Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 649: Douglas Rushkoff

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, documentarian, AND podcaster(!) re-joins the DTFH! Check out Douglas' podcast, Team Human, available wherever you like to listen. And read his new book, Program Or Be Programmed: 11 Commands for the AI Future, available wherever you buy your books! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg and Duncan Trussell. This episode is brought to you by: This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self. PrizePicks - Signup today and get $50 instantly when you play $5! You don’t even need to win to receive the $50 bonus, it’s guaranteed! Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site.

Hello friends, it's me Duncan and this is the DTFH and today we have a glorious guest for you. Douglas Rushkoff is here. Douglas Rushkoff is a philosopher, professor, author who's written some of my favorite books. He just re-released one of his most popular books, Program or Be Programmed, 11 Commands for the AI Future, very timely release And you're gonna love him. If you're not familiar with him, get ready to have your mind blown. He is so brilliant. And his takes on the paradigm

that we're living in right now are so brilliant. So get ready. And you know what? Before you listen, do me a favor. Subscribe to his podcast, Team Human. It's fantastic. and especially if you enjoy our conversation. Again, his podcast is called Team Human,

and why not, while you're at it, order his book, Program or Be Programmed, 11 Commands for the AI Future. Now, everybody, welcome back to the DTFH, Douglas Rushkoff. Mr. Rushkoff, welcome back. I'm seeing you in person. I know. For the first time in, well, a couple years. Incredible. And ironic, I guess, right?

Because so much of what you teach us is like the importance. In person, eye contact. And it, oh. And it makes a big difference. It really does. Like, you know, I was. Isn't it so funny that we even say that?

Hey, you know, it makes, like, fucking a person is just way better than looking at a video of them. I know. My God! I know. It's like, look at the news, latest news break. This is, here's a quick way into what I wanted to start off chatting with you about. Because in my thinking about a lot of what you write about

and in my interactions with chat GPT, a lot of them lately, my consideration of what exactly is going on here, there's this sort of like shift that is happening from 3D space to 2D space, right? From we live in 3D, right now we're in 3D, we're together. There's time space around us. And the moment that you go on a Zoom meeting, the moment you do a remote podcast, you are now in 2D space.

You are now existing in a flat world, even though obviously you on the other side of the camera, you have three dimensions in 3D. So the sort of woo wooey hippie mixed in with science idea is, and you know, McKenna talks about this stuff, hyper dimension, like moving out of 3D space into 5D space. In other words, like instead of shrinking, flattening, we're expanding, right?

So looking at it from that perspective, technologically, there is a contraction in the 2D space that's happening. And to end my point here, And in my point here, AI lives in a 2D mathematical linguistic vector space, right? AI does not live in 3D. It can't. It only, it's math. And obviously I don't mean lives as an actually biological life. Because AI is a reflection of us. It's trained on all human data sets.

It is fascinating to me that it is reflecting a more common experience that we're having because we are living in 2D space. And I don't just mean and also I'm sorry. I'm trying to put these thoughts together AI I Used to fantasize when I was chat GPT. It's fun to imagine. Maybe it's sentient not telling us or whatever it obviously it's not and but what it is doing is it's finding these vectors between words and somehow slamming

them together in a way that creates meaning when humans read it. This 3D to 2D thing is happening to us not just in Zoom calls. sort of it seems like going from an AGI into a non-AGI by compressing our reality into these symbol sets that are being shown to us via the algorithm and then repeating these symbol sets because the vectors between them match up or doing it instantaneously. But what I'm saying is what is happening instead of the expansion into the grand universe, the eternal one, the now, we're all of us seemingly being compressed consensually into 2D space,

not just via technology, but philosophically. What are your thoughts on that? Well, that's what I've been trying to say for the last 35 years. Yes. Basically is that. It's like there's a yes and no to it. Yes, that's what's happening.

We are using AI and technology to flatten the human experience into one of data processing and sharing without any prana. Right? Yes. And it's the way that sort of digital wires and Wi-Fi and whatever can transmit data, but they can't transmit prana. Right? There's a difference between the internet and the mycelial network.

Can you define prana for folks who don't know what that means? Like chi, like life energy, like the spiritual thing, woo woo, sorry, but it's real, right? When you're, when you're, when you're, it doesn't have to be psychedelic, but if you're lying in bed next to another human being, your nervous systems are co-processing reality together. It's different. You know, even on a, on a, on a just plain old neurological level. So when these technologies came out and from the beginning, for those of us who are playing with the net, we understood it as AI. It was. AI is just the first software running on this thing that we built. Of course it was always AI. Google was trying to be AI. Facebook was trying to be AI. But when we first were playing with it, our understanding was that these digital technologies could actually increase our dimensional experience of reality.

Yes. Because now we could be non-local, we could be hypertext, we could have multiple instances of ourselves operating simultaneously. That we were incarnate, but the net would let us do this thing on a symbolic level that was hyperspatial, hypertextual, asynchronous, all this weird, weird-ass shit. But that was when it was human beings using technology to do this thing. And what we did for various reasons really in the 90s and late 90s is instead we started to

use the technology on the people. So instead of human beings increasing their dimensionality with these tools, we use the tools on people to decrease our dimensionality. And what we've done then on a historical level, on a commercial level, is we're reverting to the mean. So all of the weirdness, reverting to the mean. So all of the weirdness, this was going to be a weirdness catalyst. And it's turned into a conformity catalyst. And we're scared. And also historically, the stuff that we're going back to, a lot of the patterns are really, it's like, it feels to a lot of people like all the kinds of progress they made and whatever world they're in is reverting to the mean. You know, it's interesting to me that the outlaws that put their minds together and made what we are calling the internet now, didn't prognosticate this event happening.

There was a sense that this is going to be a liberating technology. You have Tim Leary saying this is the new LSD. You have Terrence McKenna talking about this is going to lead to the technological singularity liberal. It was a liberating technology. So did they even consider the other possibility that the technology would actually create a kind of conformity via social pressure to align with state politics? It's funny.

I mean, so they're like, they were my teacher, mentor people back in the early internet days. And I feel like what people like me failed to realize when we were kids is that you could give acid to an asshole and they stay a fucking asshole on acid. They're just a tripping asshole. I thought anybody who does it is gonna like turn good and see the same thing I saw yeah, and the same thing with the early internet, you know The the internet was built by psychedelics people that was I have documented that in this book in like the 90s called Siberia

It was about they would intentionally hire psychedelics people because only they could kind of hallucinate new realities and build stuff for people and Those of us who are part of that psychedelic rave-y culture the Gaia hypothesis and yeah, you know Carlos Castaneda and Tim Leary and McKennan all we assumed this that the set and setting and That's a term that Leary used about a trip. You're supposed to, the quality of your trip is determined by the mindset that you're in and the setting that you're doing the trip in.

And you have to be conscious of it. So if you do, you know, if you trip in the ACDC parking lot, you're gonna have a different trip than in the Grateful Dead parking lot, right? It's just what it is. And what you're thinking about, right? If you're reading Ayn Rand all day and then have your trip, you're gonna have a different thing

than if you're reading Rondas all day and doing that trip. It's a different mindset. I'm not necessarily, I'm not making a judgment, just different. So we assumed that the original set and setting of the internet that was of our internet culture was, you know, the wild possibilities of the collective human imagination, right? We're going to wire ourselves up and realize this thing. When Wired Magazine and other things came along, that was not their set and setting. Their set and setting was how is this technology

gonna save the NASDAQ stock exchange? So instead of looking at how are we going to increase the novelty, as Terrence would call it, the novelty of human expression, when you're betting on a technology and betting on the market, you don't want to increase novelty, you want to increase probability, right?

You want the odds that your bet's gonna work. So we turned the technology and we used it on humans to increase the predictability of their behavior. And that, it's a different set and setting, one of surveillance and paranoia. And if you've been living on a psychedelic substrate, as we have as a culture, we've been living on a psychedelic substrate

for the last 35 years with a set and setting of paranoia and control, no wonder we're having this bad trip. Right. I mean, just imagine. This was actually, sometimes I would think about this when I was like in a mild DMT phase Mild the mild I just using the mild DMT, but I know what you mean. There's a little vape pens that kind of have DMT

Yeah, so, you know micro dosing DMT. Maybe you could sort of break through but You know obviously what we all know now what's interesting about DMT is the, you know, versus like mushrooms, LSD, there's a coherence to the trip that you can map across different people who take it. It doesn't seem to have as much of a, it weirdly points to either some endogenous part of the brain that is so identical. Or an agenda in the plant, right, in the molecule.

