Douglas Rushkoff - Team Human

Full transcript: Guest on London Real

4:17 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Douglas Rushcroft, the writer, documentarian and lecturer whose work focuses on human autonomy in a digital age. You’re the author of 15 best-selling books on media, technology and society, including Programmer Be Programmed, Present Shock and of course Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. You’ve also created the award-winning documentaries Generation Like, Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders.

5:38 And in 2013, you were named one of the world’s 10 most influential intellectuals by my alma mater, MIT. Today, you serve as Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY in Queens, where you recently founded the Laboratory for Digital Humanism and host the Team Human podcast. Douglas, welcome to London Real. Thanks for having me. It’s great having you here. We just had a conversation before this conversation, but I’m sure we’re going to get a lot of that stuff too.

6:05 What’s it like being in London? What does it feel like when you land here? Do you get different perspectives than you get when you’re in New York? Yeah, I mean, it’s weird. In some ways, it feels like London’s not here anymore. I don’t come that much.

6:23 You know, so I come every five years, 10 years. And the London that is most anchored in my psyche is the London of the late 80s, early 90s, the birth of rave culture, the psychedelic revival, the sort of New Age, smart drugs, herbal, Covent Garden girls mixing potions. Rupert Sheldrake was, you know, the guy I would come and visit and talk about morphogenetic fields and his wife, Jill Purce, doing spiral dynamics and Tibetan monk chanting. Chanting, yes.

7:03 Right. I would go to Brixton and hang with Fraser Clarke, who had Evolution Magazine and Camden Lock Market, where they were doing these at the time were just called illegal parties. You know, and there were, I don’t know, it was kind of a pre-internet-y, psychedelic place that seemed to understand that humanity was about to undergo some big cycle. And so I would come to London, believe it or not, for almost a spiritual recharge. You know, New York felt new. New York felt like it was about money. And London had this, there was this thing.

7:48 And as I came here more and more, it felt like, you know, the U.S., we had Silicon Valley happen, the Internet happened, and then I felt like London was trying to copy the high-tech culture of America. And in some ways they did it better, better design and, you know, all that and better diodes and cool stuff. But it got so, it got high-tech and then it got so expensive here. So now I come to London and I feel, I feel very middle class, you know, in not the good way, in the poor way.

8:22 And, wow, how can I afford to take a taxi to this place? I mean, just the pounds and the, so it feels a little, and there’s a desperation here, too, because of all that’s been going on lately. It’s got a different, I’m not saying I don’t like it, but it’s got a different, a different energy to it. And I don’t feel like I come here and I’m reconnected to the roots of Western civilization. Right. So it used to feel that way, probably because it was lagging New York by maybe 10 years and still had a lot of its roots.

8:55 And I guess this city has many different types of cultural roots here, right? Yeah. And there was also, you know, London more than New York or any, London had, it celebrated an internationalism in a way I had never experienced before. You know, they call New York the melting pot. London’s the frigging melting pot, you know, or it’s certain, there was this celebratory internationalism that it’s just more on edge now, you know, the different kinds of people.

9:23 Yeah, I would say the internationalism still exists. And I agree, it’s much more than New York. If you go to New York and you’re taking a cab in from the airport, there’ll be this guy and you’ll say, where are you from? And he’s like, I’m from New York. And you’re like, where are you really from? He’s like, I’m from Nigeria.

9:36 And you’re like, oh, because everyone wants to assimilate there. In London, I mean, literally in Knightsbridge, a woman will walk down with a full hijab on and she’s like, what’s up? And the Russian will be talking Russian and the Chinese will be talking Chinese. And it’s like, you really do feel like you’re in a multicultural place. Probably felt more so like that, maybe even 20 years ago, too.

9:55 But these people you mentioned are great. Funny you mentioned Rupert, him and Jill were at my house for Thanksgiving. I actually just bumped into him in Hampstead Heath. And what a great person to be like touching with, you know, to get the essence of London. And those rave culture, it just sounds like that was a whole different thing going on back then. And now it’s become probably like you said, maybe this copied version of Manhattan. It’s been globalized.

10:18 It’s been the Emerald City now, super expensive to live here on the inside. So maybe we’re bleeding a little of our culture out. I don’t know. Well, yeah, I mean, and it thinks ping pong. I don’t mean to come down negatively on London. It’s just when I first came here, we were trying to be like you.

10:35 We were importing your culture. We got the rave movement and that whole vibe. We got that from you and combined it with our digital stuff and then bounced it back to you guys. And it’s just funny, you know, so it goes back and forth. But I just liked that. But then again, I like San Francisco better in 1992 also, right? Because that was a hippie, crazy, early Internet, wonderful thing.

11:05 And it was before Wired magazine came and recontextualized the whole net as some business pyramid scheme. Right. And I want to get into that, definitely. And I’m guessing you like New York back then better than now as well, or not necessarily. Yeah. Well, you know, I don’t live in Manhattan anymore. And people ask me, oh, do you miss Manhattan? It’s like, yeah, I miss Manhattan when I go to Manhattan because there’s no neighborhood. There’s no shoemakers. There’s no, you know, it’s yeah, it’s up.

11:28 It’s now you said desperation. You feel when you’re over here. What do you feel when you’re walking around the city? Okay. We, you know, got hit with another terrorist attack couple in a row now a few weeks ago before that was in Manchester.

11:41 Obviously, the Brexit things happen and we’re kind of in the middle of a post election. People don’t know what’s going on. What do you feel when you’re here? And then what do you see when you’re in New York? Like, what the hell is going on there in Britain?

11:52 You know, in some ways, I think it’s the same. I feel the same thing here that I do there. You know, in the States, we’ve got Trump. We have the Russian hacking. We’ve got, you know, this this social media confusion.

12:07 There’s so many people are spending so much time on social media and using that for their news. And they don’t understand that these spaces have been engineered to be disorienting to create this state. So, you know, we’re all confused. And I guess part of me expected to come to London. It’s like, okay, you guys, you’ve been through these things before you’ve been through wars, you’ve been through propaganda, you’ve been through and you guys will know how to deal with it.

12:31 And, you know, I get in the cabs and I’m expecting, you know, that good old, you know, wisdom of the of the cab driver and at each one is that to me, oh, you know, it was labor that burned down that building, or it was the Tories that put up that guy to do the thing on London Bridge. Like, oh, no, you’re just like, where’s the good old wisdom about this is just how it is. Don’t worry, we’re going to be fine. So you guys are just as as as panicked and disoriented as we are. Right. Right.

13:01 Talk about the that these these social media companies are created to to to actually instigate this type of disruption in us because we feel like we’re getting the latest news. We feel like we’re connecting with our friends. And you have a great video where you say the people in the Facebook boardroom aren’t thinking, how can we get Johnny more friends? Right. They’re thinking other things. But talking about this idea that they that the product itself is supposed to just engineer a state of confusion and anxiety because most people wouldn’t think that’s true.

13:31 Well, I mean, once you understand that the companies, you know, financially, they have to grow by any means necessary. They just have to find a resource to extract if they’re not getting money from you, which they’re not. What are they going to get? You know, they’re going to get your data and they can sell that to some extent. But in the end, the data is useless unless they can use that data to change your behavior.

13:57 Now, that’s the proof. So you end up if you go to Stanford, you could go to you can take as a whole department there called Captology. And Captology is really the science of how do you manipulate people’s behavior in digital spaces? There’s a guy named B.J. Fogg, who wrote a book called Persuasive Technology.

14:17 And he’s got the main lab there. He’s the guy who was the he was the instructor for near all the guy who wrote Hooked, which is about how do you. And what they’re looking at, you know, and these are the smartest kids from Stanford are being trained in how do you use digital media to get people to do stuff. So essentially, there’s two main sciences. One is the Facebook science where you take somebody’s data, you take somebody’s past behavior to figure out what’s their most probable future.

14:48 And they can figure out with about 80 percent accuracy. If you’re going to decide you’re gay, if you’re going to decide to go on a diet, you’re going to decide to get divorced. If you’re going to decide to get fertility treatments, they know with about 80 percent accuracy. So on the one hand, they can use that to market to you. Oh, here’s diet pills for you, you know, and because they know with 80 percent probability, that’s something you want.

15:11 But more importantly, what they want to do is get that 80 percent number up to 90 percent or 95 percent or ideally 100 percent. So what they want to do is get that 20 percent of people who weren’t going to go on a diet and make them behave consistently with the statistical profile, with the algorithmically derived big data analysis of you and your group. Because the more predictable you are, the more money can be made off you. Anomalous behavior is scary to these folks.

15:43 So, capitalogy is really the science of generating compliance with what we know you to be. Does it reward you for even being consistent? So maybe it gives you good rewards when you start behaving like the pack. Yeah, well, the idea of in any compliance profession, but even more so online, where these interfaces and platforms can reconfigure themselves in real time based on the feedback they’re getting from you. You know, what they really want to do is sidestep your neocortex, sidestep your advanced brain and appeal directly to the reptile brain.

16:25 You know, they’re very base. And in order to do that, to trigger behaviors in real time, it’s a more Pavlovian thing. Then they don’t want you thinking. They don’t want you making considered reasoned responses. They don’t even want you engaging in a genuine connected social relationship with someone else online.

16:44 If you’re engaged, if you’re thinking, if you’re using your cognition, then first off, you’re not buying and selling anything. You’ve paused to think, to reflect. That’s terrible. If you’re connecting with another person, that’s a problem because then they can’t sell you. Wait a minute. You’re having sex with your girlfriend? Oh, no, what are we going to do? How are we going to sell you Viagra?

17:03 How are we going to sell you blue jeans? How are we going to sell you hair tonic? He’s getting laid already. We’ve got to have him not getting laid so that we can sell him something. So there’s that.

17:11 But there’s also the problem is then you can’t be manipulated in the look at red. Red, go eat. And that’s a problem. That’s why we see our political conversation falling. That’s why we see the extreme polarization between right and left.

17:36 Because if you’re going to be, you can’t just be a right wing intellectual. You have to be a right wing reptile. And that’s going to be someone who’s just like, you know, that’s the person that you can manipulate in that simple polarized way. And are we becoming that person because we’re constantly being trained to be that person because of these digital devices, digital networks? Yeah, we’re addicted to these things. We are. I mean, and they’re there. It’s just beyond the proven addictive.

18:07 It’s the proven that these are addictive. They’re using the same techniques that the folks who made the one arm bandits in the slot machines in Las Vegas, the very same algorithms to figure out how do we get a person most addicted to this? How much money do we have to give out in little bits for them to stay completely focused on that? Those are the same algorithms they’re using to figure out with your newsfeed when we give you little pellets of reward in order to keep you stuck.

18:34 Yeah, I remember 60 Minutes did an article or one of the video things where Leslie Stahl went to Vegas. And it was about these people that the extent doing a lot of this digital poker, this is like 10 or 12 years. And they do these little micro bets like each time they would win like 12 cents or whatever. And as you look at them and you look at what are these people doing? Why would you sit there and push these buttons for four hours?

18:55 You’re making 12 cents. You’re losing four cents. And now that I look at it and you read Nir Eyal’s book, that’s exactly what we’re getting with these digital companies, right? We’re getting these small little, what is it called, variable reward? That’s one of the things that Nir talks about.

19:09 You don’t know what you’re going to get. You get the dopamine hits with the uncertainty and they’re engineering it in. And you go to the amygdala is what you’re saying. So you get these panic reactions and that’s what gets people to pay attention. Right. So we stay in fight or flight that way. And now we’ve got a news media that makes so much money off terror.

19:29 But terror… Haven’t they always though? Yeah, they have. But now they’ve got better technology. And now we are, rather than living on terra firma, rather than living in the world and visiting these spaces, now we’re living in these spaces and occasionally visiting the world. And that’s an issue.

19:50 So people think, oh, you hate digital technology. No, I love digital technology. What this stuff could be doing, how it could be connecting us, the peer to peer society that we could be building, even the original vision, Rupert and those folks that were building a global brain that is the realization of the Gaia hypothesis. I mean, that was and that was London. That was this vision of the technology before the west coast of America got a hold of it.

20:20 It wasn’t the west coast. First we went with individual achievement. In America, our spiritual culture was much more self-improvement. So you go to Esalen and you reach the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, self-actualization. Whereas London always felt and the London spiritual subcultures were more collectives.

20:42 You had your posse of people, your little group and their rave posse. So it was much more about collective transformation. So when you come back from one of your trips with Rupert here in the 80s and you go back to the US and you hear about this thing called the internet, you’re thinking, OK, maybe this is the technology that can help us realize this kind of global collective. For a time, I never saw this coming. Oh, my gosh, the technology could do everything that we had been talking about through these groups.

21:12 I remember in 1989, I got to MIT and they gave me an email account. It was called the project Athena and I didn’t know what the hell it was and nobody really used it. It was this little glass room off the main hallway of lobby seven and I got it. It was MIT.edu and I think I sent my brother an email at Stanford and that was it. And there was really no internet until I graduated in 1993.

21:36 And I remember I finally used it for the first time in like 95 somewhere. Tell me what you saw when you first saw the internet. What did you think it was going to be? I thought that the internet was going to augur a renaissance for us the way the printing press did in the original renaissance. And in some sense it did. It did.

22:03 Only I thought it was going to be a renaissance that empowered people rather than central institutions. I didn’t think it would go in the direction it did. I saw it back from like the home brew chaos computer clubs and the bulletin boards and cyberpunk. I mean the first internet thing I was on was called FidoNet. And FidoNet was a way for different home computers, little tandy radio shack computers, would call each other up at night and pass messages back and forth until the message got to the right place.

22:37 It was like a mesh network. But way back then there was no central internet. There was no node. So the vision of it was so grassroots that it felt… So I discovered the internet or networking technology around the same time that I was reading James Lovelock and the Gaia hypothesis and Peter Russell and the awakening earth and all.

23:00 And I thought, oh, this is the way. At least we’re going to practice wiring up the global brain. I never thought the net would be the global brain, but I thought it would be the way like training wheels for some… And this sounds crazy, but for some kind of global telepathic connection. That we were going to have to deal with so many issues of privacy and connection and all that.

23:26 If you just know everybody’s thoughts, that’s going to be scary. So the net was going to train us in how to do that. And then we’d find out, oh, we don’t even need the net at all. I just know you, you know me, and we’re all together. We’re all good.

