Transcripts For CSPAN2 In 20240703

Television Companies Support cspan2 as a public service. Douglas you describe yourself survival of the richest is a humanist who writes about the impact of Digital Technologies but not a w futurist whats the difference between the two . Futurist is usually someone they come to to tell you what is going to happen in the future. I have been right about that a lot. So the call me futurist but im really a present just im more interested looking at describing accurately what is happening right now thats usually an easier way to know whats going to happen in the future. But i dont usually talk about it. Most of futurist see it more like propagandists fighting for the future they want to see or positions their company and the best place or positions them as a consultant in the most needed place. You cap people interested in the future by scaring them about this is going to happen or that is going to happen. But if you are a present test which is really more what i am. Sociologist looking at what is you end up free to talk about things in ways other people dont so for me when i realized was when aol was buying time warner. Everyone was all excited aol the first big Digital Company going to buy time warner the old Media Company new media it was coming and how great it was the New York Times called me too write the piece on what was happening the oped. I wrote this piece saying as i look at it, as i understand it looks to me like aol is cashing in its chips steve grew this thing is much as he could subscriber rate is probably peeking hes using his inflated stock to buy a real company like time warner that has amusement parks and cable and movie libraries and all of that it probably means we are now at the peak of the. Com bubble. He called and said we cant publish this everybody says this is the greatest thing and it means all the stuff is calming the new age is coming i said im not a futurist and look at what is. What is, it looks to me like at the end of a videogame when you level up or cash outs. And i think he is cashing out of course they didnt publish it but i turned out to be right. Not because im a futurist that is the difference. It is predictive its more predictive bite looking at what is then trying to guess what is out there. So presentist not futurist but it comes to the impact of these emerging Digital Technologies would you describe yourself as an off optimist or a pessimist . Neither. I get an optimist or a pessimist is funny its interesting the construction it optimist or pessimist is always optimistic about how this is going to work out orr pessimistic about how this is going to work out. I would say im frustrated. I am hopeful but frustrated. Im always hopeful human beings are going to find the way out of the nest as they are in. So i am really frustrated we are using technology on people. We are using tech on people instead of giving technology to people with their space and ability to use them. We are surrendering this digital renaissance to the needs of the market when i look at the people running the Biggest Media Companies look at themselves as demigods at covid in society wait a minute to what end what ethics and anthropology classes did you take in college if any i kind of look at it that way. Whent next two hours of talk about his book vegas back to siberia or your expectations at the time of this emerging and that i saw the internet the emerging internet the emerging Computer Networks as part of a larger cultural phenomenon. We had just been through we had cb radio even which was kind of the First Citizens Media Movement at least in my lifetime. Hammett radio i guess the cb radio had happened, the fax machine, the beginning of interactivity. Our television screams had always bees completely passive monitors are using joysticks to move things around. We are playing a pong. We had a fax machines we can start to send each other messages. People were Walking Around with phones rather than having to be home to get a call. There new physics and chaos math and new understandings of how the world work for theres electronic music and kids throwing braves with no one on the state justice entertainment out in the middle of a field. There is a psychedelic people were looking at reengineering their own cognitive apparatus hopefully by themselves. It seemed to me all of these things on the internet were part of a new culture. A west coast psychedelic cyberpunk biy whole earth kind of culture that might shake things up. And i was an east coast educated theater director. I loved the theater i was an artsy person but at the time i was really fed up with how elitist and predictable a place or thing edit beginning, middle and an end i felt really stifled and this internet thing was surprising. For people who Like Computers were like little geek people with pocket protectors and the kids who turn in the hallways little right angles. There is a certain type. By the late 80s i was fine at my weirdest most psychedelic friends from college or going to Silicon Valley to work for apple and sun, and intel. It was confusing. Why were the weird people working with computers . I went out there and started covering it as a journalist and i saw this very different computer story. Very Different Technology story which is that these folks would be working at intel or nordstrom during the day and going home to oakland draping the bugs off cactus tripping at night and having images that are being shown at grateful dead shows the next weekend. Something was happening that was different. The first book i wrote w about siberia life in the trenches of hyperspace was looking at all is different threads of culture as part of the same new cultural assertion we could redesign reality. And all of these Different Things weathers fantasy roleplaying games i know people were scared of the saints in us butre it really wasnt. Dungeons dragons were kids instead of watching a movie would create their own story together. It was a sort of choose your own adventure hypertext reality that no one was used to get. The idea you could read a story text on the computer click on a onthe word and choose where that takes you you could open a drawer and look inside and go in your own pathway. That was very new. And too many of us it seems to be an omen or a precursor to the idea that we were going to move into a much more deliberate and Interesting Society for it one t was much less passive and much more of a choose your own adventure and spirituality and politics thing, government and education and all forms of human activity. How do we get from that culture these cyber punk the cyk psychedelic culture that moment you described to survival of the riches the s escaped fantasies f tech billionaires . Is a few ways to look at it. The last couple of pages of my book siberia, interestingly enough i know these are both people. Siberia, my book was canceled by phantom Doubleday Dell in 1992 because they thought the internet was going to be over by 1993 when the book was supposed to come out. I have a letter from the editor saying we think its a passing fad and you are too late on it. Is that letters length summer question. Of god in a drawer with all the other rejections of books. So it is funny. And by the time i was putting it together it was three or four years in the making rather than one or two. By the time i spend the finishing touches on the last draft for harper who ended up publishing it, wired magazine had just launched. Wired magazine came along and told a very different story about what was happening on the internet. What wired was saying this is a whole big thing. But what it actually is is good for business. The internet will create more surface area on the market. Thanks to the internet the Nasdaq Stock Exchange will grow exponentially uninterrupted for ever. I understand what they were saying. They look at Digital Technology as the ultimate derivative. The weight finance work is moving ones level above was actually happening for there is atu transaction between you peoe you can buy stock in that you au are one level removed. This derivative of derivative. Hookah colonialism on whats so much territory on the planet get instant real estate an infinite number of websites so markets can again expand onto new surface, new territory, virtual territory. It is interesting what is happening but what is happening is actually a financial phenomenon. A businesss phenomenon. Once a Business People came in and this is my fear at the end of the book there is a window of opportunity for us to seize this cultural phenomenon as what it is. As a new experiment on the collective imagination on new ideas and unfolding of human culture. There are folks who want to enclose this as a business phenomenon and turn it into Something Else. To make it more about profit and exponential growth. Im not quite sure what that will do to the culture. It turns out what it did is it killed the culture. If you look at the early internet was about exploring the Infinite Possibilities of the connected culture. What does the connective do . What can we give them we are connected by machines we cant do boomer totally alone . What happensre we share the processing cycles and giant collective projects . We flipped out. Once youre betting on the internet as a stock you are not looking for how to increase possibility. You are looking for how you increase probability lets think of it want to bet on something what you want . The highest probability your pet will come true you bet on aol. But on the web whatever you bet arm you want that to have the highest probability of working. Instead of using technology to increase creativehn