. You want there to be consumers, you want there to be people working. So you want workers and you want consumers. You want them buying and selling and the money going up to you, the profit going up to you. Why do you care if those consumers and producers are human or AI?

Julian

I think it's just too foreign for me to even think about something that's not human. Exchanging currency.

Douglas Rushkoff

Exactly. But you think of an AI, right? An AI in order to do what you job, it needs energy, it needs data and it needs processing power. So where is it going to get those? It will earn money doing its AI tasks and it will spend that money buying processing power and memory and data center storage and all that from these companies. So they are your consumer at that point and then you don't need the people anymore.

Julian

Dave, can we google how many many current AI data centers does China have and how many current AI data centers?

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, China just built one that's as big as like 100 of ours. You heard about, they built this giant. Giant, giant, giant.

Julian

How many square miles?

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, there is square foot.

Julian

Yeah, so that's a. Yeah, yeah, good point.

Douglas Rushkoff

They built this really big one.

Julian

Okay, so the United States leads the global AI infrastructure race with roughly 4,000 to 5,400 total data centers. Centers compared to China which has approximately 350 to 450 publicly tracked facilities. While the US has a massive quantitative lead, China is rapidly scaling its infrastructure and state led computing hubs to close the gap. And part of that may be exactly what you're saying, which is, you know where we're building one that's 10 square miles they're building one that's 110 square miles. Okay. So this is. I want to bring it back around to this too, because we got off this, and I think it's important. This is where I, like, see the idea that, you know, you. You worry about if China got to like, AGI first, would they use it for worse than we would? I also don't necessarily trust the people we got in charge of that to use it for good either. So that's a problem. But I remember this is like a full circle kind of thing too. The very first episode I ever recorded for this podcast, which turned out to be episode six, because I put out 10 episodes. Day one was basically discuss. A lot of it was discussing kai Fu Lee's 2018 book. I believe it was called AI Superpowers. Did you ever read this? So Kai Fu Lee, Chinese American technologist guy in the venture capital world. I believe he was laying out what this race looks like, where it stood and where it could be going between China and the U.S. and so I see where it's like, you'd want to have an advantage. And I was raising this one point earlier that said, where, like, it could be such an example of the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where the people that you use the devil you make the deal with to get that advantage then eats the whole population. You know, you have Palantir running these fucking places. And then we're living in a surveillance 1984 state that that would be a total l. So how do we. How do we try to advance progress, do good for humanity also, like, get America in a good position without sacrificing everything that makes that purposeful in the first place.

Douglas Rushkoff

I mean, the easiest way would be funny, even go here, but go there. Citizens assemblies, making decisions about things. I think people picked it random. Not running, not running for office. Office people picked at random.

Julian

Interesting.

Douglas Rushkoff

In groups and giving them agency over their own regions.

Julian

What.

Douglas Rushkoff

What's allowed to happen there? You know, it's interesting. China in China's AI policy, I would think is. I think is superior to ours.

Julian

Why?

Douglas Rushkoff

Because they realize that hand in hand with AI development, they got to do renewable energy because of all the. The. You know, but they.

Julian

They emit more smog that than like China does.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, but that's why they. They've been working on it though. But they're also global. They're. They're the global leader in solar, wind and geothermal and all these other kinds of. Of energies. And we've put an intentional stop to it. You know, the other thing, funny, you were talking before about crypto and about how so much of crypto is bullshit. And I started to look at crypto as a way to. An excuse to sell chips and energy.

Julian

An excuse to sell chips and energy.

Douglas Rushkoff

So bitcoin, basically, the main thing that bitcoin is. If you look at bitcoin as a Martian anthropologist looking at Earth, you say, oh, so they're burning the planet to prove this money is. Has value. Right. Crypto, bitcoin is, is we spend energy, we burn fuel in order to value this thing, and we buy chips in order to mine more of it. So the main economic activity of bitcoin was Nvidia chips and energy. And then people are like, oh, this bitcoin stuff doesn't seem real. Then we did NFTs and we got this last burst. Oh, let's burn more, burn more.

Julian

RIP to an era.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right?

Julian

That was an era.

Douglas Rushkoff

It was. But we kept burn, burn, burn. And then when NFTs died, what happened? AI. And what is AI? A new excuse. More Nvidia chips, more burning fuel, more building. So it's like, who's really making money on this? Yeah, the AI companies are getting invested in, but what are they spending it on? Chips and oil. Chips and oil. That's where it's all. And now water.

Julian

Yeah. Now all these guys we've been talking about today. Well, not all of them, but, you know, the. The way that you recently came up on the radar again was because I had played that video on one of our weekend episodes with Deef and I, where you were talking this back in 2020 pre. It was, I believe, right before the pandemic, you did this interview where you very matter of factly explaining about how you had been advising these billionaires on how to deal with the end of the world and, you know, building bunkers and hilariously explaining, like, how to be nice to your security guards so that they won't kill you when, you know, money doesn't mean. I mean, it was hysterical and also very sad to watch, but I appreciated you, like, totally outing this kind of thing right here. And then, ironically, you had been on my friend Danny Jones show, and so I was, like, gonna hit up Danny, like, oh, can you connect me with. With. With Doug Rushkoff? But then you texted me, let's do it. So, like, great. But this whole concept of you, long before the pandemic even happened, and people were thinking in certain ways like that, obviously before the complete rise of AI and everything, you are somehow thrust into A situation where you're meeting with very wealthy people, very powerful people, who are asking you existential questions, seemingly about the future of humanity. Not with the idea that, like, hey, maybe this could happen, but more with the idea that, yeah, this is going to happen. So how do we deal with that? First of all, can you just take me there and. And tell me how you even got into this conversation or what happened?

Douglas Rushkoff

I mean, yeah, like I said, I used to get to do talks for, like, corporations sometimes or rich people, whatever. And this was a. Turned out it was a hedge fund that invited their. Some of their biggest investors to this resort out in the middle of the desert. And they had different speakers and stuff. And I thought they said, oh, we want you to come and do a talk on the future of the digital economy. Economy, you know, because I talk about that shit. And so I was ready to do this talk. And I'm sitting in the green room, and instead of bringing me out, usually they'll come. You know, you do talks. You know, they come out.

Julian

I've never done talk.

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh, they come with a guy comes with a microphone, usually they clip it on. Then you go out. And instead they brought these five guys in. They sat around this table.

Julian

Five guys.

Douglas Rushkoff

This is your talk. This is it. And I'm like, okay, I'm ready. He said, no, no, you don't have to talk. And they start asking me all these questions, like the really binary tech bro questions.

Julian

What's the lighting like? Is it dark? Like.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, it's a green room. It's in a resort.

Julian

Resort.

Douglas Rushkoff

It's like a.

Julian

So it's normal they're serving refreshments, right?

Douglas Rushkoff

It's daytime.

Julian

Okay.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, no, no, no. It was making sure before COVID or anything. It was a nice resort. It was nice. I. I had a private hot tub in my unit. It was like a. A bungalow.

Julian

I like bungalows.

Douglas Rushkoff

And they go around. They had little golf carts taking you around. I mean, it was. This is not nice.

Julian

Like the electric golf carts.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, it was a whole thing. Environmentally friendly, very cool. So. But they, they come in, they're asking me like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Julian

Okay.

Douglas Rushkoff

Like, where to place their bets, you know, alternate real or. Or augmented reality or virtual reality.

Julian

Oh, I remember that was huge, that argument.

Douglas Rushkoff

And then finally it was like Alaska or New Zealand.