23:38 What is the Gaia hypothesis? The Gaia hypothesis is really just the idea that the planet is an organism, that we’re one thing. And the more we know about nature, the more we know that. So the trees and the forest, we think of them as individual plants, but now we know that their root structures are connected to one another by mushrooms, by fungus. So that if there’s a tree that’s strong and there’s some plants, even different species of plants, that are suffering for whatever reason, the mushrooms will transport nutrients from that tree to the sick plants.

24:12 So that’s why a forest is healthy. And then we plant all these trees individually and wonder, well, why aren’t they flourishing? It’s like because they’re not… you didn’t understand the organism. You know, you’re doing weird monocultural separate plant growth and pouring steroids on them, and then you’re wondering why it’s not working out.

24:29 Right. Okay. So you thought the Internet would also help everyone realize this kind of unity of the planet, all the ideas coming together, et cetera. All right. And when did you first started to think that maybe it wasn’t going to go that way?

24:43 When the first issue of Wired magazine came out. I had Kevin Kelly in here about two months ago. Yeah, God bless him. Yeah, well, Louis Rosetta Moore. So Louis Rosetta was a really strident libertarian who saw…

24:57 And you would think he was a real libertarian, but he kind of wasn’t, because what he said was in the first issue of Wired that the Internet is a tsunami coming, and it’s going to disrupt all of your businesses, this kind of creative destruction idea. And you better buy Wired and hire the great consultants that we put on these pages if you are going to survive what’s happening. But what they really did was they recontextualized a potentially disruptive force, the Internet, which was going to turn over the free market system and really enhance local economic ability, because it was so grassrootsy and peer-to-peer in that eBay sort of way of people connecting with one another.

25:43 And they said, don’t worry, this is actually going to be the salvation of the NASDAQ stock exchange, which you know since 1987 had crashed and the biotech boom and bust, everyone was freaked out, and they said, don’t worry, the net is here, and now we’ve got this new idea, and they called it the long boom. And they said that thanks to digital technology, the stock market is going to grow infinitely forever. And it’s true, look what happens. Yes and no. That was in 1993, that first issue of Wired.

26:14 So you’re saying they hijacked what could have been this beautiful movement for humanity, and they hijacked it and said, no, this is actually going to be for business. And since the narrative was early on, you think that that actually changed the course? I think it did, you know, and at first I had hope, you know. So people invested in the net, and I said back in like 1996, I was in South by Southwest, and I said, look, yeah, I know this dot-com boom thing is happening and all that.

26:39 I said, but a month or two into the year 2000, it’s going to crash. I said, probably March, February, March 2000, and they’re like, why? I said, well, because we’re leaning forward to the late 90s, we’re leaning towards the millennium, everyone’s thinking about tomorrow and the future. Once we hit 2000, people are going to say, what now? Here we are.

26:58 Now we’re in the future. What is my stock actually worth? And the whole thing’s going to crash. And it did. And I was right.

27:04 So that was good. So it was very influenced by the turn of the century. Yeah. And it crashed, and I thought that would be good. Now, OK, now we can build, and then that’s when I said, we’re going to have this stuff called social media.

27:15 Don’t worry, it’s all going to be OK. The internet’s going to return to its social roots. The internet fought off the military. It fought off Wall Street. And now it’s going to be the People’s Net.

27:24 I wrote this cover story for Yahoo. People’s Net, it’s going to be a social medium. And then social media companies came up. The sort of blogger was considered. Then Friendster.

27:32 This is great. But then they all accepted VC. They all had to grow to 100x proportions in 18 months. And they pivoted away from their social missions and became just shills for Wall Street. Yeah.

27:48 Did you ever think a Facebook will get as big as it is today? I didn’t. I didn’t. I thought Facebook would ultimately fail at becoming at least this big because it’s so cumbersome. The experience of Facebook, and maybe this is oddly enough, even though I was Cyberboy in the early 90s.

28:08 Now I’m an old guy. But my visceral experience of Facebook is of being manipulated and shepherded. It feels heavy to me. It’s like the old AOL. It wants to recapitulate the entire internet inside its little closed walled garden.

28:30 And when I compare the Facebook experience to the Twitter experience, Twitter is light. I see who I’m subscribed to. They see me. I say my thing. I’m in.

28:41 I’m out. Boom. It’s just flow. I don’t get that same feeling. Hence the valuation of Twitter.

28:50 Twitter only makes $2 billion a year. And the problem is that’s about what it can make. So in the internet, as it’s currently designed, in internet digital economics, making $2 billion a year and plateauing is not permitted. You have to keep growing. And that’s why it’s a mess.

29:15 Not everything scales infinitely. Well, also, Twitter’s not controlling your behavior in the way that Facebook could. Twitter is providing you probably a good service, right? Some connections, some news. I can walk away from it.

29:27 Facebook is making sure you can’t walk away from it. Because I got your memories. I got your kids in there. I got your communication via Messenger. And I’m creating this alternate world that I’m going to tell you is more interesting than your world.

29:40 And I don’t think Twitter ever got there. And that’s partly because, not that they were ethical, but partly because it was a better technology. And the reason why Facebook wins is not because it’s a better technology. The reason why Facebook wins in this scenario is because the underlying operating system of venture capital, of the pyramid scheme, of the growth requirement, favors that. And that’s what I end up writing about.

30:07 You know, central currency, which has an interest imperative. Once you’re using central currency, you’re working for the bank. Because you’re going to pay them back more money than you borrowed in the first place. And once you’re working for the bank, you have to grow. And once you have to grow, you have to manipulate people in order to create more surface area on your company.

30:23 Yeah. Let’s talk on this first, because I want to get to a bunch of other ideas you have. But this idea that, in today’s economy, especially with Facebook, which is a public company now, it has to show quarterly results in order to get great stock prices, which means if they want to raise more money, they can do it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So as opposed to, say, 200 years ago, or maybe that wasn’t true, as opposed to, say, 1,000 years ago, talk about this need for growth, especially these Silicon Alley companies, and why it’s the wrong paradigm, and why it brings us these dehumanizing results, if I’m summarizing that correctly.

30:54 Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I did the history on it, and again, America wasn’t even around when this became embedded in business, but there was a healthy peer-to-peer economy that was emerging in the late Middle Ages. Once the guys came back from the Crusades, they had opened up these trade routes, and they brought back all these other innovations, like the Bazaar, which we called the Marketplace, local currencies, market monies that were basically like poker chips that were issued in the morning just to prime trade between people in the market, and then they expired in the evening.

31:33 So they developed a peer-to-peer economy that led to the rise of the peasant class into the burgers, into what became the bourgeois. The problem was the aristocracy got poor as the burgers got wealthy, so they used laws to prevent all of this. They invented the Chartered Monopoly, which is the proto-corporation, which said no one’s allowed to do business except the King’s Charter, and they invented central currency, which said you’re not allowed to use these market monies anymore that are all optimized for velocity.

32:02 You have to use coin of the realm. Borrow it at interest and pay it back so the wealthy could stay wealthy simply by being wealthy. And that crushed the economy. That led to the plague. That led to, you know, it required growth, so it was great for colonialism.

32:18 It’s what allowed us to, or what spurred us on to take over, you know, America and South America and Africa and enslave all these people and take all their stuff, you know, and work for that. But then what happens? Eventually you reach a wall, which we did at the end of World War II. Where do we expand to these little countries and brown people? They’re fighting back.

32:38 You know, what are we going to do? So we did Bretton Woods, which is another set of history, basically do virtual extraction and extortion, use the World Bank, use the IMF. Here’s some money to develop with. Just pay us back twice what we gave you. So your BNR system and the internet, rather than pushing back on that, rather than changing that, rather than retrieving that peer-to-peer economy, which it really could and still could do, it doubled down on that extractive model.

33:10 So instead of having the British East India Trading Company or Walmart going into a new territory, extracting all the value from that system and then moving on to another one, we have Uber doing it and Amazon doing it or Facebook trying to do it. So the idea of a company that can reach a certain size and then sustain itself by having revenue and giving its shareholder dividends, that’s anathema to this economy. Imagine if you told your shareholders today, we’re not going to grow anymore.

33:40 We’re going to give you great dividends. They don’t want dividends. Dividends are taxed high. Capital gains are taxed low. Why?

33:46 Because the whole economy is configured for this growth model, which worked for colonial expansion but doesn’t work for a planet that’s trying to find a sustainable equilibrium. Right, so we’re maturing now. There’s not all these, like you said, huge places with natural resources we can exploit, and now we’re still on this growth model. So we’re kind of eating ourselves. Right, we’re mining human time and human attention.

34:14 Even Wired said it, we’re living in an attention economy because human attention is the only thing that’s scarce, but human attention is the only thing we have. That’s our time. They’re buying and selling human time, and that’s our lives. And we’re paying for it by the zombie occasion of everybody around us. Right, and ourselves, and we all feel it.

34:35 And it’s so easy. And that’s why folks like Sherry Turkle or Nicholas Carr will say, unplug, just unplug. And yeah, there is that. You can unplug, you can make love, you can play cards, you can have a conversation, you can not produce or consume. There is that, but one, I don’t know, I’d rather push through than retreat.

34:58 Yeah, talking about some of these other companies, we’ve been beating up Facebook pretty good, and by the way, we’re streaming a lot of Facebook. And we’re streaming on Facebook at this moment. God bless. And you’re almost a Facebook-colored vest. Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

35:10 Uber, what do you see when you see Uber? Some people see an amazing, low-cost way to pick me up at my doorstep and go somewhere else. Why do you see something different? Well, the only reason I see something different with Uber or any other company is because, just like a Buddhist, I’m trying to widen my attention range and see what’s being externalized by the company. See, externalities are things that, corporations are really good.

35:36 You’re like, you externalize the pollution. You externalize, you know, so I’ve got my beautiful Bauhaus-designed iPhone. It’s externalized the little brown children in the Congo who are going into caves at gunpoint to get the molybdenum or the Coltran to charge the battery. They’re externalizing when I’m done with the phone. I don’t see that being taken to China and dumped into a toxic mountain that little families are looking at to take it apart and sell the things.

36:13 So when I look at Uber, I see the cabbie that’s been put out of work. I see the person who’s doing Uber as a second job and not actually even making enough money with Uber to pay for the car that he’s supplied and the gas that he’s supplying and the time that he’s supplying. He must be making some money or he wouldn’t work there. I’ve been talking to everyone I know who’s working with or for Uber and they’re all like, yeah, I really can’t do it anymore. Really?

36:41 And here, especially because there’s no competition for Uber. I don’t hear that. I hear we don’t make as money as we used to, but the usual comment I get is I can choose my own hours and at least I know that the dispatcher isn’t making games on me. That’s what they say to me. Right, and what is an Uber driver really if you look at the big picture?

36:58 An Uber driver is the research and development arm for Uber’s automated vehicles. That’s what an Uber driver is doing is training the algorithm to drive in his place. That’s one way of looking at it, okay. He’s providing the service as well. But that’s what I see.

37:17 Okay, that’s what you see. When I see Uber, I see here’s a company that went after the low-hanging fruit of an inefficient cab industry in order to establish a monopoly and it’s just going to leverage that monopoly to go do drones or robots or something else. It doesn’t really care. But it does make transportation amazingly efficient here and it’s saved me a lot of time and it’s put the right people together with the right resources. So if it was a peer-to-peer network, you could argue it’s been a success.

37:48 If it was owned by the drivers, it would be a heck of a lot more interesting. That’s one way of looking at it. But if it was the same service and exchange of goods and money, then it’s the same thing, right? Yeah, but the whole techno-solutionist worldview is that we can come in and basically turn human beings into the Internet of Things. So we’re going to have a just-in-time ready, as if efficiency really is the goal.

38:19 Yeah, humans are inefficient. Machines are more efficient than we are. If we really want efficiency, just get rid of the humans altogether. Well, we’re going to get to that shortly. All right, let me just finish with my defense of the capital market.

38:34 So, you know, I was in Wall Street for a while. I started there. I work in banking here for nine years, as you know, in the credit derivatives market. For the last six years, I’ve been repenting for my sins and hopefully I’m getting back to equal by talking to great people like you. But some would argue capital markets and efficient access to capital at the right price to build the right things and move goods and services and build amazing things in the world.

38:57 And the Limited Liability Corporation, which gets beat up all the time, of course, and in this case, we’re beating them up right now. They’ve also allowed amazing innovations to happen, amazing great things over time to set up an idea that’s not going to come back and throw me into debtors’ prison or put me in trouble for trying an idea. Are these not good things? Capital is fabulous. It’s fabulous.

39:20 And as Adam Smith said, as long as you understand that the three factors of production are land, labor, and capital, you can use capital to build stuff, right? We want to make a bridge. We don’t have enough money to get… Who’s going to… Capital! That’s great.

39:38 Now, where are we going to build the bridge? Okay, on this land here, how is it going to affect all these people? How is it going to affect the flow of traffic? What about this guy who lives here and that one? That’s the land part.

39:49 Or where are we going to grow this food? Are we going to just destroy the topsoil here by putting in some Monsanto, you know, crazy bioagromutation? Or are we going to somehow understand that the land is an important asset here? What about the labor? What about the humans?

40:06 The workers. Are we going to just extract value from them and cast them out? Or are they going to participate? Are they going to have a seat at the table? If land and labor had a seat at the table with capital, then you wouldn’t see digital companies behaving the way they do.

40:24 But right now, capital is the only one with a seat at the table. You’ve got the founder and his VC, and they use their big pot of money to, well, to lobby, as we say in America, you know, to lobby to change laws or to leverage labor. So we’re going to wake up with a huge hangover one day because we’ve been maximizing profits and maximizing growth and dehumanizing the world in the process and killing our labor and all these other pieces. And we’re not maximizing profit.

41:00 If you look at the Deloitte shift index, Deloitte Touche is a big finance firm. The shift index of 2011, what they showed was that corporate profit over corporate size has been decreasing for the past 75 years. This is not even an internet thing. This is all the way back to World War II. Corporate profit over corporate size.

41:20 What does that mean? It means corporations are really good at sucking all the capital off the table, at taking all the money, but they’re really increasingly worse at deploying the assets they’ve accumulated. So they have an obesity problem. They’re getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So they’ll go, like Amazon or Uber, into a marketplace, into a vertical, and extract all the value from it by creating efficiencies.