possibilitye start using technology on people to increase their probability. You could see a 1993, number four, 95. What we started to use on the web were words like stickiness for the object of then game was to create a website that was sticky many people get your website but they couldnt leave they had an ad for one of the companys help make your website sticky stuck on a piece of flypaper i think they were flies on a fly strip as if thats the happy user because they are stuck on what youre doing. We used a metric called eyeball hours. That eyeball hours with a number of hours a human eyeball would spend looking at your monitor. They announce reliving it whats called the attention economy. People who werent paying attention over the enemy. Its interesting after they come up with a term attention economy is and he started to see all of the diagnoses of attention Deficit Disorder and all the prescription for people getting to pay better attention to these websites. I started to write about how wonderfully shortened Attention Span mightwo be a defense mechanism against a world where they are crating sticky websites and using every tool at their disposal. Behavioralng finance, the slot machine algorithm. There is a division called cap tyler g which is how do you capture how to modify Human Behavior online. That for me was the turn especially people in the Technology Industry began to think of their users the way the heroin dealer thanks of the users how do we addict them how to control them . An ask what is the mindset . The mindset is the idea. The easiest way i can describe the mindset is this idea that can earn enough money to insulate yourself by earning money in that way. Or you can develop enough technology to correct for all of the problems you created with the technology that you just made. So the mindset is a Silicon Valley belief more intact and more money they can sell for anything. It is a techno solution us understanding of the world where human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. They tend to be libertarian they understand human relationships as a purely a market phenomenon. They tend to be afraid of women and nature and black people. They tend to want to own everything the object of the game is to see ones own contribution as unique your own ip it is without precedents. Its an urge to neutralize the unknown by the animating it. You hear them talk about self sovereignty and progress and increasing choice and somehow starting over. Its funny theres a place near california a bugs detective pros want to build a new city i knew perfect city theyre going to live in it is renewable uses the best energy has computerized stacks for education, religion, Autonomous Vehicle it is the perfect thing. But it is like going to mars or moving to new zealand or alaska. The latin word as if from scratch they need to begin at the colonizers urge to get to a new territory. Pretend there is no real life are humans there and start over lecompletely. When you talk to these guys whether its zuckerberg or mosque they all share the same clear understandings of humanal beings as the masses one level above market zuckerberg wants to go to the meta verse elon musk wants to go to mars. Peter talks about going from zero to one. Living one level one level of magnitude above everybody else. That is eight mindset it peaks in this new genic idea called effective altruism where they believe it is okay to be an awful person now as long as you earn a lot of money and give some of the money back it is a weird utilitarianism on digital psychedelic steroids where they believe this is how far the mindset goes it is tech worship. Its hatred of the human of the body of everything earthly they think in the future there will be hundreds of trillions of post human Artificial Intelligences spread throughout the galaxy that will launch these things part biology part digital whatever they are they are these human entities all over the universe. And because theres so many of them there total happiness matters more than the happiness of the 8 billion human maggots that happen to be alive on the mother nest right now. Thats a very dangerous way to look at the lives of the people today matter less then this future of trillions of consciousness. As part of why im not a futurist. You can use math and logic and a certainca kind to say that is te they do matter more therefore lets invest in bitcoin but save ourselves let people die and get ruckus to the next planet. But it is enduring the present i am much more faith in the reality of the present 8 billion people live today who actually matter. We would make very different decisions w of without the peope who were alive today it mattered rather than the robots of the fantasy future. For a lot more in the mindset the book survival of the richest the fantasies of tech billionairesfa its the latest book for 30 years nonfiction and fiction books. We are trying but all of them in depth this month asking to join the conversation to do that the fullness or 2027488200 for those living in the eastern and central time zones 202 7488201. If you are in the mountain or pacific time zone if i just sent us a text 2027488903. If you do please include your name and where you are from. And also on social media booktv on all of our social media platforms. Go ahead start calling and as folks are calling in you talk about the mindset. Team human i dont mean the podcast of the book that the concept . Upat it was a long time ago i ws on a panel with a guy name ray whos a brilliant guy brings with it chief scientist at google. And he was telling the story about how evolution is really a matter of information finding more complex homes. So information like the adam and then the molecule than the one celled organism and then the organism and human culture. As computers become more complex capable of handling more complexity than humans and human culture information will migrate to them they will prove to be our evolutionary successors. Once that happens human beings have to pass the evolutionary torch to the robots to the Artificial Intelligences and except our own inevitable accept our own inevitable replacement and extinction. I think human beings have some qualities that Artificial Intelligence and things raised on binary logic may never have human beings might live in that in between space between the guests and the no. Human being can sustain a paradox over time without the need to resolve it to one sort of answer or another. They can look at a problem as something to sustain something to solve. A human being cant watch a david lynch movie. Not understand what it means still experience that as pleasure. What is that . Human beings are special and we deserve the place in the digital future. He sent you are just saying that because youre human. Like it was an act. I said okay, fine guilty. I am on team human that is when the term came up for me. Guilty as charged i admitted i am a a human to fight for the right for others of my species to have a place on this planet. The more i thought about the idea team human eye goes against the mindset. To call humans a team. The mindset is about the sovereign individual the man emperor, zuckerberg thanks of himself as a caesar thats his goal the single lord over everyone. The idea of team humans argument no, no, no being human is a team sport. Evolution is not the story of the survival of the fittest individual. If you actually read the book we are book tv but read the book. What you will see us page after page is guys marveling at the way species collaborate and cooperate to ensure survival but they did that within the species and as it enters species coordination. Human beings are and are completely or not if human beings are the most proud species it is because we are at the most complex methods of collaborating and cooperating with each other. A lot of these are very subtle. When you are in real life with another human being you see whether their pupils are getting larger or smaller as you speak are they taking and or rejecting you . Is there breathing synchronizing with yours . The micro nod in motion with your head or micro negative you cant see any of this on zoom, or skype, or on a text message. We are trying to conduct a very complex and difficult Human Society h in a world thats not letting us get the social cues that we need for the neurons in our brains to fire for the oxytocin to go through oure. Blood. If you are online and summonses they agree with you but you do not get that biological feedback you cannot help but be suspicious of them. Every time someone agrees with the online what actually happens is the reverse effect in your body. Your body says wait a minute they say they agree with me but i did not get it in my body. It generates distress rather than trust team human is about sink wait aea minute. We have got to reemploy and retrieve these great mechanism for working and being together. Its almost like putting the social back into socialism. I dont care about the ism i care a people knowing theirto neighbors and understanding this whole human project is not about who gets to escape to their bunker but how do we do this together . So i wonder how you think in this emerging Technology Fits into team human . This is zuckerberg from the medic connected 2023 event this week previewing upcoming ai in Artificial Intelligence technology. Here is one of those technology. Ask the industry over coming decades how do we unify these experiences of the physical wery have with a vibrant justice better than anything ago today. Not too far from going to walk into a room and they are going to be as many holograms, digital things for you