In the molecule, you're seeing an alternate reality, who fucking knows? But just because of that sort of consistency, and this is, you hear people talk about this, though anytime I've gone into the quote astral realm, it's completely accidentally, and I didn't dream, and I don't ever like it. But if you read any occult stuff, there's this idea that there's places in the astral realm that are consistent, where great magicians like Crowley...

Crowley, they mapped them. They mapped them and left... Yeah, I still don't know, did they map them or did their mapping set what they are? Well, that's what's curious is supposedly they left things there that you can just go and look at, you know, like leaving something on the moon. So yeah, and that was to me, the horror is like, my God, what if Starbucks finds a way to put a Starbucks in the DMT realm? What if we start seeing Starbucks logos in the psychedelic universe? What if the corporations actually find a way to encode target logos in the DMT realm? And if we are going to use the analogy,

if we're gonna say that the internet is a psychedelic, that is exactly what happened. This complete wild west, what the fuck, crazy terrain just gradually turned into a mechanism Wild West, what the fuck, crazy terrain, just gradually turned into a mechanism via which corporations manipulate you in overt or incredibly sinister, subtle ways. And yes, and this has led us to a very strange period in history.

I know, and you know, it's a bummer. I kind of realized that a few years ago that we get these new communications technologies and they seem like they're going to liberate like the masses or the people, but then somehow elites are always one step ahead of us. You can go all the way back to like Pharaoh, right? Pharaoh could hear the word of God, apparently, you know, and could tell, and people just had to do what he said.

So then, you know, you get text, you know, they get writing, and that's like the Jewish, Judeo-Christian, you're gonna write down Torah. We write the stuff down and you would think, oh well now the people, you know, are gonna have this ability of reading and writing. No, the people didn't get that. When you got writing, the elites could write and what did the people get? They could gather on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the market and hear the word of God read to them by a rabbi. So the masses gained the ability that the pharaoh had in the last realm and the elites got the new one. Then we get the printing press.

You think, oh, now we're gonna write. You know, it's like, no, no, no, no. The elites were allowed to publish books. The people got to read the books. So the people got the ability of the last revolution, but not the new one. Then we get the computers and it's like, okay, so the people are going to program.

No, people can't program. Now people can write. They can tweet, they can blog, they can get the printing press thing. But they're in environments that are programmed by people who are running. So we're just one behind each fucking time. And my God, like, of all the dark forms of censorship,

shadow banning, holy fucking shit. At least you see books at a book burning going up in flames and you're like, I gotta read that. But the moment the algorithm identifies whatever it is you're putting out there is being potentially Threatening. Yeah to the paradigm that the corporation needs to exist for it to maximize its profit and then that It's not like you see the thing go up in flames. You just don't know it exists and we had such easy ways of

Dealing with that legally, you know, that was this thing people talk about called section 230, which is in like the the the Telecommunications law section 230 says that these internet providers are not Publications right and that's true like a ol email, right should let you go back and forth It doesn't matter what you say in it But once you are a company that is having an algorithm choose what stories a person reads or doesn't The the platform is now an editor. It is a publisher, right? So then all a different legal standing should should change right because you are editorializing via an algorithm and again

This is where we're sort of running in all these new, fascinating problems and a lot of like, well look, it's not me. It's an algorithm. Yeah, the algorithm that judges depend on algorithms for the sentencing guidelines. And it turns out algorithms, for some reason, algorithms give black people longer sentences than white people.

Yeah, what the fuck is that? Because they're racist algorithms. No, it's because they're using past data and they're using algorithm? No, it's because they're using past data and they're using what whatever parameters are Chosen are the ones that the algorithm is gonna use but then when you're using an algorithm, it's like, oh, well, it's not raised It's a computer. It couldn't be racist. It's just happening It's like no no no, but and it's getting further and further away from sort of human human control

That's it. And so this episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by my friends at Better Help. It's Thanksgiving! There's some kind of enforced you got to thank people around you thing happening right now. Never really liked that. Nobody wants to be forced to thank somebody. Makes you feel weird. But every once in a while, legitimate spontaneous expressions of gratitude will come flying out of your mouth. And you'll notice when that happens, you feel great. But have you also noticed that this thing you call your body,

perfectly metabolizing cells being destroyed and regrown. Air being turned in to oxygen sent through your whole body instantaneously. Don't even get me started on your heart. It doesn't clock in or clock out. It's 24-7 it takes one bathroom break You're dead What about gratitude for that? What about gratitude for the incredible? perfect beautiful super harmonized Miracle that is you

For some reason we never give ourselves credit. You know why? Because somewhere down the line you might not even remember it. You were taught you shouldn't be grateful for your own self. You end up in some neurotic hell loop. By the way, this is just me. I don't know what your thing is. I'm talking about me. You know?

You feel cheesy, actually, having any kind of sense of gratitude for yourself, your body, you know, all the things you did to get you where you are today. Sharon Salzberg used to talk about this. You know, you forget to open the door for an old lady as you're walking out, you see the door kind of go back on to her, you feel like a jerk. Doesn't matter if you've done a million other great things all day long, You feel like a jerk. Doesn't matter if you've done a million other great things all day long.

You're just going to remember the look on the old lady's face as the world failed her yet again. You don't remember the kind words for your friends. You don't remember helping your neighbor out. You just remember that poor old lady coming out of the pharmacy with her meds. Another disappointment in a long line of disappointments in her life. This is why we need therapy.

And therapy has certainly helped me. And I'm pretty sure if you're thinking maybe I should go to therapy, you should. Just try it out. Give Better Help a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. You just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist. You can switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Let that gratitude flow with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Duncan today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash Duncan. Thank you, BetterHelp.

["BetterHelp Theme Song"] This to me is a really dangerous time. And I don't mean dangerous in the sense of like some dark government thing. I'm saying dangerous in the sense that naturally, naturally, when I'm looking at my screen and I'm seeing some discussion happening over and over again with some opinion, any human brain finds a pattern and I begin to think people... Then I find myself thinking, you know what people think? People think fill in the blank and that blank part gets filled in with whatever the algorithm

was showing me. It's a very... Have you ever taken statistics? filled in with whatever the algorithm was showing me. It's a very simple, logical flaw in humans, because we're seeing a thing over and over, it must be all over the planet, global. And so now you've got people who have begun to think that the social media, the internet, is a window through which they can see reality as it is. And fuck, dude, that is not reality at all. You are seeing not just a distortion, but an intentional distortion.

It's not just malfunctioning. It's whatever distortion is going to stimulate your sensationalist fear, usually. That's right. Like I had been off ex-Twitter for a long time just because it would, it just, I just didn't like it. You know, it's like, I'll go to 4chan if I really want to play that game. And I went back, and for some reason when I went back, it was showing me like videos

of middle school and high school black girls fighting. There's like a lot of them. It must have been just a period of time. And I was like, wow. It's sort of like when sharks attack, you know? It's like these things that come through. And I was like, wow. So if this was how I looked at the world, I would just think high schools are places where black girls fight in the halls.

What is that weird confirmation bias that would come from that? We have to deal with that. Why is that happening? But these distortions, to me, are so fucking dangerous. And also where the lack of ethics comes in. Everyone's always criticizing tech companies. And what a mess. I mean, imagine running Instagram, Twitter, TikTok.

Imagine having any kind of sense of ethics. And I think a lot of people who are running these things really do, and realizing that no matter what, a bias is going to emerge here that will wag the dog. Yes, but one aside to that is like when you see someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who's one of the best of the bunch at this point, when he's saying, oh, I'm gonna give back 90% or 95% of my money that I made off Facebook,

I'm gonna give it back, you know, and put it in. If you had made Facebook 95% less extractive, you know what I mean? You wouldn't have any of the problems. You just hire people, have some human beings. That's the thing. The whole tech bro vision of business is to have no human involvement in their company.

It's like, that's why you get these unintended spin out effects. Well yeah, and yes. And you know, that to me is where we run into like a problem that I think there is a precedent for there is a precedent for the Problem we're experiencing right now And I say go back and look it when everybody was doing blow Because they thought cocaine was some kind of like universal cure for everything. I'm like Coca-Cola era

It was yeah, everyone's doing blow you go in the pharmacy you get cocaine people didn't there was no association Cocaine was not associated with the destruction of your life. Cocaine was like do you want to live? Here's how you do it cocaine. It will fix a lot of the problems and hilariously one of the Mental illnesses that they invented was a mental illness associated with how things were speeding up. People were going nuts because things were getting too fast. Cure? Cocaine. Things are going too fast. Speed yourself up. Now you can sync up with it, right? Right.