41:44 They’ll extract all the value because we don’t really have to pay you, and it doesn’t matter if you leave and we’re going to replace you with a machine anyway. It doesn’t matter if the topsoil’s gone because Monsanto’s going to come and grow crap on there for a few years and kill people later, but that’s going to help the medical partner aware. It’s all good. You extract all the money, and then there’s no more market. So what these companies are doing is actually destroying the markets on which they depend.

42:07 And traditionally, like a Walmart or a regular company, they could just move to another market. Move to another market, and there’s always China. Move over there. But what they’ve done is destroyed the topsoil. They’ve destroyed the markets on which they depend, and now they’re sitting on this money and they can’t deploy it.

42:24 So what do they do? They do mergers and acquisitions because they can’t actually innovate anymore. And as you know, 80% of mergers and acquisitions end up losing money for both sides because they’re not real acquisitions. They’re just buying a company for its innovation and then because it’s part of this monolith, now they can’t innovate either. So coming to the end of this is what you’re saying.

42:44 Bad business. Even though we don’t know it. We don’t know it’s bad business because they’re just folks. They do know it. And I’ve spoken with the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies.

42:53 These are the biggest ones in the world. I’ve sat with them in their offices and two different Fortune CEOs have wept in their offices with me because one of them, because he knew he was cannibalizing his own company. The shareholders were forcing him to sell what are called his most productive assets. These are the assets that actually have employees and did things. Like when GE sold off its washing machine business because they realized they make less money selling a washing machine than they do lending money to someone to buy a washing machine.

43:22 A washing machine business, you have employees. You have health insurance. You have materials. Screw all that. Let’s just go abstract.

43:29 Let’s become a money company. So they sold off all their productive assets. I’ve been with another CEO who had done a talk, a big talk online about how this person was going to shift the company towards doing healthier things, and the share price dropped immediately because they wanted the company to do unhealthy things, the things that it had always done. So these CEOs do see it, but they understand that they are incentivized for the 18-month window to create growth.

43:58 I was at a Fortune 100 company’s annual shareholder meeting and they had everybody shouting, chanting, 5.2, 5.2. That was their growth target for the year. Is that Walmart? No, no, no. It was a soft drink company.

44:13 Soft drink company. And I got up there to do my keynote and I said, Jesus Christ, you guys are one of the 50 biggest companies in the world and you’re chanting 5.2, 5.2. If you’re not big enough, then we’re all screwed. We’re all screwed. If you have to grow…

44:29 But there are shareholders pushing this action and those are human beings. So what are we, just stupid? Are the shareholders stupid? We are stupid. We are stupid.

44:38 They accept the rules of growth-based corporate capitalism as the underlying condition of nature. So we’re killing ourselves. They don’t want dividends because dividends get taxed at a high rate. They want capital gains which are taxed at a low rate. So it’s even built into the legal policy structure is to favor growth over revenue.

44:58 So we’re slowly killing ourselves with the wrong paradigm and one day we’re going to have this realization that our dogma is completely wrong but by then hopefully it’s not too late where we haven’t killed our own brains or killed our own culture. Or our own planet. Or own planet. Okay, let me tell you a couple more companies and then I want to go down to that stuff. And you know who gets this though?

45:17 Who? Oddly enough. And I don’t like to say good things about it. But the CEOs understand it. Because they have the inside look, right?

45:23 Right. They get to see the inside of the company, the reality. They get shareholders that are going to sack them if they don’t get rid of the washing machine company because they will. Yeah. And so they’re probably the most conflicted.

45:34 They are because some CEOs… Some CEOs? I know. And some CEOs, they actually like the industry they’re in. Right?

45:41 They actually like you. That’s why they’re there. We’re a good company. Actually they like competence. You know?

45:46 It’s like if you love hotels and you run a hotel chain you’re going to get booted. Because you want it to be good. You want the carpets to be clean. Right. You know?

45:53 You just love that. You love what you do. You know, that doesn’t work. But you know who kind of gets the long term picture? The Chinese.

45:59 Really? Interestingly enough. They don’t have the same colonial understanding. Right. They have a long history.

46:07 And they understand. We are China. They don’t see themselves as owning the world. They see themselves as the center of the world. Okay.

46:14 And that’s kind of a difference. You know? And they’re doing way more environmental research and development than we are in the West right now. Okay. They get accused of doing all the damage.

46:26 They are doing damage. But that’s because they see the damage. It’s interesting what they do now. They’ll shame. They have online sites.

46:33 They will shame companies that go over their carbon emission quota. And like the whole nation will boycott them. Really? We’ve got to talk about the Chinese later. Because they get kind of this faceless, the Chinese are doing these things.

46:45 They’re building our hardware. They’re ruining the planet with resources. They’re going into the African countries. I want to talk about that. They are doing, I mean, some real nasty, nasty stuff.

46:55 But they do have a slightly different approach. Okay. There’s certain things that we could probably adopt. Let me throw a few of the names out here. Google or Alphabet.

47:07 What’s going on with this company? You’ll read on it. We’re also being probably watched at some point now on YouTube, which is owned by Google. So again, my hat’s off to the other digital media companies. What do you see when you see Google?

47:21 When I see Google as a company that got so big that they became a holding company. Google was two kids in a Stanford dorm room who came up with a kind of a peer-to-peer style algorithm to take down Yahoo. Yahoo were the big bad guys then. Right. They were the guys that were abusing the internet for their own corporate gains and being a portal.

47:46 You get to see what we show you. The people and the bottom-up collection and all that. And now that that company… I mean, on the one hand, and I called the book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, not because I think people should, but because the real image of people in Oakland and San Francisco lying down in front of Google buses or throwing rocks at them because they understand that this company is hurting the real world that we live in. So San Francisco rents went up, people couldn’t live there anymore, and the company was using public bus stops to transport its employees back and forth on these buses.

48:20 It felt to people like the alien mothership had come down and they’re being shipped back and forth on these transports while their own town becomes unaffordable and they have to leave. So the good guys, at least to the people in the real world, felt like they were becoming the bad guys. But what I really see is a company that got too big, that got unmanageable, that got to the point where, if we are, we’re a bank. So Google is now a company that buys and sells technology companies to make money rather than innovating itself.

48:54 That’s what I see. And that was the creation of Alphabet. I actually saw Eric Schmidt speak on stage about a year ago. I was actually interviewing someone on stage and he came on and I had to remind myself he works for Alphabet now, not Google, and I don’t think people even understand the difference. Right.

49:09 Or does he work for the NSA? His entire hour-long speech was fascinating. It was an interview and he really talked a lot about politics and how, and law, and how, as a CEO, the biggest thing on his mind was trying to get around like antitrust stuff and how, at his level, he’s pushing back against government lobbying and all these things. And I thought it was really revealing and a little scary because I thought he might talk about innovation and all these kind of touchy-feely human things.

49:39 Yeah. So now, who does he work for? I don’t know, the NSA. But Google itself doesn’t really exist. It’s now one entity…

49:46 Inside Alphabet. Inside of Alphabet, which I think has an entity for every letter of the alphabet, which is… Oh, is that what they’ve done? Yeah. That’s cute.

49:54 Which sounds actually like a really scary sci-fi movie because A for this and B is for this and this is for this and X is for their division with all the weird stuff and G is actually Google. That’s why they call it Alphabet. And I think each one has a division. And you’re saying now they don’t create things. They buy and sell technology like Goldman Sachs.

50:10 Are you taking a little too far here, Douglas, or is that really fair, that analogy? I think it’s fair when you become a holding company… You call a horse a horse? Yeah, it’s a holding company. There might be companies in there that are going to innovate, you know, so I always thought it was interesting they bought that robot, the robot-killing company or whatever, the robot war plays and then got rid of it.

50:33 Right. Was that that company in New England they bought? Yeah, yeah. They owned that, right? Yeah, but now they sold it.

50:39 Oh, they did, okay. It’s a scary animal-like drone. Yeah. It’s very scary. Okay, what about Airbnb?

50:44 But the other thing I see when I see Google is Ray Kurzweil sitting in the middle of Google as chief scientist. And Ray Kurzweil is a singularitarian. Ray Kurzweil is a guy who really believes that humans will be and should be replaced by computers, that we’re going to upload to Silicon, that we are just one step in information’s evolution towards greater states of complexity. And we should surrender past the torch onto Silicon that what they’re building, Google is building the AI of the future.

51:16 They’re building a home for Kurzweil’s brain. Okay. And so when I see that and I realize… What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with that is, and I get it’s an unpopular position, but I still think there’s a place for human beings in the future of our civilization.

51:35 I do. I think human beings are more complicated than the algorithmic representations of us. I think that there’s aspects of humans that haven’t yet been successfully modeled. I think there’s nooks and crannies of people. And I think that human awareness and the human ability to contend with and sustain paradox and ambiguity is real.

51:59 You know, like the moment when your dog goes, humans can live in that space. Computers can’t. Computers resolve one way or the other. Even if it’s fuzzy and an approximation, it’s still, they resolve. They don’t wonder.

52:12 They don’t experience awe. And I think that’s a valuable thing to just… I know I’m almost hopeless romantic, but I still think there’s a place for humans in civilization. Who doesn’t think there’s a place for humans? Well, you just asked why I make this argument.

52:27 Yeah, I’m asking that. Because when I argue this, in Silicon Valley, when I argue to people like Ray Kurzweil, they say, oh Doug, you just say that because you’re human. As if it’s hubris. That’s why I’m doing Team Human, the Team Human podcast. So you’re taking the torch for us humans.

52:44 As opposed to us just becoming extinct like every other animal that no longer had a use in this world. That’s the way Ray looks at it. As in like, okay, our time has come. It was a good run. But now, if you really want to preserve yourself, you can upload it into the cloud and then you can continue to live forever.

53:02 But it’s just, you’re being biased because you’re a human that we should live. And I would argue that the stuff we were talking about before, the captology and all of the stuff that’s being done to reduce human cognition adds fuel to his argument. Like yeah, if we’re going to behave like impulsive, algorithmically driven, super simple reptiles, then he’s right. Then give it up. But you can’t both make technologies that reduce people to reptiles and then argue, well look, human beings are impulsive and stupid.

53:35 They’re working us from both ends of there. Is this just part of their grand plan? Is it first with the addictive social media to dumb us down and take any type of our wonders as human beings before they just extinguish us? They don’t have a grand plan. You said it.

53:52 There’s no conspiracy here. They are responding. They are unconscious. The problem is they think the rules of the marketplace for growth are the same as the rules of nature. They are like misguided libertarians who think that you have to grow all the time.

54:09 Look at a coral reef. That’s not nature. A coral reef reaches a certain size and then circulates. Not everything in nature grows infinitely. The planet has a certain, the planet’s not growing infinitely.

54:23 Forests don’t grow infinitely. They grow to a certain size and then they recirculate. And that’s the same way. If you really want to have a market that’s based in nature, you have to understand that nature reaches certain kinds of equilibriums. Okay, you predict the future on a regular basis.

54:41 You can read some of your old books and it’s uncanny how true they are of what’s going to happen coming forward. How does this end? 20 years from now, 50 years, 100 years from now, how does this end? Well, I never really go out that far. I’m not optimistic, but I’m hopeful.

54:59 You know, so I try to figure, I try to visualize how could it end well. I mean, I’m looking at, you know, worst case, and it’s not so bad. I mean, worst case, not that many of us make it through, but enough of us make it through to preserve civilization. So you figure, it’s like Terminator in the movie, like literally, there’s the machines going around and we’re there. It’s not that awful.

55:26 It’s more like we just do such things to our environment that, you know, that it becomes really hard for people to stay alive. Or we plague ourselves with something, you know, or, you know, Monsanto makes something that it turns out, oops, you know, and something happens and then only, you know, half a billion of us survive. But half a billion people is still enough. There’ll be poets and astrophysicists and brain surgeons and, you know, we’ll get Wikipedia back up and, you know, we’ll figure it out.

55:56 But I feel like I’m looking at that as worst case, that we do catastrophic things, but enough of us are able to survive to get things going. We don’t go down to the warlords, you know, walking dead level of civilization. I don’t think it gets to that. But it’s such an unnecessary downsizing. It’s such an unnecessary amount of pain.

56:22 So I really think, I really do believe that our economic model is the easy access point. That’s the high leverage point from which to sort of change this. So if a company like Twitter can be considered successful, we’d be a long way towards developing an economy that supports good businesses. Right, so it’s redefining our metrics of success. Right.

56:51 Okay, and I would argue if this system truly is broken, at one day it’s going to break. And that break is probably a catastrophic event where we all look around and say, oh my God, Douglas was right. The last 50 years we’ve been chasing this digital growth, 20 years, whatever the hell it is, and look what we’ve been doing now. Maybe that event is that we’ve lobotomized ourselves and our kids don’t even look at us anymore, or maybe that global, you know, environmental disaster, or something where it just, boom, like a 9-11 event of wake up, you haven’t been looking at the world right, you haven’t been evaluating things right, there’s things that you just assumed were right that were wrong.

57:29 Is that how that ends? You know, you would think so, but I thought that the stock market crashed, the derivatives crash and all that would have woken people up to that. But instead, again, it’s just like, you know, instead of using digital technology to develop a peer-to-peer economy, we used it to double down on the worst aspects of a VC economy, we bailed out the worst players, you know, in order to perpetuate that system. And I thought foolishly that someone like Obama would have said, oh, this is, you know, this is how we fix this.

58:06 You know, I’m a community organizer and I’m gonna help communities develop local economies. I’m gonna send out a PDF that shows economies how to make a local currency, how to create a favor bank, how to develop, you know, local economic resiliency. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he supported the most brittle supply chain of capital that he could have supported. Right, right.

58:26 Well, first of all, I am on Team Human with you. I think that as humans, since we have this physical space, we know our time here is limited. We know we evolve, we have these bodies that break and we get hungry and we get sad and all that stuff. It makes this fascinating organism that we still have no idea how we understand it. I agree.

58:45 We don’t know so many things. And so I’m on your team as opposed to Team Kurzweil. I mean, I like Ray, but come on. I don’t understand why you would want to upload yourself to the cloud. I don’t understand how we could exist.

58:57 There’s something about being this animal and also this intellectual that I’d like to keep going. So wish me on that. Because we die. I think people are still afraid of dying. Oh, and so this is the way to try to engineer that out forever.