to interact with as our physical objects. Think about the things that are physically there but dont need to be physical things. The paper, the media, the games, the workstation, any, screen and theyre all through active holograms. Think about going and hanging out with your friends. Soon will be will be at the point you be there physically with some of your friends and others will be there digitally as avatars, holograms they will feel justice at presentt as everyone else. Or you walk through a meeting will sit down at the table you will be there might there be people there physically people there digitally as holograms those sitting around the table with you a bunch of ai who are embodied as holograms for help you get different stuff than two. On that technology preview,. The interesting thing is the word unify the object of the game for him is to unify the real world with the digital world. So digital can continue colonizing the world that we are in. It is that unification that may be the problem. So for me when he describes hanging out with your friends and some of them are virtual. That makes me feel sad compared to his said you canal be in a meeting at some of the people in the meeting are virtual. And that i am like who cares, interesting, right . So for me the technologies are great for increasing our utility value. Which i understand since the Industrial Age people event measured s in terms of the utily value. How much work can be done for how much money do we have to fly this person to this place of the meeting . I get that. But the idea of not getting to meet in real life even if it seems easier on the surface it never actually is. All of this stuff all these things they do not need to be physical things. In order to get to the place where you dont have the physical thing you need to have a lot l more physical things involved. In order to make the ai in the later projecting whatever it machine it is its going to create the virtual avatar in the room youve got to send kids into the mind to get the rare metals to m make mistakes. Huge factories around water to get cobalt out and pollution out and pollution in effective silicon wafers unit energy and solar panels that yes they get their energy from the summit house a solar panel made . Where is it disposed . Was describing was not less a physical matter but more physical matter being used too o then deny the human beings of actual physical presence. The avatar is a great substitute. Grandma and the netherlands the baby is in cleveland. They can see each other, that is beautiful. Or someone is stuck and i hospital bed or as a paraplegic and can have a virtual experience of togetherness and a picnic they would not be able to get too. That is a beautiful but for people who could actually be together buster marked the complexity of human relationship. The complexity of say, just imagine the complexity of the mother nursing a baby. We have a virtual bottle in a virtual mother she could be at work. You are going to be missing something the virtual baby is missing something from that virtually nursing baby is missing something from the mother. I wouldha argue i am missing something if you are not at my house watching the game with me but if your avatar on the couch watching the game. It is not the same food we are denyingch it. We are turning the game into again its a work or the utility value of the game without the presence for the other thing interesting is technology describes you wear your glasses so you will never be in the position of seeing someone on the street and not remembering what their name is. It is uncomfortable you meet someone on the street by had the rayban glasses hey doris who is doris . Extortion is the person. You met 1993. It will tell me all those things i will fake report with this person i did not know. Which is moving into bizarre almost a dishonest relationship with my world. Its wondering what matters . What really matters that i remember that persons name i think it was a sales connective business wee used to have the thesethings like constant contad databases. Someone calls you in their profile comes up you say how is your wife mabel . You know that because it came up on the computer screen when they call you up great its a fake business relationship trying to sell mattresses to macys be okay fake that relationship but in the real world to be burdened with this sense of data as part of our interaction. Then ate world burke who paid for the day that walking down the street and going to pick a restaurant whose paid too be and Mark Zuckerbergs virtual augmented reality world . The restaurant did not pay did not even exist that might be the best pizzeria on the block. 30 minutes is a two hour interview this morning is our indepth the program looking for your calls, looking for your questions for you this morning. This is jim in california it is good morning still in california. Jim are you with us . We will try michael in a Broward County florida. Jim hang online will try to get shoot michael go ahead. We will work on those calls blessed write one more think we have julie on the line in minneapolis, minnesota a lot of calls resort would keep rotating through them if theyre not there. Julie indianapolis goahead. Hi i am here. And i am glad to be here. I have heard him say a number of things they fired me up. You sir are passionate. You are insightful. You have a great many opinions you have a great many questions and a lot of ideas which could be molded and discussed by people who agree with you and people who oppose you into actual policies and means of achieving progress. My question is you write books, you teach, you appear here. How do you actually get people involved in talking to one another . How do we . I share some of those characteristics and some of your thoughts. How do we begin to think at one point you said we had an opportunity to take control of the digital age and instead we receive it to business such as art universities. Do we retract that and say no we want it back we are capable of doing this. Host thanks for the culprits we too thats great. Thats really where i am at asking processing that question. With the construction of how to get people to is potentially hazardous construction in itself. Thats with a tecra process think of us how do we get people to do this . How do we get people to do that . Once we talk about getting people to do something im putting myself in a superior place and we get into almost Television Style influence. You become and influence a peddler print how we influence society how do we change people becauseet i know how people woud be better if their drink this instead of that. I have tried to move away from that as i think about it and rather thinking about it how do i engender an environment in which people feel welcome too. Welcome to socialize and care for each other and nurture each other rather than compete with each other. I broke that down this is probably going to be a next book i broke it down into four ways of changing the environment or changing the register and which we are operating. The first one im calling the naturalize power for all and trying to do is help people recognize how many things in our world are social construction and not conditions of nature. Anything money. These bills this is not money this is paper will used to used torepresent money in our s. I go and see and or somewhere in there asking me about ai and the unemployment problem. Exactly why is unemployment a problem . M . One was employment invented . What was it for . Was it a street employment and work when it they were for themselves or with a force to start doing wage labor and kinds ofg work they used to do. It is challenging these underlying assumptions of how things work which then leads to the second onely which is triggering agency. I am trying to help people feel like theyve got more agency more authority over what they are doing. For me that was a Digital Resolution did that. I realized i could save a file not just as a readonly file that people looked at but as a read write file other people could edit. For the establishes read only television, money, religion. Why isnt it up for discussion . Why it shouldnt be up for discussion . The third one is if are going to do that once you have agency want to change things you need other people. So the third one was to re socialize people. To help people feel less afraid of each other. The great example i like to use this if you need to drill a hole in the wall you dont have a drill in america what most people would do is go to the home depot and used it wants to drill the hole leave it in the garage and then it will probably never work again every charge. You sent a kid into the cave for the renewal youve used it wants to create all this carbon you throw it away its sitting on a toxic waste some others going to beat look at trying to find the recyclable parts inside it. What you could have done is walk down the block knocked on bobss door and say can i borrow your drill . Why dont we do that why are we so scared were going to owe something to bob you going to have a barbecue next week if you have it in bobs easy healing to the drill is going to be expected to be invited over question of baby want bob over theres going to be fined up bob comes over the other neighbors are going to smell it and think why did he invite bob not us . Worst case you have a block wide barbecued party that is the nightmare. We have to look at why that is the last thing i was looking at is cultivating all. What is that party why are we so resistant to it . Why are we resistant to the state of all when youre looking at a canyon and drink up party