← Danny Jones Podcast
Danny Jones Podcast
#394 - “I Was There” Tech Elites Are Planning Breakaway Civilization | Douglas Rushkoff
02:07:22
Loading summary
Transcript429 lines
- [00:00]
Douglas Rushkoff
Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds.
- [00:10]
Danny
Get the unreal college deal.
- [00:12]
Douglas Rushkoff
Everything you need to study and play
- [00:13]
Danny
with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft
- [00:17]
Douglas Rushkoff
365 Premium and a year of Xbox
- [00:19]
Danny
Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th. Terms at aka mscollegepc. Nice to meet you, Doug.
- [00:38]
Douglas Rushkoff
Good to meet you.
- [00:39]
Danny
Yeah. You are into some fascinating stuff. You read. You've written, like, 25 or so books.
- [00:44]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [00:45]
Danny
And all kinds of wild stuff. The history of media culture. Why don't you probably do a better job than me? Why don't you sort of explain your background and how you got into this?
- [00:56]
Douglas Rushkoff
I don't know. I started really originally I started writing because I was interested in altered states of consciousness. And I wrote this book that no one knows about. I wrote this book when I was, like, 24 or 25 called free rides Ways to Get High Without Drugs. And the idea was that they're not so afraid of the drugs themselves that they. The people making the laws, they're afraid of the states of consciousness that they provide because then people can see alternative ways of understanding reality. You know, so once you're high on anything, you come back and you go, well, why did I agree that this is money? Why do I agree that that is rent? Why do I agree that I work for him? It's like, what? All your social agreements go away. So that was what it started. And I was a theater person, and I got really sick of theater because it was, like, very expensive and predictable and all. And just when I was getting sick of theater, the Internet thing was just starting to happen. So I started to write articles about what is email? What is hypertext? What is virtual reality? Before anybody believed that the stuff was real or gonna happen. Right? So I was in New York. I'd go out to San Francisco, go to the house where they, like, publish Mondo 2000 magazine, or hang out with Terence McKenna and learn about all the weird stuff. I started writing articles and then books about that. I wrote a book called Siberia, which sort of took rock, rave and psychedelics and hypertext and. And all that sort of new stuff happening. I'm just gonna tilt that up, all right? And saying, this is part of one thing. Society's changing. So I was the guy on the beat of the original Internet. I wrote a book called Media Virus, sort of naming the viral media Phenomenon that put me on the map. You, once you get a word, they kind of thing. So I got that term and then started writing about how the Internet went from this great creative collective playground to this kind of controlled big money surveillance manipulation apparatus. Wrote a bunch about that. And then I got interested in magic and the occult and weirdness kind of as ways of creating more wiggle room in consensus culture. I wrote a bunch of those, wrote a bunch of graphic novels, one about Aleister Crowley, one about the Bible, went in a bunch of different directions. And then now do a podcast called Team Human, arguing that being human is a team sport. We can do this together. The only way out is through, but the only way through is together. And I wrote this book that kind of made a lot of, I don't know what waves claps, both called survival of the richest escape fantasies of the tech billionaires that looked at. Why do these guys want to escape our reality and leave us all behind? That.
- [03:45]
Danny
How did you do the research for that? Did you go meet with like a bunch of tech?
- [03:49]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, that was weird. That happened accidentally. You know, I, I get hired to do talks and sometimes even by I'm counterculture guy, but big corporations will hire me almost as a proof that they. That they dare. Right?
- [04:02]
Danny
Or, or they're tapped into the culture.
- [04:04]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, exactly. Or, or they do it as some sort of intellectual dominatrix thing. You know, it's like I tell them what they're doing wrong and they're like, thank you sir, may I please have another? So it was one of those I was got invited out to do a talk for. It was some kind of hedge fund about the economy of the future and whatever. And they fly me out like business class, the whole nine yards and limo through the desert to this resort and it's a whole thing and I'm waiting in the green room to go on. And usually when you're in the green room, the guy comes with a little clip on mic and whatever to bring you out. And instead of these five guys come into the green room and they sit around this table and this is the talk. It's these five ultra wealthy guys and they want to know. I mean originally it was like these sort of investment questions. They were like Bitcoin or Ethereum, you know, virtual reality or augmented reality. Like dude, don't come to me for that. I would have said Betamax, I would have said CompuServe. I understand what's going to happen, but I'm not the guy to. I don't, I don't tell you what company to bet on. But then finally they were like, Alaska or New Zealand. They wanted to know where to put their bunkers in case of what they called the event, you know, the electromagnetic pulse or revolution, climate event or pandemic that makes the world unlivable and forces them to go somewhere else. And that was, you know, I got. I tried to play with them at that point because they're just crazy wealthy guys.
- [05:28]
Danny
Yeah.
- [05:28]
Douglas Rushkoff
You know, and I was like, so how are you going to protect your bunker from the rest of us? Like, oh, we got Navy SEALs, you know, on speed dial. They're going to come out and, you know, like, okay, and then how are you going to pay your Navy seals once your Bitcoin's not worth anything? Because the world's in and they're, you know, so they've like, thought it out, like Walking Dead level scenario planning, but they haven't really looked at how do you stay alive and you can't, you know, not for very long. Like that.
- [05:55]
Danny
Yeah.
- [05:55]
Douglas Rushkoff
But it. So then that's what set me on the journey to figure out how did the. The wealthiest, most powerful people in the world convince themselves that they're utterly incapable of sustaining our world, that the best they can do is prepare for the inevitable collapse of civilization and try to survive in some kind of a feudal bunker.
- [06:20]
Danny
Yeah, that's kind of. You know, this recent stuff with the Epstein files kind of illuminated a lot of that because there are so many emails with Epstein and people like Peter Thiel. There was like thousands, I think over 2000 emails with Peter Thiel and other people like that. And you could kind of see if you started to, like, really spend the time to read it and digest it, how these people operate, you know, and it really got me thinking. Like, I mean, I was sitting down reading some of these emails at night. Like, it was like I was binging Game of Thrones.
- [06:54]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [06:54]
Danny
Like, it was just. I was so into it. And, you know, it got me really thinking about, thinking differently about these people at like, the top of the hierarchy of the top of the food chain in society. Like people like Teal and Elon and all those folks that, like, it's pretty clear these guys aren't necessarily. They don't feel responsible for society or they don't necessarily feel like they. It's their duty to, you know, push forward the American empire or whatever their public claims are. Don't. Don't seem to be reality. What the reality is, is there's this inner sort of something going. Going on within their psyche, like deep within them, that is being projected out publicly and narratives are being spun in the media. So we all have this, like, distilled, sort of like reconstructed version of what their reality is, if that makes any sense.
- [08:04]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, although sometimes they really do just say it outright. You know, Peter Thiel was doing these lectures on Satanism, right? On what he sees as the Satanic force, and he sees mutual aid as the satanic force. In his model of reality, a few humans will rise above, A few humans will level up. You know, his book is called from 0 to 1, meaning that you go from 0 to 1, that you need to become one order of magnitude above everybody else. And in business, it can kind of make sense. Like rather than having a website, own Facebook that controls the websites, right? Rather than having a store online, have Amazon, which is the aggregator of all the stores. So you have Level Up. But he sees that as kind of in his version of Christianity, you level a few humans will level up, and they need the resources and the stuff in order to do that. If you're busy spreading out the wealth and resources and giving it to people who are just going to die eventually anyway, you're wasting what could be going up. So that's why, you know, to him, like a Greta Thunberg is the devil, that anybody who's trying to spread it out. When the object of the game, it's a pyramidal society, the object of the game is to gather the stuff and climb up it, right? And get to the. Get to the top and. And transcend. And that's. I mean, to cut to the chase, that's the vision of the most extreme of these kind of transhumanist tech bros. What they see, they see human beings like larva, like maggots living on the Earth, which is this piece of dung, you know, and you've seen maggots, and they're on the other. That's what we are. And a few of us are going to sprout wings and get off, right? Either up into the ether of the cloud or off the planet or into another dimension or through a quantum leap or something, a few of us will sprout wings and go. The rest of us, we're only important insofar as we serve as the labor and the fuel for the few who get the wings and go everywhere else. So now that they see, and they do believe in climate change, probably more than you and me, they see that the thing is ending, the civilization is ending. The economy got too poorly distributed, right? The pyramid of the Societies, there's too many elites at the top, it's going to collapse. We all see it, they see it. So now the race is on. They've got to build their AI to figure out how to get to the next place. And temporarily they could stave off maybe 50 or 100 years by having a castle protected by droid armies in a police state. That's sort of what they're building currently. That is the plan, but that's not the long term. The long term plan is to get out, is to leave us behind.
- [11:26]
Danny
And it's like the fact that there he, he is the one in charge of, or he's the one behind everything in Silicon Valley with like wrapping everything in Christianity and, and all. There's all these articles that have been coming out about how now everyone in Silicon Valley is going to church and he's trying to paint Christianity onto everything that's happening there. And he's hosting these Antichrist talks, lectures that Duncan went to.
- [11:51]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right.
- [11:52]
Danny
And what he's doing, like his beliefs, his values, wanting to live forever and escape the planet doesn't seem to be a very Christian ideal.
- [12:02]
Douglas Rushkoff
No, because the thing he doesn't realize, and the tech bros in general don't realize, is their vision of transcendence is the opposite. What they want to do is preserve their ego and personality exactly like it is, you know, record it and stick it in an AI or get enough, you know, child blood so they can maintain it, whatever. But they, they, the things they're doing are so earthly, they're so heavy. Even all the heavy metals that you need for AI, that's what they invest in, is like rare earth, heavy grounded. They're, they're trying to even life extension as they understand it, it's not life extension, it's not the blossoming of a life form. There's no, I mean anybody who's taken a decent plant medicine understands that what we're doing here, we're metabolizing, right? We're metabolizing and changing state. That's what mushrooms do. They turn poop into life. It's that change. If you can't engage in that cycle, you're not really alive. So what are they preserving? It's back to the pharaohs. What did the pharaohs do? What does any empire civilization do? You end up with a few super duper wealthy powerful people who genuinely believe that tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives can be sacrificed to preserve their sarcophagus, right? To keep them alive forever.
- [13:31]
Danny
Wow, I never thought about it like that I've always had an issue with trying to keep my firearm within reach but also safe around the kids. Keeping it in the closet is just too far away. I remember finding my parents firearm when I was a kid and I don't want that happening with me. And that's what StopBox USA has solved with their StopBox Pro. The customizable five button pattern is 100% mechanical to open and I love not having to fumble around with a combination with or a keypad in the dead of night. And what a relief that it doesn't operate on a battery. It stays under your pillow for fast access. And the best part is I love that it's safe around the kids, which means I never have to choose between security and readiness again. I love how well made it is. And when I travel it slips right into my bag. So no need for an extra bulky pelican case. This is the best solution that I have found and I'm super happy to have Stopbox sponsor the show. Stopbox is made in the USA and it's tariff free. Stopbox is also TSA compliant so you don't need a separate carry case. They also have a wall mount version and one for easy access cars. No longer do you have to trade safety for speed and readiness for a limited time. Our listeners can get 10% off at Stopbox when you use the code Danny at checkout. Just head on over to stopbox USA.com and use the code D A N n y for 10% off your entire order. After you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them and please support the show and let them know we sent you. What else did you learn from those guys?