59:09 Yeah. These crazy megalomania max in Silicon Valley with not only all the capital behind them, the billions that they can screw around with, but also the social capital of them being told that they are God, that they go for these crazy things. Yeah. At the same time, I’m trying to… I’m not saying it’s right, but I’m trying on the worldview that guys like Elon Musk or whoever, or Peter Thiel, and these folks who then warn us about, oh, AI is coming, or even Kurzweil talking about the future AI and how they’re going to manipulate us, that they’re doing that just to sell their technology, that these obscene algorithms, they’re pretty friggin’ simple.

1:00:00 It’s like 12 lines of code, and that thing’s going to take… Yeah, I know they iterate and learn, but maybe this old AI thing is a bit of a ruse designed to get us to think, oh, just like people used to talk about the world wide web as if it was this big mysterious thing, maybe AI is not really so scary after all. Okay, you think so? Well, we’re going to have to see. Well, we’re going to have to see.

1:00:24 Talk to me about this concept of present shock. For people that are watching us right now, a lot of what we’re talking about might make sense to them, but I don’t know if they really understand what they deal with on a daily basis. What’s going on from your viewpoint? How has that human experience changed? Because it’s a lot like a fish who doesn’t know that he’s in water, right?

1:00:46 That’s something I ripped from Terrence McKenna. Who ripped it from McLuhan? Yeah, exactly. Thank you. So explain what’s going on in our daily lives for people that don’t know and how their reality is potentially not the reality they think it is, and what’s this whole concept of present shock?

1:01:02 Well, present shock is the human response to living in a world without beginning or end, without cause and effect, where you’re under this kind of constant assault of things saying, now, now, now, now, now, and you feel the need to catch up. So present shock is when you open your Twitter feed and say, oh my God, 500 tweets have happened. How am I going to scroll down to get to that? I’ve got to catch up somehow with that. It’s the reversal where you think that you need to catch up with your technology as if your technology is in the now rather than you.

1:01:44 So there’s a bunch of ways, you know, one way of experiencing present shock is something I call digifrenia, which is this need to have multiple instances of yourself happening simultaneously. So there’s you here now, there’s you on Facebook, there’s you on Twitter, and something’s happening on Facebook in your Facebook account right now. Somebody, you might have said something, who knows, something could be blowing up, you know, because of something I said on this live Facebook feed, now people could be commenting, oh no, Rushkoff’s a racist or something, you know, who knows, because I made some comment that I don’t realize is racist or, you know, or some code for some evil group or, oh no, you know, and they’re all stacking up.

1:02:26 So in the back of your head is the sense of I have to maintain all these different me’s at the same time or what happens to the drone pilot. You know, drone pilots have more PTSD than real pilots and that’s because the drone pilot, I think, he’s, you know, bombing people, you know, one minute and then going home to his family the next so he’s not really in the battlefield. There’s two instances of him. There’s the military one and the home one. How do you reconcile those two things?

1:02:57 You can’t. So it’s really, you know, part of present shock, this desire to break ourselves up into many pieces is our human beings trying to act like computers. You know, computers have random access memory. They break up a problem and put it in many and they do parallel processing on that problem and then bring all the pieces back together. People can’t do parallel processing, you know, but we try to.

1:03:20 We try to do this multitasking thing, but we’re really just switching in series from event to event to event to event. That’s disruptive to our sense of continuity. Okay, right, because humans can’t multitask. Can we say that once and for all? They really can’t.

1:03:34 Thank you. All right, what do we do about this? First of all, most people probably don’t know they’re in present shock, but say they’re listening to us now and they’re like, actually, Douglas has a point. My mobile device is constantly panicking me into all these different states to be concerned about maybe different means on different platforms. More importantly, to be concerned about thousands of situations around the world that I’m supposed to be invested in.

1:03:57 I’ve got to be invested in Rwanda and China and now London because of the London Bridge and now there’s congressmen that got shot and I’m emotionally drained. What can they do to get their presence back? I mean, two things. One is realize that digital technologies are asynchronous. They’re not in real time.

1:04:14 You know, that’s what we realized back on the bulletin boards. Bulletin boards like the well or use net. What you would do is you’d plug into the computer, you would download the conversation, you would unplug from the net, you’d read the conversation, you’d spend hours coming up with a paragraph and then upload it. You would sound so smart in that conversation because you leverage time. Then we decided we’d make more money if we strapped these devices to people and have them ping us every time someone updates you or Facebooks you or tweets about you so you live in this state of kind of perpetual emergency interruption where you’re trying to constantly catch up and keep up rather than be at home in real time.

1:04:53 You’re trying to keep up with all that. That sense of presence shock. So one is to use the technology in an asynchronous way. You go onto it but then go off of it. Realize that if someone sends you an email, that doesn’t deserve a response right away.

1:05:09 If someone texts you, it doesn’t deserve a response right away. They’re not calling you on the phone, they’re not ringing you, they’re not tapping you and saying, hey, they’re taking a message and putting it in your file set. They’re putting it on your hard drive. Screw them. I’ll get to it when I get to it.

1:05:25 You relegated it, the messenger relegated it to an asynchronous space. Why do I have to treat that asynchronous space as if it’s on? It’s not. You put something in my mailbox. I’m not getting my mail this second.

1:05:39 I’m going to get it when I’m done urinating. Thank you very much. So there’s that. And then all of a sudden when you’re doing technology in your own time rather than in its time, you’re in command. The second thing you can do is try to reacquaint yourself with the mechanisms that human beings have had to moderate their time, the ones we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, the kinds of stuff Joe Rogan will talk about.

1:06:07 You know, look outside occasionally. Know whether it’s night or day to start. That’s a real great start. Is it daytime or nighttime? Then know what phase in the moon you’re in.

1:06:20 If you know what phase of the moon you’re in, if you go outside enough to at least look at the moon once a night, then what that does is it tells your body, am I in the first week of the lunar cycle, the second week, the third week, the fourth. And when your body knows that, you actually do different things. In the first week of a lunar cycle, you tend to release acetylcholine. The second week you release serotonin. The third week is dopamine.

1:06:48 The fourth week is norepinephrine. These are very different neurochemicals, which engender different states of mind. And ancient cultures, aboriginal cultures, indigenous cultures understood how the moon worked. That’s why they would have a party during dopamine week. It’s dopamine week.

1:07:03 They get work done during serotonin week. They start projects in acetylcholine. So when you understand, they didn’t know about dopamine and serotonin, but they knew even the people, the woodcutters of Europe, the ancient ones understood, depending on what phase of the moon you cut the tree down in, its pores are gonna be open or closed and the wood’s gonna dry out faster or slower. And it’s gonna work more or less. So they understood these sort of biodynamic processes.

1:07:30 And when you reconnect with some of your evolved chronobiological rhythms, you end up so much more grounded, so much more together. Right, and why am I, as a human, affected by the moon? Why does that affect my state? Is it just another thing that we don’t yet know about our own human organism, of why it triggers all these different chemicals in life? Why do women have periods every moon cycle?

1:07:56 You know, it’s because… So we should stop trying to figure out why and just accept it and use it? Because our glands, our endocrine system, needed ways of measuring time. And we could measure time by the cycles that were around the organism. Okay, and that was something that gave us like a 30-day time frame, as opposed to a 24-hour time frame, which was the sun.

1:08:24 That’s why jet lag, you know? Jet lag… People didn’t even, you know… So here I’m talking about chronobiology and moon rhythm. People laugh, right?

1:08:32 Some scientists, some medical doctors go, oh my God, that’s crazy stuff. Yeah, I didn’t expect you to come up with something like this cycle. It seems kind of off topic from what we talked about. But, you know, they made the same critique of jet lag. You know, it wasn’t until really sabermetrics when major league statistics started to show that pictures that went from the east coast to the west coast did worse than pictures going from the west coast to the east coast, that they went, oh, I guess this jet lag thing is real.

1:09:06 And now we’re understanding that jet lag isn’t even you. Jet lag is the bacteria in your body that get all disoriented. Because now we know we’re 98% bacteria and like 2% human, you know, because of all these, you know, gut biome kind of stuff. So it’s the bacteria which have really short life cycles. They’re the ones who get all confused by, you know, sunlight and the change in the day cycle.

1:09:27 Right, and that’s what freaks us out. All right, so we need to get back in touch with being human. Why not? This is a bit of a theme here, right? Because it hasn’t been that long that we’ve been disconnected.

1:09:35 Our organisms haven’t had time to evolve and catch up. It’s funny how the computers that we built and then we taught how to do things like parallel processing and random access memory. And I learned how to code Fortran and Pascal when I was a kid. Pascal! Yeah, Pascal, right?

1:09:51 No, that’s the only language I can do. And Pascal, to me, makes so much more sense than these. I can’t do these new ones. Yeah, than the C++ and everything else evolved. And I remember learning these as a kid.

1:09:59 And so I learned how to code, right? And so I’m like, okay, now we know how to code. And then it wasn’t too much further, where then now people think, oh, I can be a computer. I can multitask. I can do all this other stuff, which is obviously going a little too far because I don’t believe one can do all those things.

1:10:14 Right. And then all of a sudden now, okay, the computers are around us and now they are interrupting our present. And so one of the things we do here with our London realers and we’ve got thousands of them that come into our academy is we have something called a life accelerator and we put them on a low-media diet that first week. And I’m telling you, they cry and they push back and like three weeks later I actually take them off sugar for a week and that’s another physical like, oh my gosh, but I would argue the low media is even worse.

1:10:39 I might as well have taken their heroin away for the week and I put them on one hour a day and that includes and they turn off all push notifications. They turn off everything that buzzes and beeps on that phone. The only reason they’re allowed to pick the phone up is someone rings them on the phone. That means someone has to have a number and another human has to be willing to call someone, which involves a human interaction, not a synchronized interaction.

1:11:02 And that’s foreign to most people. Most people are on like 10 different news apps. They have to delete them. One woman says, Brian, I have 10 different news apps. I’m like, why?

1:11:10 Because you’re addicted. You’re addicted to this device. And so that means one hour, that includes reading. That includes magazines, free newspapers, podcasts, YouTube, everything. And they get time.

1:11:23 Now they spend time with themselves and they get to think about who they really are and they get connected. And what do I do, Brian? Go for a walk. Go for a workout. Go out in nature.

1:11:32 What a crazy idea. And it has these really changing transformations on people. And I was surprised, but out of 18 things we teach, it’s the one people said had the biggest change on their life. And yet without me telling them to do it for six weeks, they wouldn’t have done it. And the funny thing is, you know, people will look at that.

1:11:49 They’ll hear that you did this exercise with people. They’ll hear me talking and they’ll say, oh, look at these anti-technology guys. And it’s like, we’re not anti-technology guys. We’re streaming live on Facebook. And they’ll say that the fact that we’re streaming live on Facebook now is it exposes the hypocrisy of our message.

1:12:06 And we’re not saying that. It’s like, you know, you’re not going to tell that person, don’t eat, just eat less or eat appropriately. That there are ways to bring digital technology into your life, but you have to understand you’re bringing it into your life. You have to understand that every app that you put on your phone is a business plan that you’re welcoming into your life. And if you think of it that way, not conspiratorial, it’s just this app has its own needs.

1:12:34 It’s coming into the ecosystem of my phone. It’s not that it’s viral. It’s that it’s going to assert itself. And do I welcome that? Do I need that?

1:12:44 Do I want… How many girlfriends can you have at once, you know? And they’re going to sleep over. They’re going to look at your stuff, you know? That’s what the app is.

1:12:52 It’s sleeping over. It’s looking at your stuff. It might decide to do something to you someday. Yeah, it’s on when you don’t even think it’s on. And you’re sleeping next to it.

1:13:00 Yeah, and again, I mean, I run a new media company. I love media. I depend on this message. I depend on Facebook and YouTube for this message, but use technology when you choose to use it and use it on a really limited basis. That’s hard, though, because the apps, especially Facebook, is really good at this, is trying to get you to conform to its sense of when you need it.

1:13:20 Yeah. Do you know how many times I’ve told Messenger I do not want push notifications? It still prompts me once every 24 to 48 hours for push notifications on my phone. It prompts me. And I’m no, no, no, no, no.

1:13:32 It’s still trying to get in there. But what you can do is you can fool it. What you do is mute all of your contacts. So then you can let it push, but you’ve individually muted everybody. Okay, let’s turn it back.

1:13:45 Very nice. And so that’s why we say media diet as well, because people don’t understand that it is a constant consuming process. And I’ll tell you one other epiphany we had on this course is that when it comes to your physical food diet, most of us know what we put in our mouths. Now, some people can eat a candy bar without remembering that they eat it. But most of us know that you put this in your mouth and if you look out your day, you’re like, I eat that.

1:14:07 I shouldn’t have that pizza. I shouldn’t have this. But with media, you don’t know you’re consuming it. So it’s that radio station that goes into your ear when you’re in the Uber. Hopefully, you’re not in the Uber.

1:14:17 Or it’s that free newspaper on the tube here where you see, oh, my God, the royal family did what? And it’s the this and the this and the this and the this and then it’s infecting in you and you become this person you don’t want to be. And so we don’t know as humans that we’re consuming this stuff. So that’s why we say you’re going on a low-media diet where you’re actually now, for the first time in your life, making a conscious decision of what’s going on in your brain.

1:14:38 Because like you said, you don’t know that these business plans are coming into your life. You don’t know that you all of a sudden have 14 girlfriends. And we don’t know who they’re becoming. But you do see, I mean, young people, I actually way more faith in young people now to to not to resist. Resistance still feels so electronic-erodomy, like resistors, you know, but to oppose.

1:14:59 That’s more digital because it’s one of the other. To oppose this like the vinyl rebirth, you know, vinyl record. Why would a kid buy a vinyl record when he could just stream on Pandora? Because they want something to hold and because it does. It sounds different.

1:15:16 It moves your body. When you put in a little earbuds and listen to some low-res MP3, you’re hearing what the song is like, but you’re not listening to music. Music is something that actually speakers, I mean, well, I was a bit of a bass head too at the time, you know, when you hang on the speakers and feel it. But music on stereo, I mean, because you were around in the 70s and 80s, music is a thing that moves the air in the room and affects your body. So you put a record on in a ritual.

1:15:43 It’s 20 minutes. Sometimes enjoying it with others as well. Right. Right. So you could drink a protein mix thing.

1:15:53 Nothing against Joe Rogan. You could drink your fuel or you can have a meal. You know, it’s everything, you know, how you shit, how you eat, how you walk, how you sleep. This is the time of your life. This is it.