with a bunch of other people its bigger than yourself. It has a response to your immune system gets better you are generous for days later. The experience seems to be unnatural important part of human health. You dont get it. You get it and commune with other people or nature or the expansiveness of reality. I am looking at those how do we help people less encumbered less locked in to the status quo institutions and more willing to again move into that space between one and zero wert life actually happens. Cook says come back to jim in california is a first person to call and as we open up the phone lines. Think he is there now jim thanks for waiting. Thank you very much for taking my call. My question is totally different from what youve been going on. I see in your resume you went to hollywood. You were in importance, a director on a major movie. Which was a huge flop. Apparently it turned you off on movies and hollywood. I would like your comments on that if you could in your thoughts on movies in the past movies and influence you y when youre younger . Ill be very interested im a movie buff. Plexus beautiful. The real story this is book tv you can talk for real. I was a theater director obstructing place, directed plays in Junior High School i directed plays in High School Theater and went to princeton that english and theater while i was there is going to drive across country strong across country with my best friend fell asleep at the wheel and we hit a tree he was impaled and died next to me. I havent actually told the story publicly, it is weird. Book tv welcome. He died next to me and all of the sudden it disappears it is the thing you had to be there and i decided im going to the film. Was the existential mover. So then i took film the sweet smell of success men and the white suit. From the wolverine movie and forward versus rory a great director we Work Together there a lot. I was making film i like jim dharmesh. I liked bobs cabaret and lenny. Liked my dinner with andre. They were theater films Anthony Gregory did. I liked the theatrical film and then i got the apprenticing gig im going toen be his apprentice on this a big movie they are spending at the time is like 50 million on a movie that was not sought out. As the very thin satire i did then they are part of it but when they went to l. A. To did do thestudio part i dropped outd returned to theater at that point and then got tired ofur theater i was supposed to do a production the cheapest seat was going be 40 bucks San Francisco minexi crew not going to charge 40 for the cheapest seat of threepenny opera which then i turned to the internet thinking the internet was going t to be e media. S i want to get away from the commercial theater pro going to go to theo internet which is going to be the countercultural antibusiness approach human it was for a moment. Its going to be that alternative. In terms of the movies out they are the best i may be untypical but kubrick and lynch do things in movies theres movies beyond what people realize is quite happening. He makes movies that are all about inviting multiple interpretations. The movie has a plot but it doesnt really have that plot you could almost project anything onto that plot. Not anything but many Different Things onto that plot as you want too. Theres much about yourself as the movie i like what m he does. Like the hallways. That he is really playing with illusion and reality. I liked david lynch work. Because again it is about opening questions. I find i am annoyed i get annoyed with the more jj abrams they do similar things but always with an answer. You figure it out. To be the beauty of film when it is working it opens outward. The answer is not the answer. Tell them i said this it has a mythic level of experiential value. What it means you could be different every time you go through. Thank you for sharing the story about your friend and the accident. Ho that 20 bucks i just wonder why you think you havent shared that story publicly before . I dont know. You shared a story about the death of your friend i k dont know it feels a little bit like its a begging for sympathy. It is like a cheap shot. You are talking about that sad thing. And maybe also because it takes a lot of years to move through trauma. Back for my theater days have this thing called sense memory. Sense memory is if you have a seat you have to cry or be upset or whatever it is in a play. What you do you recall you have a similar emotion and think about that in order to activate that in the scene. Its a rule it has to be from at least six years ago. Otherwise you have not processed the trauma or whatever in such a way its actually useful. It will end up being non useful. I think maybe now whatever this is 30 years later im distant enough from it that when it cama up it did not have the texture that made it feel inappropriate to bring to bear. And also because of the audience. Some of the audience who ever is they are. Im thinking of book tv is largely a lot of these people are book people. I do not get to talk to book people that much. Another author we go through life differently than other people. Understand how to gauge with an idea or an emotion over an extended period of time. Whatever book you are reading. It is a different thing filled remotecontrol media. I felt it was safer and more appropriate to bring up the processing of trauma for people whoo write. For people who writete and peope who read. Later chat with more there plenty of them waiting to chat with you getting california oscar you are on. Hi. Hi. The question i want to ask. Thank you for your time by the way. You are great. How can we get this ticket aspect do you have way of really expressing a big picture of things going on . For example capitalism. It has done a lot of great things a lot of people use it as a self defining term practically. Get put us on the map. How can we use it . I believe it capitalism is a great it does a lot of good things. With it but they dont see i have often lived at capitalism unchecked starts going bad and starts doing damage, like the big corporation. Host lets pick up on that because that is a theme of several of his books. Douglas the first back i wrote on capitalism, how to take it back. They got me on the colbert show. Something in itself. I was really looking at where did capitalism come from. Where did corporations come from and currency come from and i traced it backk to middle ages. There was a growth of economy right after the crusade. They brought it back and people were trading and we had a new middle class and women were taller than they were in the 1980s in england. It was a successful thing. So they came up with two great ideas, central currency that said youre not allowed to have a transaction unless you borrow money from the central treasury at interest. Because theres interest into the economy, the economy has the grow just to stay the same. It worked fine for colonialism, as long as you keep growing faster and faster that works. The second one that i alluded to earlier is the charter. You have to have charter from the king. You have to have a monopoly charter to make shoes, had to be an employee for the shoe company. Thats come down to us today as corporate capitalism that we dont even question. Even a nice president like biden says we have to have 3 gdp every year. Why does that have to do with beating people, nothing. Its in some ways its the opposite. Its about Balance Sheets and what it does is it favors aabstract instruments, its why derivatives. The new york Stock Exchange was purchased by derivatives exchange. The new york Stock Exchange which is abstraction ofto the rl market which you could argue is itself an abstraction of the exchange of actual human need was consumed by its own abstraction. This is the way it goes and thats why we understood in this world where tech billionaires who are lacking at whats the next level of abstraction. What you can think of the ai crazy, digital craze how do i go abstract on reality itself and being one of the robots, being one of the drivertives, being one of those things because who wants to be a little human . Hes the guy. Ity make less money making and selling a washing machine than i do lending you the money to buy ay washing machine. The actual making of stuff and turn ge into a Financial Services company because the abstraction makes more money than the actual work. It worked really well in 2008 when they had no productive assets. Thats the tendency of capitalism which is why it works great to a point. It works great for colonial empires if youre not looking at who are the people they are enslaving and what land they are dispossessing and all that. It still can work and theres more balanced forms of capitalism that we could use but when i tell the story about the drill to peopleab and i say, lo, what if everybody on the block, why are we borrowing drills and instead every house having lawn mower and we share it because you only need it 2 or 3 hours a week and much less production and spending and you dont have to earn as much money and all that, somebody gets up at the end, well, yeah, what about the lawn mower company, what about the people who have stock shares ine Retirement Plan for the lawn mower company, what are you going to do about them . Thats the backwardness of starting capitalism of the underlying premise of our society rather than thinking of the economy as something that is supposed to serve us o rather tn us supposed to serve to serve the economy. We are about an hour into our indepth interview with Douglas Rushkoff. This is from tim who said do we exist within assimilation and what tests could we device to