- [14:47]
Douglas Rushkoff
Oh my God. Well, I mean the thing that I was interested in because I also have kind of a, it's weird, I kind of have an academic hat. To the outside world it looks like to people in academia they know it, it's a frazzled little hat. I mean I was, you know what I mean, a regular kind of writer dude that got a PhD late so that I, I could, I could teach for money and health insurance and stuff. Because writing is an up and down, it's an up and down profession, you know. Yeah, but, but getting a PhD taught me enough to really try to look at where did this thing come from? You know, I've always been really good at looking at something and saying like that's weird, right? Like looking at a dollar bill and in that kind of stoned way and going why does this paper have value? Like huh Right, right. But then what the academic does is say, let's find out, you know, who was it that. Who was it that figured out how to make a piece of paper have value? How do they enforce it? Why do we believe it? What are its biases? What came before it? What kind of money was there before central currency loaned out by a central bank at interest, and how did it work and what did it do? So that's the sort of thing I'll look back at those kinds of things. So, I mean, money is a great one, right? So in my work, what I look back at is I kind of go back to the late Middle Ages as my starting place, so that you can go all the way back to anything. You know, in the late Middle Ages was like, right after the Crusades, they'd gone on all these Christian soldiers from Europe and out into Muslim lands and they, you know, fought and killed and whatever. And then Crusades kind of ended, and it was a whole bad thing. But they had opened up all these trade routes to all these other parts of the world. So Europe got really cool and interesting. They brought back all these new technologies and, you know, windmills and water mills and new money systems, and even the marketplace, we didn't have a market until then. We saw this thing called the bazaar, right? And it was like, oh, that's cool. People just bring their shit and sell it to each other and whatever. So we started in Europe. We. I mean, I don't know where my people were at that point, but, you know, they started doing these marketplaces, and these were people who were formerly peasants, right? They would just bring their crops to the Lord and eat what they could. So now people are starting to bring things, like one person selling shoes, someone else is selling chickens. And then they started to use this kind of money that was like poker chips. It was basically money that got issued in the morning, but usually by the baker or someone who had some kind of commodity, and it would expire at the end of the day. So the idea is it was like poker chips that they had no value in themselves. So everybody just traded stuff, right? It was optimized for trading. There was no way to save up, right? So nobody would hoard money or try to hold. It wasn't gold, it was worthless. So it was just used like IOUs so that we can each get the thing. I want shoes. You want chickens, he wants meat. This was so we could all get the things and then sort of settle books at the end of the day, and it was done. There was no Money. And people got rich. People actually got rich and because they couldn't. And this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but this is actually. It's a happy conspiracy. It's just history. People got wealthy and they got healthy, like women at that time, late middle ages England, 11th, 12th century, they were taller than at any time until the 1980s, till they caught up. That's how healthy people were. They worked like three days a week. Because what do you do if you're doing well, but you don't want to keep. We don't even have a reason to keep working because you have no way to store the money. So if you can't hoard money, what are you going to do? You're going to start optimizing your society for leisure, which is what they did. How much do I have to work in order to have everything I need? So the sign of wealth, the sign of doing well was, oh, look, Joe only works two days a week, right, because his pig farm is doing so well. He doesn't have to work that much. So what is that like? So people started to get wealthy and. And the aristocracy got really upset, right, because there were the former lords, they hadn't worked in a thousand years. And now all of a sudden, the peasants are becoming the middle class, the bourgeois that we hate. So what did they do? They had to stop the rise of the middle class. And they came up with two ideas. One that we know about was the corporation, or what they called the chartered monopoly. The idea of a chartered monopoly. We know what a monopoly is. Charter means it's the king mandated monopoly. The king charters a Monopol. So now it's like, if you're my friend, I'll be like, okay, Danny, now you're not just a shoemaker. You are His Majesty's Royal chartered monopoly shoemaker. You're the official shoemaker. All the other shoemakers in town, in the city, in our country, they got to work for you. That's when employment was invented. There weren't employees before that. There weren't employees. People worked, but they didn't have jobs at companies. It wasn't. It didn't work like now. Instead, all the other shoemakers, instead of them making shoes and selling them, now they go work for you by the hour, right? So that's when hourly wages happen. That's when the clock went on the tower. In the medieval village, they didn't have clocks up there before. They put them up really as a way of normalizing, showing time is our value. That's the highest thing. Now time is money. That's when that started. So what happened was people got really disconnected from the value they were creating. You were punching the clock, you were working eight hours a day, you know, 40 hour week, whatever it was. Instead of working for what? For the value you created. And then what people like you figured out what Danny, not you in real life, but Danny, the guy who runs the company figured out is you don't even want qualified workers working for you. You want to go to the Home Depot parking lot, pick up a bunch of undocumented aliens and bring them in, train them in 15 minutes and pay minimum wage. You don't want some super qualified shoemaker that's going to demand 40 bucks an hour, right? So that's when we got the assembly line. That's when we developed the industrial age so that you could train someone in 15 minutes to do one piece of the job, pass it on to the next person, and only you and your other boss, people know the whole process of making it. So we got that and we also got central currency. They've decided to make all those local currencies. We were using all those poker chips, all that stuff that's all illegal, right? You can't use that anymore. Now what you have to do is borrow money from the central treasury at interest. So if anyone wants to buy shoes from you, you can't use your own money. We want to make the wealthy want to make money off that transaction. So the way they will is for me to have money, I've got to borrow money from the central treasury at interest, do my transactions and then pay back more money than I borrowed. And that's a really weird ass idea. How do you pay back more than you borrowed? Where does the other money come from? The only way to get warm is the economy has to grow. And that's why we talk about to this day, that's why we talk about GDP and economic growth and all that. It's not so I can have the shoes I need and people can have the stuff they need. The economy has to grow because the operating system of the economy, this central currency needs to be paid back with interest in order for it to work. That's the kind of money we use. So we live in a, in an economy and a society, a civilization that has to grow in order to stay functional. Right? That worked really well for colonialism. Getting a new world, getting new territories, getting new enslaved people. Oh, keep going, going, going. We kind of ran out like 1950s, we kind of ran out of room, right? The Palestine pushed back India pushed back. No more. What do we do? What do we do? So let's create consumers out of Americans. We'll get people to buy more stuff. We use advertising to get people to buy shit they don't need just to keep the economy going. And they'll get storage facilities to stick all the shit they don't need. And we'll get pollution. We'll make stuff disposable so they need to buy more so that the economy can grow. And we all accept that this growth is a great thing. Finally, the Internet, that's going to be the best one of all because it's going to create infinite surface area. We're going to have the world wide web forever. It's an infinite marketplace. But what happened was it turned out people only have so many eyeball hours in a day, right? You only have so much time, you can spend so much attention. So that's part of why we're seeing the breakdown of the human mind is we're mining human attention. But that's the thing that's really reached its limit is our ability to keep growing the economy in a way that's not just. Well, in a way that's not just hurting people. It's not just extracting value. So now it's really hard for almost anybody to make value except the people who are at the very top of that. That growth pyramid. And those guys see this isn't going to work anymore. That this last thousand, two thousand years, you know, of. Of of growth through extraction and growth in this sort of corporatized central currency way, that one's over. So they're like, what happens after? What happens kind of after this particular capitalist extraction. And that's why you got folks like Nick Land in Europe saying, oh, it's going to be monarchy. That's what's going to come. It's no longer a capitalist society, it's a monarchic society. And then things could work like that. Some people see socialism and that's what the sort of the Occupy people are all. We're going to have a sharing economy. And that one sounds better to me than a monarchy. And the Tech Bros are like, it's going to be nothing at all, right? That whole thing's going down that's, you know, forever. Chemicals are forever. I don't want to live there.
- [24:53]
Danny
We got to get off this place. We got to get off this planet.
- [24:55]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [24:55]
Danny
What do you think? What do you think? They think those Tech Bros like the people like Teal and, you know, all those people. What, what do they think that this AI stuff is going to lead to, like, the. Now that the AI is, the ChatGPT is updating itself and, you know, it's baked into everything, the social media. Like, we can't figure out what's real or not real. Now, Grok, when you ask Grok if an image is real, Grok can't even tell you if it's real or not. Like, do they. I can't imagine there's any optimism within those people.
- [25:29]
Douglas Rushkoff
Well, there is sometimes. You know, the thing I love about these people? I mean, these, these guys were kind of like the guys I would hang out with stoned in college and have these crazy thoughts. What if we're living in an experiment that's being a simulation run by a grad student or somewhere on another planet? Those are fun, great conversations to have. It's just not great to run a government or an economy based on the most crazy answers to them. I mean, different ones are thinking different things. I mean, Elon Musk used to. He really thought he was getting off the planet, and pretty recently was when he decided, oh, I'm not. That's not going to work.
- [26:10]
Danny
We're going to dial it back to the moon is what he said.
- [26:12]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, yeah, dial it back to the moon or even try to make it work, you know, as you can here, you know, because, you know, I'm sure you've had somebody talk about that. What do they call it? Kessler Syndrome, maybe.
- [26:24]
Danny
Remind me what it is saying that
- [26:26]
Douglas Rushkoff
the satellites in space are crashing into each other and making smaller and smaller particles.
- [26:31]
Danny
Oh, I haven't heard this.
- [26:32]
Douglas Rushkoff
Oh, this is a big one. Right? So Musk knows about this, all right. It's an aside, but it's kind of cool, at least in terms of getting off the planet. So, you know, we have all these satellites and stuff up in space, and occasionally they crash into each other because they're up there moving at 20,000 miles an hour or whatever, and when they crash into each other, they make smaller particles, and then those smaller particles are all going around crashing into other stuff. Like the. Remember the Chinese? They were just going to bring their astronauts down from the Chinese space station or something. They couldn't do it. They couldn't do it because the, the craft that was supposed to pick them up got pierced by one of those projectiles.
- [27:10]
Danny
Oh, no.
- [27:11]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right. But the more satellites that get hit by projectiles, the more projectiles there are until it reaches this thing, it's called Kessler Syndrome, where there's so many that it cascades and then it's just like, just zillions and zillions of particles. They could be. Yeah, look, they could be.
- [27:30]
Danny
So it's like exponential.
- [27:31]
Douglas Rushkoff
It's exponential. And they could be a millimeter or a centimeter big, but still if your spacecraft gets hit by a centimeter, it still shreds you. Right. So the idea is then this whole layer of, of the, of the orb, this whole level of orb is like. Exactly. It's like Gettysburg. Right. It's just like thousands of things. And it's so bad though that then we can't get off. It makes it impossible to get off planet. Wouldn't that be ironic because they trapped in there. From that irony recently, what Musk did, he was just asked permission to start. I don't know whether NAS or whatever runs this, the FEMA who knows to start using a different orbit because that orbit's just too crowded with crap to start launching his satellites to.
- [28:18]
Danny
So they want to start doing it deeper into space.
- [28:21]
Douglas Rushkoff
No, they can't. They got to do it closer, closer in. Because every time you go deeper in space, you're going to risk going through that shrapnel. Yeah.
- [28:28]
Danny
What's the number? Isn't it like 30,000 something satellites are up there right now. Or is it 60? It's something crazy. It's like clo. It's like. I think it's getting damn near a hundred thousand satellites.
- [28:38]
Douglas Rushkoff
And I would bet Musk has a lot of. And I'm not saying anything against space travel or whatever, right? It's just like dudes work this out.
- [28:47]
Danny
Oh, 15,000 twice. 20, 26. There's approximately 14 to 15,000 active satellites in Earth's orbit.
- [28:53]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, but there's 45,000 total human made objects.
- [28:56]
Danny
What?
- [28:57]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, because those are inactive satellites and debris trapped in orbit with millions more smaller pieces of debris. So millions of. It's like. Do you remember that movie? Who was it? Julia Roberts was up there or Sandra Bullock or somebody was in space and gravity.
- [29:13]
Danny
I never saw that one.
- [29:14]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right. Now all these, that's what screws them up is this shrapnel goes back. But anyway they're there. It's an interesting metaphor for the, the reverse impact of so many of these things. Right. The more it's like you kind of like the more locks you put and guarded whatever, the more fences and shielded doors you put on a city street, the more crime there'll be on the street because it's just like you're making it worse. So it feels like. And that's what they're doing, they're so afraid. But yeah, what I looked at was I looked at how capitalism, which is really what we were describing before the corporations and central currency, how it led to this sort of growth based economy where the only way to survive is to become really big, right, You've got to, you live in a pyramid and you've got to get higher and higher up the pyramid.
- [30:09]
Danny
Psilocybin mushrooms are seeing major breakthroughs in scientific research right now. But there's a whole nother mushroom that's just as effective and it doesn't make you trip. It's called Amanita Mascaria. I would have never tried Aminata mascara if it weren't for Amentara. At high doses it can feel sedating, even a little dreamy, but at lower doses it gives you a calming patience. I take a few capsules most days after work and, and it helps me forget the stresses of the workday and settle in and be in the moment with my family and friends. Imagine being in a super stressful environment and not feeling triggered. That's what Amanita mascara does for me. There's a lot of gas station fakes out there doing lots of harm. Amentara is the complete opposite of that. With 55,000 customers, everything is lab tested, cleanly sourced and fully transparent. There's no synthetics or mystery blends. They also have a huge range of gummies, capsules, extracts and even raw material. And just now they launched limited Amanita and Blue Lotus beginner bundles with raw materials, plus ready to use products designed for people who are completely new to this and at a heavy discount. And if you use my code DJ11, you'll get an extra 11 off on top of that. So you're getting a pretty serious deal. Just hit the link in the description or go to amentara.com go/djp Again, that's code DJ11, but it's only available for a limited time.
- [31:24]
Douglas Rushkoff
I blamed capitalism for killing the net for a long time. That was like 10 years of books going, look what they did to my Internet. We were just gonna rave and party and, and it was a shareware. Everything was free, it was beautiful. And then they wanted to capture our attention and they took these technologies that we were using and turned them on us. Right? So instead of giving people tech to realize their visions, they used tech on people to create our visions. Right? They reversed the whole thing. It became what they called captology. Right? Using tech on humans to predict and steer our behavior forward and then use AIs and algorithms, which are basically algorithms, are almost like demons, right? I'm gonna TR something to use everything, use everything it knows about you to get you to act against yourself. So there was that. But then I started to look and I thought, you know, it's not just money, it's also something about the tech and the science also is part of it. And I look back at like the origins of empirical science. You know, it was this guy Francis Bacon, around the same period, late Middle Ages, early Renaissance, right? It's that same period, Francis Bacon and when he was selling the idea of empirical science, meaning evidence based science to the court, he said that empirical science will let us take nature by the forelock, hold her down and submit her to our will. So take nature by the hair, hold her down and rape her. Right? Submit her to our will. So the way early scientists looked at the world was like this scary, dark feminine nature, moon fairies, earthworms, unpredictable stuff. We're going to use science to make it all predictable, you know, so you take something, you, you kill it, you take it apart and understand what it is, right? It's not about life, it's about reduction, right. So anything that you can, anything you can weigh and measure exists. If you can't do have enough metrics for it, may as well not be there. It's nothing. Right. So it's like it was, it wasn't just like, like anti female but I mean women kind of represented that unruly. I mean I understand is what is that? What is it thinking? How is it thinking? What does it want? Yes, and I need to be with it, but I'm afraid of it. No, I understand they were there, but that was the way they dealt with it was to control it. So then you look at how that scientific, that's not even scientific. I would go scientistic mindset. It was like scientism. It was sort of reductive materialist science as religion rather than science as the exploration. It really is, you know, not scientific model. It was scientific reductionism then that came through to the, to the tech bros. Anything you can't quantize is not real. Anything that can't be digitally weighed, weighed, measured. Exactly. And if you don't know what it is, then it's just noise. So all that DNA, oh, that's junk DNA, don't worry. But don't take my junk DNA. What's, you know, so my monkey DNA or whatever that it's not junk, it's gonna just wait, I might, it's there. I might need it, it's my history, it's my, it's all the species I was. I don't want to lose, I don't wanna lose that. You know, it's like anything that's not on the quantized line is expendable. Everything is kind of auto tuned into their reality. And just like, I get it, you wanna auto tune Ariana Grande or something, she'll be a better product, hitting the C perfectly. Go at it, go for it. But like James Brown, right, Who's like reaching up to the note and lives in that in between space. If you auto tune James Brown, you're literally removing the soul, right? And the soul to these guys and to the digital realm is noise. And it's not the soul. It's that. All that in between stuff, stuff you talk about on here, the in between the liminal. The reason why we talk about even the stuff we don't believe in is because it puts your head in that weird in between space. Just the exercise of hearing somebody talk about aliens. You decide later you don't believe in wrapping your head around it for an hour or two. It makes you realize there's more going on here than meets the eye, right? There is a shamanic sensibility, right? But that's the scary female power, nature stuff that gets quantized out, right? So those are sort of the two histories I look at the, the history of, of capitalism and money, right, which only wants to value things that it can put a dollar value on and that will expand the market for the bankers. And then a scientistic view of reality that the only things that matter are the things that have metrics and all the other stuff doesn't. And that's how you end up with this kind of sociopathic marriage going, which is like, like it's funny. I mean, you want, you want a real conspiracy story that I lived. All right, so I was at a, I was at, I was in my late 20s, at my first like important scientist party. I'd written my first book or two. And I'm there and I see Richard Dawkins, right, the selfish gene guy. He came up with the term meme, you know, Nobel, whatever, scientist dude, Cambridge, the whole thing. And he's there and he's talking about memes and stuff and he starts saying that human beings are just like computers for memes, that a meme runs a human like a program runs a computer. And that ultimately he had this very reductive view that there's nothing going on here, we're in a completely materialist world. And we're going to live selfishly because our memes and genes tell us to live selfishly. Movie and you know who was there was Naomi Wolf. Remember Naomi Wolf? She. She was a big feminist writer. And then she ended up becoming kind of a maga Kennedy.