1:16:08 And I bet on humanity in the long run. That’s why you see kids going back to vinyl. Humans, okay, we can go way off the reservation for a while. But I think something deep down inside us knows that it’s wrong that the family’s at our mobile phone during dinner. We know there’s something wrong about some of these things.

1:16:23 And I think we do know and we can course correct it. Right. As long as there’s not all these factors against us. So, you know, when people try these things right away, they’re like, oh my gosh, this really worked. Oh my gosh, meditation worked for me.

1:16:35 Yeah. Oh my gosh, I’m in touch with myself. I’m killing my own food and cooking my own meal. What a concept. I’m listening to a piece of music, you know, on the airwaves with people around me.

1:16:44 And we have to hope that having those experiences will then trickle up into the way human beings make choices. And that will include investors and VC people and developers. And you see now, kids in Silicon Valley, developers who come up with companies, they are now seeking lower valuations, you know, less venture capital. They’re trying to do convertible debt rather than do a Series A right away. Why is that?

1:17:09 Because they know, because they watch the HBO show, Silicon Valley. And they even are learning from that, that the young CEO figured out in comedy, oh, if I took a lower valuation, it would have been better, not a higher one. So, if it’s on an HBO comedy written by the Beavis and Butthead creator, I think it’s trickling down to the way we actually choose to do things. Yeah, definitely. A couple weeks ago, I took a walk through Hampstead Heath here in London with…

1:17:39 Speaking of Rupert Sheldrake. Yeah, funny enough. Which is where they live. And he lives up there, and I actually bumped into him a couple weeks ago. I was running through the Heath, and Rupert’s been on the show before, and I know him, of course.

1:17:48 And I walked by him, and he just told me all this stuff that was happening up there. But I was walking around with his friend, the one and only Dennis McKenna. And so we decided to have what we call a moving conversation here on Unreal. And it’s like this, but we walked and talked. Yeah, beautiful.

1:18:03 So you get these different kinds of conversations. We’ll do one next time. And we walked through the Heath, and it was designed, because Dennis talks about plant intelligence, right? And so Dennis is very aware of what’s happening in this world. Obviously, he’s got a long, crazy history with his brother Terrence and the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.

1:18:19 And he was at La Chorera in 1971 searching for one thing and finding the magic mushrooms and all that stuff. But we were there really to talk about plant intelligence and in the way of what you were talking about earlier, that all of these plants around us that we don’t really understand what’s going on, that there’s a lot of intelligence here. And if you want to take it a little further, maybe the plants are guiding us in some way. And when it comes to, say, the plant psychedelic ayahuasca or these other things that the plants are doing, maybe they’re slowly giving us the information and the lessons that we need to course correct.

1:18:52 And I’m curious, to get your thoughts, do you think plants might ultimately help us on this war on consciousness that we’re having with ourselves? I just want to get your thoughts. Yeah, plants will help us. But it might be a painful set of lessons. I mean, right now, I guess in actuality, rural and urban land use have reversed.

1:19:26 It used to be cities in the middle of these giant farm agricultural or rural regions. Now, it’s little rural pockets inside an urban sprawl. I mean, you look at Europe from a satellite, and there’s houses everywhere, and then these little patches of plant life. And plants, it’s really hard for them to survive in there. There are these plant plagues going on.

1:19:58 I know there’s conspiracy theories about it, but all the olive trees in Italy all got that bacterial plague. I mean, Monsanto will figure out something to help it, which is why people expect, if they’re the benefactor, maybe they hired someone to drop it in there. Or in New York, you go up and down the state highways, the kudzu-type vines have just pulled down everything. And they’ve done that because the soil has been contaminated, just too acidic, so all the microbes that used to help plants do things.

1:20:29 On a surface level, plant intelligence is martyring itself. It’s dying. But other plants are replacing them, just plants that don’t feed us. Plants, different vines that are not useful as agriculture. What about Gaia?

1:20:48 I mean, if Gaia is this organism, do you think there is some power? Do you think it can help us course correct? Or do you think that’s just being too hopeful that it’s going to ultimately say, okay, guys, we’ve got to go back this way? Well, the question is whether Gaia will guide us or reject us. I don’t know that Gaia is conscious in the same way that we are.

1:21:16 I don’t know that Gaia is passive so much. Gaia is groping for intelligence and awareness and all these things. If we continue to move towards unconsciousness, it’s going to have to grow up somewhere else for that. So we’re at such a speed and we’re so capable now as a species that if we continue going toward this unconsciousness, we could literally exterminate Gaia. Right.

1:21:42 Which is why when you get a message from a plant, it’s not like the plant is your parent saying, oh, I care about you and hears it. It’s more like you get a message. It’s hard to describe. What are you talking about in particular? The way that psychedelic plants communicate to people.

1:22:03 Right. And people come back and they use the metaphor of, oh, the plant told me this and the plant told me that. And it leads us to believe that, oh, the plant is a character or a parent who cares about us and is telling us this stuff for our own good. No, it’s not really like that. It’s more like, I understood this.

1:22:22 You know what I mean? Right. So I… What does that mean? It means that I’m not reassured that plants care about us so much as plants are going to tell you like it is.

1:22:41 Okay. They’re giving us the straight up message. Here’s the straight up. Okay. You know, and yeah, I mean, I don’t think they’re not mammals.

1:22:51 It’s not quite the same thing. They’re not… What I find… You know, it’s not like… And what I find when I go and have an ayahuasca ceremony, so that’s drinking this, you know, the two plant species that have been brewed together or psilocybin experience that consume these mushrooms is that it’s telling me something that I already know deep inside me.

1:23:11 But I’ve forgot because I’m so worried about my own dogmas and maybe my own goals and my own personal this and the ego this and that. Not to mention, I’m probably not even present enough to listen to my brain, but I forgot, oh my God, I forgot about all of this here. Look at what we’re doing here. Look at what I’m doing to my life. Look what I’m doing to my fellow human being.

1:23:32 That’s the message I get from the plant. And sometimes it’s brutal. Sometimes it’s shaking. But… How many days or weeks or months even go by in your life without you ever even walking on the earth?

1:23:49 Yeah, very long. You know? And that… What does that do? And I’m not talking about spirituality.

1:23:55 What does that do to your organism? What does that do to all the parts of you that were once grazing on this planet? So we need to be out in nature, being in touch with nature. It’s hard. And not everyone can be.

1:24:08 We live in cities where this is how we are. So we’ve got to find other ways, many of us, to reconnect to what is. You walk around in a park, even that park, I mean you’re not walking on soil anymore. You’re walking on dirt. And that’s kind of different.

1:24:22 So these are just other elements of you kind of getting back and analyzing our present shock as well. So we’re in a city. Not only are we getting all these interrupts and devices, we’re wearing these things on our feet, walking on a piece of concrete, surrounded by buildings. Whereas we probably could use some time with the trees and nature. And at least if we’re going to live like that, make eye contact with other people.

1:24:44 Spend time. Touch them. Use each other rather than, just so sad you walked down, even here, you walked down the public street. You used to see people, people looked at each other, and now they’re in there. It’s like, why bother?

1:25:01 What are you doing? You’re missing the show. Yeah, well, the cities have kind of engineered any traces from the tribalism we used to have. And I don’t know if something, you said or something today, you look at where I live, I walk down this street, I go into this door, I go up to this floor, there’s humans all around me that live in the same city, they speak the same language, they’re British like me. I mean, of course, from all walks of life.

1:25:27 And yet, I don’t say hi. I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t offer to help them with their kids or invite them for a meal. It’s the craziest form of disconnect. Yeah.

1:25:37 I don’t know how to reverse it. It’s hard. Let me finish with psychedelics and we move on something else. What is the role of psychedelics in our humanism and can they fix potentially any of this stuff? They can’t fix it.

1:25:52 I mean, psychedelics are, they’re plant medicine. You know, I mean, I do think that, I do buy Terrence McKenna’s Food of the Gods argument where he believes that human beings and mushrooms kind of co-evolved and we would follow around the cows or whatever prehistoric cows were and we would eat the mushrooms that grew on their dung. And it being part of our diet, it was a bit like what they talk about in Silicon Valley now having micro doses of, they have micro, regular micro doses of mushrooms and it fights depression and leads to some cognitive enhancement and all that.

1:26:33 I buy that, that people lived that way and it, that I don’t even know that you need the heroic trip, but just a mild, mild, regular exposure to psychedelics is certainly better for your brain than mild, regular exposure to glucose. You know, cane sugar, which you could trace to the beginning of the downfall of civilization or caffeine or alcohol or, you know, one of these other more approved substances. Right. So yeah. That have corporations based behind them, of course.

1:27:11 I mean, yeah, psychedelics are really good at helping the fish experience the water. Right. What if you could give a heroic dose to the Elon Musk’s and Peter Thiel’s and Bezos’s and Schmitt’s in the woods? I think they’ve had them. Really?

1:27:26 I would bet you all of them have had heroic doses of psychedelics. Just because you have psychedelics doesn’t mean you see the truth or that you turn or that you, that you take that message in the direction, you know, that we might have decided to do it. Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately it doesn’t. You know, just as I learned with the Internet, just because you go online doesn’t turn you into a Timothy Leary, let’s all connect in the global brain cyberpunk.

1:27:56 You can go online and say, ah, there’s a way to promote corporate capitalism here. Yeah. New derivatives. Yeah. Ultrafast trading. Yay.

1:28:06 Artificial intelligence. No such thing. Okay.

1:28:13 Where is this going? And where is it now? And how is it going to affect us? You know, I spent time with IBM Watson. Okay.

1:28:24 And… Like having drinks, hanging out, watching Jeopardy. Yeah, I chatted her up. He? Him?

1:28:32 Who knows? He said, boy, I think, Watson. With it and its people and, you know, in New York, there’s an instance of Watson in Washington Square Park, basically, or Astra Place. Okay. And…

1:28:45 You can go interact with it? Well, one can. Okay. You got to be really super invited and go through security. Okay.

1:28:51 Every part of you touched and inspected. But right now, Watson as AI is glorified search. It’s search that has the natural language recognition, so it can do… It can search stuff. And then it can access stuff.

1:29:13 And that’s great for playing Jeopardy. Yeah. You know, or it can process out, you know, 10,000 permutations of a chess game for the next eight moves, which is great for beating Kasparov at chess. But it’s not intelligence, as a Buddhist would understand, intelligence. It’s not the element air.

1:29:33 You know? It’s something else. It’s… And, you know, I understand that there’s money in it. And that’s why Google is pushing it, you know, and they’ve pushed way ahead of Apple and its Siri with Google’s, you know, natural language work and its capabilities.

1:29:51 But it’s really… Right now, I think of it as search, not as thought. Okay. Will it become thought, or never? I think it’ll get more…

1:30:05 It’ll get more complicated. But it’s… It’s never contemplating. It’s concluding. It’s searching.

1:30:19 It’s aggregating, concatenating. And it even can go fuzzy, so it’s kind of this. But it’s never staying in between the two things. It’s like a snap-to grid in a graphics program. It’s here, or here, here, or here.

1:30:39 It’s never… Right there. Which is where humans live. Right, okay. And that’s what’s social.

1:30:48 The whole beauty of me looking in your eyes now, and it doesn’t have to be psychedelic, is are we separate things, or are we the same thing? Are you me? Are we one? Are we just two sets of eyes in the same organism now, looking at itself, or are we separate? And it’s kind of both, and we don’t know and we can sort of live with that, and it’s scary and weird and intimate.

1:31:05 What is that? You know, all that stuff that freaks us out. It’s not binary, and it’s not together. It’s something else. Computers, AI don’t know that.

1:31:17 They don’t live in that liminal realm. And that’s intelligence to me, is the ability to tolerate that, to experience the awe without freaking out. It’s like, again, it’s a very psychedelic thing. How do you be there without having a bad trip? Or how do you understand that the only good trip is a bad trip?

1:31:37 You know, that you get through there. Yeah, and that’s a human thing. So, if we don’t have to worry about computers simulating us, because they can’t, based on what you’re just saying. Right, we do have to worry about us simulating them. It’s worse.

1:31:52 I’m less concerned with AIs taking over us, or computers dominating us than us becoming computers. Which is what we’ve been talking about. Which is what we’re doing in so many different ways. Now, what if they go ahead and program all these different human-like behaviors to where they start making decisions and all those things. Of course, they can’t be us.

1:32:16 Are you worried that that ends up in a future that’s scary and something that’s out of control, as opposed to Elon and these other people making these bad decisions, that they end up making decisions like that? Well, guys like Elon are so concerned about their own decisions that they’re building spaceships to get off the planet so they don’t have to deal with the repercussions of their decisions. So, where I get worried about AIs, the main things that we really are going to do with it is make killing robots and fucking robots.

1:32:45 That’s the main thing. So, you know, often in Japan they’re making some gorgeous little, you know, nymphet based on, you know, Battle Angel or something. The Japanese are always way ahead of the curve on this thing. And out on the West Coast they’re building, I mean they already have autonomous killing machines. And they’re, you know, they don’t activate them, but they’ve got Robocop.

1:33:07 So, once we’ve got those, can we be made to feel unsafe enough to use autonomous robots to protect ourselves and can we be made to feel pathetic enough to prefer the safety of a robot girl to the danger of a real one, you know? I’m sure we’ve all had the time where we would have preferred the robot girl for some part of the day. Especially guys, because they’re scary because the women are still more human than we are. Yeah, they’re more in the fuzzy realm than we are.

1:33:43 Like you were talking about this interaction we’re having right now, I find with the female you really don’t know what’s going to happen. Well, they have two advantages over us. One is the more developed connection between the left and right halves of the brain so they can connect holistically and see big picture, see systems in ways that we can’t. So they’re better systems theorists than we are. And the other is, I mean believe it or not, I know it’s awful, but the monthly reminder, it’s a chronobiological reminder that grounds them in reality and the fact that they can give birth, they can give more people, you know?

1:34:19 It grounds them back into being a human. They can create life, which maybe reminds them that life will end, which means they’re a little bit more connected than we are. I agree, and more intuitive I think. I think they trust their intuition more, whereas maybe with males we’re analyzing. Right, and they’ve been repressed for a couple thousand years.