prove or disprove it . If we dont live in digital simulation by, you know, created by martian graduate student of the future, lets say we live in a jewish or christian or buddhist reality, what would they say we are, right . What would they say . They would say this is the illusion, theres Something Else going on here. So one way or another we live in assimilation because we dont even see whats going on. Look back at your ego, we have sensory organs that are trying to create a picture of what is going on here but thats all we get anyway, right, we are we are just sensory organs trying to process based on what we see. So i dont think it really finally the question doesnt matter but, no, i dont believe we are in, you know, like in west world, one of, you know, a ikmillion simulations that are being run by someone to figure out, you know, how the society works. If we are it rating i would say its much closer to comic iteration of of civilizations over time than it would be running running simulations on a sensory experience a minute ago you were talking about the importance of the experience of awe, i want to go to your 1999 book coercion and talk about the difference between experience of awe and spectacle and how you define spectacle . Yeah, spectacle is like a rally, trump rally or these days an nfl Football Game where the energy of a crowd and many of the the features of all are leveraged for a purpose. There was some architect dude that made machine, with stain glass and the arches to generate an experience of awe you go to a rave and they put the light and musicc and 120 beats a second ad beautiful young people around dancing half dressed and all like the scene in the matrix, rave that they have. Theres inri between but for me spectacle is really less about inviting true participation and more about stoking the rage of a crowd against a unified enemy. So in the jets game, well, the dolphins. Lets get the dolphins and then you can use that to sell airline tickets, whatever you want, you take that that war like rage enthusiasm or against a potential racial group or whatever it might be or or against democrats or whoever. So spectacle is more a designed for me any way a more designed experience in order to focus the energy of the crowd onto a named enemy in most cases whereas as awe is more about kind of breaking people out of their their trap, the trap of the allusion of individuality and letting them experience themselves as part of something much, much larger, you know, its just a matter dont name that large thing now youre in the army of this or that. Thats why enhe was playing, i was calling team human. It seems open enough that any person, youre a team human. But a its not team human like against team squirrel. Its team human as this is our this is the way we experience our perspective on nature and peeverything else. So from coercion, think of having 3 main acts, unify the fycrowd, stoke their fashion and third speak as god or nature. Help me understand the third part a little bit more. When you speak as god or nature, youou can think of, you know, hitler speaking about himself as the father and all of the children and that you are, i mean, its interesting you look at the the look at the twitter memes that people like elon musk put up of themselves with them as, you know, as gods. Think of when when even zuckerberg and musk challenging each other to a mixed martial arts fight and if they are kind of, you know, demagogues that they inhabit, Silicon Valley, Mount Olympus and spectacle battle as we see with each other. Speaking of god or nature is really just it depends. Theres a lot of book on propaganda from the 50s, i guess, is really good its really good on this but its having people identify you as as the mother, as the father, as connected to god, as your your both universal and completely personal where the person feels you are speaking just to them and theres apparently like a taylor swift has the ability to do that, right, but shes pretty benevolent about it and shes doing with the message of empowerment and identification and all but someone weve heard her ability could be doing politically and differently which is why again. I always say we have to be careful about how do we get people to blank because then we are the same as those who are lets create a big rally where we get people to believe in our god, where we get people to vote for our party, where we get people to do this. Theres the vulnerable moment that happens inor the spectacle where people are like, its the same moment thats called growing transfer when someone walks into the original Shopping Mall and you go and they show it on tape, you can watch the videos of it. The person is kind of jaw opens an their eyes glaze over and its called the growing effect. The moment that you can drop in whatever you want, whatever brand, what party, whatever political ideology, whatever enemy. Thats where you just see it. When they do that, they develop back in and then they act as if and now we are meeting our destiny together, you know, now we are with the blood and the soil and the forest and the god and theres that rhetoric comes a certain assertion that this is the natural way,er that this is more natural, that we are returning to some kind of, you know, barbarian masculine original authentic back to what we really are. That it is a more natural, open from my gut state of being but its not, its completely manipulated. The book from 1999 coercion, why we listen to what they say, bob kerry on the front cover. Remind folks who he was and why he ended up on the cover of your book. Bobob kerry, hes a senator from nebraska, right, who he actually lost his foot in the vietnam war and he was kind of a president ial candidate and then had kind of a scandal about a particular episode during the war which is still unclear exactly what happened. It was not good enough to to, youat know, cost him his bid the but he was always nice to me and an artist and interesting and he was the boyfriend of my neighbor when i lived in the west village back when you could live in the west village as a single barely working writer, you could get an apartment in the west village and she lived across the hall from her and her boyfriend and i got to hang out with him a little bit and asked to do a blur of the book and he did. The whole blurb and accepted and i thought it was foolish, read this or else which is like perfect for like the book is called coercion. Clear warning to americans that are unaware of the power of words to intentionally mislead the reader, read this book and nobody gets hurt. Yeah. Nobody gets hurt. At least they sent it back and thank god he added to it so they would accept him on there, but iyeah, it was a real gift. She then became president of the new school in new york for a while and helped them build up this big building and absorb persons and a bunch oforb persons and a bunch of things. He was a controversial but very useful figure in bringing that place to its current current standing. Caller still waiting for you, michael, Broward County, florida. Youre on with Douglas Rushkoff. In chatting with chat gpti discovered in trying to get information about our governor desantis, hes doing exactly what desantis is doing and its semantics it is the fact that the responses that it provides and the program that way is for the same reason as he wants to avoid things that are potentially negative say things that are just positive and what im talking about if you look into anything having to do with the racism or misogyny. Your friends that are rich, tell them abouth success ptsd wheret changes your brain so that you react in the same way to be selfinterested, quite reacting, their brains are its interesting because Herbert Spencer started that in 1860s which is why 30 of the kids cant read and we teach that way even though 100 cant. We verified medically but we teach to the bell curve not to prevent the bell curve. The heir and the rabbit. The state department has done for 50 years they have done randomized tests. Weve never had more than 30 . Michael, you bring up a lot of topics. Let me let Douglas Rushkoff and what you want to talk about. The embracing feature of this is sort of applying Industrial Age logic to our many social institutions, you know, coming up whatever metric you put on the wall is the metric that youre going to get, right. Thats what youre going to go for and they are necessarily redactive metrics and so you bring the kid in in vitro, we are going to teach this kid Long Division and without any understanding whats going on in that kids house, you know, the kids mother is moving from shelter to shelter and the father is drunk and not even there andfr the kid is trying to contend with that, how do i take care of my mother, the life challenge that kid is dealing with and what the child needs to learn at that moment is not reflected in the assessment that theyve done in their Long Division at the end of the week. Thats the problem with a one size fits all education but everything system. When we decided, funny, in thatcher era, theres a famous story when they were trying to use incentives to get hospitals to perform better and would give money to hospitals that would reduce amount of time people spent in Emergency Rooms into beds. What the emergency room did, was they took the wheels off their gurneys to call them beds and lined the halls and put people on those and declared them being in the room. But the time and energy took to do that slowed the rate at which people got medical care. What i hear in the callers concern is the way that we kind of we institutionalized shortterm oversimplified values at the