Julian

You're like, what?

Douglas Rushkoff

It's 2018. Since 2018, this happened. Like, what? It's like we have. Yeah. What's the better place? Assuming climate change happened, where's the better place to put our Bunker, Alaska or New Zealand.

Julian

So were they only asking you in the context of climate change?

Douglas Rushkoff

No. And I was like, well, that was for that. And it was like, where do we put our bunker? For the event.

Julian

The event.

Douglas Rushkoff

That's what they called it, the event.

Julian

What do you think it was?

Douglas Rushkoff

Climate catastrophe, pandemic, economic unrest, nuclear war, mass migration. You know, whatever it is that. That makes life as we know it unlivable and forces them to go to a special place and. And ride it out or live there forever. And so I. I then got in. Then I did get into my intellectual dominatrix mode. And then I was like, oh, so you're going to have a bunker that's going to somehow, you know, so you. And. And one of them showed me these plans he had of this underground thing that all these shipping containers all together, and he had a heated pool in there.

Julian

Heated pool.

Douglas Rushkoff

That's what I would think about in his thing. And I'm like, dude, you know, there's a guy I know in my neighborhood who's got a heated pool, and all summer there's always a little van in front of his house with, like, the guy with the spare parts and the fixing this. It's like a heated pool is a hard thing to maintain. I'm like, where are you going to get the spare parts for your heated pool after the apocalypse? And he's like, opens this moleskin book and he's like, parts for the heat. Like, he hadn't thought of this. It's like, these are like Walking dead level scenario.

Julian

When they're sending up billionaires, they're not sending their best. God damn it.

Douglas Rushkoff

So then I'm like, okay. Then they're like, your water table. Your water's contaminated from the nuclear fallout. How long is it going to last? You're going to have filters. Oh, reverse osmosis is going to do the fucking benzene and the radiation or whatever. And then so they're like, oh, no, we've got this. We got scientists on that and this and reverse this and the top water in the landfill. We work that out. I'm like, okay, so who's going to protect your bunker from the rest of us? You know, from all of us, the

Julian

ones that are still alive.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. Oh, cement gate things, blah, blah, blah. And then the guy's like, oh, you know, I've got.

Julian

Got.

Douglas Rushkoff

I've got Navy SEALs on speed dial. They've got. Helicopters are going to come, they're going to pick us up and go bring us out of that. And I'm like, oh, you got Navy seals? How. How are you going to pay your Navy SEALS after your bitcoin is worthless? Why are they going to.

Julian

Money don't matter why.

Douglas Rushkoff

Exactly. And they're like, oh. Then they're like, okay, so. So we could control. We could have a what if I'm the guy says, what if I'm the only person? Person says how smart they are. Tech bros. Billionaires who are richer than us. What if I'm the only person who knows the combination to the place where we keep the food? It's like, oh, Navy seals, they don't have any experience getting information out of people. You're going to spend the whole apocalypse getting waterboarded.

Julian

I've had a lot of Navy seals sitting in that chair. Let me tell you wouldn't take them.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, no. Or they said, we're going to have chips. Chips that will control everybody's access to different things. And if they got out of hand, I could hold always like, use it as a shock. Yeah, it's like, oh, they're gonna yank that thing out and fucking kill you in a second. Just even knowing that you're saying that you've already lost your Navy seals.

Julian

Oh God, we are so fucked.

Douglas Rushkoff

You know, I funny because I told that story and someone said, dude, they should get Army Rangers, not Navy SEALs.

Julian

How long was this meeting?

Douglas Rushkoff

Less than an hour.

Julian

Less than an hour.

Douglas Rushkoff

Less than an hour. Less than an hour. Well, because the whole thing, you gotta realize I was not like called into the lair by the wealthy guys. I was the entertainment.

Julian

The entertainment there was that you said they had mold skin books and.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, I know. Well, some of them knew I was going to be there. One of them definitely knew because he had his plans. But it was more like first. I don't know if they all really had plans. They could have also been trying to impress each other, like, oh, I got this going, I got that. You know, and there were other speakers at the this thing. It was like a weekend long. So you just like learn to make an omelette with this famous chef. Improve your golf swing with this golf pro. Spend an hour with a futurist. You know, so build your bunker. Yeah, exactly.

Julian

When everyone dies.

Douglas Rushkoff

And I'm like, why are you asking? I'm a, a anarchist media theorist about how to build a bunker. You know, I'm just like, love each other, man. You know, I'm not.

Julian

I love that where you're explaining and how disconnected these guys were. And you said in the clip where they're asking like, how they can build goodwill with their future security guards. And you're like, I don't know, pay for the kids birthday party or their bar mitzvah or some. And they're like, oh, wow.

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh, so I gotta be nice to him?

Julian

Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

Pay for your head of security's daughter's body. Yeah. Because then they were like. I said, be nice to them. Be nice to their family, Be nice to their friends. And then one of them. This was one of the last things he said. He's like, yeah, but where does it stop?

Julian

What do you mean, where does it stop?

Douglas Rushkoff

The being nice. How do you. Where do you draw? And I'm like, dude, that's the whole thing. We're all in this together. But for me, the thing was I realized that the people who. The richest, most powerful people I've ever met felt utterly powerless to impact the future. That the best they could do was have someone like me predict the future. And then just.

Julian

But they're assuming that future's happening and they're assuming inevitable. Inevitable they call it. They have a name for it. The event.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right.

Julian

And there's multiple. Whether it be some climate disaster, whether it be a nuclear holocaust, whether AI taking over. AI taking over. Like, these are people that have access to people, whether you like them or not. They have access to people who have a lot of information and a lot of simulations and a lot of things that could point to what the actual future is. And it's pretty alarming that they're having this conversation very matter of factly with you, even if you are describing yourself as the undertaking entertainment in 2017. This is before COVID before the rise of AI, before this. That is wild.

Douglas Rushkoff

And these are people who would rather have. With robots or teenagers than women. Right?

Julian

Wait. Wait a second. Please explain that these are people who

Douglas Rushkoff

want to build sex robots. These are people.

Julian

The people you were talking to.

Douglas Rushkoff

This is. This is.

Julian

They said this.

Douglas Rushkoff

This is who they are. These are the Epstein kinds of people. These are. Are they talking about the culture that we're talking about? Right? The culture that we're looking at, the billionaire tech bro culture. What are their values? What do they want? How many wives do they want? Who do they want the wives to be? How much power do they want those people to have?

Julian

Can you put the camera on, Doug, real fast, Steve? Let me just write this down on my band. Was that one of them?

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh, one of the. Is that on the camera?

Julian

It's not on the camera. You're on camera right now. Yeah, yeah. You couldn't See it on that. But let's make sure that. Said it. Was that one of them.

Douglas Rushkoff

If you want to know if I.

Julian

It's off record.

Douglas Rushkoff

That's one of them.

Julian

God damn it, bro. God damn it. That's so.

Douglas Rushkoff

But that's this.

Julian

That's so.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, you know, and I. I had. I did have a brush with the Epstein crowd, interestingly enough. Through the science people.

Julian

Yeah. What.

Douglas Rushkoff

So you.

Julian

Did you ever meet him?

Douglas Rushkoff

I don't think so.

Julian

You don't think?

Douglas Rushkoff

I don't think so.

Julian

You didn't mean Palm Beach?

Douglas Rushkoff

Pete, I don't know who that. Oh, that guy. No, no, no, no. But I. I was invited to a party in New York thrown by a literary agent. Who was the literary agent?