1:34:38 So they’re more familiar with the things that we’re just now, technology’s doing to us what we did to them. That’s deep. These robots, the killing machines that do exist somewhere in a lab in San Francisco, if they get released with the AI that we can’t control, I mean, do we really got to look out? I mean, they’re going to come after us? Or is this a scenario there’s no point in debating because it’s either going to happen or it’s not?

1:35:02 I’m not that concerned with the sort of the Colossus movie, or the Space Odyssey, you know, AI closing the pod door bays or whatever, you know? It’s not that so much as us making that choice, us sending that robot into war. You know, us, you know, our facility with drones portends a willingness to externalize the human cost of war. And I think we got to be right up front and face the cost of it. Funny enough, a lot of military guys believe there should be that human cost in war, believe there should be pain and heroes and fallen dead and losses, you know, to humanize that experience.

1:36:02 And so people know the cost, they feel the cost, the soldiers know what’s going on. Without it, it’s hard to say what starts to happen. Right, and the other irony is we think that, oh, we have these technologies and the big question is whether or not it’s ethical for us to use them. Once we start, they’re going to be used on us too. You know, you think, just wait till there’s drone strikes in England or in New York.

1:36:24 This is not that hard. Right, right. So the police will be striking us with those things. Not the cops, whatever our enemies are. Yeah, they’ll use the technology.

1:36:36 Speaking of the enemies, just in general, your thoughts on terrorism. You know, it’s in the news, it’s here in London, it gets us to behave, it’s almost like an amplified version of present shock in a way. Yeah. What do you see when you see the current state of terrorism, the way that they’ve embraced social media say in the last few years, the way it affects us and as humans, how should we be thinking about this? Terrorism, modern terrorism is a hack of our media system.

1:37:06 Okay, explain that. It’s a hack of the attention economy. We’ve got multi-zillion dollar corporations that will put anything on that gets our eyeballs. Right. So the terrorists are using our own media system to hack into our brains.

1:37:24 That’s what Donald Trump did to become president. If I do something crazy, they’re all going to cover it. Again and again and again. Night after night after night. And he understood that all publicity is good publicity.

1:37:36 Let me just keep, let it ride. Right. And so that’s what the terrorists are doing. I saw this article, I think it was the New York Times, that said, dirty bombs. Remember when we were worried about dirty bombs like 10 years ago?

1:37:47 Oh my gosh, it’s the way that they could do a large scale, get radioactivity into people’s brains. And they said, look at the last attack in London. What did they have? A van and four knives they bought in the store. And yet they created all this terror because of the media.

1:38:03 Right? The thing is buzzing, isn’t it? We’ll let it go. And yet they created the reaction they wanted. They disrupted the whole world, more so than a dirty bomb could have.

1:38:13 What do we do about this? Can we fight back? Yeah, we can fight back. I’m going to fight back by turning this off. Look at that.

1:38:24 Your digital technology interrupted us. Yeah. And CNN actually. CNN’s calling you. See, they probably don’t want you talking about this.

1:38:31 They probably, yeah. Right? Look at that. This is a perfect example of our own presence shock. Yeah.

1:38:40 What to do about terror? Yeah. Because we allow it to happen, right? I mean, we allow our own media companies to beam it at us and we allow ourselves to react and be disrupted. So what can we do?

1:38:57 It’s a tough one. You know, I mean, no one’s going to like my answers to this kind of thing. Who cares? Who cares? Yeah, I guess.

1:39:07 You know, we’ve got to respond. We’ve got to use it as an opportunity to experience love and empathy and compassion for one another and everybody else. You know, it’s again, it’s like terror. Okay, so now what are you going to do? Are we going to hate?

1:39:26 Get more afraid, put on more locks and figure out, or are we going to say, oh, my gosh, look where things have gotten. Look what’s happened. You know, it’s not that they’re right. And it’s also, I don’t know that there’s any genuine effort by Western nations to stop this. I really don’t.

1:40:08 You know, when I look at who funds what in Saudi Arabia? Who buys what from whom? Who’s got their bases where? And it’s a little, these are not major players, you know, compared to, you know, good old-fashioned industrial warfare still works. And it’s not being deployed.

1:40:43 The allegiances are too strange. The energy resources and deals with governments and sovereign wealth funds, they’re not so far, our governments are not considering them the real problem. Something doesn’t smell right here. You said we could extinguish this, but we’re choosing not to. I’m saying that we’re not, I don’t think we’re genuinely focused on that problem.

1:41:34 I’m glad you said that. And so Trump can come out and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and Theresa May can come out and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oddly enough, Trump may actually care in a way that his predecessors did not. Trump may actually, you know, his, I don’t love him or anything, but his willingness to question the underlying assumptions of all of these international arrangements. Okay, NATO, NATO, what, you know, what is going on here?

1:42:07 Why is it, why are we doing this? It was World War II, right? And the Germans or the Russians would come and say, wait a minute, is not necessarily an unhealthy urge to evaluate where are we, what’s going on? I mean, you look at a New York Times story and it’ll say, oh, well, Trump didn’t say, we’re all gonna protect each other in NATO. Therefore, U.S.-European relations are the worst that they’ve ever been.

1:42:30 And now Angela Merkel has said, well, Europe’s gonna have to figure out how to take care of itself and make decisions for its own future. And that’s a tragedy. You can look at that same news as good news. Say, oh, look, Europe’s no longer a weak little thing. Europe has certain stability.

1:42:50 We’re not afraid of a fascist coming out of Germany or Poland or somewhere and trying to disrupt the rest of Europe. And Europe’s gonna make its own decisions? Shouldn’t Europe make its own decisions rather than what, the U.S. should be making decisions for Europe? So there’s ways, there’s a certain refreshing naivete.

1:43:15 Right, because Trump is almost more human than any other politician because he knee-jerk reacts on Twitter. So at least it’s a genuine reaction. Right, it’s not the best. I mean, there’s more intelligent humans you can be using or nicer humans or less vindictive humans or less insane humans that could do this. But it’s not, the idea of breaking business as usual is not terrible.

1:43:40 I mean, because the neoliberalism and internationalism of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, all the CIA-sponsored, you know, and Rockefeller-sponsored internationalism of the United States and Europe in order to create a global economy that was suitable for multinational corporations, that has to come to an end. So that’s why people, and I don’t think they know it, but that’s why Brexit isn’t all bad. It’s pushing back and saying, wait a minute, something’s wrong about that thing too.

1:44:14 We love a globe, but globalism has certain problems too. Globalism is operating on a scale that feels dehumanizing. So, you know, the WTO protests and Brexit to me have something in common. Okay, so it’s this kind of deep down kind of, you know, humanism coming out and saying, wait a second, you know, this whole everything-should-be-equal growth mindset, blah, blah, blah, that globalism promotes, maybe doesn’t actually go with our core values as these local humans.

1:44:46 Right, that there’s something that feels too generic, too one-size-fits-all, too industrial-strength about the way this is going, and boundaries of a certain sort, even if they’re social conventions, social constructions, boundaries can kind of help. When I lived in Manhattan, I decided I’m not going to go north of 14th Street or south of Houston Street or west of Fifth Avenue. I lived in the East Village. I’m going to stay, you know, there. Me too.

1:45:12 And if I’m going to go out, I’m going to be really conscious that I’m leaving my neighborhood today. Okay. So the boundary, even though it was artificial, creates a sense of circulation. Having a bounded economy, local economy, encouraging the circulation of money in the local economy is good. It prevents Walmart or something from extracting money and sticking it in the bank.

1:45:33 It helps your economy. So this urge towards boundary isn’t entirely bad. It’s misguided where it’s, you know, the way it’s expressing itself, but it’s coming from impulses that are probably appropriate. Okay. Let’s finish up on Trump.

1:45:50 When you see Trump, what do you see, as opposed to what I see to other people? And you got to watch the election, the transfer of power, and now, you mentioned earlier, he knew how to use the media. Yeah. Because scares and craziness gets covered for free. He even said later, I got free coverage in the media.

1:46:10 What else do you see in this man? Well, in the election, what I saw was a guy trying to please whoever he happened to be with at that moment. Because he’s a man who’s in, I mean, they call him a billionaire, but he’s basically sitting on debt. And he’s a guy whose job is to convince the people in the room why they should give him yet more money, even though he’s in debt. And you know what kind of person that is?

1:46:34 It’s like, well, don’t worry, it’s all going to somehow and this is the, and please them and sell them. And when I saw him in his rallies, you know, it’s weird, he was aware of the people in his rallies, but in some ways unconscious of the cameras and the people at home. Hillary Clinton was aware of the people at home but couldn’t connect with the people in the room. So she’s hyper aware of everything I say is being recorded, it’s going to go on YouTube, it’s going to be on TV, so I need to comport myself in this way that’s going to be appropriate generically in all situations.

1:47:07 Right. As humans, we say we don’t like her because of that. Right. Donald was in the room with 10,000 screaming racists. So what’s he going to do?

1:47:16 How are we going to please him? How is he going to please those people? By being another screaming racist with them. You know, and that’s why he kept changing his positions, whatever was going on. He would test things out.

1:47:26 And I mean, you know, you’re a performer too, you know what it’s like to play a crowd and you kind of feel, and it’s really tempting to go all the way into it. And you know, how do you maintain your own integrity and sense of purpose, even if you’re saying something that’s not, I mean, sometimes he failed miserably. Like he went in front of APAC, this Jewish kind of a Jewish lobby organization in America, and he said to them, well, you know, I’m really good at making a bargain.

1:47:53 I know you all are really good at making a bargain too. And he thought he was going to please them by recognizing, oh, you’re all Jews, so you know how to negotiate. You know, as if he was stroking their strength. That it really kind of worked reverse. But when I see him, I do see a slightly mentally ill, but a human being trying to sell whoever is there and feeling really persecuted when people don’t understand that that’s what, I’m just trying to make you feel good.

1:48:22 I’m trying, so why are you yelling at me? So that’s what I see. And now, I mean, I don’t think he knew what was going on with all this, you know, I don’t think he understood quite how Russia had bought his team, and I don’t think he knew. I don’t think he wants to cover them up for sure, but I don’t think he knew. I don’t think he understands.

1:48:41 I think he still doesn’t quite get what happened. All he knows is that he came in, he really tried, and these same people, the same kind of Hillary Clinton neoliberal media are defending this corrupt system that I’m trying to break down. What he doesn’t realize is that he and his oligarch friends, Erdogan and Putin are not a breath of fresh air. They’re just a different side of the same totally corrupt coin. Okay, so they’re just as bad as the organizations he’s going after.

1:49:13 Yeah. But he thinks that they’re like him. And they’re worse in many respects because they more directly and shamelessly repress human beings and violate rights and kill. Yeah. What do the next four years look like with Trump?

1:49:29 I don’t know. I’m cool. I’m interested to see. Are you optimistic? Well, what is optimism?

1:49:35 Is optimism that he leaves? Is optimism that Pence becomes president? Is optimistic that he stays and becomes something else? My optimistic vision of the next four years is with the federal government utterly and obviously paralyzed and incapable of doing anything, that it’s going to encourage local governments and local economies to kind of take care of themselves. So when Trump left the climate deal, and all these governors and mayors said, don’t worry, we’re going to still choose to do that, that was kind of positive.

1:50:15 For a guy like me who’s talking about everything can be distributed and local, it’s kind of a good sign. All right. So you think that the system might be able to figure out a way to thrive, regardless of if he has these policies that might not seem… Well, I’m thinking more individual nodes in the network can figure out how to survive. So there’s going to be more agency and responsibility near the periphery on the capillary level than the heart level.

1:50:46 Okay. You know, Trump told a great story to get into office. And like you said, he’s a billionaire, but he’s not really. And they think he’s this and he’s not. And, you know, he had all the women on stage with him and the rags to riches, and of course it wasn’t.

1:51:01 Just curious of what you think about the art of storytelling. I actually had Robert McKee in here who wrote this book called The Story, the famous screenwriter. And, you know, he walked me through all the essentials of story. I actually attended his seminar here in London as well. And it’s fascinating to think of how a story is structured, again, back to us being humans and not machines, how we gravitate to these stories to educate ourselves and to convince each other of these things, maybe because we’re mortal or we’re biological.

1:51:27 And so I’m curious what you think of the art of storytelling. Has that changed because of digital media? And is that something that we should be aware of and anyone listening to us now on how stories are being used towards us and in our brains? I mean, Robert McKee is brilliant. What he’s isolated is the particular story structure that works really well in capitalism.

1:51:55 So he’s taking a version of the Aristotelian story arc, create a character the audience likes, put that character through a series of trials that put him in danger until finally he makes a decision, you know, kill the bad guy or marry the girl, whatever, that creates the reversal and then the release, you know, crisis climax release, the male orgasm curve of narrative dramatic fiction. And that was great from Aristotle to now. Look where it brought us, capitalism.

1:52:28 And, you know, this almost, you know, I won’t even use a bad word. This jizz culture, you know, that we’re in, it’s explosive win, win. And you live your life to win, then what? And that’s a very male understanding or a particular male understanding of success, of narrative. And digital technology has helped to open that up a little bit.

1:53:01 People tolerate other kinds of narrative. I mean, I used to write about Beavis and Butthead who kind of broke the rock video or The Simpsons, which you’re not watching in order to get to the conclusion to see if Homer’s going to get out of the power plant. You’re watching it scene to scene to see what are they satirizing, making connections, like Mystery Science Theater, MST3K, where you’re not watching that movie. You’re listening to all the jokes. You’re making connections.

1:53:24 You’re doing pattern recognition. So I feel like there are other narrative forms, exploratory games, missed. What was missed? You know, as an archetype video game where you’re exploring a world. So I think McKee is right that the blockbuster movie that you’re going to get a zillion people to come to and pay their 10 or 12 or 15 bucks, whatever it is now, to go in.

1:53:48 And they want crisis climax. Where’s my money shot? You know, and then relief, that’s there. But when you look at the new styles of viewing that we get, say, on a Netflix, where you can, or HBO, where you have shows like, not even fabulous, but good enough, like Breaking Bad and Westworld. And these are different structures.

1:54:16 They’re, you know, whether you can call them Dickensian, that they’re just serials or soap operas. But they’re also creating their narrative effects by saying, look at this world. No, it’s actually that world. So what is that? That sort of memento Christopher Nolan frame within frame.

1:54:31 If you have a frame within a frame, it’s creating a sense of dramatic reversal without the Aristotelian reversal. It’s a different thing. Or Charlie Kaufman movies, where what world are we in? No, you’re in this world. No, you’re in that world.