expense of whatever the thing is that we might actually want to accomplish and the bigger and more convoluted what it is that we want and the same with, chat gpt. People have to realize im sure most viewers do, chat gpt is hype right now. It really is hype. Its a stock market desperate for another big thing, right, zoom and all these post all the covid apps are not being used as much. All of the screening Media Companies are not being watched as much because we are going outside. They need another thing. Chat gpt is really an advanced Search Engine right now. Thats all were looking at. Takes yourr google results and puts them in human speech but its wrong most of the time. Its not actually correct. Its reverting everything to the need. Whats the most average answer to that question and that doesnt offend anybody or saying anything controversial or upsetting and its wrong and its its not its not what we think it is. Its just search right now and yes, we can use on the future where these things are actually smart but were not there. Hi, i have a couple of points to go back to some of the things that you were talking about earlier in the conversation. Long time caregiver. I live in this gorgeous area, so my life is all about experiencing things not virtually. Try and deliver something essential. Its great for my soul. Thanks for that. Mr. Rushkoff. Yeah, i mean, ive been blessed to be able even just drive through utah a few times and if you have the opportunity to do it, do it. Its different, right. You feel different from the creation itself. Get out of the car and stare at a rock for 5 minutes. Boy, talk about awe. Utah, some parts of new mexico do that too. Its amazing. But, yeah, its so the thing that amazes me about our state of disconnection is how quickly you reconnect, recalibrating to reality is almost instantaneous. If you dont have nature, real world, find a friend and look in their eyes and take two or 3 breaths with them and its almost unbearable if you havent done it in a while. It it connects you of almost instantly so its interesting for how long it took to recalibrate us and how many billions or thrills of dollars were spent to h get us in this crazy state where we all need the ssris and you need to get an app in order the cure from from the app that cured you and Meditation App to get through the facebook app, the senate snt app. You touch ground. Look at another person, look at a shore, look at a cliff, breathe in a forest. Look in the eyes of your daughter, cat even. You get it so quickly, its so accessible. The forest fire haze we are looking at today on the east coast. Its still its so accessible that when i have hope in the future its how quickly these bonds, these systems, how quickly they restore when you give them half a chance. You were talking about creation a minute ago. When youre creating your writing and im not talking about the podcasts and interviews like this but when youre writing is there a place you go to create, to think what is your process for writing now 20 books . I mean, i tend to go about it the same way whether its fiction or nonfiction. I write note cards, you know. I have ideas on note cards and i end up, you know, putting them on the wall and, you know, what are called slugs sort of content areas and then content areas kind of mutate into chapters and then i order them so that each chapter t flows as a little 5 ap structure. So because of that i need to have a place where the book happens, you know, a room, an office, because the the book ends up withen the note card and ive had experience with the note cards because i know how much i have w based on how many cards there are and how dense they are and how important the topics are in each one so i can kind of feel the book more intuitively or sematicly. In the room right now . I wrote the end of survival of the richest in here. Yeah, ive rearranged it sense. Ive been trying to use trello. It doesnt quite organize the same way. Okay, these ideas are here and its in my head and located there and that chapter, so i could look at any book and the chapter and i remember wherere e chapter was in the room where i was writing at. A chapel of memories, what was the hardest book for you to write . Its interesting. The book b came right out. Thats what my agent told me. The best part of the book is not the rhetorics but the stories so i end up telling ridiculous stories with crazy billionaire people and their antics. So that one came right out. The most researched book was life inc. I really looked. I went to the yale library, charters and that was pretty intense. And 3 of the the first 3 artists who were hired to work on the book. I do the writing and they do the art all had major life catastrophes, illness, suicides and awful things and i was starting to get scared, you write about someone like crowley and then theres something dangerous hang. Happening. I got really scared writing that that i was touching energies that i shouldnt and faithful to world war ii story and to tell the story as reality as history while also getting into these characters and the part that wasnt real and trying to distinguish between the two and what felt like a responsible way. So that was the most harrowing writing experience ive had. Just 35 minutes left with Douglas Rushkoff, this is marshal, houston, texas, thanks for waiting. Thank you, gentlemen, this is a fascinating conversation. Im interested in your role with research particularly that life inc that you talked about, how much of the researching and writing do they overlap each other, how much do you need to do before you start writing . And also your role with agents, thank you very much. Literary agents . Yes. Okay. So with life inci like to have all the Research Done before i start writing writing. I will do i will do a little bit of research to get to the proposal stage andt the proposl is usually something that turns into the version of the introductions of the book so the proposal usually gets me to what in academia we would call the research question. You know, so for life inc was where did the corporation come from and how did corporatism become the religion of our society and what the heck can we do about it and ive done enough research to done i was going to look at central currency and monopoly but i didnt know that i was going to find, that i was going to uncover the nature of the deal between monarchs and the first charter monopolies and what that was and how it worked and i discovered things that werent understood before so that was th that was Real Research but once the research was done and i had all of the stuff i make my outline on the wall and i could see occasionally theyll be a little blank area but im really scared to write all the way up to than area that im going to discover something thats going to undo what was earlier so once i get that done then going straight through with blinders on. I have to go straight through it and i dont look like because if i look back and i tried that where you kind of rewrite the book to the point that youre at and continue then rewrite it and continue, then the end of the book has much less attention than the front of the book, its like combing someone with really long hair. You end up different at the front if you havent gotten all the way down. I get to the very end of the book and then i edit. Then i edit going through it. The only thing weird as im writing the book i realize the chapter is so much bigger than the other four, fiver chapters and i break it up into two. Im going to go back and get more justification and worst case i find out that the justification pushes things in another way and then i drop it. My relationship with agents has been ive had a bunch of them. You know, i started getting an agent because i had written a screen play for somebody and that screen play had an agent and then there was like a coagent. I got my first literary agent sort of through the back door and ended up doing the wrong thing. I thought they had dropped me, they hadnt called me a long time andpe i thought they gave p selling the book and i had a different that was an agent and he told it and then the first agent was like wait a minute, thats my book but it was like a year since the first agent called me or done anything and i got pseudoand i had to get like a bunch of money for this one and a bunch of money to that one. That was media virus so i was this agent and that agent turned out to really have a lot of issues, he was stealing money from a bunch of people so i left him and went to william morris. I had them for a while and my agent left william morris. Do i stay or do i followed. I stayed. The next agent wasnt so good and then i went with science agent John Brockman who is a great literary agent and his whole agency ended up having epstein association that i thought they werent fully acknowledging so i kind of left and i also want today do more hollywood things at that point and that agency was only really just books and i wanted to get things on the screen and Start Playing there. So i ended up at Creative Artist Agency and i dont talk to my agent there that much but shes like really good. Shes the one who told me, dont write another book like this. Youre going reaching these people, the seam parttime again and again with these kind of polemic things if you really want to reach people you have to tell stories, you know, if i want to do nonfiction tell nonfiction stories but at least tell stories that thats in the literary, the story of how you engage, thats the narrative art. Thats what it is. So i started doing that. She was right, so now now and always ive seen my agent but even more so my editor as my