Julian

Brockman.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. Of the scientist stars, you know, Dawkins and all those kind of Dennett and Pinker and all, you know, and. And really, really smart. Super smart. Smarter than us people.

Julian

When is this?

Douglas Rushkoff

Late 90s. Late 90s. So it was before Epstein was known, before he had gotten arrested the first time, before any. Any of that. But it was basically called like the Millionaires Dinner, the billionaires dinner. And I got to go to it because I was one of the kids writing about the Internet was new, so I was like cyber boy. And I got into this thing and the guy who was throwing the party said, this is a really special party. I'm going to give you a plus one. Make it count. And I'm thinking, these are the smartest people in the world. I invite the smartest woman I know, this woman who. Who runs a website at the time, a literary website.

Julian

Not a looker.

Douglas Rushkoff

It was beyond that. She's the smartest woman I know.

Julian

Yeah, I know, but like something else, right?

Douglas Rushkoff

And I bring her there and I get to this. I get to the party. The guy grabs my wrist. I can still like, almost feel. He grabs me, pulls me aside, and he goes, how dare you waste your plus one on a lesbian. And I'm like, huh? And I said, this is the smartest person. You said, make it count. And he goes, you've. I invited you. You're like 27, 28 years old. I invited you to raise the quotient in the room. I'm like, what do you mean? And he goes, look. And there are these all these like middle aged guys with like 20, if they're lucky, 20 year old, gorgeous little model people. And I'm like, oh, that's the quotient. Oh, duh, you know, because I was so worried about not being. You're Going to go to a thing with Dawkins, and you're a young writer. You're thinking, I'm not smart enough to be with these people. I want to. I'm going to impress them with a fucking genius, you know, And. Oh, my God. And so that it turned out that that dinner and all those dinners were funded by Epstein, and I gotten this fund fight with. How many people are here at that thing?

Julian

Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

40, 50.

Julian

And where. Where is it in New York?

Douglas Rushkoff

In some. The.

Julian

What kind of place?

Douglas Rushkoff

Townhouse. Rich person thing. There's some townhouses.

Julian

Yeah, but not his place.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, I don't think. I don't think.

Julian

Remember that.

Douglas Rushkoff

You would think I would, but I really wouldn't because he wasn't famous yet.

Julian

Was it on East 71st Street?

Douglas Rushkoff

It could have been.

Julian

God damn it.

Douglas Rushkoff

God damn it. It could have been. I just don't know. It was so far. It was so far back when. All right, I don't know. I don't know. It was a very rich person's big, big place, though. But anyway, so I get in this argument with Dawkins about whether or not there's, like, a soul or any meaning or anything to this, and he's basically saying. Saying that human beings are just basically computers running memes, and we're all just. We're all, you know, like, memes are like genes, and we're just sort of automatic.

Julian

How did he say reach that conclusion?

Douglas Rushkoff

Because it's. That's what. There's only evidence of that. There's no evidence of anything else. And I was arguing. My felt experience is that human beings have souls and that the universe is leaning towards, you know, morality, and we're trying to make the world better, and we're. We're reaching out, that there's an effort, there's some kind of a love or something animating us. And he dismissed me. Finally, he said, oh, you're a moralist. I don't even know what that meant, but it's like, as a dismissed thing, you're a moralist. And then it's like 20 years later, I see their pictures on the fucking Lolita Express heading out to the TED on Jeffrey Epstein's plane. And I'm like, okay, I'm the moralist. You know, guilty. I'll take that. And it's like for all the 20, 30 years that I was sad that I never got rich or invited to the right things or being one of those people, I realized, oh, there's a deal you make.

Julian

It's a price to pay.

Douglas Rushkoff

For going there.

Julian

And that was the only time you ever went to one of those things that you know of that was, like, funded by him where you invited by Brock. Brockman.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. Yeah.

Julian

When's the last time you talked to Brockman?

Douglas Rushkoff

I saw him at a thing. You know, it was weird because then after that, he represented me for a while. And then I saw the article come out that those parties were funded by Epstein. And there was a guy, Evgeny Morozov, really smart guy, kind of anti. More anti tech. Anti capitalist. You know, he would call me pro tech because he's like, anti tech. Okay. I'm critical of that. But he's like, more critical. And he wrote this piece in the Atlantic exposing all that. And I was like, oh, when was this? Whenever Epstein was exposed and all.

Julian

Back in 2019.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. When everyone was exposing those things. And I was like, what the fuck? And he wrote this piece and he said. And he was more philosophically educated than me and better at sort of figuring out a moral conundrum because he's this great agent. I'm at this agency. He's not even my agent. I'm at the agency. And he said, the agency needs to make some public acknowledgment and of what happened. Some commitment about or give back the money that the foundation got from this guy. Make some repair, and I can stay. And the agency never acknowledged it at all. Never did anything. So he left. And then I left the agency then because it was just like, you do something.

Julian

Yeah, that's one thread that kind of gets ignored these days. And it's been a thread that's been open for a while, because, to be clear, John, you could run through. I don't know if it's still on there, but, you know, two, three years ago, even you could run through, like, the organization of everyone who's. Who's at least related to Edge foundation, run by Rock. It was fucking everybody. Like, there's literally no one. And you have to be objective at that point. And you're like, okay, obviously all these people, all of them aren't down on Epstein doing things with things.

Douglas Rushkoff

Being in the Edge foundation meant there was like 500 of us, I think, send. Oh, really? They would send in. What it meant was you would get an email once a year, just like Club of Rome. No, but they would have an email with a question, and it was like, what's the greatest invention of the last 2000 years? And you would give an answer, and if they thought the answer was cool, they put it in a Book of the Edge. That's what the edge was. And then there was.

Julian

You get access to stuff, too, because you're in the fraternity.

Douglas Rushkoff

I didn't. But there was. The people who were really in it. They would get to go to. It was interesting. They would have, like, seminars like they did a thing on. And ultimately it turned out they were into kind of dark stuff. Behavioral finance, they got into that. Behavioral psychology, behavioral finance, which is sort of. How do you get people to make financial decisions that are best of their own against their own best interests? And it was like, oh, that's what you're interested in. But so there were inner things. Or if you were, you know, Dawkins or Daniel Dennis, Steven Pinker, you got invited. They would, like take a cruise around Antarctica or go to Galapagos. You know what I mean? They did cool things, if you were. But I wasn't.

Julian

You didn't get to go to Antarctica?

Douglas Rushkoff

No, I wasn't.

Julian

Pyramids under the ground?

Douglas Rushkoff

No, I'm just. I was more periphery. But there were, there were. I mean, I met Alan Alda. He was. Oh, yeah, he was in there because he got really interested in science. He did narration for some cool science things.

Julian

But all you from. From that one experience at the party you went to that you didn't know was sponsored by Epstein, you remember having an intellectual argument with Dawkins. And that was kind of. It.

Douglas Rushkoff

Two strikes. One strike against them was that this is a party where I was supposed to bring a hot woman.

Julian

Right?

Douglas Rushkoff

Is like, oh, this is some weird misogynistic thing going on here that I don't understand and creepy and whatever. And the second was that these guys are calling me a moralist and laughing at me for believing in something, in anything that. As if believing, having faith in anything. I'm not saying there's God. Don't worry. I'm not saying I won't say there's God. I'm just saying that there's, you know, man, it's okay. It's okay. You know, I'm not going to be that radical. I'm just saying, you know, that there's. There's, you know, like. Because among scientists, you know, talking about God, things like, oh, no, you're. You know, there's a lot of scientists

Julian

that do believe in God, though.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, I know.