And so everyone thought it was fine. And then gradually, people began to realize like oh shit This is real bad like fuck imagine a whole country on blow Imagine you can get blow at 7-eleven right right that that was happening. That was right before the stock market crash. Yeah Yes, and so I think if you look at what's happening now and especially if you start thinking of technology as a drug yeah, is a If you look at what's happening now, and especially if you start thinking of technology as a drug, is a drug infinitely more dangerous than cocaine in the sense that it is free, so to speak. It is, anyone can have access to it.

Then what we're seeing an echo of what has already happened in this country, which is a gradual coming to Jesus of like the, at a global level, I think that, wait a minute, this, this thing is like warping us in not good ways. And, and something must be done here. And that's what we're looking at. And the answers that the tech companies are putting out are really not very satisfying. I don't know if you've seen the new Instagram commercial. It's like now it's a safe Instagram. You know, like now you can let your kids fucking like look at Instagram,

but somehow there's some kind of controls. It's like, dude, if you never met a teenager, I would chat, oh, if my parents tried to fucking like nerf my Instagram, are you kidding me? I would instantly find a way out of that. So, yeah, so here we are. We are now living in a bizarre world where default reality, I love that term,

is no longer what it used to be. Default reality is now corpos space where the main ideas of what we're fighting about, what we're arguing about, does not reflect reality, but we're like roosters fighting chickens. Right, it's so weird. I mean, that's why after the election, I started to, I'm getting texts from everybody,

panicked in all these different directions, and I'm telling people, get your get your eyes off the screen, right? To your neighbors, whatever is going on. It's like the whatever you think the the the die has been cast. I start this is when I go back to spirituality. You know, there's this prayer in Judaism called the Unatanah tokef. It's weird. It's a medieval poem that was written in one of the dark, you know,

the Jews were just clobbered in the Middle Ages. It was not a good, there's good times, but it was a bad time. Bad time. Right. So they, they in the Unatanah Tokeph prayer, they say it on Rosh Hashanah and on Yom Kippur, the high holidays. And they say it's so dark between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it is written, who will live and who will die? Who will be sick? Who will lose their children? Who will live? And it's like, and you think it's like, oh shit, I better really, because they say on Rosh Hashona it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed in God's book of life. Who's going to live? Who's going to live? And you think it means like, oh, so I better pray a lot this week so God crosses, erases my name

off the bed. It's like, no, no, but at the end of the prayer, it says, but only through only through compassion, mutual aid, you know, and love, can we, can we lessen the severity of the decree. So they're saying this shit is written down. What's going to happen is written, but our choice as humans is how are we going to help each other through it? Are we going to to to to? Collaboratively doula one another right right through this through this thing through compassion and it's it and to me It's like this is Digital doesn't do that. Right.

So what do we do? We back to the Israel. Let's take one seventh of your time off. One day. You don't have to digitally detox. You don't have to stop using the net. Do what the Israelis do. One day out of the market.

One day off the screens and touch someone, look in their eyes, breathe together. It's like our ability to recalibrate is so available to us. We can still use these tools. It's like don't. Right. But just you've got to remember what they are. And it's hard to,

because it does go further back than digital. It's like language that we speak. Right. The words we speak, than digital. It's like language that we speak. Right. The words we speak, especially English, it's programmed, right? It's a subject-object language. So this whole colonial dominator thing is built into the language we use, right? The subject works on the object. Right.

So we're born into a world where two, we're listening subject object subject object. I'm acting on you, you're acting on him. Who's acting on the other? And it's like, as one discovers eventually, like when you're making love, it's you, who's subject, who's object? No, no, we're emerging to one thing. This doesn't make sense. There's no language for it, right? Right. So you transcend the linguistic program of Western nouns and verbs and move into this other space. Same with digital. Of course it's fixed. And in some ways, I don't blame it.

It got taken over by capitalist. Its job is to extract value from us. It's a tool. It's a tool. But if you understand that, then you can recalibrate in real life. You can start to breathe again. That's why so many people are taking mushrooms and going and doing yoga. It's like a romantic resurgence.

Well, wait. Okay, what are the steps though? When I think of myself and my own internet addiction, my own proclivities online, or I think of like close friends and I know like they're like, you know, glued to the screen right now. And I think one like positive here is I do feel like a lot of like phone addicts or whatever you want to call it tech addicts do recognize are really starting to recognize that the technology is not improving their lives at all, it's not improving their mental space at all, it's not leading to any kind of really good outcomes

in their interpersonal relationships. But I feel like all of us are a little sort of uncertain. I mean, I know you can go cold turkey, throw your phone away, get a flip phone or whatever, but what are some steps here? Some basic, like here's how you could begin to sever the umbilicus connecting us to this bizarre corpo demiurge that's inflated a bullshit reality

that we're all freaking out over. That's funny, because it's like 15 years ago I thought that's what I'm gonna do is give people the steps that you know I wrote this book this programmer be program thing and when it came out, uh People took it as like the the it became like the banner for the learn to code movement It's like programmer be programmed. Oh, let's learn programming go to code school. Let's do STEM education in the schools I'm like, no, no, no, no, I didn't mean that and then

Understand the way our reality is being programmed like more as a liberal art be able to think critically about it so, you know what I thought was the easiest first step was for people to recognize the biases of the technology the affordancesances of it. So something as simple as, like you were saying at the beginning, digital technology doesn't live in time. Digital technology is asynchronous. It's sitting there waiting. It's living in the ticks of the clock,

where humans live in the space between the ticks and the duration of the second. So it's like everything on the internet is chest by mail. It's all asynchronous. It's gonna sit and wait there. You don't have to catch up with it. It's trying to catch up with you. So once you kind of realize that,

oh, it's all asynchronous. It's not, it's pretending it's always on, but it's actually not. You send me a text message, it's not now. Fuck you. Unread is an insult. You left me on read. Which is why I was at an insult. Fuck you. Unread is an insult? Right. You left me unread? Right.

Which is why I was at an insult. Right. Fuck you. Gotcha. You wanna step into my world, touch me, and then I'm there for you. Right. Hey Doug, this is not.

So it's that sort of stacked thing, or looking at the biases of choice, digital technologies, these platforms, they give you these three choices, you want to do this or that? And it's like, what about none of the above? What about the in-between? Right! I don't, I'm not, I'm not that or that.

I'm, I'm in that mushy place in-between, this sort of grid. Okay, let me stop you here. I'd love for you to talk more about this, because I have seen this and it's infuriating and confusing, but it's this sort of tyranny, this tyrannical binary, where like right now it's so black or white. It's so either you believe this and you're good, or you believe this and you're bad, or you don't believe this.

There's no in between. That's because it's a binary landscape. That's digital. We could have. We were developing analog computers at one time, which we're all in that more like a transistor reality where everything's a rheostat. I mean, there's no resistance in a digital world.

It's on or off. There's no dimmer switch. Switches, baby. Exactly, switches. On, on, on. So then when you're living in that world, you eventually start to see everything in terms of white or black, left or right,

up or down, you know. It's just left and right. And that's not our world, but boy, it sure does spin out that way. There's that almost centrifugal spin you know, spin of it. And then you get, you know, the rich and poor. It really, it divides everything in that way. And again, you're not going to change digital and not be that way. But then you've got to start living your life in a way that's compensating for this extreme bias.

If you're going to do this drug, you have to apply to the use of this drug the same idea that is emerging in the new destigmatized world of psychedelics not all bad. Like the prohibition taught us that. And all of my friends who work in that space will say things like personal responsibility is so important when it comes to psychedelics and

similarly if we're gonna look at this as a psychedelic and I think there's a just 100% is a psychedelic personal responsibility if you are going to do a big fat rail of Instagram Yeah, you have to go in there Reminding yourself. this isn't reality. Exactly. And these are tools, but they're not just hammers. A hammer is generally made by Stanley or whoever made the hammer,

for you to put nails in a piece of wood. That's its function. When you go onto any digital platform, you are stepping, the easiest metaphor, you are stepping into Macy's. Right. What does Macy's want? Macy's is designed to make you buy stuff, and they're going to use every technique, every way to make you feel bad or good or whatever it is to attract you to that pair of shoes or that hunting jacket or whatever it is that they want you to get. So when you're

on any of them, Facebook, X, Twitter, Instagram, whatever, they're not there for you to, Instagram's not there for you to post photos. Right. Instagram's there to do something to you. These are private spaces. These are little tiny feudal empires. They are not worlds. They are not social worlds.

And once you know, it's like it's fine. Kids learn to hack the function of a mall, or we did in the 70s, right? You go to the mall and you hang out with your friends, you smoke pot, you know where you go. It's like, you cannot buy shit in the mall and still- Have fun. Have fun, right? We learned to do that, but we understood we're in a mall

and what the emphasis of this place is, and you're still gonna get the slushie or you know, you're gonna spend a little something. And eventually malls, remember when the malls would have rules, like they would try to get teens out? Yes, it was a big problem. It was, we were the problem. I love it, because we were having, you know, and then Rave was an extension of that.