partner in the project. You know, i dont want to sell to a Publishing Company that has an editor that is not adding value to the book, right, not just value toit the distribution and the cover and the sales of the book but the editor should be my partner in they really are the first audience and, boy, my editor tom mayor at norton where i ended up in my publisher. Im not going the leave them unless god knows what happens but hes the one that told me to write the book. He had read a couple of articles that i had written doing stuff and some of the articles were doing well and i did this article on the survival of the richest about the 5 billionaires i met who wanted advice on how to how to get out there bunkers and the article is done really well and a year or two later i wrote about the covid crisise how i thought people we retreating and almost adopting that billionaire mind set if im going to retreat in my house with 60inch tv my glasses and get a private tutor and make it work in the hamptons. This is your next book, you have to do this and i called the agent, the editor, i should do this. If you could do it in stories, you know, then, sure. Do it. Its ala strange place to be. I see the notes and critiques from the editors as gifts rather than as work as ways to get in thatss because i trust them, my gosh, this guy is helping me make this better. Hes making me a better writer to give up both fear and humorous that somebody doesnt know better than you or at least as well as you is really good for me. I look at all of these people as my partners in crime here and, boy, it feels so much better to come out with a book that you know your people are are a part of it. Its a group, a group project. Of course, its my whole team human thing but im finally, im finally living it. If you want the story of meeting with tech millionaires its how douglas rushroff has survival of the richest. Professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens College new york and we willrk o to new york. Mike is waiting in new york, mike . Yes. Youre on with Douglas Rushkoff. I have a question to the professor in terms of human nature why where communism and socialism throughout the world has been in effective and basically a miserable failure but in terms of the tech billionaires and o so forth, i just want people listening to understand that what complete hypocrites these people are. Zuckerberg, soros, gates, all of them. Theyll advocate for average man or woman in the United States in terms of defending themselves and so forth. So i just want people to understand that these theoretical systems of government, you know, i think they dont work and then people will say, it hasnt really been tried. Capitalism by far has been most effective and where we live in america. By far the most effective way to govern and live and in terms of economics. These tech billionaires, its really disgusting. They are just bathe in hypocrisy, the entire way they live versus the average person in america. Mike, got your points. Mr. Rushkoff. Yeah, capitalism has worked as long as when we get to periods of extreme access we have, you know, major reformation, right. Big regulations, so, yeah, when things spun out of control you get franklin roosevelt, wpa and gi bills and you education bills. You reform the thing and thats when capitalism works best is when you do that. You ended up in a situation because they realized they had to income tax went up to 80 or 90 in order to bail out to what was happening because when capitalism works too well and automate it you end up extracting so much value that you make the people around you poorer. When ubernd and facebook and google are doing well, you see tech villages are living around them, right, so they end up destroying markets. So what they are calling Creative Destruction but its actually destructive destruction. Theyre storing more money and then, sure, you get to the place now where Mark Zuckerberg says im going to give back 95 of my money back to the places that i took it out of. Dude, if you had made facebook 95 less extractive you wouldnt have to be trying to shove your money back into the systems that you decimated, these ecosystems and society. Now ii would argue that communim and socialism, the reason why i would say they havent worked is because theyve been they are trying to do these things at scale. Iin look at scale is itself the problem like when marks was writing about socialism what he really meant how do we return, how do we retrieve the social element of commerce and exchange, right, me borrowing a drill from the neighbor instead of buying one at home depot. Is that a crime or is it okay and i understand the perspective that it is a crime because even though i dont need a drill if i dont buy the drill then how will home depot grow, how would black decker grow. Its my responsibility as a citizen in capitalism to promote the exponential growth of the economy and thats the part where it gets where it gets off, where we see it not just as a means to an end but as the end, as the thing, it is a only way, so when i look at socialism im talking how do you put the social back into it and the sort of minimize the ism. You talk about communism, i like community, i dont know i like ism so much either because its not something that you can orchestrate so well. Its interesting, mark this is where he went a little off or someone in trying to exercise marks. He has track when he writes about robinson carusso. Maximize his own efficiencies so he said, okay, he needs 5 fish per week so he could spend this much time fishing and this much time collecting watere and this much time collecting and he has a ledger and mark said, oh, if robinson carrusso did it for himself why if we create a ledger for the whole country. How many people need to do this and that. Dude, you cant plan that out or you will end up with people on the line to get tooth paste. Its not going to be enough. Markets are good figuring out supply and demand and all that but they are really back at figuring out like how do we share water. How do you deal with Something Like air, how do you deal with things that are best orchestrated as common sense. I dont mean communism. This is a river we all share responsibility for the river, we are going the make rules about what canal happen in this river, how many fish youre allowed to take from the river and we are going to enforce those who violate those ruleses so theres enough fish or enough pasture or enough air or whatever it is for everybody to use. So some things, sure, lets make markets for i phones and lets compete. In capitalism lets have people invest in things that they think are going to win. A lot of stuff doesnt really work in terms of market sensibility. You need to create a scarcity of something in order for the market to work around it and its much harder to do with stuff that should or could be in abundance. So i think what we need is a multifaceted ecology of economic models that are different depending on what it is that we are tryingnd to share together. 20 minutes left in our discussion with Douglas Rushkoff on indepth. One of the questions that we ask our authors their favorite books and also their books that theyre reading right now. Here is what Douglas Rushkoff said onot questions. Cosmic trigger, john kennedy, confederacy of dunces, the torah. To the lighthouse and what hes currently reading. End times and jim bendells breaking together. Which one or two of those books do you want to talk about in the context of the discussion weve been having today . Well, i already talked about tahra. I got one out of the way. Cosmic trigger is an interesting one with respect to the last conversation we were having. A great counterculture, writer, prankster, partly responsible for the church of discordia where every number is a pope. Early 1960s style of intentional disinformation that was being used to kind of promote the abby hoffman radical hippy psychology but he wrote the book cosmic trigger and what hes arguing is that not that everything is true but that we can all hold multiple perspective at different times and not take any one of them too very seriously. So you can look at the situation at atheist scientist and see it from that perspective. You can look at it as a cynic, you can look at it as a new age fantasy person. You can look at it as a psychedelic person. Theres all the different ways to look at things and it would have helped people today, you know, in h the whole kind of conspiracy theories and qanon, people looking what really happened here, is the tower connect today the election booth or covid vaccine. Wait a minute, to be able to tolerate not knowing and to be able to tolerate that theres different perspectives does shield you from the same kinds of people that you spectacle to gain power use confusion and conspiracy and unknown and as ways of gaining power as well. And i feel like, you know, a lot of the poor kids the gamer gay boys who were scoop intoed this radical right mean wars ended up kind of being the victims of their imagination rather than the being able to really kind of harvest their own creativity, so his book is really good walking through through what he calls the chapel parulis and how do you get to the other side of that. He was really good at that. The other up with was the book i finished last night peters book, what was that called again. The path of political disintegration. Yeah, it was really what that book does in a really interesting and rigorous way is show that and it was nice to feel wrong. I love to be wrong and to get corrected, is that when these kind of revolution period things happen, when civilizations