- [37:27]
Danny
Really? Yeah, she's not. The name's not ringing a bell here.
- [37:31]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [37:32]
Danny
Oh, okay.
- [37:32]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, she's been on like Bannon's show a lot. She was anti vax. And I mean, she went from being a kind of a lefty intellectual feminist to.
- [37:42]
Danny
She had gray hair.
- [37:43]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, she kind of horseshoed to the other side of it. But at the time she was. She was. More. What would the word be? More intellectually dependable to the regular classes. You know, more a New York Times, you know, approved intellectual at that point, if lefty. She hadn't kind of gone off road yet. And she was arguing, and I saw her arguing with Dawkins, saying, but isn't there a soul? There's something. There's spirit and all these dudes. It was like Dawkins and some of the other scientists of that ilk, these God delusion type scientists were like laughing at her and kind of teasing her. And I tried to defend her because, you know, I was for a bunch of reasons, but, you know, but I wanted her to like me, I guess, you know, and I'm defending her and, you know, arguing that the universe doesn't work. Like, they're saying these other things. And I was bringing up Wittgenstein and systems of Meaning. And finally they dismissed me. And Dawkins said, oh, you're a moralist. Like, I didn't even know what a moralist is. Dismissed. Oh, you're a moralist. As if like means Christian or something. Or a moralist that I believe we live in a universe that does have some sense of right and wrong, that there is a conscience, that there is an ethical something that humans can do. And 10 years later, I see Dawkins and some of the other scientists from that party in a picture on Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express right now. They weren't going to the island, they were going to the TED conference. But I find out that Epstein had funded my literary agent and these scientists conferences and stuff. And I was thinking, you know, so I'm the moralist and they're the ones who are on Epstein's plane. So what really is going on here is that the marriage of these things is Epstein funded. And he did. He funded these particularly scientistic, kind of anti spiritual scientists as a way of Kind of justifying the exploitation of all these other people. If people don't have souls, if people aren't even really real, they're not even conscious, they're just kind of machine animals. Then it's okay to have a harem of 14 year old girls. What are, they're not real, right? Nature. We're gonna hold her down by the forelock and submit her to our will because she's just stuck. There's no nothing. And that was when I saw the sort of the sociopathic tendency of the kind of tech bro scientist to look at everything as programmable matter rather than an other. Right. There's another person there. That's not a thing to exploit, that's a human. It really dovetailed perfectly with the billionaire sociopathic view of the rest of humanity. And that's how they get, get to this weird version of transhumanism where the super elite can leave everyone behind in order to pursue.
- [41:01]
Danny
I've always wondered though, what is that something that's baked into us from the, from the jump? Or is that something that just happens when you attain that level of financial wealth and power? Is that something that bubbles up out of the human psyche naturally? Because this stuff goes back to like, like early Greece. Let's get. Maybe this stuff goes back. What is the. The Greek emperor Tiberius, you know, who like famously had like, you know, was like testing and killing children all day long on his island. And, and there's tons of stories of this stuff going back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome and like, and is this just some like freak genetic abnormality in some people that also happens to coincide with becoming a billionaire at the top of society? Or is it, is that what happens when you attain all of that power?
- [41:58]
Douglas Rushkoff
There's some of both. Right. So it is true. And I talk about these actually in, in that book there are studies that show like basically you take a billionaire and put them in an MRI machine, show them a picture of like a starving baby. The parts of your, my brain that would light up and empathy don't for them. So as you, as you get wealthier, your empathy decreases. And it's not that people with low empathy end up doing well, although that might be true too. It's that as you get wealthy, you help less wealthier people help less in the street. You, you just do. You have less.
- [42:32]
Danny
Yeah, you, you do separate.
- [42:34]
Douglas Rushkoff
It's, it's part of the way you justify. You have to justify after the fact that you've gotten there.
- [42:40]
Danny
I think it depends on how you got wealthy Too. Yeah, I know super wealthy people who are not like that at all.
- [42:45]
Douglas Rushkoff
Some. Yeah, yeah, some. But they must have good, good upbringings or strong anchor. The other thing you bring up which is interesting is some percent, you know, 1 out of 100, 5 out of 100 of humans are going to have a sociopathic tendency. That's just the way we are. Yeah. You know, one say 5 out of 100, even 10 out of are going to have that. So then the question is, is the landscape in which your society is operating, is it a landscape that rewards the sociopath or, or prevents the sociopath from gaining power? Right. So if you look at some of the, some, not all, some of the Native American or indigenous cultures, they have a lot of safeguards to prevent a sociopathic, usually male, but not always, but usually sociopathic male from taking over. So they'll have a, they'll say we're going to have a male chief at all times, but we're going to have 10 females who are allowed to veto and change the chief whenever they want. So it's a weird balance. You get the wisdom of the women and the, you know, macho whatever brouhaha of the guy, but he's kept in check by this panel of women who can go, okay, you're out. And then they even had mechanisms if we really don't like the dictator we're with. They were migratory societies. People leave, we'll go 50 of us, we're going, this guy's fucking maniac. So, so you can build societies around that and those are called horizontal civilizations or you build pyramidal civilizations and they're throughout history, pyramidal civilizations, you have to climb to the top in order to gain power. And they're optimized for accumulation and control and taking, that's what you do. And then there's horizontal civilizations, like the late Middle Ages time we were talking about. Horizontal civilizations are, are optimized for leisure, but we take our productivity and we give it back to everybody in the form of more time. And that one to me seems like the more natural human state. What are we here for? We're here to fuck and play and create. That's not just stuff you let workers do so they work more. That's the reason we're here. You work in order to have time to fucking play.
- [45:03]
Danny
Right. And now it's becoming, you're, you're compiling onto all that stuff, all the digital and all of the separation of humans where people only communicate within via screens and text and dating apps and all that stuff. And like Now, I was laughing my ass off when you and Duncan were talking about this, but also injecting themselves with Botox so you can't see their emotions anymore. So not only are they hiding their facial expressions, they're also behind the screen. Right. And, like, the separation is becoming exponential on top of all of that stuff. So.
- [45:36]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right. That is interesting. So we're zooming already, and we're unable to really establish rapport in zoom. I can't see if your pupils are getting bigger or smaller as I speak. All the, you know, hundreds of thousands of years of painstakingly evolved mechanisms for establishing rapport are thwarted there. And then you're right. Then we go into the real world and do other things to prevent rapport.
- [45:55]
Danny
It's like we're on this runaway apocalyptic train that. That I don't see. There's an end. It seems to be coming soon. It doesn't see. I mean, maybe. Maybe.
- [46:04]
Douglas Rushkoff
Oh, it's collapsing.
- [46:05]
Danny
I seem to be.
- [46:06]
Douglas Rushkoff
I'm optimistic.
- [46:07]
Danny
I seem to be optimistic. I like to be optimistic about this, too, because, like, I always look at all the stuff that was happening in the 60s when Kennedy got shot and all this other crazy stuff that was out, and, like, imagine if we had phones and Instagram back then. You know, imagine how many conspiracies there would be everywhere and how people would be running wild. So, yeah, you know, people are getting
- [46:27]
Douglas Rushkoff
sick of it, though. I mean, they are, for sure.
- [46:29]
Danny
We're more aware of how unhealthy it is.
- [46:31]
Douglas Rushkoff
I know. And I feel like kids, not just. I know there's a. Every once in a while there'll be an article about, oh, here's a group of kids. It's. Throw away their phones and they're only reading books, you know, but they're a tiny group. On the other hand, I was in. I was in Target the other day, and right. Right in front of the target, they had. I think it was like Taylor Swift's last record or something, but. But it was in vinyl. And I saw this girl buying it, and I asked her. She's like a gen zer. And I said, oh, that's cool. You're getting. I said, what kind of turntable do you have? She goes, oh, I don't have a turntable. I just want the wreck. So it was both heartbreaking and sweet at the same time, but that. She wants the artifact, they want the thing. Even if she's listening to it on Spotify, she wants the thing. And I feel like we kind of reached a place where, you know, I know all the stats say the kids are having less sex. All that. Eventually, I think, I think it's, it's going to come back around.
- [47:30]
Danny
Really?
- [47:30]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [47:31]
Danny
How does that happen?
- [47:33]
Douglas Rushkoff
Through sheer nausea and boredom and sadness. It's like things like sex and meditation and movement and ecstatic. Have you gone to an ecstatic dance? Done one of those?
- [47:47]
Danny
No, it's like, what's an ecstatic dance?
- [47:48]
Douglas Rushkoff
Remember rave? Were you around for rave?
- [47:50]
Danny
You know, a thousand people go, I never, I never. I went to maybe one.
- [47:53]
Douglas Rushkoff
But yeah, so raves was a thousand kids, 100 beats per minute, taking ecstasy.
- [47:58]
Danny
Yes.
- [48:00]
Douglas Rushkoff
The ecstatic dance night is like 300 people. Maybe not on ecstasy, but like dancing all together. Not like with partners, but just like in this thing. And you really do. A few hours in, you end up in a beautiful altered state with people.
- [48:20]
Danny
And it's like, you don't even have to do drugs.
- [48:22]
Douglas Rushkoff
You don't. It's like, you know the scene in the second Matrix movie, you know, where they're all, they're dancing, they show the people who are in Zion. I remember, basically Zion is like this kind of.
- [48:33]
Danny
Zion. Yeah.
- [48:34]
Douglas Rushkoff
Zion is literally like a Burning man kind of rave thing. It really, it. You reconnect pretty freaking fast. You know, people go to one of those or one good mushroom ceremony, you know, they, they're just like, oh, okay, I wanna, I wanna live like this. Not like that.
- [48:52]
Danny
Yes. I was explaining this, I was explaining this to somebody where there was a, I went to a, a Metallica concert last year in Tampa. And it was my first time ever going to Metallica concert. And when I was there, it was like 60, 000 people packed into this. It was the, the Buccaneer Stadium, which is a huge outdoor stadium. And what they do is they put this circular stage in the middle of the football field, right? And they put all the people basically gather around. They're in the stadiums too, but it's all on the floor, like in the middle of where the football field would be. And it's like this donut shaped stage and there's people in the middle. They call it the snake pit too. And there's like these giant towers, the LED towers that show graphics. There's like, there's smoke, there's giant beach balls. And the sound is like vibrating through everyone. And it's like, it's hard to describe this like palpable, palpable energy that's there that just vibrates every fiber of your being. And it's like, you don't have to be on drugs at all. But it's intoxicating. Like there's the sounds, the lights, the energy, the smoke, the. Just the ambiance in general. It got me thinking, I'm like, this must have been what, like the Eleusinian mysteries were right.
- [50:10]
Douglas Rushkoff
Except, you know, it's interesting. So you can do that. And in some of the ways we're describing, it's through a kind of a sensory overload that creates a reset. It's a little bit like, you know, they've been doing it since the Roman games, the Nuremberg rallies, a sports game or a terrific concert. So it's through size. You know, the interesting thing, what I've been trying to play with is how do you get there through stillness? You know, there was. So you can be bombarded by it, but you can also kind of fall into it, you know, and in some ways, like a drum circle of people, there's still stuff, you know, and they're, they're. But you know, it's sort of what David lynch was describing. He wrote this book on meditation because he was a big meditator on sort of how you, how you, you go into that state or. I know it's tricky for kids now because they're sort of, they're trained on porn, but there's ways of having sex.
- [51:09]
Danny
They're trained on porn.
- [51:10]
Douglas Rushkoff
Well, you know what I mean? Crazy thing, but you know what I mean?
- [51:12]
Danny
It's like, yeah, no, I know, I know it's crazy.