Julian

A lot.

Douglas Rushkoff

I know. But these ones, there was a hyper vigilance against any of that. And that's because if you believe in the. In the sacredness of the other human and you can't do that shit to them.

Julian

Right, you got it. Great point.

Douglas Rushkoff

You can't rape a 12 year old girl if you believe human beings have souls. And so what happened was people like Epstein ended up admiring very staunch atheist scientists because these scientists were giving, were creating a permission structure. There's nothing going on here. There's nothing inside that person. It's just genes, it's just memes. They're not real.

Julian

You just unintentionally, in my opinion, made the most up but legitimate other argument, just another one. Add it to the list of believing in a higher power because of the way you just described those people. And, and I don't, I don't think you're wrong at all. I, I, and I, I'm, I think, I think it's pretty, pretty, pretty telling too that you as a younger guy, you know, among the other people there, went to something like this. You say you didn't know the context of it and everything and all that, but even back then when you knew nothing about what they actually really do, walked away going, yeah, that just, and it's Spidey sense.

Douglas Rushkoff

It's all Spidey. We all have it all the time. And you know, there's so many things we can do that repress your Spidey sense. I mean, I feel like being online all the time, the time is probably bad for spidey sense. But, but that feeling in your gut, it's so real. You can trust it. You can really trust. You know, you meet a person and

Julian

it's like, you know, man, it's, you

Douglas Rushkoff

know, it, you know, and the fact that you know it means that everybody knows it on some level. So don't lie because people know you're lying. Even if they don't know consciously you're lying inside, they know you're lying and they know what's like. So it's like, like it, it makes life so much easier in the end, right? If you're just like, oh man.

Julian

Right.

Douglas Rushkoff

I don't have to worry about anything. I'm just going to spidey it out.

Julian

Yeah. Now go. And so you never went to something like that again as far as, you know, like some party like that where he's involved and you don't remember seeing him or anything like that?

Douglas Rushkoff

No, that's why he could have been at that one. But it might have been something that he like funded and wasn't. And wasn't that interesting, you know?

Julian

Interesting. And that's the crazy thing, man.

Douglas Rushkoff

I mean, I spoke at mit, you

Julian

spoke at mit, right?

Douglas Rushkoff

What context I went to a media lab to talk about a book, and then it turns out. You know what I mean? But, yeah, a lot of people. But that's the thing. A lot of people have been in Club of Rome.

Julian

A lot of people have been in Horrible, you know.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

Like, yeah, it's. It. There's some line there at some point where it's like, okay, you know, we're probably making a reach. And then there's things where it's like, you're not. And it kind of is like, whoa, like what?

Douglas Rushkoff

Right?

Julian

Everyone around that poison. And that's the thing that. That's unfortunately what made Epstein and Maxwell, while they were operating, so effective at their game is that they knew all they had to do was take a picture with you. And there would always be the question. That's all it would be. There would always be the question like,

Douglas Rushkoff

I wasn't important enough for anyone to want to picture me. I wasn't.

Julian

Either way, there's people who will listen right now, now and be like, oh, he went to a party with them, or whatever. And they'll be like, maybe, maybe. And that's a really tough thing because they knew so many people.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right? And I didn't know them. But that's the whole point for me. The whole point is you're gonna run in. Sometime in your life, you're gonna run into sketchy people, especially if you start publishing or, I mean, look at you. You're gonna run into sketchy people. Of course it's gonna happen. And the only thing you've got. The only thing you've got is your Spidey, because they'll have money, they'll have opportunity, they'll have women. I mean, whatever they have, they'll have. And it's like. I mean, for me, I mean, I was lucky. I was a Gen X counterculture determined to stay poor. You know what I mean? There was a bunch of us. We were like slackers. So we were optimizing for something else. So the. The traditional temptations didn't quite apply to me, you know, it was like. I don't know what. It would have been something else. Yeah. You know.

Julian

No. To go back to it, though, that less than one hour meeting, as you describe it, with, say, five billionaires out there, I'm still.

Douglas Rushkoff

And I think it was four billionaires and one almost billionaire when I tried to look them up.

Julian

Sorry to hear that from that guy. But you say so matter of factly, I guess that they. First of all, did you know any of these guys before? They walked in the room.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, I knew of one of them.

Julian

You knew of them but you didn't know?

Douglas Rushkoff

Like, no, they weren't like Zuckerberg level. But you know, because I asked them even that. I said I thought you guys are making rocket ships to get off the planet. They go, we're low level.

Julian

Not there yet.

Douglas Rushkoff

We're low level billionaires.

Julian

Like 5, 6 billion. But like you said it in a way that would suggest they were extremely open about it. That they were into sex with underage girls and robots.

Douglas Rushkoff

No, they weren't open about it.

Julian

You picked up on that?

Douglas Rushkoff

I, I picked up that they're of that culture now.

Julian

What made you pick up on the fact that they were of that culture?

Douglas Rushkoff

That they, I mean morally. That they were perfectly okay with leaving humanity behind. You know, they just seemed, I mean, mean and, and I guess it's a, I'm drawing them with a, with a, with a inaccurate non journalists brush. That's okay, right? I brushed up against these kind of folks two or three times in my life. Right. Once at that party. That's it.

Julian

Only two. That's kind of low for a guy. If you're like the types of things you talk about, I would imagine they're all over you.

Douglas Rushkoff

I know. Or giving money to my team. Team Human show. Like, what a rude sponsor. It's like I got like 200, two or 300 people paying two bucks a month. It's like, where's one, you know, one tech bro? They're not, they're not. No, they're not.

Julian

But two or three times you were, you were.

Douglas Rushkoff

Obviously I feel in presence of those kind of people, you know, and it's energetically and what it is just the, they're, they really, they just really don't care. Yeah. You know, and I guess it's more like, it's, it's not that they are. It's more like they could be like I talk about, I talk to people who've, who've met like James Dolan or something and they just go, oh, he gave me the creeps.

Julian

I feel like that's everybody.

Douglas Rushkoff

You know, I saw, I saw Harvey Weinstein once at a party and I was like, when? Oh, in late 80s, early 90s. Yeah, he was, he was the Merchant Ivory. They were big producers even then. And he just like the only other. He looked like like a Mossad agent or someone. You know, he's big. You know what I mean? Like he could just.

Julian

No, I don't know what you mean.

Douglas Rushkoff

He was scary. He was Scared.

Julian

Look, like you. You pegged him as a Mossad agent.

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, like, not like. Like a Mossad guy. That. Or Special Forces Mossad, you know, like an Israeli guy who could just crush my neck. You know, it just. He was just scary. He had a scary, imposing presence.

Julian

She picked up on that in the late 80s, early 90s.

Douglas Rushkoff

There's guys that just. There's certain guys, they got a look in their eye. They do. And you're just like, oh,

Julian

stay away, stay away. Good for you. Yeah, it's funny because.

Douglas Rushkoff

But everyone has it.

Julian

What do you mean?

Douglas Rushkoff

I think everyone has. Everyone would look at those same people and go, oh, I think we all have the. That I think.

Julian

But here's the thing. I think enough people didn't or subconsciously look the other way with a guy like that.

Douglas Rushkoff

He's got something else. I want. Want power. He's got some power. Yeah. God, it's so.

Julian

Oh, it's dark. But it's also fascinating to just, like, consider.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, I got to pee again.