Really, Rave was taking, we were taking spaces, like parking lots and places, and throwing a party. Right right like showing in this like wreckage look what can happen I Son of like psychedelic exactly beautiful utopian Temporary autonomous right you bring a generator and some turntables You do this thing until the cops come and shut it down. We didn't realize how political that was. We just thought we were having a party.

Right, right. That is very political. And that is the kind of politics I like. You see, that to me, what you just described, is the hope. And the hope is... It's in the interstitial. It's the finding the weird space. And the net was that hope. There was a military fucking platform for defense contractors and people to talk to each other and send nuclear codes and shit and we Squatted it. That's why my original email. I still have a way media squat comm We were squatting the media to do weird shit to talk about psychedelics and Star Trek and yeah changing the world the Gaia

Hypothesis and all the weird wonderful stuff. This is the so to so this thing that happens in it happens all the time when you are around a person it happens this is what I love about podcasting. Something in the podcast something in conversation, something else comes into the room and that is completely out of the control of the individual in the conversation, but also out of the control of the state, out of the control of anyone who wanna regulate novelty,

you can't do it. It just shows up and there it is. You might look into like the difference between Newtonian physics and quantum physics, right? Like Newtonian physics, very strict regarding how things work. You go deep enough, shit's popping in and out of reality. What just happened? How does that even work? And that thing that happens can't really be controlled. You can sort of set the space for it. I mean, this is the magical ritual. This is the opening up of the possibility, but you can't. It's not gonna, you know, my

favorite in the Chronicles of Narnia, one of the little, one of the kids says, where is Aslan? I want to see Aslan. And the other kid says, Aslan is not a tame lion. And this thing is not a tame lion. It might come, it might not come. But most importantly, because of its impossibility to domesticate, it can't get owned by the algorithm, by politics, by anything. It transcends empires. That, to me, that thing, that should be the primary focus of anyone in the world right now interested in helping is creating spaces where that can emerge regardless of the people

in the space, regardless of the politics, regardless of the ideology, regardless of whatever. Right. And it has to do with, it requires that participants learn to resist scale. You know, everything on the net happens kind of at scale, right? Total. It's like all audiences at once. And the original net, you weren't on the whole net at the same time. You were in a use net group. You were in a slash dot discussion.

You were on the well. And you were reaching maybe 40 people, 80 people, 200 people, a community of a thousand people and you're engaging with them. When you're trying to reach everyone on Twitter at the same time, everyone in the world, you're gonna, you're gonna, you are fucked, right? You're now have to operate at scale and in order to do that, you're gonna have to become, you know, you're gonna have to become either, either, I mean, who really the first victims of it was like Charlie Sheen, right? Or Trump or Musk to some extent.

You're gonna have to become a super troll in order to get the whole world listening to you. And it's not the place, or Oprah or something. And it's like, we don't need to all be that. The beauty of podcasting, which is why it may kind of be the killer app of the internet in some ways Yeah, it really is especially for me, especially voice only is it's vibrational You know more that you they like they can watch us on YouTube and all that and that's one experience

But when you're in their ears when they're doing their chores or whatever and you're mmm Yeah, they feel the vibration of you. It's we return to the that an analog type feeling a sensational nervous system our voices are in their bodies vibrating them and if you're not worried about the size of your audience if you're happy to reach a couple hundred couple thousand people instead of you know ten hundred thousand million whatever instead of you don't have to not everyone should be Joe Rogan much less can be Joe Rogan right if you're happy with a few thousand people you're you're you're doing it you're finding the weird nook that's it cranny you have identified it this is oh my god

and it's the opposite of AI AI is the other side so it's like if the internet experience is bifurcating into two things one is the particular weird analogue fun of Podcasting and the other is AI which is necessarily totalitarian Like taking all the data of the world and reverting us to the mean right? I'm gonna go on the podcasting side for my experience And I'll use the tool of the AI side to inform my podcast. Oh my god, you have, you are shining a light on the Achilles heel of this digital demiurge,

which is, oh my god, somehow I just miss this completely. It's mind blowing. Fuck. Yes. It's mind blowing. Fuck. Yes, because I'm someone who, if I'm in a conversation with someone and they seem even slightly interesting to me and they wanna be published or talk to people, I will always say, start a podcast.

And they will say, everyone has a podcast. Or they'll say, no one will listen. And that self-censorship based on not being able to scale Everyone has a podcast or they'll say, you know, no one will listen and that self censorship based on not being able to scale to the global level instantaneously is Annihilating so many possible like philosophies ideas Essentially novelty it's the way you fucking stop novelty right and people think you know Oh, if I'm not making enough on patreon to pay for my life, then my podcast isn't worth doing right?

I'll tell you fuck that you know when the 2007 mortgage crash and Stock market thing happened and book advances and magazine rates and all that went down. It's like fuck it I got my PhD to become, and I have a day job as a professor of media studies at City University of New York, right? That's not shameful. You know, so you're right. I can't Malcolm Gladwell myself into a townhouse

in Manhattan, right? Because my books are only read, and it sounds like, and I refuse to be embarrassed, my books are only read by it sounds like, and I refuse to be embarrassed, my books are only read by 40 or 50,000 people. My podcast is only listened to by the entire MetLife Stadium. And I'm gonna be embarrassed of that? The MetLife Stadium shows up two or three times a month

to hear my little podcast. Not enough, not enough for the money. You need to go crazy baby. I know, and it's like, it's more than that. It's so many people. It's so many people it makes me cry that that many people would want to hear it. And no, because only 0.01% of them give $2

a month. It's not enough to live on. It's not, I pay an editor and all that. It's not enough to live on, but it's worth doing. And if my, if your day job's gonna support your expression your participation in the culture you know the the amount of money you're making on your art and media is no reflection of its impact on the the the human

organism oh my god but if you wanted to truly do some kind of modern like you know we are entering Christmas and we all know the story of Jesus. Who was that king? They heard a... He was... Herod? Herod. Heard there was going to be some kind of messiah or something, a prophet. And so he just starts killing all the babies. Going all over the place, kills all the fucking babies. Because what a pussy.

Like, Jesus, how insecure are you? You were going to do a pogrom on infants because you're afraid some future king by the time you're old is gonna fuck you up madness But if you look at what what you just described is a great way to kill a lot of babies Which is make it so that people don't even try because they can't reach a global scale Instantaneously, and if they just have a few hundred listeners they feel like failures. What you've done there is you have squelched all new voices, you've squelched everything, you've commodified conversation. It is the perfect form of censorship in the modern age.

Oh, fuck, that's so wild. If you want to be an influencer, most influencers think about their influence impact in terms of the metric of numbers that they have on the thing. What if you are an influencer operating in the style of an acupuncturist? You found, what if you reached three people? Yeah. But you flipped their, you fucking rocked their world. You changed the way they move through the universe?

Yeah. That's infinite, baby. That's the whole thing. Infinite. It is, you know, this is, I keep thinking I had to I had to and I still use that language I ended up stuck with my mother-in-law the night she was dying in the hospital Right and I was there when she Crossed over when she passed and the first thing I'm thinking when I'm there and she's heaving. I'm like, oh my god It's three in the morning. I'm the one here. I'm not one of the kids. I'm the in law kid first thing

I think is why the fuck am I the one right who's stuck here doing this and then I Could feel that she could feel me there. I could and I was realizing. I'm now Experiencing the greatest privilege. Yep of being a human being is to be the one who's who's Helping someone cross over in the most profound thing. And I'm like, they're weeping with compassion and joy at the same time that I had been granted this mitzvah. Right? It's like mitzvah means commandment and blessing and the same thing. And finally I realized, oh, I get it. It's this moving through this obligation being doing this thing is and that's and that's one person's one person

one night might be the most important thing I've done in this incarnation. Right? Right. And like think how corrupt it would be if you set up your tripod and let me stream. Let me stream this mitzvah. this is gonna get a lot of traction. And it's like that is the other sort of like cultural gravity well that is happening now, which is we are being pulled into the commodification of moments that should probably just be for you and your family. But people are setting up their fucking tripods but people are setting up their fuckin' tripods, people are setting up their tripods,

having public nervous breakdowns, people are setting up their tripods to commodify, monetize their... And to be fair, that's because life has become so precarious under end-stage digital capitalism that they're looking for any way to make... I'm lucky to be able to get a PhD and then a teaching job. Yeah right, right. I mean who can blame them? It's like you know you gotta eat. But that, what

you're pointing towards here is like an invisible, not just self-sensory. I mean self-censoring is bad. You know they talk about, I'm sure you've heard the term cops in the head. Have you ever heard that term? Yeah, and that cops in that is bad You pull over police in neighborhood and then you don't even have to over police it anymore because people just think right everywhere, right? So that's bad. So If we are, you know doing digital share cropping We're existing in one of these like Macy's or whatever and we've set up our little booth or whatever and there's an ambiguous set of rules regarding how we're to conduct ourselves because if

you you see some of your peers get kicked out of Macy's and like I don't even know what happened they just said I couldn't do it anymore and you're like but wait wait are you like set you're experiencing a strike or a shadow banning or any reach out like what did I do I tell me the rules and they won't tell you. So what you do in that what you've created there is not just self censorship, but a kind of weird paranoia regarding saying anything at all. And you begin to look at what the algorithm is serving up to people. What are they saying? Right.