- [51:15]
Douglas Rushkoff
It's what sex is. So. But if, I mean, I invite, I invite young sexually active people to go enter and be still, you know what I mean? Be still and see what that's like. It's like there's another. You know what I mean? There's a kind of an intimacy, a connection, an opening to everything. If you can be, you know, passively active and actively passive, you know, if you be yin and yang at the same time, really fall into the moment. And that's the hard thing, especially in our society. That's what I've been pushing for now is how do I be in the now and truly in the moment that I'm in and not let even my most well intentioned social justice efforts distract me from exactly where I am in the moment. I mean, here I am having great water and coffee with you in this gorgeous studio and I know there's people starving somewhere else and you know, some kid getting their hand blown off by IED or something. This second, like, yeah, but, but it's still okay to be, to revel and here we are connecting about this weird shit, you know?
- [52:36]
Danny
Right, right.
- [52:38]
Douglas Rushkoff
It's. It's both. It's both. And if you truly fall into that moment, then you reconnect with all of that stuff again, you know, and that's the kind of weird ass spiritual thing I've been working on lately is how do you kind of metabolize what's going on here? How do you kind of make like a mushroom? How do you be, you know, the. How do you. Through your very existence, how do you metabolize what's going on in all of its horror and grief rather than try to make enough money to rise above it, to insulate oneself, like.
- [53:18]
Danny
Like to break out of the system.
- [53:19]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right.
- [53:20]
Danny
New seasons means fresh starts. And with Ira Store's Memorial Day savings event from April 28 through May 26, it's the perfect time to upgrade your hair and skin routine. IR Store has been leading the way for red light therapy for over two decades. And this is the last month for their bundles discount on two of the customer favorites, the IR Store Elite and the Illumina skin mask. The Irestore Elite is clinically proven to help regrow your hair with 300 lasers and 200 LEDs that send light therapy directly to your scalp. And the Irisore Illumina is a dermatologist recommended face mask with double the power than most competitors. It targets fine lines, breakouts, stimulates collagen, and boosts blood flow. I've been using the Iristore Elite for months now, and it's the coolest, most, least invasive way to maintain my hair growth. And Iris Store is kicking off their Memorial Day savings event with some huge discounts on their red light therapy devices. Right now you can save on customer favorites like the Iristore Elite helmet and the Illumina face mask. Just head over to irestore.com and use the code Danny to take advantage of this sale. That's code D A N N y at the letter I R E S T O R e dot com. Please support the show and tell them we sent you. Give your hair and skin the upgrade they deserve so you can feel conf and refreshed. What you just said translates into every aspect of life and to society. You know, everything from from engineering rockets to the economy to meditation, psychic, religion and all that stuff. Everything is. Everything in our lives, from from podcasts to rocket engines is. Is just intertwined and baked into this pyramidical structure. And like, I can't comprehend how other than what you just said, which I think is great, trying to reconnect with yourself and meditate how to break that system. I feel like it's gonna take something just like overwhelmingly catastrophic to do that.
- [55:25]
Douglas Rushkoff
You would think, well, we want the Goldilocks event is what they call it. Right. Something that's bad enough to wake us up, but not so bad that it kills us all. You know, we kind of hope that Covid would be that or maybe, you know, the Trump prison camps or something would be that. What is it that does that? But for me, the easy way to play with it is meet your neighbors, go ultra local. If we conclude, like the wealthiest people in the world that this pyramid's coming down, there's gonna be a crash of one sort or another, Whether it's climate crash or economic crash or both, or all of them. You know, the ocean current we saw that big ocean wave is dying down the North Atlantic, whatever that thing is. So England's gonna.
- [56:13]
Danny
In, like the magnetosphere or whatever. Yeah, there's like the anomaly.
- [56:16]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, yeah. There's bad. No, there's like the ocean is changing. The climate change thing is happening. There's going to be mass migrations from the coasts. Even the Koch brothers are investing in it. You know, the people that are saying there's no climate change are investing in what's gonna happen. Everyone knows. So there's gonna be that thing, and then it's like, we can work to try to prevent it. Sure. But I think the more important thing is how do we soften the landing as much as possible? And the way to soften the landing of an economic or a food supply or an energy crisis is to have very resilient local networks. The more you know your neighbors. And it's not like to be a prepper, but to be. How can our village, how can our town, whatever area, be more sustainable? Where do we get our food? Where do the old people live? Who needs help? How do they get their water? The more that we do for each other, rather than buying it on Amazon, then the more prepared we'll be when Amazon's not delivering. I'm not saying you can do it all overnight, but we can build more resilient communities. And it starts, it's really as simple as meet your neighbor. We don't really know them. I told this story when my daughter was graduating high school. We had this picture. We got the frame picture, wanted to stick it in the wall. We got plaster walls. I don't want to put a nail on the plaster walls. I got a drill to put a set in there. I don't have a drill. So what's my first impulse? Like any American, go to Home Depot, get a minimum viable product rechargeable drill. Use it once, stick it in the garage, maybe never use it again. Or take it out and it won't recharge and throw it out. Out, right? So I sent kids into the Congo, into the mines to get the rare earth metals for the rechargeable drill, all the carbon that was made to make it, and then I throw it out and it's going to go on a waste dump in Brazil where some other kids are going to pick at it to pull out the renewable part and sell it to Apple so they can call themselves a green company, right? Or I could walk down the street and knock on the door and say, bob, can I borrow your drill? Why is that so hard? Why? And because. You know why it's so hard? Because Bob's gonna come out and he's gonna say, doug, you're a nerd. You don't know how to drill hole. I'm gonna come over there and I'm gonna drill the hole for you. He's gonna come over, he's gonna drill the hole and set it and whatever and plug it in the wall like it's supposed to be, you know, some non rechargeable crap. He's do the whole thing. Then that weekend I'm gonna have the barbecue party for my daughter. And Bob's gonna be over there working, routing the door, whatever he's doing in his garage, smelling. He goes, what's going on? Doug's having a graduation party for his daughter. And I drilled the hole for the fucking picture. What's that? Right? So I invite Bob, okay, Bob, come to the house. Now Bob's gonna come with his wife and the mother in law. And the mother in law sees we have a piano and says, oh, you know, we should come over and sing songs for Christmas. And now we're supposed to be friends with those people. And now the neighbors see that Bob's at my barbecue party and want to know, why didn't I invite them? So then I invite them. So now I got the whole block at my daughter's graduation party having barbecue in my backyard, like a block party. And that's the bad thing, right? That's how screwed up we are, right? That's the bad. That's the good thing. That's the good thing. Because then we start talking about, how did you meet? Why did you knock on Bob's door? I needed a drill. He said, you know, we've got, every family in this block has its own lawnmower. What if we had two lawnmowers for the whole block and we shared them and now we don't have to buy as much stuff, we don't have to work as much, we don't have to pollute as much. And I told this story at a conference of those kind of tech bro banker people, and someone got up at the end and said, well, yeah, it's all nice and good, but what about the lawnmower company? People are buying less lawnmowers and their stock's gonna go down, it's gonna hurt the economy. And what about the old lady who's depending on the dividends from her stock in the lawnmower company for her retirement? Now you've just taken food out of her mouth. To which I say, I don't wanna live in a society where the welfare of that old woman is depending on how many lawnmowers we buy. We should be taking care of her. She's part of our neighbor. She. What kind of society is it that you have to earn enough money in your working years to support yourself entirely by yourself through the rest of your life?
- [60:25]
Danny
Right.
- [60:26]
Douglas Rushkoff
It's a non society. It's an every man for himself competitive economy.
- [60:31]
Danny
Yes. And you know, the, the social media stuff is hugely responsible for that too because it, it goes back and forth because you have these people that are just competing to attain more wealth so they can have, or have bigger Instagram followings or bigger Twitter followings or whatever. So they're incentivized not only to just like run that rat race, but they're also doing this whole other thing on, on social media, trying to like prop up this fake existence to impress more people. And it's spending, they're spending more time on that. And it seems like that, that is also spiraling into more and more of this control grid system where all those companies are also like intertwined with the government somehow. That's like controlling what can be said, what can't be said. And I know.
- [61:30]
Douglas Rushkoff
Did you see Zuckerberg that, that they released these messages that he was agreeing with. He told Trump that they weren't gonna, that they were censoring negative Facebook posts on Doge.
- [61:44]
Danny
Oh no. When did this come out?
- [61:46]
Douglas Rushkoff
Last week.
- [61:47]
Danny
Really? No, I didn't see this.
- [61:49]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, it's funny. I mean, they did it for Biden too, with, you know, and not saying bad things about vaccines. Now it's like, okay, so it's like they didn't change Their behavior, they just changed their allegiance.
- [61:59]
Danny
Right, right. And that's what I'm afraid of. Like, I'm afraid of, like, when it comes to the integration of the tech, the big tech stuff and all of these platforms like Google and Facebook and YouTube and all that stuff, how they can just turn a dial and try to and like, manipulate culture and manipulate humanity and manipulate this sort of, like, extra layer, this extra, like this consciousness that lives above us that we're kind of all tapped into.
- [62:24]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah. I mean, and the big name in that, that no one really talks about. Everyone talks about Thiel and Musk. It's Larry Ellison.
- [62:30]
Danny
Right? Well, Larry. I mean, what he's buying these companies that, like, nobody really gives a shit about. Right. Like CBS and.
- [62:36]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, but he's got really watching. He's got a bigger surveillance infrastructure than Palantir. Oracle was named after a CIA project. The whole thing has been surveillance and control. He's the one. He's. He's on the board of Peace, you know, in the Middle East. He's got the contract with the IDF to be doing their data and analysis on Israeli Defense Fund, on all their intelligence. He's got the highest security clearance his company has in the US Government. He's got all of our employment data because all the companies, big companies, use PeopleSoft as their employee management system. He's got our medical data that. He just got our medical data. And he's building the DNA database. He wants a DNA database of everyone in America, everyone in the world. He's got more. And what he wants to do with it is, on the one hand, be able to do. To cure cancer, predict all diseases. On the other hand, he wants to help predict crime.
- [63:35]
Danny
Oh, my God.
- [63:37]
Douglas Rushkoff
Predict crime. And it depends how you define crime. So what we're looking at is AI being used. Yes, in the way you're saying it, to control what the population thinks, but also to monitor and enforce are those who don't behave as we want. I mean, the easy thing I can't imagine they're not already doing it is you use AI and predictive analysis to see. Just look. Even the blogosphere. Look at the podcast sphere, whose media and talking is most likely to sow discontent in the population. And let's just throw a couple of tax audits at them. Right. You don't need to. The warehouse, you don't gotta make a martyr. Right. If they cart you away, you know, they cart Danny Jones away. That's not good. Right? All this, what happened, you know what I mean? It creates a Charlie Kirk kind of movement around that.
- [64:32]
Danny
You'll become huge dry sand effect for them. Yeah, yeah.
- [64:34]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right. But a few tax audits will just take you off the playing field for a while. If it really. You know what I mean? It's like.
- [64:40]
Danny
But they don't even need to do the tax audits. All they need to do is turn a little dial on your reach.
- [64:45]
Douglas Rushkoff
I know.
- [64:47]
Danny
So like with the shadow banning, they just turn you off in the algorithm so no one's the issue anymore. That's. This has happened. This has happened to lots of people. I know, right? It's crazy. So it's not just like they're censoring or they're. They're burning the books or whatever. Now they're doing it secretly. So not only. Not only are they burning the books, but they're doing it and making it invisible so nobody even knows it's happening.
- [65:06]
Douglas Rushkoff
I know. It is weird, though. It's like if certain posts. It's like, why didn't this one reach 200,000 people? This one's really cool and it reached 2,000 people. Like, what happened there? Right. And they'll. They'll have reasons, you know, other reasons. They'll say, oh, because, you know, that one was 7.3 seconds longer than the optimized something or other.
- [65:29]
Danny
Yeah, but we can't see behind the curtain, so we don't know what's really happening. Yeah, but they just have these loose rules that are on all these platforms. These. These sort of, like vague, ambiguous sort of guidelines that you have to abide by.
- [65:43]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right.
- [65:44]
Danny
But you're. They're not really, like, enforcing them. There's no court.
- [65:49]
Douglas Rushkoff
I know. And we think that we're winning or losing the war based on sort of.
- [65:53]
Danny
What?
- [65:53]
Douglas Rushkoff
You have an ant on your shoulder.
- [65:55]
Danny
I do.
- [65:55]
Douglas Rushkoff
Eat it.
- [65:56]
Danny
Other shoulder.
- [65:57]
Douglas Rushkoff
It's not an ant. It's a. It's a oracle. It's a. It's a Palantir.
- [66:03]
Danny
B. I think it went under my shirt. I'm okay.
- [66:06]
Douglas Rushkoff
That's what it could go. Penetrate.
- [66:07]
Danny
Your steam won't let me kill an ant.
- [66:09]
Douglas Rushkoff
It really. No, because he's a Buddhist.
- [66:11]
Danny
Yeah, he's a. He's a hippie.
- [66:14]
Douglas Rushkoff
Oh, my God. No, but the funny thing is, we think it's like we're competing, like, against each other in terms of our content.
- [66:21]
Danny
On my chest.
- [66:22]
Douglas Rushkoff
Oh, is he.
- [66:23]
Danny
He's gone.
- [66:23]
Douglas Rushkoff
You're hurting him.
- [66:24]
Danny
I know. I just. I just smashed him into my chest.
- [66:26]
Douglas Rushkoff
It's all right. You're absorbing.
- [66:28]
Danny
Exactly.
- [66:28]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [66:28]
Danny
He's getting absorbed into my Bloodstream right now.
- [66:30]
Douglas Rushkoff
It's part of your. Now your metabolism.
- [66:33]
Danny
Balls here in a second.