Julian

Okay, we'll be right back. All right, we're back on air. We were just talking off. Off air on this. You said you got into 12 steps, but you're not an alcoholic, right?

Douglas Rushkoff

12 steps. Well, we're something else. Anonymous, right?

Julian

Okay.

Douglas Rushkoff

Call it capitalist anonymous or ego anonymous, or are. We as a species, we as a civilization are addicted to something, right? Some sort of disconnection from nature, accumulation of money, saving stuff, security. We're addicted to this abstracted way of dealing with the world. And. And when you look at something like 12 steps, it's just the steps that are involved. It's like a Quaker meeting, right? They just get together and fellowship and share where they're at. The first thing you do is you accept a higher power. Doesn't have to be God, but the kind of stuff we're talking about before that, there's something else going on here. You make amends with other people. You know, it's like the things. Things that sort of. It feels like we could almost take western civilization through 12 steps and we'd get to a better. We get to a better place. And I just like the way it's organized. It's that anarcho syndicalist thing we were talking about. There's all these individual groups. They're all. All their little meetings run themselves, but they're also part of this big network doing sort of the same thing. You can go anywhere in the world and find a 12 step meeting and go and do your thing there, right? So I Just like it as a, A lot of things about that model I really like. That's why it's funny. Like at the beginning of Fight Club, remember how they meet? They're all going to different self help meetings because they're looking for that loss

Julian

and a common connection. Of course that's interesting. No, because it also goes back to what you were first writing about when, when you were getting into the tech scene and like thinking about what the world was going to be. You were thinking about a world where humanity could integrate correctly with text, with tech for the good of humanity, rather than tech taking over humanity and making rendering it obsolete.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right.

Julian

Which has been a theme of other parts of our conversation as well today. But like, you know, now that we are 30, 35 years down that role from when you were first. Right down that road from when you were first writing about it. Like, how do we make sure that in a world of where there's people like Sam Altman's and Peter Thiel saying, yeah, you know, we, a few of us may transcend, but humanity itself probably won't survive, it'll be something different. How do we make like, what are the ways that we make sure collectively is even like a world population that like that thought process doesn't win and a tool like AI can be a great use case to us and something that takes us to the next level and allows all of us to enjoy it rather than people to die off. It's a loaded question.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, I mean there's a lot of things. First, I think it's good to be able to distinguish between technologies that bring us together and technologies that pull us apart.

Julian

Okay, what would be two examples in your mind of that?

Douglas Rushkoff

I mean, social media doesn't really bring you together. Right. Social media, when you know now how it's designed, it doesn't. But you could look at something like Reddit and it's interesting and it kind of does. And then you say, well, what is the difference between Reddit and social media? Reddit has moderators in each subreddit. So they're sort of the moderators are there to try to help keep it cohesive and social. That's sort of one thing. Think about, I mean, think as much about. Are you going to bring an app into your ecosystem? I know you worry about your phone. If you're going to put an app there, is it going to fuck up my phone? But is the app going to fucking up you? What are you bringing into your day? What are you and really to think about that and the Other thing I started to advocate is for this was like in 99, I said we should do a tech Shabbat, Tech Sabbath. Tech Sabbath one day a week where you don't use screens.

Julian

I think that's not a bad idea at all.

Douglas Rushkoff

One day a week. It's like the Israelites gave it to themselves. First thing in the desert, we got one day off. You don't have to pray, produce or consume because the idea is, the idea that they did it then was to say a human being is sacred just the way you are, that's enough. You don't need to do anything in order to justify your existence. So to take one day a week where you say, I can just be. I don't have to swipe anything, I don't have to send an email, I don't have to. And to get off the screen too, and then to see other people, what are you going to do? You know, play games, fuck, walk around, pet your dog. I mean, there's all these other things besides the app. 1. So there's that sort of on the one hand and the other for me is I think the path to the kind of empowerment you're talking about is local. You know, it's like the simple stuff. I used to do this talk called borrow a drill. Borrow a drill. Borrow a drill. Yeah, it was based on this story happened to me when my daughter, granted, graduated high school and we had the picture of her and I had to stick it on the wall and I got these plaster walls so I can't just put a nail in there. So I need to get a drill. So I'm. First thing I'm thinking I'm going to do like any American. I'm going to go to Home Depot, get a minimum viable product rechargeable drill, charge it up, drill a hole, stick it in the garage and maybe never take it out again. Or if I do, it'll be a year from now, it's not going to charge and I'll throw it away. So I sent one kid into the mines to get the rare earth metals to make the rechargeable lithium lithium battery for this thing and the carbon footprint. Use the thing once and throw it out and some other kid is going to pick at it on a pile of toxic waste in Brazil to get the renewable part to sell it to Apple so they can say they make great computers. Or I can walk down the street and knock on my neighbor Bob's door. Bob's always routing doors and things in his driveway and he's Got and Bob, can I borrow your dream drill? You know, and why am I so reluctant to go to Bob and say, bob, can I borrow your drill? And it's because I'm afraid if I go to knock on Bob door, he's going to say, not only can you borrow my drill, but actually I'm going to come over and drill the hole for you. Because you don't know how to do an anchor. You don't know how to do a stud. You're a fucking nerd. He's going to drill the hole, put in the anchor, the butterfly thing, whatever it is I need, and get it in there and put up. And put up the picture, you know, with a drill that plugs in the wall like God intended, and go home. Then that weekend, I'm gonna have the barbecue party for my daughter, the graduation party. And Smoke's gonna go over to Bob's house. You can say, Doug's having fucking sirloin steaks over there at his house. Graduation party for his daughter. I hung the fucking picture. And you didn't even invite me, right? So I'll invite Bob, right? Now I invite Bob. And now, you know Helene over on the other side of the buck. What? Since when is Doug friends with Bob? He invites Bob, so now I gotta invite Helene. And if I invite Helene and Bob, I'm gonna have to invite everyone on the block to the graduation party. So my whole block is going to be there at a graduation party. And that's the bad thing. That's the bad thing. That's the good thing.

Julian

But I flipped it.

Douglas Rushkoff

We flipped it. We flipped it. Oh, my God, we flipped it. And then when everyone's there at the barbecue party, we're going to say, oh, why did this happen? Oh, because I borrowed a drill from Bob so I wouldn't have to buy one myself. Because I don't really need a drum. I use it once every two years. Then someone just say, well, you know, I only use my lens lawnmower once a week. How much do you use yours? What if we had two lawnmowers for the whole block, and all of a sudden we're going to start sharing things and be friends? And I gave that talk and told that story. And someone got up at the end, some business guy, and said, well, yeah, but when you're all doing all that, what about the lawnmower company? What about the lawnmower company? How are you going to grow this economy if you start sharing lawnmowers with each other?