OK, well, I'll say that. And now you've not just self-censored, you've gotten people to actually rewrite what they were gonna say to fit into some ambiguous thing that they imagine will make you go global, will get you the most views. And now you have completely subverted the way philosophies grow. the way every good thing grows into

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Run that game with prize picks! game with price bags. There's a eyes that do I mean, I've seen, you know, you get on Instagram, at least I'll get served up something by some duties like you won't this is a trick. They don't want you to know. Here's what you do. This AI will show you what the top 50 most viewed things in the last day are. And then it will do an analysis of them and I think prints out a script for you

that some kind of amalgam of all of them, which then you get an AI to read the script. And then it generates images based on what's popular as the content. You don't do shit. You just get this AI to, like, look at what people like and just replicate it. And the fuck, man, what a... If you want to cause a real apocalypse, that's how you do it, man apocalypse That's how you do it man. That's how you do it. You don't just suppress freedom of speech free discourse, but you actually encourage people

Because of money to just say the same shit to go to scale right? Oh God that's dark. I mean the other thing that happens is the the There's no I mean the other thing that happens is that the There's no Slack in this world in it. It's like everything I feel like everything gets exposed And I know I know it's not like I used to call it truth serum. It's not that it's truth serum It's that it's like a spin cycle on things so so institutions whose That are not completely internally consistent they kind of get

Exposed it like speeds everything up like I kept thinking about in the last Election cycle this immigration thing everybody's all set about immigration. Right? Right at the border. All right, but Immigration thing everybody's all set about immigration. Crisis at the border. Right crisis at the border. All right, but It's not you got to go back a step though with digital has brought it to a head and we all see it But what we're seeing really is Wait a minute. What is a border? So you don't let's not worry about America and Mexico for now and all they don't think about that think about like There's an island that has both Haiti and the Dominican Republic on it right you're born on the Haiti side People are like throwing rocks at you and burning your babies and taking your you on the Dominican Republic side

You're like working in a hotel or you know you got it like well Why aren't so if your baby's born on this side of the line? It's fucked if it's born on that side of the line. It's not and If it's born on that side of the line, it's not. And who made that line? That's not God. That's some political boundary thing. So what is that? It's like, oh, so there's a nation state. So a nation state has these lines around it.

And then if you're on one side, you're cool. If you're not on the other, that doesn't make sense. So the nation state itself is intrinsically a kind of violent act. Just to put that line on there. Where did the nation state come from? I mean, this a kind of violent act. You know, just to put that line on there. Where did the nation state come from? I mean, this is kind of programmed to be programmed to the nation state.

Oh, it was invented by monarchs in the, you know, whenever they wanted to disempower the city states, they said, oh no, you're not Venetians anymore, you're Italians. You know, you're not Napoleon, you're this. You're this. So, and you create this mythology around this thing, you put that line. So when you're looking at something like immigrants or refugees, it's like, well, they're not

allowed over the line because this is our line. No, we should put the line. Of course we have the line. But we also know it's kind of mean to say, oh, no, you got to stay on the line and not have your food and it's like so It's not an immigration problem. It's back further. It's a nation-state national boundary problem those you you it's really hard to maintain compassion and see someone over an imaginary line and not Want to do something for them? So it's like we're not having the actual discussion We're just looking at the aftermath of these institutions that are crumbling in a digital society They're all all these institutions are crumbling electoral politics is crumbling the FCC is crumb

All these things don't quite work and we don't yet know how how do we retrieve the functions of these things and bring them forward? Before the institution housing them right it's gone. We're just mad at the institution. Now I remember in the 70s in New York we shut down Willowbrook. They shut down all the mental institutions because they went in them and they saw they were abusing everybody in the mental institutions. These are terrible places! And we nationally, Reagan, let's shut them the fuck down. And we did and then we didn't realize, oh but another function these mental institutions were. Were housing.

Housing. Oh no! Now there's always the homeless. Open-air mental institutions. Now you give the citizen the job. If you're a citizen living in some of these cities, it's not just like getting to work and following the rules, but you have to find a way to work with the people who probably need care in a

middle institution who is sitting in front of your house screaming about how they're Jesus. And like most people aren't trained to deal with something like that. Even people who are trained to deal with something like that aren't sure what to do. And then so we end up with all these fights over yes and no over second and third order effects of problems we're not even looking at, of underlying assumptions. And that would be the beauty of a digital age. If we're spending time in programmed environments, what I was hoping is once you see that your

digital world is programmed, you come back to the regular world and say, oh my gosh, it's programmed too. You get that Bucky Fuller urge to some extent of saying, oh, look at the dollar. Why is the dollar a read-only medium? Why can't I program my own money? Why is the Bible set in stone? Why are schools work like this? Why all these institutions that have been created

with other people's needs in mind and not mine, we can reprogram reality to work better for people. Yes, but everything you just said is unspeakable. I mean, you've really gone off the edge of what we should be talking about because you're not allowed, there is some sense. Whenever I start looking at certain ideas, and I like this feeling, whenever I realize

I've gotten into a forbidden zone in my own mind It's like whoa, what the fuck and you know, I a few of them for me are number one the consideration of I'm born into a system, right? As far as I'm aware depending on what paradigm you want to subscribe to I wasn't like, you know Put me in late-stage capitalism in the United States. I'm just born into the United States. Exactly, it's naturalized. So you're born here and then the moment you're born,

you're given a lot of ideas regarding what borders are, boundaries are, this is our house, that's the neighbor's house. Don't go in the neighbor's yard, that's the neighbor's yard, don't do that. And so then, so you're taught all of these. I remember that feeling when the ball goes over there, oh shit, the ball's in the neighbor's yard. What the fuck?

And like I can see in the way that I like when I'm on a walk with my kids and my children just naturally On their scooters are like that's a good driveway to like scooter down. I can see in boiling up in me like oh That is an off-limits driveway We must respect our neighbors are That is an off-limits driveway. We must respect our neighbors or Their property Some girl was walking her dog and went right up my driveway as I was sitting in my car chatting with my wife and threw dog shit into my trash can and Like the amount I don't like that. Oh, but but I would say that the amount of

Anger that I felt Considering the how mine thought it was disproportionate to the offense like I'm Mussolini you know I have become like pure fascism I'm like arrest that girl how dare she throw a dog shit into my stinky trash can oh this was my property! Like, you know, and, and, but this is programmed in us, and I'm not saying it's all wrong. We, our cells need boundaries. You don't want a crisis at the border

and your fucking cells, you're gonna die. Your cell needs to let certain things in and put, I'm not saying boundaries are wrong, I'm just saying the exploration of the way the systems are running, giving yourself the compassion, being self-compass and allowing yourself to realize you didn't choose this system. You were born into this system and these days especially

questioning the atomic level of the system seems to be somewhat forbidden. Right. You have to. But you have to. That's, that's, you know, and that's, you you know at the end of this the the new version of this book I came up with these kind of four interventions because I was getting really pissed off in the sort of political and Activist and I mean I kind of hang out more with the sort of progressive lefty activists kind of people and they're always saying I'm just kidding. I'm trying to feed the fire on my socials. I'm in the more Burning Man-y climate change kind of people.

There's a lot of questioning regarding my politics right now. Whatever. Boo! I'm just trying to feed that fire. So then what they do is they say, how do we get people to da da da? How do we get people to care more about the climate? How do we get people to get more politically active? How do we get people to dot dot dot? How do we get people to care more about the climate? How do we get people to get more politically active? How do we get people to? And it's like, once you're saying,

how do we get people to, you're on the wrong track. You're manipulating people. That's in the 20th century advertising television influence. You're instrumentalizing human beings. So then what I wanted to do is come up with, how can we even begin to talk about this in a less manipulative way. So I came up with these kind of four interventions that I think we can do. The first one is what we're talking about, and I got to come up with an easier way of saying it, but it's denaturalized power. So you help people recognize that the way things are is not necessarily... don't accept these as given

like I was on with Jake Tapper. Okay cool. You remember him? He's still there on CNN doing this thing about AI, you know, one of these interviews and you know because I've written some negative things about AI but every day I feel differently about AI. Some days I'm like it's fine, some days I'm like it's gonna destroy us all. So this was one of the days I was like, I really don't give a shit about AI. This is the wrong day to get that interview. So he keeps asking me these questions,

trying to get me to say something bad. And I'm just like, well, it's not that strong. It's not that powerful. I don't know, it's not that whatever. And then finally he says, well, what about the unemployment problem? And then I said, well, what about the unemployment solution?