- [66:34]
Douglas Rushkoff
I was always thinking about this moment. We used to have this show when I was a kid called Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. It was like animal documentary footage in Africa. And there was. I remember when I was a little kid, I saw this and stayed with me until I figured it out, like last year, like 40 years later of the. You know, the gazelle is running, and the cheetah's running after it, and the cheetah jumps on the gazelle, and the gazelle kind of struggles for a while, and then you see the gazelle stop and its eyes kind of glaze over. And I always thought about that moment. What's the gazelle thinking? And why does it give up? You know? Why does it stop? And then I realized there was this moment that the gazelle realizes, I am now cheetah food. I'm cheetah food. That's what I am. I am now more cheetah than I am gazelle. And not that it's blissful, but a little bit like those vampire movies when the person getting bit finally goes, ah. You know, that there's this moment of. It's scary to say it. I'm sure this is what, like, masochists or sadists or something are all in. There's a moment of bliss in the surrender. So it's like I'm thinking about it because of the ant on you, that when the ant finally. If it's, like, absorbed, the ant becomes. Danny, the ant is part of you. You know that It's. I mean, it's an antipeta justification for eating animals or something. But there is that. We are metabolizing each other. Everything. It's life. Life is.
- [68:07]
Danny
Yeah.
- [68:08]
Douglas Rushkoff
Things go into other things like that. It's the way it is. And I feel like the tech bro mentality we're talking about, they're. At the one hand, they're resisting that they don't want to be part of that. They don't want to be in the swirl. And on the other hand, they're using it as an excuse to be fucking sadists. Right? It's okay for all these thousands of kids in the Congo to be going into mines at gunpoint as slaves to build the chips for my AI that I'm gonna use to solve the world's problems and make a trillion dollars and get off the planet.
- [68:43]
Danny
Totally. Yeah. That's. That's a crazy thing. I think that when the. When the. Going back to what you're saying about the animals, which is kind of not to your point, but I think it's interesting. I think that when that happens, when the animal starts eating them, I think they start probably tripping. I think it's for like a DMT trip.
- [69:02]
Douglas Rushkoff
Probably like something gets released in their brain.
- [69:04]
Danny
Yeah, Like a. Like a. Like a breakable glass capsule in the brain or something goes. And then all of a sudden you're just, like, shuttled into, like another dimension.
- [69:13]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right. But that dimension, in other words, that you're tripping. I like that you're saying you're tripping. It's not like it's morphine. It's not like you just shut down your nervous system, right. That you trip. So you return to. You get to see the way things are. In other words. So when you're in this dimension here, trying to live. Okay, we gotta have some. You gotta keep this life form alive. You gotta do this stuff in order to promote your DNA. And it's like, okay, you're dying. Here's how things are.
- [69:37]
Danny
Nothing matters anymore.
- [69:37]
Douglas Rushkoff
You're one. You're one with everything. It's all good. It's all part of the swirl. Welcome home. Welcome home.
- [69:43]
Danny
Yeah, yeah, because. And it's like the DMT thing. Like when, like DMT feels like death, it feels like you're actually dying sometimes. Right? Like you're disconnected from everything in the material world. And all of a sudden, whatever is in there, whatever consciousness is, seems to be shuttling through, like a different dimension, a different. A different universe. Right. And like everything that's around us is its own organism, but not a material organism. It's like something that you can't really touch. It's not tangible. It's hard. It's hard even to put into words. Yeah, I think that. I think that could be it because I don't know what my. My. I've been thinking about that lately because my algorithm's been feeding me all these videos of people being eaten by sharks lately.
- [70:27]
Douglas Rushkoff
Really?
- [70:28]
Danny
Yeah. For some reason, my Twitter algorithm and my Instagram algorithm feeding me all this crazy stuff of people getting eating by animal. Eaten by animals. Very weird.
- [70:36]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [70:37]
Danny
I've been so much death on the Internet lately.
- [70:39]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah. I've been off social media and it's a little hypocritical because I create. Now I create content for social media. I used to just do my podcast, just as an audio podcast. You can download it. Everything was organic, you know, no Gary Vaynerchuk, micro content, anything. And. And now what I'm doing Because I got a sponsor for. I'm just trying. And I moved it to video on YouTube too. Because all the kids watch it on YouTube. They'll even start watching it and they'll, you know, the behavior is they open another tab and then they listen to it in the background. Yes, but if you've got to be on the YouTube because who wants to sit and just watch the video for that long? But they want to hear it. But I make micro content on Instagram or YouTube Reels and all. But I'm not making micro content to get them to come to the podcast. I feel like I'm making the podcast in order to be able to create micro content to reach other people. I'm thinking of it in terms of cultural transformation. How do I get, you know, these sort of, you know, pockets of, of, of smartness. How do I, how do I create, you know, sparks of intelligence out there? You know, so the podcast is kind of funding the social. It's not the social as feeder content. Because they don't, they don't go from. They're not for me. And they don't click on a. Watch a good tick tock and go, I'm gonna listen to the two hour version of that.
- [72:07]
Danny
Right.
- [72:07]
Douglas Rushkoff
You know.
- [72:07]
Danny
No, those are totally different people. I think that, yeah, that do the.
- [72:10]
Douglas Rushkoff
But I like reaching them.
- [72:12]
Danny
Sure. Yeah, totally. Do you. Did you recently stop using social media as like a entertainment?
- [72:18]
Douglas Rushkoff
2013.
- [72:19]
Danny
2013.
- [72:21]
Douglas Rushkoff
It was when Facebook started the policy of where they would. They could use your posts as advertising. Yeah, it was, that was one of the, one of the things that they tried and I was just like, oh, fuck this shit, I'm sick of it. Wow, that was a long ass time ago. And I played on Twitter. When Evan Williams started Twitter, the very early Twitter, I was on there 140 character thing, using it to send links to things. And it was interesting and I played around on there, but I got sick of it before. Once the algorithm was tweaked to sensationalism, it was just like I, I felt, I mean, maybe I'm overly sensitive, but I didn't feel good physically after I'd be on it, you know, and it's like email is hard. Hard enough.
- [73:04]
Danny
Yeah.
- [73:05]
Douglas Rushkoff
I wanted less screen time. I want to do.
- [73:07]
Danny
I need to detox. I need to take a break from it to see how you feel. I've heard, heard people, friends talk to me about like taking like month breaks from it from the scrolling stuff. And like they literally feel like a physiological difference. Yeah, they feel healthier. They don't feel as bogged down.
- [73:22]
Douglas Rushkoff
No, I'll tell you, I did. I've been bogged down anyway, just because of the way I live my life. I'm doing too much work, too many jobs and all that. But I took my first vacation, like 25 years, right. The last time I went on vacation was 1999. When what. When the. Yeah, when the. Remember the planes were supposed to fall out of the sky because the Y2K bug. Oh, yeah. All that. Didn't know.
- [73:41]
Danny
So.
- [73:41]
Douglas Rushkoff
And I just. Because I'm. I'm a writer, thinker, artist person, and in some ways I don't have a job, so I don't need a vacation. But I didn't really. I went to Costa Rica. I did this crazy thing. You got to get someone from this called ista. Have you ever heard of this?
- [73:54]
Danny
No.
- [73:54]
Douglas Rushkoff
The International School of. Of Temple Arts. It's kind of like sexual shamanism. Oh my God, it was intense. But just being off that and doing sort of meditation and weird practices for a week in Costa Rica, eating that totally natural food, you know, I come back and it's like I realize every ping from one of these devices, every email, it's all. It's fake. There's this. There's this reality that we're in, right? That you touch it when you're tripping or having sex or you meditate or you're in an art. It's like. It's a shamanic thing. You can feel when someone shitty's coming around the corner. You can feel. You know what I mean? You can. There's. There's, I believe, retro causality coming from the. You can feel events from the future rippling back in time. You can feel this is real. This is the way that real things. That's why you see birds fly before the storm and the shit. It's not all physics. A lot of. It's this thing, this thing that we're in, this thing.
- [74:56]
Danny
And that's how our brains evolved.
- [74:59]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah. And our hearts and our gut, biomes and our nethers and these devices and these things and these systems are. It's almost as if they've been designed to distract us and occlude that. Right? It's back nature by the forelock, right? To hold her down. So we submit to the will of the system. But when you rediscover it, it's like I re. Found it again. It's like, I don't want to let it go. I don't want to. It's like it's Luscious, you know.
- [75:32]
Danny
Yeah, no, I like to what you're saying like that there's something baked into us that has probably evolved for millions of years that is. Tapped us into nature and made us. Because. Because we've become sort of unlike any other species on Earth that sort of like lives in this symbiosis with nature. Right. We're sort of like, we have become the one species that doesn't really fit it. Right, right. Like, we don't, we don't really add anything back to. We don't give back. Right. To nature at all. Like every, every other animal in the rainforest does. But we sort of like exist outside of that. Right.
- [76:14]
Douglas Rushkoff
We're out. Right. Like, like most or all other animals are kind of part of some symbiotic
- [76:21]
Danny
circularity all the way down to phytoplankton, you know.
- [76:23]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right. And it's circular and we live in this linear thing.
- [76:26]
Danny
Thing. Right, exactly.
- [76:27]
Douglas Rushkoff
You know, which has, has, has externalities and waste or at least the illusion of one and progress to some future. We have like forever chemicals, like, you know.
- [76:35]
Danny
Yeah, exactly.
- [76:35]
Douglas Rushkoff
Mice don't make forever chemicals.
- [76:37]
Danny
They pee.
- [76:38]
Douglas Rushkoff
You know, so what, it, what is that, that one way thing that we're
- [76:42]
Danny
on and when you go into like the woods and stuff, and I've had multiple people explain this to me, like when you go into the woods, whether it be, you know, like the redwoods or the Amazon rainforest and you're completely disconnected from the grid and you're in this like almost like another universe when you're in the woods. Right. You. You are almost tapped into another realm. It's like these, these buried senses start bubbling up to the surface where now like the sound of the branches and the birds and the footsteps and the insects, all that stuff is sort of like another language that we used to be able to understand. And now it's kind of like bubbling back up.
- [77:23]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, but you can without tripping. If you're in. You put your hand on a tree, you know, there's something there. It's a living thing with a kind of. I don't want to whether call it consciousness, but a presence. Yeah, it's there, you know, and it's like once you kind of get that, but it's like, boy, what about befriending this place? I mean, I understand why we didn't. Big things would come and eat us, you know, it was scary. I remember watching, you know, Kubrick's Space Odyssey 2001. Those little caveman creatures. There's this one scene where they're like sitting on this cliff at night and they're shivering and you hear this like, like some saber toothed tiger out somewhere walking around and they're just sitting up. You know, how many hundreds of thousands of years did we as a species just sit and going, you know, that's going to breed an Elon musk. Right. That's what.
- [78:22]
Danny
Right.
- [78:22]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [78:23]
Danny
It's kind of inevitable. Right?
- [78:24]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah,
- [78:27]
Danny
yeah. That's bizarre.
- [78:29]
Douglas Rushkoff
But we didn't, you know, but we did have, we did have these sort of indigenous societies and not just and, and other ones that did develop in other ways. There are, you know, there's that great book, Donna Civilization that writes about all these different civilizations that happen. We think it's just this one line from, from, you know, sort of, you know, Israel and Greece to Europe to us and it's like, oh, there's, there's a ton of others and that have risen and fallen throughout history.
- [78:57]
Danny
Some of them, you know, probably don't know about.
- [79:00]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [79:00]
Danny
A lot of them before written language, you know.
- [79:02]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right.
- [79:04]
Danny
For recorded history. I had the psychologist on a couple, maybe a couple months ago who was explaining to me her take on like written language. How she was explaining how like the story of Adam and Eve in the garden eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge was like a deviation from, from inherent knowledge to trusting the written word. And she was explaining how the written word, you know, we get everything that we've got going back to recorded history has been. We rely largely on writing and text and stuff like that. Obviously we use things like archeology and other stuff to corroborate all that. But like the written word is inherently deceptive.
- [79:56]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [79:57]
Danny
Because it enables you to lie and it gets you away from intuition.
- [80:01]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yep. This is why I became a media theorist. That's in theory. My job. Right. Is looking at that. You can look at the whole Bible, the whole thing as an ethical manual for a society that was transitioning from an oral society to a written society. It's the whole thing that's called the Axial Age was when we started writing things down. Once we wrote things down, we got two things. We got history because now you could write down your history, what happened. And we got contracts into the future. Right. Now you could bind someone in the future the way you couldn't before. Now you've got that there. So you end up with this sort. That's what sort of invented this linear notion of time that we didn't have before writing. You just went by the seasons. It's next winter Plant the crops. Once you could write it down, this happened and that happened and this happened. And then what happens is God promises Abraham, oh, and your future generations if you do this for me, you know, don't kill your kid, but cut his little penis, do something, whatever, then I will reward you in the future, you know, and there'll be a Masonic age, messianic age, there'll be all this stuff. So we ended up in this society that values its past as its origin story. We own this land, this is our thing, we deserve this. And we have our inevitable. Our messiah is going to come and save the day and do all that. So we get the linear story and we lose, we lose that and we're
- [81:30]
Danny
combining it with the, with thermonuclear weapons.
- [81:34]
Douglas Rushkoff
Well, it's an end game. The alpha to the omega, you know, where, where before that, before writing, our spiritual, our spiritualities, they didn't have future point. They didn't have. There was no goal.
- [81:47]
Danny
Right.
- [81:48]
Douglas Rushkoff
It was, it was a way of being.
- [81:52]
Danny
Yeah. And then, and you know, also before all that there was a plethora of religions and you know, these secret societies and religious cults and stuff and people worshiped multiple gods and there was no one exclusive God until like this whole biblical canon came about and like the Council of Nicaea to include this book and this was the doctrine and we had to follow this. And that was kind of like what shuttled society into what it is now. And like all the other gods and you're a pagan if you do any of that stuff and burn down the temple of Eleusis, no more drugs, that's bad.