1:54:44 So you can create that same sense of tension and shifting reality without that arc. And I think that’s valuable for us. Because again, this arc is the style of corporate capitalism that we’re stuck in right now. Where’s my unicorn? My unicorn, my payday, my thing, rather than the great long-term sustainable family business.

1:55:09 You can still become even a billionaire with a good long-term sustainable family business. You can make the money in revenue rather than selling shares. Your product can be the thing you do rather than the shares of your company. That’s sort of, but that’s another kind of story. And do we have the tolerance for that?

1:55:29 That’s life. You actually stay alive. Can we do that as a species? Or do we need that endgame? Do we need that apocalypse?

1:55:37 Do we need that? If we’re addicted to stories with endings, then guess where we’re going? It’s interesting how the music and media of a culture reflects the culture. You look at the 80s in New York City in the 90s and you look at the music and the dress and all that. And it kind of either feeds back to us what we’re thinking or sometimes it even leads the way we act.

1:55:57 And yeah, you’re right, with that storytelling arc, it’s like, yeah, the wind, the success, the climax, when life is really not about that, is it? Well, it’s interesting. Robert was, I think he was going to walk away from the business because the way he saw storytelling, I think in the naughties, he was like, this is going nowhere. Movies are not evolving. It’s the same garbage.

1:56:17 And when he saw what long-form storytelling was happening in television, he didn’t know if we could evolve. He thought it was over. And when he saw that, where you could have a narrative over, I think in Breaking Bad, it was like a thousand scenes. He’s like, I couldn’t conceive of that before that that could ever exist. And now that we have it, he’s so reinvigorated because there’s so many other options and so many other internal and learnings and all of that.

1:56:42 The fact that, I mean, if you think about how many people Walter White killed in Breaking Bad, I mean, if you start adding up, it’s like 60, 80 people, like that would never happen in a movie or it would be like Rambo. And yet in this, it’s just this whole pattern of who he is as a character and we engage with that. And like you said with The Simpsons and stuff, it’s not like you’re learning from the climax or the ultimate win. You’re learning from this human behavior patterns.

1:57:06 And in Breaking Bad, you know where it’s going to go. You know from the first episode, this guy’s going to die of cancer before the end of this thing. This guy’s going to become bad. He’s going to break bad. But you watch, so you’re not watching to see how’s he going to get out of it.

1:57:20 I mean, the individual things you might, but you know where it’s going. And I respect that form of narrative almost more than the Netflix spoiler based narrative. Where you just get to, oh, season three, episode two, the spoiler, spoiler alert. You know, if a spoiler can kill it, then it’s not that good to begin with. You know, spoiler to me seems to be almost like looking at narrative as IP, intellectual property.

1:57:46 You know, so there’s our spoiler is our IP and once it’s exploded, we’ve spent it. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. And you can learn about yourself and humanity along the way of like a Breaking Bad. And you can see these lessons.

1:57:58 Oh yeah, I guess we are like that as humans. Oh, I’m like that. Sometimes I’m a jerk like Walt. Sometimes I’m not. And then that’s how, yeah, I think we kind of grow as a species.

1:58:08 Let me ask you a question. While I’ve got you there, I’m going to get some personal consulting from you. London Real is what we do here. The last six years, we are basically a new media company, I guess, if you want to put us in that cubby hole. We have conversations with fascinating people every week.

1:58:23 My original tagline was putting the BBC out of business, which was a little bit of a joke because you can’t put them out of business. Because they’re public service. Yeah, and they tax you and if you don’t pay their money, they throw you in jail. And so it’s like a little jab at the fact that they’re not a business either. And funny enough, they’re actually coming to the studio this afternoon to film some, our next guest and stuff like that.

1:58:45 But, you know, our goal is to have these conversations with you and to really question the same companies that are streaming this conversation live. And to question those companies that are interrupting us with their mobile devices. And so we’re trying to stay relevant and compete against media sources that use terror and amygdala responses to shock people into paying attention, to get them to buy things, to stop having sex, to start having real communications.

1:59:12 So we’re always in this uphill battle. And I always try to remind, we tell ourselves around here this narrative that I’m here to create media that brings people together and doesn’t just divide people into these organizations. So when the terror attack happens, it’s not like, you know, fuck them and kill them and don’t do this and don’t go to London Bridge. But it’s like, I want to know, why aren’t we having the conversation with these people that felt so disconnected from the society that they want to go stab people?

1:59:37 Why are we doing all this stuff? But how do I continue forward? Coming from you, how can I have these conversations and engage with humans, do you believe? What is the future of a new media company such as this? How can I take on the giants?

1:59:52 I just want to get your thoughts in general because ultimately I’m trying to get into people’s humanity, their brains. I don’t think you have to take on the giants. And if you are going to take on the giants, the only way you can take them on is by being satisfied not being a giant and then modeling that for others. So if you reach 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 people, that’s good. And then there’s someone else that’s going to reach a different 200,000 people and someone else is going to reach another whatever.

2:00:28 Joe Rogan, he’s a monster in this business because he reaches what, a million, two million people with each one of those things? That’s as big as it gets. And he still does his, he’s not making a ton of money on that. Maybe he is, I don’t know, on that podcast. I don’t think not to support his lifestyle.

2:00:45 He’s going out and announcing wrestling gigs and doing the stuff he does and his shows and his comedy. I’m doing a podcast called Team Human and we’re, I mean, I’m listening, I didn’t know what to do. I eventually put a PayPal link of all things. Speaking of, is that Jack Dorsey? No, he’s Square.

2:01:04 It’s somebody, probably Peter Thiel or somebody, he’s getting all that money. Yeah, of course. I’ve got a PayPal link on there. We’re getting, you know, gosh, maybe $200 a month is coming in to support our enterprise. And that’s sweet.

2:01:17 You know, it pays for our uploads or something. That’s about it. But, you know, luckily, that’s why I took a job as a university professor to subsidize my media rather than me having to, you know, figure out a way to make my podcast suitable for MailChimp or whatever advertises on these things. You know, I would say, you’ve done it. You did it.

2:01:48 Just keep, you know, can you keep, be, the object of the game is to somehow become satisfied and okay and joyous with that you’re making it work. I am. Yeah. No, that’s good. Thanks for that reminder.

2:02:03 Tell me about the man himself, Douglas. Tell me about your life the last 10 or 20 years. I’m just curious. Was there something that you found turned you into a better human, to where you could communicate better, you could live your life better? Were there certain practices?

2:02:19 I mean, you’ve been coming to London since the 80s and hanging out with some real great thought leaders. So it seems like you’ve always connected with people in a big way. But do you have certain things that you do to yourself? These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy. Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meetups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more.

2:02:50 Now back to the rest of the show. I teach in a public university, meaning the City University of New York. You know, I didn’t do the MIT or Princeton or something. Is that a conscious choice? Yeah.

2:03:11 I could have. Be with, you know, I’m teaching classes with, I mean, first generation of their family who’ve ever gone to college. First generation Americans, you know, kids whose English is a second language. Kids who, you know, are late for class because they’re busboys in their parents’ Chinese restaurant, you know, and they had to clean up a spill before, you know, they got to my class in propaganda. So, yeah, I’m part of what feels like a more mission-driven institution, you know, and trying to convince people that the object of the game in college is not to get prepared for what jobs are out there, but to be able to create the jobs of tomorrow, you know, to develop some kind of an entrepreneurial spirit about what they’re doing, you know, rather than just, you know, the education’s become its opposite in some ways.

2:04:12 Education used to be almost a gift that you gave to the working class because they’re going to be working in coal mines or whatever, but at least they should know how to read. They should know how to vote. They should understand what’s going on in the world. Now, college has become an extension of the job market. You know, you’re getting job readiness.

2:04:27 It’s like, no, that’s not what it was about. So you’re building entrepreneurs. Most people would be shocked to hear that that’s what Douglas is doing. Yeah, but social entrepreneurs. Actually, a real entrepreneur looks at a human need and figures out a way to answer it.

2:04:42 Right, right. And what about your television series, that job advice, that da-da-da-da-da. I mean, you could have taken a lot of other opportunities, but you’ve chosen not to. I mean, partly, luckily, I’m kind of constitutionally incapable of it. I’ll get, even if I want this sort of thing that gets shiny, I’ll get kind of nauseous.

2:05:07 Actually, physically nauseous. And I used to think it was that weird, I mean, someone, a dot-com billionaire friend of mine, said, oh, Doug, you’ve got the shtetl mentality. Shtetl is the little villages that Jews came from in Eastern Europe, because he was also a Jew who now is a billionaire. And he’s like… That was a billionaire, as if he’s no longer a Jew.

2:05:26 And he’s like, he abandoned the shtetl mentality. You think that the way life works is, you make something and then you sell it. You make something else and then you sell it. Like your books. You write your book and then you bring it to the market and then you sell it.

2:05:38 I’m like, yeah, I create something and I sell it. And I make something and I sell it. So I just sock a little money away, so when I can’t make another, I got something to live on. That’s what you do. He’s like, no, that’s not what you do.

2:05:49 You’ve got to learn how to leverage other people’s time so that you do this whole thing. And that never quite worked for me. I mean, so no. I mean, so in some ways, the good thing is I can’t sell out even if I want to. I guess I could sell out without knowing it.

2:06:05 But no, I once got an offer from when I was just coming up. And just as I’d written maybe one or two books about digital media and I was talking to some people and I got an offer from a bank. And banks weren’t online yet. It was really early. The only thing they thought online was going to be for was marketing.

2:06:25 And they wanted me to be the digital chief of this bank. And I’ll never forget, they offered me $470,000 a year. This is like in 1996 or 1997. I remember the exact amount. $470,000.

2:06:42 And then all these things that I didn’t understand that I would now. But you know, options and stock packages and all these things from this major bank. $470,000 a year. Which I guess would be after taxes $235,000 or something. You get half of it.

2:06:55 And I remember my mom saying, Douglas, just do it for two years. If you just do this for two years, put your careers on. Two years you’ll be a millionaire at the end of it. And I said, yeah. But what if I do it?

2:07:10 I start doing it. Then I, you know, at first I said to her, what if I do it for two years? And then I’ve got my million dollars. Then I leave. Then I get hit by a bus.

2:07:19 What then? And then she said, well, you could get hit by a bus anyway. At least you’d be a millionaire. And then I said, all right. What if I’m doing this job and I meet a nice girl?

2:07:28 And we start dating and she likes me and all that. And then I tell her, well, I’m leaving. You know, who will I have met? And what will she have gotten used to? And what?

2:07:39 She married this guy who was this millionaire bank digital thing. You know, so I didn’t. So it would have infected your life in all these other ways. Right. Or gone into advertising or something.

2:07:51 You know, I wrote these books. Like I wrote, you know, invent media viruses, right? And then all the advertising agencies wanted to hire me. It’s like, oh, you could be our viral guy. You could chief strategist and all this.

2:08:01 But it’s like, no, I was this book is trying to deconstruct and take you down. I’m not going to go, oh, but you can join us and then help transform our culture. Help make us good. Help us be more socially responsible. And it’s like, you know what I mean?

2:08:17 Oh, you know, infect from inside and all that. It’s like, no, I’ll infect from right here. Thank you very much. And then also it’s like, how much is enough? You know, I wrote media.

2:08:26 I got $55,000 to write media virus, which is a king’s ransom. You know, certainly in 1994, it was a king’s ransom. But to me, you had made $8,000 or credit card debt in every year. $55,000, that’s enough. It’s enough.

2:08:42 You can live on that. And can you imagine, which would you rather do, be a millionaire doing something you don’t like or be alive doing something that you love that’s changing the world in positive ways? You know, and it seems to me such a no-brainer. But that’s easy. I was a theater person.

2:08:58 I made no money. So when someone throws more than $10,000 at me for something that I did and like doing, it’s freaking insane. I’m still embarrassed. That’s part of why I said it. I’m still embarrassed to say, I’m such a freaking leftist, to say I made $55,000 writing a book.

2:09:15 That to me still sounds like an almost obscene sum of money. Even 20 years later. Even 20 years later. It’s like, 55, can you imagine getting paid? I mean, with the people listening to this thing on Facebook who have great ideas, things they want to say, just as important as my media virus was, who could write a book and are not getting paid $55,000, I was lucky.

2:09:37 Yeah. Speaking of media, The New York Times is from your city. What is your read on that organization? I watch what they write, you know, about Trump and everything like that. What do you think of The Times?

2:09:52 It’s hard to know. I don’t think there’s a great conspiracy in The Times. I think The Times, like most liberal, urban Americans, has accepted the underlying premises of neoliberalism. Sort of Clintonian style globalism as given condition. So, I don’t think they understand that they’re biased in that way.

2:10:18 You know, I also think that they’re… I don’t even know how specific to get, because I don’t even understand it fully. I don’t think that their coverage of the Syrian conflict was understood of what was going on there, I think. But they’re pretty much the best we have in the States. And the one thing I will say for them is I believe that they’re trying.

2:10:44 They’re trying their best. And that, in this world, is way more than you can say for most of these publications. Yeah, they get it wrong sometimes, because they’re biased, because they come from their own perspectives. But they’re trying to do the right thing. And they stayed alive.

2:11:03 They stayed alive. Yeah, they were smart enough to stay alive and adopt some very interesting digital practices. I do believe that they believe the news comes first, to a greater extent than any other organization I can see. But then I also will say that everything seems to come through that lens. And so even watching the Trump election and the post-Trump, and I didn’t necessarily vote for Trump, but still it just seems so tainted sometimes the way they evaluate those things that I just feel like they could do themselves so much more justice by trying to be a little more objective sometimes.

2:11:35 But what’s objective? Either that or be true to a value system and say this is our value system, this is what we believe, and we’re going to cover from this perspective. You know, which is what the Guardian used to do. But then what happened to the Guardian? The Guardian got all confused too.

2:11:50 But still, I mean, they’re pretty much… I mean, if you read the Guardian, the BBC, the New York Times, the Nation, you can get some sense of what’s going on. The thing I’m questioning, and maybe this is just me, is how much… I don’t want to say this in the wrong way, but how much do I really need to know what’s going on? It’s like, they’re not listening to me anyway.

2:12:17 Let’s say I really understand the Syrian conflict and what’s going on. Then do I call the Secretary of State and say, look, I understand this now. Don’t do this. You know, it informs what? How I vote every two years.