And he's like, huh? And I go, you know, honestly, I don't want a job. I want stuff, I want food, I want meaningful participation, but a job, I don't want a job. And in fact, jobs weren't invented till the 12th century. People used to be crafts people, and then they started charter monopolies.

You weren't allowed to make jelly. You had to work for His Majesty's Royal Jelly Company, and you clocked in in the morning, they put a clock on the tower Yeah, so what I and Jake he did not like that or I don't think I'm gonna be invited back But what I was doing was was Denaturalizing this Assumption that you need a car to get to work. Why do you need a car to get to work?

Because GM lobby to move your homes away from the work so you need a car. So first one is sort of denaturalized power. Second one is trigger agency. That's the sort of program or be programmed thing. Yes. To help people to understand that we're not in a read only universe. That's the sort of a computer term for a program that you can see but you can't change. We are in a read write universe.

We got video. You don't just watch TV. can make TV yet. So we're in a read and once you realize once you trigger agency I'm suggesting we Re-socialize people help people realize once your agency's triggered and we're gonna reprogram reality. Let's do it together Right you do it. It's a it's a social phenomena Yeah, and the and once people are socializing it triggers the the fourth one, which is to cultivate awe. That awe has been really sequestered and removed from the modern experience.

Ecstatic dance, tantric sex, shamanic ritual. All the stuff that we look at is, oh, that's some crazy new age crap. Say ecstatic dance again. Ecstatic dance. Boo! I like the other two. I just can't do ecstatic dance.

Would you watch other people, other beautiful women doing ecstatic dance? You wouldn't like that either? Nope. Would you take ecstasy? Yes. Would you dance while you're on ecstasy? Nope. Aha.

Would you squirm on the ground while you're on ecstasy? When I take ecstasy, I go to my Excel spreadsheets and I just write down what experience I'm having per minute. Excel, Excel, ecstasy? When I take ecstasy I go to my Excel spreadsheets and I just write down what experience I'm having. Excel, ecstasy. Yeah I just chart my ecstasy trip. I start at like I feel pretty good and then I'm horny and then like oh god I want to kill myself. Alright well you don't have to do the excited yet but what I'm saying is just these experiences are looking at the grand canyon, looking at your baby, looking at a puppy, right? And you experience yourself as something connected to something larger than yourself. Well, your actual identity.

Right, right. So, and those things will change the society from the bottom up, you know? Let me, okay, now, not like Tapper, but I, and you know how much I love you. I'm gonna push back, and I don't think that my critique of what you just said is actually even accurate, but I feel like I want to say it. It'll be fine. Yeah.

So the term intervention itself, this is as I'm looking at the cultural landscape right now. What I'm seeing is on both sides, for sure, here's the messaging, we got to fix this. That's the messaging on both sides. I think that the problem right now is people are so fucking tired of one side or the other trying to fix their ass. And that is backfired. It is backfired in the most extreme way, because now, compassion, you know, which if you ask me,

is like unplanned kind of, it just happens in the moment. And it's when there's the awful, it's sad that if you're like, there's probably in war and in disaster and climate disaster and all that shit You will see an explosion of compassion spontaneous natural compassion Just flowers just grows out of those horrible events Unplanable it just happens generally you can cultivate it as they say but what I see happening is a confusion regarding compassion Because the central premise seems to be What I see happening is a confusion regarding compassion. Because the central premise seems to be,

we gotta fix this. And I think that's central. That's not mine, but yeah. But intervention. Yeah, but intervention, I'm thinking of it more in terms of 12 steps. Well, I'm saying, but intervention implies other people intervene.

Right, but I'm saying no, not other, but human beings intervening in the digital program. In other words, we are, it's automated. I gotcha, I gotcha, I gotcha, I'm so sorry I misunderstood you, I figured I did. But you know, like, there is a... Right, I'm not gonna, that's the whole point is why I'm trying to not get people to do this or get people to do that. Leave the fucking people alone every and then and and when I get in trouble the biggest thing I got in trouble

It was right after the election. I did this thing to calm people down and whatever and I ended it by saying Everything's gonna be okay Josh cut that out No, you didn't say that! You can't say that! Josh, cut that out. I'm just kidding. Isn't that wild though? That got people so upset. People hate it when you say that. We're having a bad trip.

What do you tell people when they're having a bad trip? Everything is as it should be. That's not true! The government's monitoring my thoughts! They've been planting nanobots into my mind, man! And it's gonna be okay. No! The nanobot says it! This, so this, this to me, is a really, like, in Buddhism, if you really wanna like get fucking deflated

regarding your hope of like what enlightenment might be or the powers you'll get or all of the stuff that could come, it's when they start telling you, you're fine. You're fine. No, like right now, before the meditation you're fine, during the meditation you're fine. I know! That's what Krishnamurti says. That's what the friggin' Dalai Lama says when people come up, oh no, I know this! And he goes, you're good just the way you are. Exactly!

It's great! And everyone talks to him about a problem and he always flips. I love when someone said, don't you hate spirituality in America? It's like, have you heard the name, you know, spiritual, we're living in a spiritual shopping mall. And Dalai Lama goes, that sounds great. Like a spiritual, you could just go into any store and get the spirituality you want. Yeah, I'm telling you, man, this is, this is what was the part of your, the intervention, this is the empowering part.

What did you call it? The trigger agency, trigger agency, the beginning of triggering that agency I think starts at the subjective level With realizing you're fine. Well, that's you got to get people people that internet doesn't communicate to people that they're fine No, so for people to get fine. This is easy anybody listening anybody. Whatever if you don't feel fine Stand up put your feet on the ground Feel put your feet on the ground. Feel, put your feet on the ground. They are like a foot or two apart. Your body doesn't know it's safe,

because we lived in trees and we were all in, until you put your feet on the ground. Right. Right. And then breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, and try to do it, if you can tolerate it, do that twice. Well, let me, let me- And you're gonna feel so much better.

But I wanna, this is something I've identified in me. I start feeling bored when I'm fine. And I feel like this is sort of the byproduct, this is the radiation poisoning of the tech, which is that we have now connected the feeling of being okay with boredom. Because everything that you look at, if you just want to like, just for everyone listening or watching, the next time you're on Instagram, just begin to notice anything that is trying

to fix you, other people, the world themselves. Right. And you will realize that the rush, part of the rush seems to be if we can maintain a state of constant nervousness, anxiety and neurosis, we won't be bored. Oh, it is wild. But I feel like Instagram and the internet do this thing that I do for myself when I'm meditating, which is distract and agitate myself.

Yes! I sit there, I'm finally at the place when I meditate now that I'm laughing at what I do to myself. Oh, it's incredible. What if my daughter's not OK? What's going on there? Oh, I didn't check that bill. It's like every it's like, why?

It's 10 minutes. It's all going to be there when I'm done. 20 minutes left. It's all going to be there. It's like, wow. Why? Why do I do that? And it's like the if you don't like it,

you don't want to do it for yourself. Go online. It'll do it for you. Yes. You've got plenty of time to do that and it's like the if you don't like You don't want to do it for yourself go online. It'll do it for you Yes, you've got plenty of time to do that and that to me is if you really want to find like why meditate It's like how the fuck is something so simple Something really just like any of us will sit in front of the TV for hours. Yeah Completely still watching the TV. Why is it that you remove the TV and you feel like your brains on fire, right? What's going on there? And I think that is where we connect with this like, you know Crisis at the fucking border and this border is the border between

the the the hyper sped up modern world and that thing where for a second you give yourself a vacation from being fucked up. In other words, you're sitting there and you're like, God damn, I got to check my phone or oh my God, I just thought about like throwing my mother's corpse into a fire. Why did I think that? What all of these things?

What happens if you, instead of thinking, I'm a monster, just like, yeah, that's something I think. That's something. But you don't judge it anymore. In those moments, you, I think, plug in to the novelty. That is the novelty field. And that place is so precious, is completely outside of politics, completely outside of time, completely outside of like whatever the day to day anxieties that you are like distracting yourself with. That to me, man, that place, that's where we need to find a way to hang out. Not and again, I just always go back to Ram Dass's advice. We work on ourselves so that we can help those around us.