- [82:27]
Douglas Rushkoff
And yeah, in some ways the pagan gods long term did better in that deal. You know, I was watching, I guess it was during COVID I started to get obsessed with all those Viking shows. You watch any of those Viking shows, they're really good, you know, like Netflix and they do these long, you know, four season sagas of Vikings. But they have like Odin is their God. Odin and Thor and all these. And the Viking gods didn't stay alive in church, but they stayed alive in like popular culture and comics and movies. So they were allowed to sort of almost live better lives. They could morph and get refined by sort of successive, you know, TV shows and comics and popular culture things. So in some ways they got to live in a way that, you know, the kind of the Jesus or Muhammad gods were sort of locked down, you know, in their first or second century form and not allowed to sort of iterate with culture. So I Kind of like, you know, I'm into like Grant Morrison and Alan Moore and those guys who are sort of imbuing popular culture and comics and novels with these spiritual sensibilities because they've sort of, in some ways they're, even though they're pop culture or low culture, in some ways they've gotten more, more evolved because they've been allowed to, allowed to simmer and change.
- [84:00]
Danny
Yeah, yeah, that's really, that's really interesting. But yeah, what, what do you make of like the fact that there's this merging going on of like, like on one hand you have this super advanced, unbelievably high tech group of people that run the world who are embracing ancient texts and sort of using like this ancient writing as like an excuse to do whatever they can to control the world.
- [84:35]
Douglas Rushkoff
It's weird. I think about it a lot and then I look at each one of them seems to be doing it for a different reason, with a different philosophy. Musk is getting over a childhood, trying to spread his seed as far as possible. Teal is gay and wants to be transformed and awakened. Oracle and Larry Ellison are kind of like Rupert Murdoch power family. Trump and his people are just sort of low life organized crime, criminals using government to get lots of money. And it's like there are all these different. And then there's some genuine kind of Christian believers who want to get Israel and bring on the messianic age. Then there's like the chameleons like J.D. vance or like everything, everyone depending on who's going to give them the money or whatever. So it's like it's really hard. It looks like kind of strange bedfellows or an amalgamation of people who have very different reasons for supporting this kind of regime. I mean, Justin, I'm not saying there's equal opportunity. The left had a very different amalgamation of people. I mean, what makes these the left and right not really work is that the people in them don't really have common interests. For the most part they don't have common cause. But it is weird that there are people in the White House now who go to prayer services like in the White House in Congress where they say the Jews killed Jesus or let's do we're going to bomb Iran so that the Messiah sees the fire and comes down to earth when you've actually got but some people who will say it just to get approval. And then there's people who actively believe it. And if we're working on those, I'm fine for people to have Faith. But you don't. This is why they're so mad at the Pope. And the Pope is saying it's good to have faith in all that, but don't blow people up for your faith. There's this sort of papal doctrine on when you do war and when you don't, that the international laws around war are based on this Catholic doctrine. And Catholic doctrine basically says you don't go to war on somebody unless they're doing something really bad to someone else, unless they're actively bullying somebody. You don't attack. And even if you do, you can, but then you don't say you're doing it for religious reasons. Right.
- [87:24]
Danny
Yeah.
- [87:24]
Douglas Rushkoff
So now they really. They really. They're mad. They're mad at the Pope. The. The war ones.
- [87:30]
Danny
Yeah. Because the Pope was. The Pope was talking about or talking.
- [87:34]
Douglas Rushkoff
Not.
- [87:34]
Danny
Wasn't talking, but basically he was like, going against everything that our government's doing right now. And that's bad because we're trying to paint. They're trying to paint everything as like this big Christian thing.
- [87:43]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right.
- [87:43]
Danny
And trying to promote this war based on. There was a crazy story that came out where, like, the. The generals were trying to. They were talking to their subordinates and telling them, like, Trump was, like, commanded by Christ to do this.
- [87:56]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah. The guy who broke. That's my friend Jonathan Larson. He's got this great substack. Yeah. Called the News.
- [88:03]
Danny
Oh, yeah.
- [88:04]
Douglas Rushkoff
He's so cool. Oh, yeah. You should put him on sometime. Yeah. The fucking News is one who broke it. Tfn. And it's great. They got this logo instead of, like, the Facebook thumbs up. It's. It's in Facebook style. It's, It's. It's a figure perfect. It's perfect. But yeah, they. They were. Yeah. Troops were complaining because their generals and their commanders were telling them, you know, we're fighting. You know, we're fighting to bring back Christ. Right. Christ will come back. Yeah. You're not supposed to do that, but I guess not.
- [88:33]
Danny
Good. You're not supposed to do that.
- [88:34]
Douglas Rushkoff
Well, at least we say that. But now there's people who believe we should, you know, and I get it. They think it's a Christian nation and that. That America can be. America and Trump are instruments of a kind of a triumphalist vision of Christ. Not. This is like nothing, what Christ said or did. I mean, it's not. It's not Bible.
- [88:56]
Danny
It's not Christ, like, at all.
- [88:57]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right. But it's. There is a religion that's been built around Christ. It's a, you know, legitimate religion. It's got churches and stuff where the idea is to, you know, we do what we can to bring about the apocalypse, you know, so that. Then, you know, so we got to get the Jews, got to own Israel or Greater Israel, which is like a bunch of other countries. And then once that happens and there's the red heifer, and, you know, all those things happen. Exactly. Then boom. Right. And there's some, you know, Jewish cults that believe that and some Christian cults, but that's the Washington, D.C. that's the prayer Breakfast group. That's the Prayer Breakfast cult.
- [89:40]
Danny
Yeah.
- [89:40]
Douglas Rushkoff
That's their vision of how. Of how it goes. Therefore, you need sort of American triumphalism.
- [89:45]
Danny
I don't know what's crazier, the fact that that's true or the fact that everybody in society has access to that information and that knowledge, and they're not
- [89:55]
Douglas Rushkoff
freaking out about it.
- [89:58]
Danny
Right, exactly. That that whole thing combined with all the Epstein things got their own thing.
- [90:05]
Douglas Rushkoff
So it's like, even if. Like, oh, I'm gonna be all mad about that. I'm gonna be all mad about that. But then it's like, oh, look, Trump. Trump just signed that. Psilocybin's legal. It's like, Joe Rogan. It's like, Joe Rogan. I don't like Trump. I don't like Trump. Then it's like, oh, well, I was like, I'll show up for that one. You know, and it's like every once in a while, they throw you a bone. But the thing is, we shouldn't be living in a society where our dictator has so much power that they throw you a bone for you to.
- [90:27]
Danny
Then I think Trump's probably getting so desperate because he's losing so much popular support from the people that lobbied for him so much during that when he was running.
- [90:36]
Douglas Rushkoff
Well, I know that Marjorie Taylor Greene. And this one, I think he probably.
- [90:40]
Danny
I don't know. I have no inside knowledge, but if I was to guess, I would guess that he saw an opportunity to do something that he knew Joe would like. And he's like, hey, man, I'll do this for you. I'll get the FDA approval. Will you. Will you come to the White House and be in front of the camera with me? I bet you he asked him to do that and, like, put Joe on a hot seat. And then.
- [91:02]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, and it helps with all the. Because the RFK thing helps.
- [91:05]
Danny
Helps Trump way more than it helps Joe.
- [91:07]
Douglas Rushkoff
Oh, yeah. And the RFK stuff was going shit, walled you know, if you love diving into culture and comedy like on Danny
- [91:15]
Danny
Jones podcast, playoff hockey is right up your alley.
- [91:18]
Douglas Rushkoff
NHL on TNT has the best coverage, making every game feel intense and unpredictable. Playoff hockey is a different level. Overtime, big hits and no.
- [91:29]
Danny
1 coast. The studio crew with Paul Bissonnette cracking
- [91:33]
Douglas Rushkoff
jokes and Wayne Gretzky breaking things down makes it even more fun to watch. Every shift matters and the personalities keep things lively.
- [91:41]
Danny
Watch the Stanley cup playoffs on TNT, TBS, TruTV and HBO.
- [91:46]
Douglas Rushkoff
Max that, that. I don't even know the whole story, but, you know, RFK lost all his popularity and changed his mind about this and the vaccine thing and the measles. So the whole sort of rfk, you know, health nut new age, you know, to get that contingent wasn't working was like, you legalize mushrooms, man, you get, you know, you kind of win a whole lot of that. That the sort of failed FDA people.
- [92:12]
Danny
Right? It is a, it is a, it's a small victory.
- [92:15]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right? That's like, it's like celebrating the gut biome or something, you know? Oh my God. Oh, I got. Can I pee and come back?
- [92:23]
Danny
Yes, absolutely.
- [92:26]
Douglas Rushkoff
Because that's the main thing I did. I got a pull up bar and I went from. I could do one pull up. Now I'm like at six.
- [92:32]
Danny
That's great. Yeah. And then, and then just try to like increase, increase the amount you do and then start increasing the weight. You don't have to do a lot of them. Just do 10. Do 10 reps of a weight. That's like you can barely do right. Comfortably without hurting yourself. And, and yeah, keep doing that. There's lots of, there's lots of supplements you can take. Creatine's a great one.
- [92:54]
Douglas Rushkoff
I did, I got that.
- [92:55]
Danny
Creatine's a good thing, a good daily thing that you can use.
- [92:58]
Douglas Rushkoff
And machines are all right. Someone said don't you. Machines only do free weights?
- [93:01]
Danny
Oh, no, machines are fine. Yeah.
- [93:03]
Douglas Rushkoff
Because that feels like I'm so much less likely to get injured.
- [93:06]
Danny
Machines are totally fine. Yeah, yeah. You don't. That person's crazy. I prefer machines, honestly. But yeah, lots of the more you can do outside is the better. Is way better.
- [93:24]
Douglas Rushkoff
Really?
- [93:24]
Danny
Because the oxygen not. No, because the light. Yeah. It's better to do stuff outside. It's better like for me, like if I wake up like early and I get like out in like the, when the sun's still rising and to do some just like, like some activity out there like in the morning, like, and also like you don't have to think of it like this big task. You just like, if you just keep some weights around your house, you can like, you can microdose it, right. You know, like before work or whatever, just, just for five minutes, lift some weights, do some push ups, stuff like that.
- [93:55]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right.
- [93:56]
Danny
Just like throughout, like work it into your day. You don't have to do, you don't have to go crazy. Yeah, eventually you'll, eventually you'll start to see some progress and you'll get more and more in tune with it and. Yeah, it'll work.
- [94:05]
Douglas Rushkoff
No, because it's good. I got like nice little stringy like Bruce Lee muscles, which is kind of, I mean they came from nowhere. They really came from nowhere. Like two weeks in I was like, oh, that's great.
- [94:17]
Danny
You know, a lot of people, a lot of people.
- [94:20]
Douglas Rushkoff
Because I had no fat, so I didn't have to work off fat to get muscle. I was just, just bone.
- [94:25]
Danny
Right.
- [94:26]
Douglas Rushkoff
So it came from, it was easy. It's easier to grow it than, I
- [94:29]
Danny
guess then creatine is a great way to do it. Do you get your blood work often or have you gotten your blood work?
- [94:36]
Douglas Rushkoff
I mean, I, researchers.
- [94:37]
Danny
Yeah, you can test your hormone levels and there's things you can do to like optimize your testosterone level. And if you can get your testosterone level optimized, it'll really help with muscle growth. And not just that, but like, like mental clarity, all kinds of things. Sleep gets better, recovery gets better, more energy. Yeah, all kinds of stuff. It's like a, it's amazing.
- [94:58]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, I'll do it for Rio because I look at, online. Oh, get tribulus, get this, get that. You know, there's all these names of, but yeah, I'm going random if I, I should have a professional, you know.
- [95:09]
Danny
Yeah, yeah, there's a ton, there's a ton of stuff you can do to optimize. But for like the weights, for, for like the, the weightlifting stuff, you don't have to go.
- [95:15]
Douglas Rushkoff
So you're not a big, you're not a, a daily gym kind of guy then?
- [95:18]
Danny
Yeah, I, I, I, I, I am a daily exercise guy. I do a lot of cardio stuff and I do like when I have a gym in the other room here and I do heavy weights, I have like a sled that I push, I have lots of weights, like kettlebells and stuff like that. But I do it, I don't do it every day. I do it maybe two days a week. But I just go, I go really hard when I do.
- [95:37]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right.
- [95:37]
Danny
So I'LL just do as much weight as I possibly can until I'm just, like, exhausted.
- [95:41]
Douglas Rushkoff
But because you got babies, right?
- [95:43]
Danny
Yeah, I got three.
- [95:44]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [95:45]
Danny
Yeah. It's a lot.
- [95:49]
Douglas Rushkoff
I know it's a lot. And there's, like, no amount of money that changes that either, you know, I mean, I guess it could if you're an.
- [95:55]
Danny
But what do you mean, changes it?
- [95:57]
Douglas Rushkoff
You know, that changes the amount of work it is having three kids, you know?
- [96:03]
Danny
No, no. I try to spend as much time as I possibly can with them. You know, I don't want to be an absence father. And then, like, you know, like, the other thing is, you know, you don't want to give them too much. You don't want to make them feel like they have, like, an easy way. You want to make them feel like they're going to have an easy way through life or that they have any money or that they have any sort of, like, backup. Yeah, you kind of want to make them feel like it's. It's like that. It's like that fourth turning thing, you know, where it's like the hard times. You heard this saying. It's like, we should record. Are we rolling? Yeah, we're still.
- [96:42]
Douglas Rushkoff
All right.