break down, its not because the rich got sodo rich and the poor got o poor that the poor revolt. Thats what i thought is happening. Oh, no, if it gets worse, division of worse, so many people are in the tent villages then they will revolt. No, thats not what happens. What happens is that actually its the creation of too many elites. Not that theres millions of elites but theres so many elites that theres not enough for the elites to all be elite and they start competing with each other and thats what breaks things down when theres too many elites. Im sure the, you know, any of the listeners are angry at coastal elites and all that, theres too many coastal elites. Theres not enough for coastal elites theres not enough, theres a lot of billionaires. Oddly enough, this is research im doing for a guardian piece im writing now that i thought like bezos and musk and zuckerberg and you took 5 billionaires today had more than the 25 billionaires of jp morgan and carnegie and those guys. They less than percentage in the economy . Percentage of the economy, but theres more billionaires. The top thousand billionaires have, you know, way, way more than everybody else. So theres a larger billionaire class. I mean, its still a tinny number ofas people compared to e whole population but its its spread out throw a wider bunch of billionaire who is are now competing with each other for the the scraps of billions and thats sort of what breaks things down. To minneapolis, minnesota, steve emailed question, to what extent do you think americas societal tend to be less present in contributing to increased emotional and anxiety trends . Tremendously and totally and maybe 99. 9 of it. Its funny, when you have a lot of are raising kids that have one kind of sensory or nervous disorder of another whether its add or spectrum or sensory processing or too much cortisol that they are not calibrating and the easiest way to calibrate your kid is to bring them into bed with you or sit with them body to body, skin to. Ideally if they are little enough its still appropriate but being with people, being on a team, copresence, colocation and its the surest way to calculate to gain mental health. I mean, when you think about if you think about our society as like addicted to technology and addicted to money and addicted to crazy stuff, this idea that just one more thing and then i will try to do good for the world, i just need another thousand dollars in the bank and then i can start behavioring ethically. If we are addicts and we need the 12 step program, we need the equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous for the crazy things whats the first thing you do, you go in a room with other people, you dont do you go to a meeting. Thats the one requirement. You go to a meeting in a room and experience fellowship every day. You find the others, thats what on the book of my book team human. You find the others and be them. Absolutely. Its our our lack of presence with each other that is making it harder for us to calibrate naturally and making us actually actively more distrustful of each other. You are looking on twitter. You dont know you can want ever feel the positive, not truly, you can get dopamine but you dont get oxitocin and you dont have organic experience of commodore, fellowship, not to call it communism. You dont have that, you dont feel part of part of the group. Its a very different kind of its much more like spectacle, right, we all agree, we all look at this persons tweet. We have all given it the thumbs up because they told us who the enemy is because they are mad at biden, they are mad at the u. S. , they are mad at russia. You know, we all do that. Thats not the same thing. Its not the same internal state and it doesnt no, we see all the data the kids that are on on, you know, twitter and instagram and snapchat and all those things instead of live copresent with one another are suffering terribly from everything from, you know, an anorexia to torretes, its a symptom they are cutting, they are culling themselves. Its becoming Public Health crisis and the thing is you dont solve it with another app but then the wellness app, you solve it with good old fashion, i sound like an old person but it shouldnt be considered nostalgic copresence, touch, being with other people is i think it should always stay in fashion. For book readers who dont know your social media presence, do you tweet, are you on facebook, do you tiktok . No, im not. I have a twitter account and i will send a link to my podcast each week and now im even considering stopping that. I mean, i used to participate inback when it was a little bit more of a conversation but now, you know, i will tweet like, im going to be ont cspan book tv today and, you know, if i get 50 likes for that and 30 of them are from bots pretending to be sex workers. Theres a new kind of bot out there theres some kind of a scam and i guess youre supposed to want to hire them as either virtual or real strippers of some kind or sex workers. Whats the point, you know, its like such a little pool of crap and its aggravating and to see the kind of conversations that are engendered there that i dont i dont even want to do that. So i put linkedin which is less that way. Its professional but, no, i dont have a social media presence. I dont do social media activity. I have a blue sky account i havent used yet. Federated version of a twitter that i would useh but im not finding a o real need for it. I get so much emails that servicing the email feels like as much time as i want to spend looking at the screen and im just learning, meeting my neighbors, finding about my town and who is here. Theres only so much light left. Im an adult. I dont want to spend it in there. I want to read whent you publicly quit facebook in 2013, you wrote a column about it on cnn. Facebook has never been merely social platform rather exploits social interaction the way a Tupperware Party does. Social graphs into a commodity for others would exploit. Right. Facebook decided they could use to advertise to your people whether or not you wanted it or not. You know, so its like you said im at starbucks today, they might broadcast that to your friends or everyone who follows you and more. Or if you eat better fod whats going on in your bloodstream. They are not doing that to sell a specific diet product. What they are doing that for us to get the 80 accuracy up to 90 or 95 . Those messages are direct at the 20 of people who are going to choose to do Something Else, who are going to do something that wasnt consistent with their profile so the function of facebook and these other social networks in that regard is to autotune humanity to take the 20 with some wonderful thing who will be less predictable less like the algorithm predicted it to be and reduce that down. You dont want people doing the weird things. So its auto tuning the weirdness, the independence out of humanity. Thats not an environment you want to be spending time with. We did want to read this from another you were in hawaii who said thanks for sharing your insight its a brilliant as a yoga therapist, actor, i do see the repetitive nature stopping and breathing has another profound power. Humans are disconnected from each other and themselves. How do you recommend we begin world healing . Do yoga three times a week with someone that teaches in my neighborhood and after covid ordering covid she started doing it on zoom, and some of the people dont want to go back to the room so its become zoom yoga and a few months ago i started crying afterwards. Im glad to move my body in that way, but i was doing yoga partly to be in the room with the other people doing it. I im going to be in a room with other people. Its great thatwe we had two calls. G to find the others is my whole purpose. It with the two and a half minutes we have left the last words of your book, just a page or two before you write this and we started the conversation today about futurist. You write the future is less unknown than a verb. Its a thing we do. I want to end with that, with your thoughts on that. Its robbed from god is a verb which is a great book. The idea thatwe the future especially the technologists and planners and institutionalists they look at the future and say we are going to hire people to tell us whats in the future so we can prepare for it. They look at the most likely probables and say it says disaster, economic unrest, nuclear war. The way that i prepare is building a bunker, getting a rocketship and going to mars. The best i can do is predict the futureis and prepare and hang on for it and what im saying is no. The future is something we are creatingng right now. You are making the future with the choices you make it if you are preparing for a future where that thing is going to happen then you are way more likely bringing that on. What if we prepare for the future we realize their neighbors or their friends and people realize we are in this together, that mutual aid and togetherness and connection and community and care and acknowledging nourishment and thee social reality that thats the future we want to create. We created that future by doing it, by enacting it. So start today and you will like how the world turns out. Author and professor has ben our guest for the last two hours on indepth this morning. His latest book is survival of the richest escape fantasies of the tech billionaires in 2022. Thanks for talking with us this morning. This is an important gathering of people. Charter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers, and we are just getting started. Building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need