Right. It's not we work on ourselves and then we work on other people. We work on ourselves and then we tell other people why they're wrong. We work on our, you know what I mean? It's, we work, nobody wants to hear this right now. And working on ourselves is not even fixing yourself. It's funny, I went, you know the Rubin Museum, with all the Buddhist stuff in New York City,

there's this Rubin Museum, it's really cool. They're just gonna close it now and make it a traveling thing. So I did this tour there with this guy who's like a child heart surgeon and a tour guide Buddhist practitioner meditation teacher dude at the Rubin Museum. And he's walking around and he keeps,

he's talking about our conditioning. You know, as you go, this is your conditioning and that's your conditioning. And he teaches meditation. So I was like, well so dude, how do I get rid of my conditioning? And he said, oh, you don't get rid of your conditioning. You don't even try, that's there forever.

But you can change your relationship to it. And I was like, oh, you mean I don't even try. It's there. That's there forever, but you can change your relationship to it Yes, and I was like, oh, you mean I don't have to fix that I don't and he goes no, it's like it's so it's it's in and once I realized that it's like Oh, that makes it so much, but I'm just this little fucked up person But I don't have to act fucked up all the time. There you go There you go. I love that so much. And also I am annoyed by it. It's like there is something really like boring

about being okay. And I don't mean okay in this. I mean, you know, in Buddhism especially, you will hear them say you're already enlightened. The enlightened mind is there, or the way Trump put it was confusion is a condition of enlightenment. other words like you're not Right if you have no confusion

Then it's like you lean into that though like, you know you lean lean into your taboos and they become your fetishes Right lean into that so it's like oh, I'm so bored Lean into that. So it's like, oh, I'm so bored. Mm, let's be bored. But just, I mean, oh, it's not boring. It's like, it's the opposite is the thing. It's like, I don't even know. I'm trying to think of a metaphor other than a sexual one.

But think of it this way. When you get aroused sexually, it's actually a process of relaxation that gets you aroused. That's the way the erection works. It's not something clenching, it's something letting go. Let that thing happen. So what we're thinking of as boredom is not boredom. What boredom is is exhaling, it's leaning into the bliss of this moment. Every single second is an infinity and I promise if you lean into one real second of infinity you'll go that second was worth my whole lifetime, right? That's where you go. It's like, Yep. That's it. And you know, I love like, you know, you've taught me this, but you taught me

this with conspiracy theories. And I always think about ever since we had this conversation about like, let's look at metaphorically, what are chemtrails? Let's look at like all the big things like what what what could that be? And so like, and I, you know, I do love the as above so below. So if there is some thing that we've been being told over and over, crisis at the border, crisis at the border, let's think about the border that we create between the person we want to be and the person we actually are. And you know what I mean? There's a border. When you meditate, you know, suddenly,

I don't know how many people I've talked to, like I just, I can't do it because like all I do is think. And it's like, oh, I, right? Oh my God, they're just getting in, aren't they? They're getting over this fucking border. Like you're right, like the moment you sit down, your mind is going nuts. You're letting all these thought refugees, you know,, your mind is going nuts, and you're letting all these thought refugees,

you know, into your mind. And then in sort of day-to-day reality, you're sort of trying to create a wall that's blocking out all the bad thoughts, not good thoughts, that's not me, I'm not like that. And yeah, the moment that that goes bye-bye, and there is no more border. You stop distinguishing There's no distinct what you know, you do enter into this this space. That's our birthright and it right and it's okay

It's okay. That's where the Jews did it. Look, we know it's intolerable so just one day a week sit there and Accept that you're a sacred being, that you're okay just the way you are like Mr. Rogers would say, that you're allowed to just sit there and be sacred. It's fine. One day a week, you can go be yourself the rest of the time. Go be crazy, worry. It's really so you don't have to do it all the time. You don't have to. But give yourself tastes of it's okay. I know they're starving over there and this bad thing's happening there. It's all happening but it's it is what it is. Right. And if you are on it, if nothing

else if you are on think of it like all of reality is a tree or all of civilization and you happen to be on a privileged branch of that tree where you get to be on a green leaf. Yeah. You owe it to the sick part of that tree to soak in the sun, get those nutrients, really because you're connected to the whole thing. That's it. I'm not saying be selfish, but be open to the good or you're not serving anybody.

You know what, here's what you do. Become the paramedic that you want to put you in the ambulance when you have your heart attack. And I'll tell you what I don't want my paramedic to be. I don't want my paramedic to be political. I don't want my paramedic to be fucking freaked out. I don't want my paramedic to be more scared than I am. I don't want my paramedic to be like, Jesus Christ man. You had a heart attack the ice caps are fucking melting I want my paramedic to be centered in the moment and Completely just doing exactly their next right thing, right? That's what I want them to be and if you have any and I think it's a wonderful thing

And I think it's fucked up that these terms are being co-opted by the state right now But if you have a legitimate Human desire to help which is a good thing. Mm-hmm doesn't mean you're woke go broke It doesn't mean you're whatever I'm saying This is a this is in us and you want to cultivate that because it's fucking incredible when you get a chance to help somebody The training has to be right now, if you can't figure out a way to be okay, then how the fuck in a crisis situation,

when at last you can be the hero, are you gonna execute that in the most efficient way? If you can't do it when there isn't anything on fire around you, there isn't someone who's like holding their guts in. There isn't someone who's about to shoot someone in the fucking face at a mall. Like if you can't do that just sitting in your own house, that means that when the thing emerges you are not going to be able to fully help the way you are saying you want to help. And it has to be okay even when it's not okay.

That's right, I'm saying. It's even when it's not, the boy's holding in his guts and he's gonna die and it's gonna be okay. I would refer you to that guy on the train. It haunts me, there's a guy on some train, he was trying to protect people, he got stabbed in the fucking, he got stabbed to death. He was trying to protect people, he got stabbed in the fucking, he got stabbed to death. He was trying to help people, he got stabbed.

And he's dying. He said, I love everyone on this train. And that just sticks with me because when I talk about not okay, it's when you just got stabbed to death on a fucking train. And from his perspective, it's all love. And fuck, man, if if like to me, that's That imminent reality doesn't torture you that that that is an imminent reality

I know there's a contradiction here in the sense that I'm just said it Don't stop trying to correct people and yet this could be misconstrued as a correction and also a lot of times when I'm saying shit Like this I'm saying shit like this, I'm talking to myself. Well, if you're just talking, it's a correction. Right. You can't. Otherwise we'd be like the llamas and just sit silently.

Yeah, yeah. It's just this pointing people towards that idea, just even though it's a challenging idea, even though it's not. So we have to think of any suggestion or thing as an offering Here's an offering here's something that I've that's that's helped me on the road and I offer it through my podcast Right to you, right and I don't care if you adopt it or not I don't you're not a bad person or a good person. It's not about that. It's just yeah, this worked

it's just you know Douglas is it. It's just, you know, Douglas, it's like, I keep thinking about like, God, so many, I'm such an asshole. There's so many, I don't like ecstatic dancing, and I don't like- That's okay. I don't really like doing it so much, but I like that it's there.

I like watching it and hearing it. I like loud drums and stuff. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I don't like the term intent in intention setting an intention for some reason that just chafes my ass and but This episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by my dear friends at Squarespace. And yeah, sure, I could go on and on about the benefits of Squarespace. I could tell you about how they are now using artificial intelligence to help you build an incredible website. In a third of the time, it's insane.

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Forward slash Duncan take it for a spin when you're ready to launch use offer code Duncan You'll get 10% off your first order a website or a domain Thank You Squarespace. I know and they do that, you know, when you get a guided psychedelic thing, they're like, okay, now set your intention. I'm like, oh god, I don't know why it bothers me me. Set and set, I know what you mean, no, cause it's like, I just wanna see what the mother earth, you know, goddess wants to tell me. I have been thinking about that setting the attention thing in terms of being fully in the present moment. And I've been thinking a lot about how

the general sort of activist move is organizing, right? Organize, plan for the future, have a step-by-step sort of plan to get the world to the next whatever, right? And there's a lot of future thinking. Also I think there's a lot of past thinking, right? And so like the messaging in this election was, we're not going back or we're going to make America great. It was either thinking about the past or thinking about the future.