Julian

God forbid, Bid. We helped each other Out God. We weren't suspicious of it like even below the final point there of like the guy thinking from an economic standpoint before you even get there. The social dynamics of that. We used to live in a world, you know, pre Internet even, you know, forget pre phones where the block raised the kids. Right. Everyone in some way could parent. There was a trust, there was a social contract and bond. People didn't have the. This extremely suspicious outset at you for everything. And what I feel like technology has done, specifically social media is we had all these apps that were built to connect us but they really divided us mentally because they made us be suspicious of every other thing that someone else could be doing, thinking or even acting on about you. And it also made you personally narcissistic without you realizing it. And I'm not even getting to the points of like posting yourself and stuff like that, but like you're constantly thinking people are paying attention to this. Everyone is focused on me, me right now for out of the crowd wondering about every little thing I'm doing and judging me for it to the point that then it affects you in the real world. So that you could see people or come across people that you know but don't even really know a lot but that you assume that they're making assumptions about you and vice versa. And it creates this almost like I don't mean to make this too meta but like electromagnetic force field between people. And I have watched this get worse and worse and worse over the last especially 10 years and I don't really know how we put that rabbit back in the hat when even if you look at like kids coming up right now like you know, in high school who are getting into dating or something like that, they're growing up in a world where they have to make assumptions about oh my God, what is that group text going to say about me? And what is, what is his group. The girl's like what is his group text going to say about me to where you can't just like feel each other out. You know what I mean? Like it's, it is, it is totally. It's like anti evolutionary.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. I mean there was always peers involved I guess. You know, you meet someone and you're. How does your, how does your gang feel about.

Julian

Sure. But it wasn't viral ability.

Douglas Rushkoff

It wasn't exactly. And it was, it was in some ways there were positive aspects even to different generations. He's no good for you, you know. Yeah, yeah, there was a little of that. I know it's. It's hard. And the thing is, it's not just tech. This is older. I mean, I did research back when I wrote this book called Life Inc. And I was looking at the sort of the corporatization of America and how people were turning into corporations and corporations were turning into people.

Julian

Oh, wow.

Douglas Rushkoff

It was really fun and dark, but fun. And I found out, you know, like, have you ever heard of Levittown? It's this giant, the first giant suburb developed in Long Island. Levittown.

Julian

No. I don't know.

Douglas Rushkoff

It's one of the first ones. And it was built by these guys, the Levitt brothers. And you can see there these letters that the Levitt brothers were writing to Franklin Delano Roosevelt about. They're going to build this suburb and it's going to be a way to prevent a rebellion by the returning World War II to veterans. We're going to have all these houses. They're all going to be zoned just a little far apart. Men are going to have to work on the lawn. They're not going to have any gathering places, no social gathering places. They're going to all have a mortgage. So it was calculated. You have a mortgage that forces you to keep your job and always you're a little bit in debt.

Julian

GI Bill.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, the GI Bill. You're going to have a yard that you're going to have to take care of. So you're going to be busy on the weekend. The woman is going to be in the kitchen in the back and the kids are going to play there. And it was designed to promote social alienation so that we wouldn't gather and. Oh, wow. And you know, and I get it, men are dangerous and we might have labor movements and, you know, whatever, but they thought this would be. They thought it would be benevolent. Everyone gets a house and a wife and their kids. Yeah, yeah.

Julian

Road to hell.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. Paved with those wonderfully good intentions.

Julian

You know, there was a movie Brando did in the early 50s called the Men. You ever see this? Where we can pull it up? Thief. But he plays a wounded disabled veteran of World War II. And you know, the movies obviously covers a lot of that and dealing with that, but it shows a lot of amazing imagery of exactly what you're talking about. This almost like ant farm system that's set up. White picket fence, house. White picket fence, house. They all look the same. It's open, no trees, just grass. And each unit lives here. And you just live your life. You save up for a 401k. That's the American dream. And you die. You know, it's like they, they systematically. Yeah, there you go. Created that plan. And listen, there were some good aspects to like there was more nuclear families back then. There was, you know, you didn't have technology separating each other as much, but

Douglas Rushkoff

you only had room for the nuclear family in there. There wasn't room for grandma in there.

Julian

So took away the tribe.

Douglas Rushkoff

It did. Because the tribe's going to share stuff. If you have all these different families, you're going to have more consumers. Everyone's going to need their own everything. And at the time, again, at the time it didn't seem like a bad thing because the economy could grow forever, the factories would grow forever. Until around 1969 or 70 when the club of Rome came out and said, you know, everyone having to buy one of everything forever may not work. There may be social limits to growth, there may be physical limits to growth and economic limits to growth. That maybe everyone having an individually air conditioned home is going to backfire on us in some way. We're going to make the world hotter than it's going to require more air conditioning.

Julian

Well here, here's the other thing there. This was a creation, was, was a unnatural creation in a way of a post World War II Middle Class which began, okay, because there was a burgeoning middle class that built the boom years of this country, no pun intended there. Then you get the official going off the gold standard in 71, 72 that had already started really with FDR. And you could go back to 1913 with the Fed and you know, Pinker in Enlightenment Now. I know Picker gets a lot of bad press righteously so these days. Smart, smart guy. You ever read the book Enlightenment now in 2018? So you know, it's a positive book in the sense that he's showing, listen, things don't always work on a straight chart up, but over time it's provable by every statistic from sustenance to all the basic things that humanity is in the, the best part of history right now overall on a rolling 10 year basis or whatever it was at all times. That said, there was one alarming chart and he pointed it out as alarming in that book which showed specifically since the beginning of the 1980s, the wealth gap and the destruction as you can call it, of the middle class. And it also then correlates with a more technological society where it used to be winner take all would be, you know, know. Yeah, like a John D. Rockefeller could control oil and that would certainly be a lot. But they Break them up with trust bus. And like, you know, someone who was wealthy, wasn't a billionaire, they were worth 10 million or something like that. But as technology came out and global scale came out, someone could be worth 10 billion, 20 billion, 100 billion, a trillion, eventually. And they become a country like a powerful. Elon Musk is a powerful country. As a man, we've never seen that at scale in society in the highest parts. And so when I look at that and I see this going away and I see that, what is it, 54% of Americans don't have $500 in their savings account. Eventually, if a trend like this continues to bring it back to, like, that end times type scenario, If a trend like this continues and people can't eat while other people are trillionaires, one event that could happen, and I'm not rooting for this, I'm throwing this out as an analytical possibility. So people get in the streets. If inflation gets to 40, 50, and they can't feed their families or they don't have a job and AI is taken over. And now you have real class revolution warfare, like French Revolution style.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right.

Julian

And I think that people, like. I hope that doesn't happen.

Douglas Rushkoff

That could be the intent.

Julian

But that could, like the fact that people think that can't happen. Oh, it can't happen here, brother. It could. Do you ever think about that as the possibility that that's what brings down the house of cards?

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh, yeah. Bloody revolution. Bloody revolution. And it's then. Then the question is, will Elon Musk have his droid armies in time?

Julian

His droid armies?

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, that's what. When someone asked him, why do you need a trillion dollars? And it's when he said, I've got to have enough money to control the droid armies. God, that's.

Julian

I can't even.

Douglas Rushkoff

I'm glad he didn't say it against us. Yeah. Yeah.

Julian

But still, like the idea. I can't even think like that.

Douglas Rushkoff

I mean, I don't have that money. Could go somewhere else. I mean, there have been. There have been peaceful revolutions, too, where, like in Czechoslovakia. And that was peaceful. Yeah. Well, they had. They had candles and held hands and stuff until the guy left.

Julian

They did.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. Not Yugoslavia. That was bad.

Julian

Okay.

Douglas Rushkoff

That was a civil war.

Julian

I have my. I have my Slavias mixed up.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

It's gonna say. I feel like there are a few.

Douglas Rushkoff

Check. It was called the. You could look it up. It was. Had some great name.

Julian

Czechoslovakian Candle Revolution.

Douglas Rushkoff

They just stood outside. Basically. Everyone went into the streets and they just stood there with candle.

Julian

Good for them.

Douglas Rushkoff

So it was peaceful, you know. Yeah, you do general strike. There's ways to do. Do it.