- [96:42]
Danny
It's the. It's that. That fourth turning phrase where it's like, hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. You know what I mean? And, like, I grew up with. Not any. I didn't grow up with no money, right. But I grew up around a lot of kids. A lot of my friends were very wealthy, you know, and there was, like, a big difference between us. And you can see, you know, people that, by and large, I would say most people that grow up with a lot of money, with really rich parents, they don't always seem to be, like, the most interesting, adaptable people that people
- [97:16]
Douglas Rushkoff
that grow up with the most. It was always like, people had money and no class or class and no money is what you felt. I used to think we were rich because I lived in the suburbs, you know, and we had two cars. We didn't. You know, we got our clothes from Sears, Roebuck catalog, but, you know, it seemed fine. Then I got into Princeton and went there and was like, oh, that's what rich is. You know, there's people who, like, had, like, country. Like the girl there, her last name was Rhodes. Like, Rhodes scholar, like Rhodesia, you know, it's like, Timmy Forbes. It's like, Forbes. It was like, those were the people. I was like, oh, my God. And they Would. They would go to New York every weekend and have these, you know, Park Avenue things or. Oh, we're having a party. Oh, this weekend there. Oh, Martha's Vineyard. We'll send the plane around. You know, it's like, jeez. Yeah.
- [98:04]
Danny
I kind of got blasted into that world when I was really young too, because one of my first jobs ever was working for this car magazine called the Dupont Registry. And it was. I was surrounded by the duponts, you know, and all these people were flying around and in jets and driving in Ferraris and stuff like this. And I was like, whoa. I got to like, spend some time at their parties and hanging out at their houses and like, like, you know, rubbing shoulders with their kids. I was like, God, this is a whole different world. It was like crazy that I was like, even in the same room as these people.
- [98:34]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah. I quickly realized when I got invited to one of those events, I only got to like two or three things. I was the entertainment. You know,
- [98:46]
Danny
your. Tell your. You should tell your. Your Epstein story.
- [98:50]
Douglas Rushkoff
You went to a party.
- [98:51]
Danny
Didn't you go to a party?
- [98:52]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, well, sort of the same. The same people. I mean, what I was talking about before the whole. That dawk crowd. Yeah, I went. It was. This was really funny. I. So after I went to that, I didn't, you know, hang out with those people much anymore. I kind of disgraced myself, I think, and my agent by challenging the great Richard Dawkins on the. On his atheism and being a weird ass spiritual psychedelic.
- [99:16]
Danny
Didn't you? Didn't. I was listening to you and Duncan talk about it. You brought a lesbian to an Epstein party.
- [99:21]
Douglas Rushkoff
That was a big.
- [99:22]
Danny
That was a.
- [99:22]
Douglas Rushkoff
No, no, I know. Yeah, well, it was. It wasn't. I didn't know it was an Epstein party. I mean, Epstein wasn't famous yet. This was the late 90s. But it turned out to be an Epstein party. But no, it was a party of. Supposed to be these. The scientists and tech bros. It was called like Millionaire dinner or something. Millionaire dinner Club. So it had a bunch of the people who are running the big tech companies at that time. And then the famous scientists and this guy, this literary agent invited me to go to it. And I was like, oh, this is like my chance to really meet the movers and shakers and all. And he said, you can have a plus one. He said, but make it a really good plus one because this is. Make it. Make it count. And I figured. So I thought, like, who's the smartest person I know? Right? So There was this woman in Brooklyn who ran this literary web scene, early web days, but she really smart, the kind of person who can finish your thought before you've even had it. You know, one of those. And I thought, okay, I'll bring her. So. And she said, sure, I'll go. So I bring, I go there and the host of the thing, as soon as he sees her, he takes, he grabs me on the. I could still feel it. Pulls me aside and he goes, how dare you waste your plus one on it on an ugly lesbian. Actually, he said ugly dyke, I think.
- [100:48]
Danny
And how did he know that she was lesbian? Was it obvious?
- [100:50]
Douglas Rushkoff
I guess, I don't. Maybe he knew her better than I or whatever. Looked up her wiki.
- [100:57]
Danny
I had no idea.
- [100:57]
Douglas Rushkoff
I didn't know. I was like, she's lesbian. Oh, darn.
- [101:00]
Danny
Looked up her MySpace.
- [101:01]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah. I didn't think she was ugly, you know, And I didn't know she was a lesbian. That still don't necessarily.
- [101:06]
Danny
But you were supposed to bring a young, hot, big breasted.
- [101:10]
Douglas Rushkoff
I was like, what are you talking about? And he's like, you were supposed to. I invited you because I was East Village 20 something. I invited you so you'd raise the quotient of the party. And he goes, look. And at the tables it's all middle aged guys with these very, in some cases too young girls that look like they could be seniors at Dalton, right? And. And only like 10, 20 years later I realized, oh, those dinners including were paid for by Epstein. These were Epstein funded dinners. I mean, they were essentially dinners for scientists to become part of culture and all that and to meet potential funders. I mean there was a lot of. It was the tech science funder world, you know, and they're together. You could still go to conferences and find all those people together. But it was like, oh, you know, But I remember once that I, I had such. I'm an innocent. I had such a sick feeling in my stomach about what is this? And this is, am I, should I be more cool? Should I have known? Should I be going out with someone hot? Should I? And it's like, this is, this was. I was kind of immersed in suddenly in the sort of wealthy, toxic male Epstein value system and you know, ended up just staying away. You know, I just stayed away from them for years.
- [102:45]
Danny
That's so funny. Like you have to bring this accessory, this human accessory, right?
- [102:52]
Douglas Rushkoff
But you realize how people fall into that. I mean, I should have been a more impressionable 28 year old or whatever, but I was already Kind of set in my ethical ways. But if you're a scientist and you're not getting laid and whatever, and now you're in this thing and there's millionaires and other scientists and it creates a sort of a permission structure.
- [103:12]
Danny
Exactly.
- [103:12]
Douglas Rushkoff
Around doing icky stuff. It's like, oh, really? Look, there's Noam Chomsky over there. Right. He's as lefty as it gets. And he's kind of saying, oh, he's a friend of the thing.
- [103:22]
Danny
Stephen Hawking's over there getting a lap dance. I'm good.
- [103:24]
Douglas Rushkoff
So it's like, I guess this is really. And I know the arguments they'll make. It's like, look, since ancient Greece, scientists and men, you do it and these young women are getting something out of it. They're there, there, they're giving consent, they're going to get professional things. They're meeting you. You know, how much better is it for them to be with you?
- [103:42]
Danny
They weren't dragged here against their will.
- [103:44]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right. They're going to want to be with some 17 year old who's going to come in 20 seconds. It's like, no, they're going to be taken in and cared for and you appreciate them and honor them. You create a, you can create a, a story around, around that kind of abuse.
- [103:58]
Danny
Totally. Yeah.
- [103:59]
Douglas Rushkoff
That, you know, and there but for the grace of God go we. Right. Because anyone could be frustrated and, and tempted into that.
- [104:08]
Danny
100. Yeah. No, I had actually had a guy on here a couple weeks ago who was telling us a story about how Jeffrey Epstein wanted to meet with him and they ended up doing a Skype call and he's like, basically like looked him up. This was before all. I think this was before his first arrest and in the early 2000s. And he was like, oh yeah, this guy's funding all of the smartest people I know. Why wouldn't I do a 20 minute Zoom call with him? So we did a 20 minute Skype call with the GU guy.
- [104:35]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [104:36]
Danny
And he said Jeffrey Epstein was just sitting on the Skype call asking him to tell him stories about spoon bending and telepathy for like 20 or 30 minutes.
- [104:45]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right.
- [104:45]
Danny
Like he was fascinated with this. That's interesting paranormal ESP type stuff.
- [104:50]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [104:51]
Danny
You know, I mean that combined with all this other occult stuff that he was into and then Ghisan was into with like we were talking about before. I don't know if we were recording, but we were talking about the Temple of Poseidon earlier and her obsession with like the lost city of Atlantis and all this stuff. And then you combine that with the eugenics stuff that he was interested in and like. Well, right.
- [105:09]
Douglas Rushkoff
If you can connect it to something really old, then it doesn't feel like you're such a psychopathic aberration. Right, right. Part of a. It's sort of a continuity of it. You know, the other thing I was thinking with talking about these sort of Epstein interactions and stuff, what got me out of that alive. Right. The reason I didn't fall into was because I. It's my spidey sense. You know, our spidey sense is what goes, something's off here. Right. That's why we've got to stay connected to this whatever, this natural shamanic, whatever this realm we're talking about. The more invested you are or distracted you are by all the social media metrics, if those are your gauges of good and bad, of right and wrong, then you lose that gut spidey ethical thing, you know, and that's. And of course, I mean, it's just like saying, oh, if you're completely a capitalist and nothing else, you're going to end up doing immoral things. Of course you are, because you're not going to feel the externalities of your actions. You're not going to feel the people you're killing or whatever. So it's that I really feel like the way to survive and thrive in this unfolding landscape that's getting weirder and weirder and darker is to stay in touch with that. That, you know, that the part that we're trying to crush the sweet, innocent, vulnerable, fleshy, psychedelic, thoughtful thing, you know, that's the strength.
- [106:40]
Danny
Yes, yes, exactly. Have you ever heard of Adam Curtis? Oh, humanitarian.
- [106:44]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, yeah.
- [106:45]
Danny
You know his film Hyper Normalization, that's what this. This whole moment reminds me of.
- [106:50]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, you should get him on. I want to get him on my podcast.
- [106:52]
Danny
We've talked to him before, but he doesn't. He's not interested in doing podcasts.
- [106:56]
Douglas Rushkoff
I know, but he's making five hours of movies every year, so.
- [107:00]
Danny
It's incredible. Yeah, it's incredible. The stuff that he does. And like, that whole. The whole hyper normalization thing seems to be more relevant today than ever because, like, the way the media is, where it's like you have access to all the deepest, darkest secrets, it's like, of the people that run the world now, but everyone knows they can't do anything about it. You know, it's like all we can do. You have two levels of it. You have, like, people like us who Talk about it for a living. Who, like, we can talk about it and do everything we can to like boil our, boil our little pot of water in this ocean.
- [107:40]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right.
- [107:40]
Danny
And then you have like people who have real jobs who have to go to work and to take care of whatever they have to take care of. And they don't really have the time and the bandwidth to pay attention to all this stuff, but they're kind of peripherally aware of it. They know it exists and they know that like, oh my God, like this whole system is kind of not real. So I'm just going to keep pretending my way through. Like if I, if I accept the fact that it's all a sham, how can I reconcile that with like getting up and going to work every day and being a part of this whole system?
- [108:13]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right.
- [108:14]
Danny
You know, it's like we're pretending.
- [108:17]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah. But then the object of the game is to start to dedicate as much of your time and energy toward the alternative ways of being. You know, whether it's just being nice to people in the street or not being on the phone or answering less email or changing jobs, doing favors. You know, it, it, you know, we can't single handedly create a new social economic order that doesn't reward sociopaths. Right. That can't happen overnight. But we can engage in behaviors and ways of moving through our lives that engender a more compassionate, local, friendly, human approach. That's what, you know, my pocket team human. It's like to say being human is a team sport. Let's act like that. What would that, what would that look like?
- [109:15]
Danny
Yeah, 100% behavioral.
- [109:16]
Douglas Rushkoff
You know, it's behavioral. It's like, it starts really easy. It's like the first thing, you know, I would tell people is, and it works for the Christian too. Remember the Sabbath? Maybe start that way. Take one day a week and unplug from these systems. Don't even look at a screen one day from Friday night to Saturday night. Don't look at a screen, meet people, touch people, have sex, play games one day. And that's enough to recalibrate your system. When you go back on Saturday night at sundown to the device, it's like, oh, this is. Yeah, this is doing something.
- [109:54]
Danny
Yeah, it's a, it's like an alternate reality. Yeah, it's an alternate reality.
- [109:58]
Douglas Rushkoff
It's the simulation.
- [109:59]
Danny
People always keep saying, are we living
- [110:01]
Douglas Rushkoff
in a simulation or we are. No, no, we made a sim simulation. Right. You know, we weren't living in a simulation. We are now.
- [110:07]
Danny
Yeah. 100%. And also inside that simulation, you have multiple simulations because, like the way the algorithms are, there's. There's pockets, right? There's like little like pocket echo chamber echo chambers that people live in where they don't cross over. The other day we had this dude on the podcast who. He's like a, an academic attack dog. He's like an attack dog for academic consensus crisis. And so like, normally online, all of like the alternative stuff, like the alternative history, all of the. Any. Anything that doesn't go, Anything that goes against like, scientific consensus or norms, right. Seems to get the most attention online, like exposing corruption.
- [110:54]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right?
- [110:56]
Danny
Talking like, stuff that Graham Hancock talks about, like ancient civilizations. The possibility, like when you use your imagination and you try to say, you know, what if they were. What. What if the. What if the textbooks in the schools aren't actually what's. What the truth is? What if there's more to this story?
- [111:13]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right?
- [111:13]
Danny
Right. And, and this guy is like the one that goes online and like publicly humiliates and belittles that group of people. And I was like, I'm like, what if we just like went completely against the grain and had this guy on the podcast, the guy that, that everyone, right. The guy that everyone who listens to my show despite, would despise, cool and hate this guy. Like, let's, let's. Let's give it a shake, see how it goes. And I thought it might like open up a portal, but it didn't. It was just like a brick wall.