2:12:29 There’s a certain point at which I am not responsible for knowing this whole thing. And the way it’s covered and the way that I get to be with it is a distraction from where I can make a difference, which is in my community. Yeah, at some point you have to dial the media down and dial the present shock down. Yeah. And like, yeah, you want to get the coverage and then you want to actually move on, right?

2:12:49 When you think of the word successful, who comes to mind? Could be living, could be dead, someone you know, someone you don’t know. Who’s the one that pops to mind? Besides Elon Musk, of course. Um, I don’t know.

2:13:03 The first one that hit my consciousness was Nelson Mandela. Okay. You know, that’s… Why? That’s a lot of cop-out answers.

2:13:11 Yeah, in some ways, because it’s like it sounds typical in a way. Because he made it through, right? Real. A zillion years in prison and came out the other side as… He came out the other side relatively non-militant.

2:13:29 You know, which is real and open and willing to learn. You know, we’re all successful. You know, everybody who took the time to sit through God knows how long we’ve just been talking is successful, you know, in the current environment. Wow. You paid attention to something for an hour?

2:13:52 It’s crazy. I haven’t heard that before. I like it. Uh, darkest moment of your life. What was it?

2:14:01 Uh… We were… Me and my best friend were driving back from California to New York when I was 25. He fell asleep at the wheel around dawn near the Grand Canyon and we hit a juniper tree and he got impaled and died next to me. And so I’m there 5 in the morning at dawn alone in the middle of the desert with my dead best friend.

2:14:27 And… It’s something I got… I honestly said I never recovered from. You know, and you can do… I mean, I’m not in PTSD.

2:14:37 My eyes move properly and… You know, but it… Moments like that, I mean, it gave me not survivor’s guilt but survivor’s responsibility. I mean, I think that’s part of why I can’t sell out. Because this guy, that was the one thing, he would die before he’d sell out.

2:14:57 You know, he lived in a ramshackle queen’s apartment with 9 people and cockroaches because… I mean, he couldn’t even work because anyone he’d work for would be somehow contributing to, you know, the neoliberal conspiracy and all. So I’m kind of living for 2 people. But no, that was dark. That was dark because really…

2:15:23 I don’t mean to be atheist on you, but when I saw him dead, I was like, there’s no thing coming out of him that this is him and he’s dead. It was like, okay, this really is an existential quandary we’re in. We’re going to die. We’re going to not exist. So now what are you going to do?

2:15:47 And you believe that. Yeah. That that’s it. You’re dead. No spirit realm, no energy fields.

2:15:56 It’d be nice. But it’s not true. And again, we’ve been talking about AI and, you know, cyborgs and stuff like that. But again, this is the essence of the human experience. Right.

2:16:08 Because you had this experience that was literally a human thing, death. You got reminded of it. And now it changed who you are and your message and your drive. And you can’t program that, right? You know, into a machine.

2:16:22 Right. And that’s what makes you human. So best day of your life. A few things come to mind. The birth of my daughter.

2:16:34 It’s crazy intense. After I believe it or not, it was going on the Colbert Report for the first time with this book called Life, Inc., which was about, you know, corporatism and all. And it was like, this is beyond anything I was hoping would happen when I first started writing or sharing or doing or even doing theater or whatever. All I wanted was to figure out if there’s a way can I stay alive by doing this? Can I support myself by doing this?

2:17:15 And now I was not only supporting myself by doing this, but going on Colbert to spread this sort of anti-corporate message to the world. And for him, this guy who’s made his career of being a fake foil in order to draw out precisely that message. And it was like, wow. Perfect, basically. Perfect.

2:17:39 I’ve arrived. I’ve arrived. I was like, that was it. Take me now. What better person to interview than Colbert, right?

2:17:46 Because he could ask the questions nobody else could. That’s nice. Tell me about theater. How long did you spend in theater, and how does it affect this amazing performer I see today? From the time I was 11 to the time I was 33, I did theater.

2:18:05 And that’s my main thing. And I actually partly left theater because of that car accident. I was in graduate school at the time, and I came back. I did Waiting for Godot, which is the perfect play to do after your best friend dies in a car crash, right, about this partners and existentialism and all that. I was writing for Godot, but I decided that it felt like theater, it’s just gone.

2:18:28 I had it urged for a while. I wanted something permanent. I decided, OK, I’m going to make movies. At least they’re going to stick, write books, because they’re going to stay. It felt more, I want to leave something when I go, rather than do a play that people just talk about.

2:18:45 But I loved theater because of, it’s that fourth wall. It’s that thing I was talking about between you and me. OK, now we’re going to have a little social agreement where you guys are going to stay still, and I’m going to go on the stage and now do this thing. What do we get by that? Well, this is the human organism choosing to act something out for itself.

2:19:07 Now, what is it doing? It’s the human organism creating dimension by saying we’re not all just here. Now we’re going to put one up there in order to have You know what I mean? So it was the building of complexity. That was really just the fascinating, and in the name of truth.

2:19:27 And do you think about legacy in your own legacy? Not so much anymore. I don’t think about legacy in terms of, will I be remembered? Will my book be in the thing? But more, what influence did I have over the human organism?

2:19:47 OK, that’s important. Do you ever think you should go back to theater and create things that don’t exist afterwards? Yeah. Because the theater is the Snapchat of social media. Well, in a way, it exists more afterwards.

2:20:00 It doesn’t have an artifact. I mean, it’s what I’ve realized. Yeah. You know, the artifact was the thing I was… Again, you reversed the medium in the message.

2:20:06 You know, I thought the artifact was the thing, and it’s not. It’s the experience that people had of the artifact that matters. But yeah, I actually have returned to theater. I just got to make time to do it. Part of the reason I left theater was because it was so elitist.

2:20:18 You know, people have got to spend now $100, $150 to see a play, and they don’t see a play in order to be changed. They see a play in order… Almost that’s the way they pay their debt to whatever cause they’ve seen. I remember I saw people coming out of Angels in America, this play about AIDS, and they’re like, I’ve now paid my dues to AIDS because I’ve seen the play. And it’s like, no, it’s not the substitute for action.

2:20:40 It should be the spur to action. So I got into Bertolt Brecht in political theater and all. And so I started to have contempt for my own audiences, and I was like, I’m not going to do that. But now what I want to do is at kind of theater, I’ve been calling it enactments. And I want to syndicate theater over the net to thousands of community groups and do these short, like 45-minute plays where you decide the set and setting of the play.

2:21:09 So it might be a play between a worker and his boss. But you’ve got to decide, is this a Walmart worker and the assistant manager? Is it a slave and Abraham? Is it a trader and an algorithm that’s his boss? So where are you going to set this and how’s it going to be?

2:21:27 And then you shoot your scenes and then upload them, and then you can see everyone else’s interpretations of this thing. Because I’m thinking now of theater as something not that you watch, but theater as something you do. And what would that look like? That’s exciting. What keeps you awake at night?

2:21:45 There’s spectrum diseases, if you want to call them that. Autism, Asperger’s, plastic. Plastic. Yeah, well, now we’re thinking it’s the influence of plastic and the parents or grandparents ends up creating the genetic anomalies that lead to… I’m concerned when I see the percent of children who are going in need care as adults.

2:22:16 That keeps me up at night. And the whether we’re inadvertently mutating ourselves in unsustainable directions. Okay. Such as? Well, like, you know, whatever are…

2:22:39 And I know they’re valuable. On a certain note, people with spectrum diseases are valuable. Certainly Asperger’s people can do things that we can’t. But this sort of willy-nilly genetic damage and change that we’re inflicting on ourselves could create a species of humans that really can’t sustain ourselves anymore. I’m worried about that.

2:23:04 You know, I look at kids and how much suffering there is on an even biological level. And kids now, that keeps me up at night. What scares you?

2:23:22 I’m more scared. I’m scared for my daughter. I don’t know what the world’s going to be like in 30, 40 years. You know, I’m scared that the topsoil will be depleted in 40 years. That we know this.

2:23:45 I’m scared about that. And does that mean we’ve got to go the Monsanto route? Do we have to just learn to genetically engineer crop that can grow on cement? Or is there some way to restore the integrity of our topsoil? I’m scared about that.

2:24:05 What would we be surprised to learn about Douglas Rushkoff? Besides that he’s an actor. I mean, I’m not surprised by anything because it’s me. I mean, people are surprised to know that I played with Psychic TV for a while. Genesis, Briar P. Orridge’s industrial band.

2:24:27 What instrument? Keyboards. And I’m a certified stage fight choreographer. Really? Yeah, I can’t fight, but I can choreograph fights.

2:24:37 That’s crazy. Okay, that’s pretty good. Anything else? I don’t dye my hair. You don’t dye it gray?

2:24:46 I don’t dye it gray, I guess. No, I’m turning old. I think people would be surprised, I mean, yeah, that I’m old. I mean, that’s more surprising to me, I guess, than them. That you’re in your 50s.

2:25:02 Douglas, I always ask everyone here a couple questions at the end. I’m going to hit you with those questions now. If you could pick up your mobile device, engineer by one of those great companies, and call the 20-year-old Douglas, and give that young man a bit of advice. What would you tell him? Where was he, by the way?

2:25:22 20-year-old Douglas had just decided to abandon pre-med at Princeton, and he had just, I actually took an organic chemistry test, and I was in there and I was realizing, you know, I’m good at this, I’m fine at this, I can go be a doctor, this is stupid for me. This is too much like auto mechanics. It’s just not the way medicine was at that time, too. It’s just not what I want to do. So I ended up using the test, I started the test, and then I stopped and I used the test book and wrote this letter to myself.

2:25:55 I said, this is from Douglas, the 20-year-old, to Douglas the adult. I’m making a decision for you. I’m now going to abandon your whole future of being a doctor. I’m going to force you now to be a creative person, whether it’s doing theater or some other arts thing, you’re going to have a different life. And what I would now say to me then is thank you, you’re right.

2:26:28 I’ve never heard that, that’s so awesome. I mean, the fact that you could have done that at 20 is huge. And that you let me time travel just now, you know? That’s wild. The Bill and Ted Loop just got closed.

2:26:41 Wow, I could just see you there, Princeton. All that pressure, pre-med, organic chem, which is kind of the make or break. If you can make it through organic chem, you have a chance. I know, and the irony is I got halfway through the test and then I wrote the letter to myself. I still got a B on the test because of the curve.

2:27:00 If I enter one more question, I will get an A. I hope you saved that test. It’s got to be somewhere. It’s got to be somewhere, we got to pull that up. On that same note, best advice you ever received, could it come from a parent, a professor, somebody in the band, on stage, anything?

2:27:26 You know, it might be, believe it or not, Genesis Puridge. He’s the one who said to me, the only good trip is a bad trip. And it’s very useful at times to say okay. Because it also means that at every moment, we have the ability to transform this experience into something else. Yeah, like the car accident.

2:27:55 Yeah. It made you this person that you are today. So whether it was the worst day of your life, in many ways, it created that person. It doesn’t justify his death, but you know. Last question.

2:28:11 To that 20-year-old that’s watching us right now, you know, the new and improved Douglas Rushkoff with Facebook feed, who’s in that Princeton exam or somewhere else in the world, in China and Brazil and America, somewhere, who’s watching, what advice can you give to them if they want to grow up and maybe create some change in the world like you have or just grow up more aware or keep us from becoming cyborgs or keep us from, I don’t know, turning into these human beings that are no longer human. What advice do you give to them? In some sense, the best advice I could say is there is, there’s nothing to work towards.

2:28:58 You know, it’s happening right now. This is it. And we live in such a carrot and stick society that we’re being taught, especially young people, oh, just do all this, and then you get that. Do all this. But when you get there, they’re going to have a whole other, oh, now do all this, to get that, and now do all this, to get that.

2:29:21 And until you’re just doing all this to get your retirement plan, to them what? You know, and it’s right now. Your integrity is in the moment. There’s infinity in the moment that you’re in. And that’s the reason why it’s okay that we die at the end, because this is forever.

2:29:44 This is forever, if you can embrace this as that, rather than as the step to something else, the cause of some other effect. That’s the problem with McKee. And that’s the way a story works, because it’s a constructed. Life is not that. Douglas, thank you for being here.

2:30:05 I’ve enjoyed this immensely. You’re a bad motherfucker in many ways. I really appreciate it. I’ve been getting more familiar with your work. There’s a few people here at London Real that are huge devotees of you, and they’ve been prepping me for this and shoving books in my face and telling me all this stuff and putting undue pressure on me to ask you every question out of the book.

2:30:26 They’re big fans of what you do. Now I get why. There’s a lot of facets to you, but I can tell you haven’t sold out. I can tell you haven’t done that series and that series. It shows in your content and who you are and the fact that you believe all this stuff.

2:30:39 You’re not selling me the next book. You’re not selling me the TV series. As a human, I can feel that difference. I think everyone can feel it, and that’s what I think makes your message so important and so vibrant. Thanks for everything you do.

2:30:54 Thanks for pushing through those hard times when you were a kid and doing what you’re doing the way you’re doing it. So we appreciate that. Aw, thanks. I didn’t know it would be so spiritual. Yeah, you know, people never know that.

2:31:07 That’s the suit is here to trick you. So on London Real, we say it’s about the journey. I appreciate the thoughts you give to us as a new media company, and I, as much as possible, try to be present in that moment. And I don’t need this to float on the NASDAQ and I don’t need this to become a billion-dollar company. I’m so grateful for the conversations I get to have every day.

2:31:27 I need to still remind myself to be grateful. I’ve got to speak to you today. It’s funny. I was in Paris two days ago when I spoke to Wyclef Jean, who was one of the Fugees, and he brought up Mandela just like you did, just now. It’s almost uncanny.

2:31:42 And the more I talk to people like you and Wyclef and these other individuals, the more I realize that you all kind of are observing similar things, like these great humans, look at what they did. So that’s a big deal for me to see. And it’s a good reminder to me, as a media company, that we’re affecting change to a certain number of people and they’re getting our message and it’s important that they get it. I don’t necessarily need another half a billion people to get it, even though I think it would be a good thing for our evolution.

2:32:08 So we’ll see. We’re going to keep doing what we do. Let’s definitely do this again sometime, record something else in the future. Maybe we’ll come to New York and see you and walk around and have one of those McKenna-type conversations. Beautiful.

2:32:19 So all the best while you’re here in London. Thank you so much. And that’s been wonderful. Thank you.