Julian

All right, so the candle demonstration or candle manifestation on March 25, 1988 was the first mass protest against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia since 1969. Around 5,000 peaceful believers gathered in Bratislavas have. I'm not going to be able to say that. Right. They got square to demand religion, civil rights and were brutal. This is a point though. They were brutally suppressed by police.

Douglas Rushkoff

So.

Julian

So, all right. The protest. Thousands of unarmed citizens gather quietly with only lit candles and a conscience. The reaction State security violently dispersed a non violent crowd using water cannons and batons, detaining dozens and injuring many. Injuring many. And so like then it turns into like they had to do real revolution after. That's my point.

Douglas Rushkoff

Like they didn't though.

Julian

They didn't.

Douglas Rushkoff

They gathered quietly. They kept.

Julian

They still did. All right, let's go down.

Douglas Rushkoff

They got there. They got The Velvet Revolution. 1989.

Julian

The Velvet Revolution. Widespread democratization in Czechoslovakia is formally known as the Velvet Revolution which took place a year and a half after the candle demonstration. Another. Okay. Another peaceful student demonstration in Prague was severely beaten by riot police, sparking massive nationwide outrage created movement. Millions of Czechs and Slovaks joined daily strikes and peaceful protests, heavily utilizing candles and chants. The result was the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia surrendered its monopoly on power in just over. Wow. Okay. Wow. By December, dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel was elected as the new president. So it's possible. That's. That's good. That's cool. It's like we, well, I mean we live in a country that had a violent revolution that worked and like when you see like afterwards like it worked and they made something pretty amazing in the constitution. But when you look at most violent revolutions to happen around the world. World. It doesn't work.

Douglas Rushkoff

It doesn't. You just. You, you. When you're a violent revolution, are you often just recreate the oppression?

Julian

Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff

You become your attacker.

Julian

What do you make of. I mean we've been talking about some of these billionaires and stuff all day. But like you've been in these circles where people talk about, you know, the idea of like transhumanism and ascending to some other type of, I don't know, race of species or whatever ever. Number one. I guess. Let's just start with what do you make of all that? And do you think any of that is legitimate at all? Or it's just like a dark.

Douglas Rushkoff

We're all transhuman already, you know.

Julian

What do you mean?

Douglas Rushkoff

We got, we use glasses, you got stitches on your arm.

Julian

I mean, how does that make me transhuman? I'm still human.

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, you're still human, but I mean transhuman is just that. You've got, got technology embedded in who you are. We've taken antibiotics, we've, you know, we've used technology to be here.

Julian

Line on that though. That stops you from being human.

Douglas Rushkoff

It depends. I mean, it depends where is the line on it? You know, if you lost your arms and replaced them with, you know, bionics, you're still human. You know, your heart, then your liver, then, you know, where, where's does it, where would the line be? The thing is, it's like I feel like it's one thing, it's one thing to repair yourself with whatever is around, right? And it's another to seek to kind of leave your humanity behind, to see the human as in need of, of upgrading.

Julian

Upgrading

Douglas Rushkoff

again. It goes back to faith, but I think there's some built in challenges to our existence that are part of it. Like breathing. We breathe and I think breathing is really fundamental not just to our respiration, but to kind of who we are and how we are. So if the air starts getting really bad bad, and then the tech bros or whatever come up with, oh, we've got this new thing. You won't have to breathe anymore. It's a new blood thing that'll somehow pre oxygenate your blood. I think letting breathing go may, you may lose other things with it. You know, when we talk about genes and all, the, the, a lot of the, the genomics bros talk about junk DNA. Oh, that's junk DNA. Leave that behind. It's like none of my DNA is junk. That's, it's, it's the past. It might be stuff. You don't know what it's there for, but that's. It's there. It's resonating, it's, it's the library. It's. If we were chameleons or monkeys or whatever I want to, I'm keeping that history there. It's not that heavy, right? Not that burden. So it's like the risk is where we start oversimplifying or start optimizing for very particular values of the moment. Rather than a little bit of accepting what this is like, you could say, ugh, we're living in a moment where we have all these feelings about other people and it's making us really hard to kill them. And Eat them, you know, so what if, you know, just get rid of those feelings? Let's, let's engineer that out.

Julian

Let's engineer that out. Engineer out empathy.

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, in a certain situation, I could see why you wouldn't want that anymore. Yeah. So it's like there's a balance. And where do you find the balance is in your spidey. Yeah, but hold on, I'm gonna splint my arm or replace my finger, you know.

Julian

But getting rid of that, hold on. Getting rid of that takes us back evolutionarily, in my opinion. Like, if you got rid of empathy as a gene, what makes you different from a T. Rex dinosaur? At that point? You just eat things. Yeah, you don't care. You don't feel, you inflict pain. You don't view it as inflicting pain. It's survival. Right.

Douglas Rushkoff

And that could be the birth of the true superhero. Turn off that empathy. Well, you get a super soldier that way anyway.

Julian

Yeah, well, that gets scary. Some of these guys though, whether it be the Peter Thiels or the whatever who are going to ascend and all that, you know, what do they view as a breakaway civilization if it's not multi planetary? Like what does it look like?

Douglas Rushkoff

I don't know, Uploading to the machines like the Matrix. Yeah, but in a good way, I guess. In a good way where they, they, you don't have to die. They don't want to die. You know, that's, that's what it really comes down to.

Julian

But other people need to die. For them to not die and for it to be worth. Because they need to have the resources to live and be able to subsist forever.

Douglas Rushkoff

I would say they think of it more as a whatever.

Julian

A what?

Douglas Rushkoff

It's not other people. If other people have to die than they do. But whatever. Yeah. All things being equal. No, they don't have to die. They can live as long as I get to get up to the next place. But the more of them that are around, the more people around that could unplug the thing that I'm living on.

Julian

Did any of these guys believe in God?

Douglas Rushkoff

I don't think so. Yeah.

Julian

So why does Peter T. Go around and lecture people about the Antichrist, Right?

Douglas Rushkoff

He might, he might. But he's got a interesting take on God.

Julian

What's his take on God?

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh, it's sort of that. Certainly God's not. It's not the God of Jesus that blesses the meek, you know, and it's the God of the Ubermensch. Yeah, it's the. As if somehow Christ likeness is an achievement,

Julian

you know, rather than a previous example or.

Douglas Rushkoff

I would think that becoming Christlike would involve. Involve more of a surrender to this,

Julian

you know, surrender though, right?

Douglas Rushkoff

They don't. They don't. They win.

Julian

Yeah. What is this? Steve? We got a quote from Emil Sioren.

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh, yeah. I had this up earlier from when you guys were talking.

Julian

Ambition is a drug that turns its addicts into potential mad men.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. You were talking about like their.

Julian

Something we're all addicted to. It's.

Douglas Rushkoff

I think it's that.

Julian

That could be how.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

God, the God of ambition. I'm pure spec, obviously, but yeah,

Douglas Rushkoff

ambition, more, you know, more. It's, it's. It is. It's almost an addiction for addiction sake. It's kind of dopamine without the other reward chemicals, goals. How do I keep feeding that? And it's fear of intimacy. If you really can't be. If you're really going to be intimate, you end up in a state of surrender. You know what I mean? You, you, you. The boundary between you and the other person kind of disappears and you're just there, you know? And if you're there, if you don't like that feeling, then the only way you can get something like it is by dominating, like, yes, trolling and be over it. Squish the bug, burn the worm. You know that you create a similar, a similar kind of clutch, but without the, the vulnerability.