- [111:52]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [111:53]
Danny
And you know, I mean, we got into some. We were talking about everything from like the pharmaceutical industry to, to ancient civilizations and Graham Hancock and stuff like that. And this guy was like, I was asking him like, is there anything, is there anything that you looked at originally that you thought was 100 a bonafide fact that you were able to come around on and change your mind on with other, with other evidence. Like, is there. Are there any of these crazy fringe things that you hated at first that you were able to, to change your mind on? He goes, no, never. And he's like, I don't think it'll ever happen either. Like, he thought he, like, he thinks he's absolutely right. So like, I. It really illuminated to me that this whole sort of like podcast ecosystem is its own separate universe from a whole another part of reality. And I don't know if it's a. A fact that the people like him, the people that are in academia, the scientists that work on in labs all day, every day, that don't Pay attention to the media. Like, are. Are they. Like, are they so disconnected? Is. Are they in a completely separate universe and reality from what the. This podcasting world is like? If you were in to introduce them into this or inject this world into their veins, would it be, like a total disconnect? Would there be. Would it be like, what is this? This is completely not real. This is completely disconnected from my reality of what I see every day working in the lab with my hands on science and looking at atoms and all this stuff.
- [113:31]
Douglas Rushkoff
It shouldn't. I mean, and there's some of those guys have podcasts.
- [113:34]
Danny
Right. Some of them do.
- [113:35]
Douglas Rushkoff
Some cool sciencey people and astronomers talking about other universes and.
- [113:41]
Danny
But this guy's take is all those people are grifters. Like, anyone who does real science, who goes on a podcast is most likely a grifter, because the fact that they're going in front a microphone means they have some sort of a financial gain,
- [113:55]
Douglas Rushkoff
like Tyson or whatever, Carl Sagan, and. I don't think so. I think some are, like, public educators. Yeah. You know, and it's. It's thrilling, especially with kids, to tell them about what's going on in the. I mean, I understand what they mean.
- [114:12]
Danny
I mean, the guy had, like, no imagination whatsoever.
- [114:15]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right. And the fact that he can't change his mind about anything is not. He's not a real scientist. Then you know what. What the podcast universe can do, the thing I think it most valuable for is kind of exercising the what if Muscle in people's brains. What if this, what if that. Like, I was. I. I was telling him just before. Before we started that I was listening to a bunch of your shows, you know, before coming on, and, like, people talking about space and the aliens and stuff. And like, some of it, I'm like, I don't believe that. But the experience of what if ing, the experience of imagining it kind of creates more space in the brain. I mean, and the way. The way. I don't know if you're owner of. Do you remember Art Bell? Were you around for him?
- [115:01]
Danny
Of course. Yeah.
- [115:01]
Douglas Rushkoff
So you do an Art Bell thing with people, which I like, which is even if they're going off, and it's like, well, these people are. Them are enslaved for the gold and bring it to the other planet, but you stay with them. Not necessarily positive, reinforcing, whatever, but okay, and then what? And then why would that. And so you follow them logically through their thing and you try it on at least. You know what I mean? Which is that's what art used to do. You know what I mean? And he's like, is he believing it or not? It's like, you can never really tell. Yeah. And I like, I like, I like for you to stay in that space between. Because it's like.
- [115:46]
Danny
Yeah, I've always just been fascinated by this rift between, like, academia and like, the entertainment podcasting sort of world, you know, like the art Bell world versus, like, the strict academic science, because there's been this emergence of people that have been popping out of, like, the traditional consensus, this by the book sort of like PhD world who have, like, started sort of have been like, coming out and like, there's, there's this, like, there's this phenomena where they, they clash online and, And Right. It's become this team sport.
- [116:20]
Douglas Rushkoff
It should be. If we on the PhD side, which I am now, don't embrace our, our wonder, then people will hate us to say, oh, you're stuck in your ivory tower. You're not open to any ideas. You're just the. There to protect the establishment view of this and that. That's not what it's for.
- [116:38]
Danny
Yeah, and I see the, I see the value in both. I think they should be. It should. They should both exist simultaneous and, and there should be. They should be intertwined. But I've, like, I've just heard so many stories of people in academia being like, for example, you know, one guy who was, like, publishing, Publishing his dissertation and like, went in front of the dissertation committee. He did a, A, A dissertation on drugs used in ancient Rome. And the committee on his dissertation said, you have to take out every reference to recreational drug in ancient Rome before you. We give you your PhD. And he goes, why? He go. And the, the, the head of the committee says, because the Romans wouldn't have done such a thing. And he's like, well, that's some weird form of censorship. So he, he did it, got his PhD, and then he went out and made a book about it.
- [117:30]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right, right. That is weird. You know, it's like. But I know what the committee should be doing is saying you haven't demonstrated. You haven't demonstrated that it was recreational. In other words, you're making an assumption that they were doing recreational drugs. We don't have any evidence of that, so you can't say it, but it doesn't sound like that's what they were doing.
- [117:50]
Danny
No, he had overwhelming evidence that they were doing it.
- [117:53]
Douglas Rushkoff
Fun thing I do when I'm on dissertation committees is I try to flip it. And I explained to the Person defending their dissertation. You're not defending your dissertation. We professors are defending the canon against your dissertation. When you write a dissertation, the, the, the, the underlying drive is to say the canon is incomplete. I have new information that you need to include in the canon. And we are defending. We're here to say, no, no, no, no. We don't want something new. We don't. Because if you're writing a dissertation, you're basically saying that the establishment is either wrong or they're ignorant of something that they need to know. So who's defending what? And if you flip it to that, it makes them feel the dissertation. They're not nervous anymore. It flips the thing, Right?
- [118:44]
Danny
Yeah. And I think that one of the cool thing about one of the cool things about some of these fringe ideas or fringe scientific theories or whatever it might, might be UFOs or anything like that, is that that stuff can kind of be. Which has happened for me, what draws you into something else. Like that can be like the hook that gets you interested in something that sort of draws you in, like, uhhuh, this sounds a little bit crazy. Maybe they're wrong about something. And you. At first you may think it's all real, and then you kind of like, learn something else, like, oh, maybe it's not real. Now I'm kind of incentivized to like, really drill down and find the truth about this in them. Before you know it, you become an expert in whatever it is.
- [119:24]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah. And the stuff was. I mean, the stuff we accept now, that was seen as crazy when I was a kid. Gut biome, no one believed in that. They didn't even believe. When I was a kid, I would eat milk and I would get sick. They didn't even believe in lactose intolerance when I was a kid. That's in the 70s. It was like, not a thing.
- [119:41]
Danny
Yeah.
- [119:41]
Douglas Rushkoff
And now it's like, it's science, you know, it's real. Gut biome is real. There's real bacteria in there that determine your mood and your health and all these things.
- [119:51]
Danny
The second brain, it is.
- [119:53]
Douglas Rushkoff
And your immune system, and these are all frigging real. And you know, Amazing Randy, whatever it is, he says he's going to give a million bucks to anyone who proves something, something supernatural. He's this magician who. But he'll never give it because there's a ton of stuff that's. That's weird. And when someone from the academy, that's the worst for them. When someone from the academy challenges the laws of science, like Rupert Sheldrake. I don't know if you know him. Oh yeah, he came up with morphogenesis and all great.
- [120:22]
Danny
Morphic resonance. Yeah.
- [120:26]
Douglas Rushkoff
He did a TED talk and it's the only TED talk that ever got censored. And in a TED talk he said that he believes that the laws. What if the laws of science themselves evolve? Yes, the laws of physics change.
- [120:41]
Danny
Right?
- [120:42]
Douglas Rushkoff
Because everything else does. What if they do too? Or if we're in a bigger system and they just freaked the fuck out and they just erased it off the thing. You're not allowed to do that.
- [120:50]
Danny
That's so crazy. Why would you do that?
- [120:53]
Douglas Rushkoff
Because it undermines all the. Whatever. But it's like that was the best. It's like. Because then it's like a meta scientific. There's a scientific model with. The scientific model's living in a reality that's changing. So how does it model? It's like beautiful. And whether it's true or not, it's just a big beautiful. What if it's not as crazy as, you know, it's not a Bigfoot. What if. It's a pretty straightforward one, right?
- [121:15]
Danny
Well, there's. I mean, there's absolutely shit out that is around us all the time that you can't measure or weigh in a lab, you know, and. And that there's. There's a re. A real thing happening out there. A real multiple phenomena that don't fit into the scientific method. You can't. You can't. They don't measure up to scientific method muster. And you can't. You can't quantify it.
- [121:41]
Douglas Rushkoff
Well, they. Maybe they do at some point. If we had other languages and ways of understanding things.
- [121:46]
Danny
Right.
- [121:46]
Douglas Rushkoff
You know, with some alternate universe like retro causality is the one that I'm really into lately. Mitch Horowitz talks a lot about. Have you had him on? No. He's a great occult historian. So retrocausality. He didn't prove it, but I first heard about it through him, is the idea that events in the future affect the present and the present affects the past. So what they've done are these experiments where a whole bunch of people take a test and they don't show the. The how they. Well, they did or whatever. And then people who study for the test after the test do better on the test than people who didn't.
- [122:21]
Danny
People who study for the test after
- [122:23]
Douglas Rushkoff
the test do better. Why is that? Because there's retro. Causal. Retrocausal learning. Right. So events in the future affect the past, you know, and it's interesting. You know that crazy Nick Land, the guy who all the. He believes that capitalism is a strange attractor in the future. Future. That it's. That. What. What. What's drawing us toward it, which is why things are happening the way they are.
- [122:46]
Danny
That capitalism is what is like a.
- [122:48]
Douglas Rushkoff
A strange attractor. Capitalism is a. A future state that is rippling back and drawing us toward it into. Into its future. That it's an inevitable future that's already there. Yeah. Yes.
- [123:03]
Danny
This is like the idea. That time loop idea, right?
- [123:05]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [123:06]
Danny
And their precognition. Have you heard several stories that have dreams that predict the future? Future and stuff like that?
- [123:12]
Douglas Rushkoff
It's. The future is broadcasting back to us. And there's another physics theory. I figure out who it is now. That's. That it's. Apparently. It kind of makes sense that when the Big Bang happened, the time moved forward and backward at the same time, didn't just move forward. So we're. We're Right. It's a loop that we're coming back around time loops. Was that guy. I interviewed him on Wargo. Yeah.
- [123:30]
Danny
Yeah. Eric Wargo. Yeah. He's great.
- [123:32]
Douglas Rushkoff
I know. And it's like. And he's a real scientist, right? He's the real deal. Real. So. Yeah.
- [123:38]
Danny
Yeah. No, it's interesting because this. It's a real. It's been documented throughout history of people, like, recording their dreams and like, actually proving that these events happened after they had the dreams about them.
- [123:47]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah. And then there's that. I mean, it doesn't show a heck of a lot, but the Princeton Random Number Generator.
- [123:52]
Danny
Number generator. Yeah.
- [123:53]
Douglas Rushkoff
It's weird when something's gonna happen.
- [123:55]
Danny
There was a book. There was a. There was an entire book written about the Titanic sinking before the Titanic actually sunk. And it was like. It was called the. The name of the ship was called the Titan, I think. Right. Remember, we look this up.
- [124:07]
Douglas Rushkoff
Titan. Back to Titan Poseidon.
- [124:09]
Danny
Yeah.
- [124:13]
Douglas Rushkoff
Oh, my gosh.
- [124:14]
Danny
Yeah. Man, it's bonkers. Well, thanks for doing this, dude. This has been really fun.
- [124:20]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
- [124:22]
Danny
My pleasure.
- [124:22]
Douglas Rushkoff
I'm. I'm really excited that you can get a whole cathedral this way. I'm doing a podcast. I want a cathedral too.
- [124:30]
Danny
Yeah, it's. It's definitely fun. It didn't. It took us. It took us a while to figure out the design, but.
- [124:36]
Douglas Rushkoff
Right.
- [124:36]
Danny
Once we figured it out, we got. We knocked it out pretty quick. I'm not sure what kind of a cathedral it is, but people can use their imagination.
- [124:43]
Douglas Rushkoff
They're not that pointy so it could still. It's got a slight, you know, slight Islam shaping.
- [124:48]
Danny
Uhhuh.
- [124:49]
Douglas Rushkoff
So it's good. And a contemporary. I don't know. It almost got a slight. A slight reminiscent of the. The carpet in.
- [124:58]
Danny
In Kubrick's the Shining.
- [125:00]
Douglas Rushkoff
Shining.
- [125:01]
Danny
We wanted to put that carpet in here, but we. We found some people who made it, and it was just too expensive.
- [125:06]
Douglas Rushkoff
Oh, really? They just went nuts.
- [125:07]
Danny
Yeah, yeah, it was, like, overseas. They, like, handmake that carpet, that shining carpet. Oh, my God. It's crazy.
- [125:12]
Douglas Rushkoff
That would have been cool. All right, next time I'll put it in my cathedral.
- [125:15]
Danny
Yes, do it.
- [125:17]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, I just got to get. I got to get. Advertisers figures that out. That's how it gets paid for.
- [125:23]
Danny
Yeah.
- [125:24]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [125:24]
Danny
Well, all right, thanks.
- [125:26]
Douglas Rushkoff
Well, good.
- [125:26]
Danny
Tell people where they can find your podcast again and your books and all that.
- [125:30]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah, team. The podcast, you can find it everywhere. You know, YouTube and all those places. I'm Douglas Rushkoff. Go to rushkoff.com. the. The book you'll like is called Survival of the Richest Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. But you want a book that'll just make you happy. Get Team Human. And that's a nice. That's a nice book. Keep it in the bathroom. There's like a hundred little sections. You read one per sitting. It's good. Unit dose kind of microdose book.
- [125:56]
Danny
Perfect.
- [125:56]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- [125:57]
Danny
We'll link it all below. Thanks again for your time, man. This has been fun.
- [126:00]
Douglas Rushkoff
Yeah. Thank you. All right, good night, everybody.