Julian

How do you stay, like, so happy and optimistic when you have had access to some of the most powerful people who give you every reason to be otherwise?

Douglas Rushkoff

I'm not optimistic.

Julian

You're not optimistic?

Douglas Rushkoff

I'm happy.

Julian

Happy you're happy. Can you explain that?

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. If you were on the deck of the Titanic and you're a musician and you know it's going down, would you choose to pick up your violin, play music for the people as they go down? And would you be in a state of bliss, having realized your life's purpose? You are celebrating life. You are.

Julian

You're there or you're the soundtrack to the end.

Douglas Rushkoff

At least you're playing music on the deck of the Titanic as it goes down. You know, if you're the people, and there were. In Auschwitz, there were people who were taken from the barracks and being brought to the gas chamber. Chamber. It's a famous story. I forgot which exactly who it was. And they, as they were being taken, they were forgiving the guards, saying, it's okay, it's going to be okay. We understand that that was their impulse to be that person.

Julian

You are transcend.

Douglas Rushkoff

You are living in infinity at that point. You are living in the compound passion. And I don't, I'm not saying we're doomed. I'm not saying there's, there's a great possibility humanity can survive another century or two.

Julian

That's it. I mean, it's not exactly like positive. Another century or two, I might be alive to see it end.

Douglas Rushkoff

Well, it end. What is it? Right? But no, the humanity could, could some amount of humans could still make, make it, you know, and there's low bar here. Yeah, but that's the thing. Low bar, low bar. It's so much easier to be happy if you have a low bar, right?

Julian

Oh man.

Douglas Rushkoff

It's like, oh man, I got another meal today. I got a meal now.

Julian

That's different though. Hold on, hold on a minute. That's different. To be grateful for the little things and be happy by things that are otherwise expected on the daily and built into just what, you know, I think that's a good way to live. But to have the bar so low for like the hope of the survival of like the human race and how we exist on this crazy planet, what

Douglas Rushkoff

you makes easier to adopt the, let's call it, strategy that I'm talking about.

Julian

And what's that?

Douglas Rushkoff

The small things. Your neighbors. Who are the 20 bodies you're sleeping closest? Who are the people living next to you? Why don't you take joy in helping, in sitting with an old woman who doesn't have company in teaching a kid how to read? And it's, that's where you find the joy, not in amassing a billion dollar empire. That's not where it is. It's not where it's that.

Julian

And that's the thing though, Doug. I don't think that like that quote is great. Thief. Ambition is a drug that turns its addicts into potential mad men. I love that it says potential mad men because there's, it's two ways Western man. You can either have ambition to create something and bring something better to the world, where then you're compensated in a good way for it. And then you put that forth in a good moral way within the world. You don't do evil and you treat people well and I don't know, create jobs and environments, garments. Or you say, give me, give me, give me more, more, more. Let's go, let's go, let's go. I need it. You, I'll take it from you. Those are the two potentials of ambition. And there are a Lot of people out there, and I believe this, who are ambitious and they'll go the right way with that. The problem is when you get really ambitious, people who are sociopathic and will just amass more and more and more, they get such a big piece of the pie that they can put their finger on the scale more than the rest of them.

Douglas Rushkoff

Of us. Yeah. Or for ambition. You could look at the Bolsheviks who started out ambitious for universal justice and ended up putting people in the gulag.

Julian

That's right. See it again and again and again.

Douglas Rushkoff

Again and again. Which is why, pulling it back to the moment. Look at what am I doing right now, and you can really figure out if what you're doing right now, how good or bad is it?

Julian

That's right. What do you think happens when we die, I wonder?

Douglas Rushkoff

You know, I wanted to do a book at one point where I asked like all different, like, religious leaders what happens when we died to figure it out.

Julian

Oh, you should do that.

Douglas Rushkoff

I did a drug recently called bufo, which is like a frog venom. DMT 5 Meo. DMT.

Julian

Bufo.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. And I think. I think that. I think that's what happens when we die.

Julian

Die.

Douglas Rushkoff

I think we have the opportunity to really exhale.

Julian

To exhale.

Douglas Rushkoff

To let go of this, you know, to. To diffuse into the back into the quantum whole. And I think we're more conscious than ever. But it's less. You're not there anymore.

Julian

More conscious than ever.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right. You're part of something that's way more conscious than we are.

Julian

What does that mean?

Douglas Rushkoff

But you lose the boundary of self. You know, you. It's. It's hard to explain. I. I think we do. The closest I could say it is we dissolve back into the whole.

Julian

Like re and does that. And the dust aspect of it. That was Steve saying back here, just that imply that there's some sort of. Then we rise from the ashes and reincarnation.

Douglas Rushkoff

I think that stuff recycles, but it might not be your stuff that recycles as a single unit again, meaning just

Julian

a piece of it.

Douglas Rushkoff

You might dissolve into the. Like if you're a droplet, you go. And you go into the cloud of droplets and then another droplet rains. So some of your droplets in that droplet that rains brains, but it might not be you, your droplet.

Julian

Wow, that's heavy.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah. You go back into butterfly effect kind of thing. Yeah. You mix into the stuff and you dissolve again into the stuff.

Julian

You should do that book asking the religious leaders.

Douglas Rushkoff

Oh, yeah, that would be great.

Julian

Do you Think that we are alone in the universe or do you think there's other intelligent life out there?

Douglas Rushkoff

I don't think we're alone. You know, I don't think we're alone. I think the whole, I, I, I think the whole universe is conscious. You know, I'm kind of more whatever an animist or something. I think the whole thing has an

Julian

awareness meaning it's a body in and of itself.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah, there's some, yeah.

Julian

So we could be cellular membranes.

Douglas Rushkoff

We're doing biological life. Is this one experiment it's running, you

Julian

know, in this, in this simulation of the simulation of the simulation. We could be the white blood cells.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

And just the sum hole of every action that happens on this earth creates whatever that.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

Cellular action.

Douglas Rushkoff

I'm interested. I mean there could be other than carbon based life forms that be. But there's probably. Because there's so much stuff out there, there's probably some other place. But we got to realize is this is special. Almost more special temporally than spatially. We've had a really good 20,000, 40,000 years of temperate, perfect little Earth climate thing. It doesn't last forever. It's, it's.

Julian

Unless we innovate a way to do that maybe. Yeah, I feel like we could, we

Douglas Rushkoff

could, you know, and life was a great innovation to do that. Life is really good at homeostasis. The getting rid of so much life on the planet at once is really bad for trying to keep that balance that Earth has managed. But yeah, there could be, could be ways. We'll see.

Julian

Well, Doug, this has been awesome, man. Dude, we had a good to meet you. It's great to meet you as well. We had a wild, very far ranging, far reaching conversation I'm out to think some more about.

Douglas Rushkoff

But a lot of years are like this though.

Julian

I appreciate that. We do a lot of different topics in here, which I like, but you're a lot of fun to talk to. You've obviously known a lot of people, good and bad in your life, which is interesting to hear about it so openly here. And you know, as a, as an optimist, I'd like to think we figured this thing out and maybe some of the people that are trying to figure it out for us don't get the chance to do that.

Douglas Rushkoff

Right.

Julian

Yeah. All right, we will link your website, your socials, team human and Team human.

Douglas Rushkoff

Yeah.

Julian

And any books down below. So everyone go check that out. And now let's do this again sometime.

Douglas Rushkoff

All right.

Julian

All right, everybody else, you know what it is give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you.