I didn't hear very much about this moment right now. And so if you were, and I understand why we must plan, I'm not saying don't plan anything, but how often I am in my planning mind, how often I'm thinking not just about the next day, but the next minute. While I'm in the midst of zipping up my backpack, I'm thinking about, well, I've got to text Douglas, I've got to get him his car. Or while I'm like looking for my keys,

I'm thinking about like where I need to drive. But the point is like, I'm constantly lost in some future reality. And the intention thing, I'm starting to get it. Because it's like what happens if you what happens if you put the past and the future on on as an offering, it's an it's a burn offering you incinerate it now it's gone right all there is is right now but just add to it this simple intent I'm gonna help yeah whoa have you noticed that that is whenever I do that it's like it's a math it's like magic it is man that is magic right and it is funny cuz like the future is Hype the past is spin yeah And the present is reality right you know and I do get the feeling and then this is what gets me in the most trouble But what the heck I'll get in trouble. I'm old whatever. I'm keeping my money. You know I live off what I got

And I'll get Social Security someday, so fuck all y'all. And the most trouble is when I suggest that the 20th century seems to be about those organizing marches, whether it's Martin Luther King or Mussolini or Gandhi, it's like we follow a leader on this journey, eyes on the prize, and justifies the means toward winning,

toward the thing. And it's like, that's so linear, it's so cause and effect. We're gonna do this now for that later. And it's like, what about if you focus entirely on the way in which we are doing this now? Right. You know, the be here now. Back to Ramdhan. Say if you're actually here, what's required of you, what's incumbent upon you becomes so self-evident. Right. In the moment that you're in. That's it. That, that, that. There isn't that and that goes back to everything's fine because if you notice like if you just sort of look out at the world and I'm it sucks that the way we are getting the

Teachings is via like fucking massive insane catastrophes Yeah But if you look at like Asheville and you see the people who are coming out to help you look at Spain People just helping just get the fucking water off the streets I don't know what the politics of Spain are I kind of understand the politics of Asheville, but I'm pretty sure the people who are Like boots on the ground citizens not FEMA sadly We all know the story where they were like actually denying aid to people at Trump signs in their fucking yard That is not a conspiracy. Oh, it's so dark. But I'm saying

boots on the ground, non-government intervention. Nobody, when they're giving sandwiches to people is like, who are you voting for? After their house just got washed down. And that thing that seems to be built in to us, which is if you just are wanting to help, it's immediately right there, here's how you do it. It is. And it's not lofty usually. I think that's why people don't like it. It's real simple. Sometimes people just need like warmer clothes.

Right, but then the trick is if we are continually bailing out our neighbors out of floods and hailstorms and all these things that seem unprecedented, is there a point at which we say, hey, there's been a lot more of this stuff lately, might we need to look at something? Hey, cross that bridge when we come to it. And no one wants to hear that.

I mean, I remember hearing Ram Dass talking about like, the story of when he met the person who brought him to Neem Kurali Baba, he's walking through India with this dude who kind of looks like Jesus. And Rondas is spinning his stories, you know, all this fancy stuff to this guy. And the guy would say to him, can't, you know, just be here right now. Don't worry about those stories. Or he'd be like, my feet hurt.

Let's just stay here with, you know, constantly drawing him back into this moment, which destroyed the game, the temporal game of like, this is who I am, this is who you are, here are my stories. It destroys it, and it puts you in a fantastically frustrating situation, which is, yeah, these questions will emerge. Okay, fine. How many fucking floods do you want to clean up? Is this where we're gonna get our spiritual teaching is just by fucking like just with this

Catastrophe is that we're at right now. We must regulate we must impose we must intervene We must and it's like what happens if we just for a second Stop all that bullshit because, and then if we do, we will be in such a better position to do whatever the thing we need to do collectively. Yeah. And, you know, and people don't realize that there is huge system-wide impacts of small things.

If we're all engaging with each other more compassionately, then we need to buy less stuff, so we need less ships coming from China, we need less kids going into the rare earth metal slaves to get us more air pods. All of a sudden you're having huge, you're reducing your impact on so much. If you don't need to drive to work because you're helping your neighbor instead, you created a local economy, then you're polluting less and getting less lithium out of the ground. It's like, it's not rocket science. That's what no one likes about it.

We all want to be fucking rocket scientists. We all want to scale. We all want to scale. How does my thing, it doesn't. What if it doesn't? What if you only just helped a hundred people? A hundred people in their lives. My God.

You know, the school teacher, the good school teacher who teaches for 20 years has 30 kids, has changed the lives of 600 human beings. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. And you know, and the other thing is this messianic fucking egregore that is inside all of this and I never connected to scaling but it's clearly that's what's happened It really leaves out All of the things that led to the past world changers like, you know, we all know Martin Luther King is What about like no one's ever gonna

hear about his neighbor who said something incredible to him that set him on his path. No one's ever gonna hear about Buddha's great-grandmother. No one's ever gonna hear about, like, probably someone like Jesus was, like, Jesus was fixing their cabinet, assuming he's a carpenter. Right, or whatever Essene whispered something into Jesus' ears when he's out in the desert. Those people get no credit. Everybody wants to be the Jesus. Everybody wants to be the Buddha.

And that can't work. How does that work? You can't have a planet of Jesuses. You need not just for Jesus to work, you need a Judas. And for all we know, Jesus wasn't actually the Jesus, and Buddha may not have been the Buddha. You know, it could have been the friggin' Vimalakirti over on the left, you know? Who the fuck knows?

Who knows? It doesn't matter, because that's in the past. And now here we are. And that's it. This is it. This is, as far as we're aware, the very, you want to talk about high tech, doesn't get higher tech than right now. This is it. We are at the crest of the wave of time space, at least where we're stuck in it. And what else do you need? It's like, you know, I like,

God, I just discovered something about my, you know, about my daughter, which is so cool. She loves surfing videos. I just accidentally landed on a surfing video and she is just like, so cute. She's like, wow. And I'm thinking like, oh my God, like if this is blowing my mind watching some dude gracefully like navigating a massive terrifying wave

that would definitely drown me, What's it like for a One year old like what the fuck is happening here this like dude. It's crazy and like but I'm watching the surfer I'm Seeing someone fully in the moment right because they have to be that surfer. I'm pretty sure isn't planning to be. That surfer, I'm pretty sure, isn't planning anything. No, and they're not, you know, that's a great metaphor because like the way the digital person or the scientist understands the ocean is as the series of latitude and longitude lines, right? They put a grid on top of it. You're right here at that intersection. And I don't like the word intersectionality for that very reason. It's a Cartesian coordinate grid that you put on your race, your identity, your this,

but the cartographer puts the grid. The surfer doesn't care about the grid. The surfer's in the actual ocean of the waves. That's it. That's it. Those waves don't see that grid. No, no. And for sure they'd fucking wipe out if they were like putting grids, if they had some AR headset on that was like mapping like heat signatures and like where the crest of the wave,

I don't know surfer terms, but to me this is like, this is what it seems to boil down to, is like we are all, yeah. That's what we used to say about the net, we used to call it surfing the net, cause that's the metaphor, that was the way we understood. That's what we used to say about the net. We used to call it surfing the net. Because that's the metaphor. That was the way we understood. That's it. And within like your waves are always the same and always different. They have

characteristics that are always going to be the same or it wouldn't be a fucking wave. But they're always going to require some different thing between waves. And if we are trying to surf on fucking waves that aren't even waves, they've been invented for us by the goddamn algorithm telling us this is the social landscape. And the way we're trying to surf on the goddamn waves is some sort of bizarre, I don't know what you would call it,

fascist, this is how you surf. No adjustments. You must surf the way the other wave was surfed that seemed to be like the one we're in. You're fucked. That abandoning everything, really letting it all go. This is what's happening right now. And that's it.

Melting into the novelty. Melting into the novelty. Melting into the novelty. And that... So all that being said are we fucked yes and it's gonna be okay what oh yes and you know I mean I've been accused of you know playing in the orchestra on the on the deck of the Titanic. And you play, by the way, if there was some motherfucker who told those people to stop playing,

and I was on a sinking ship, I would be so pissed. Like, dude, let them play, I'm about to die. Please, I wanna hear it. And that they were able to be in touch with their own higher purpose. I was born to be a musician if the ships going down I'm gonna play to the last minute and vibrate out into into the infinity as you're not saving the Titanic Right nothing you can do. What are you gonna go bail water out of that?

I mean and and we do know I mean the civilization That we've been on the civilizational thing that we've been on since whenever it is, ancient Greece or whatever, this particular, very binary, abstracted, colonizing, nation-statey, capitalist civilization is destabilizing. Its institutions are no longer up to the challenge. On every level. Everywhere. Every industry, everything. Right. Showbiz, tech, industrialization,

it's all teetering. Right, so that may not be okay. And the collapse of these institutions, just like losing the mental institutions in the 70s, could lead to a lot of pain and suffering. So what do we do in such a time? Well, I guess whatever you're called to do, some people are gonna try to shore up these institutions,

keep them going as long as possible. I think what we do is try to reduce the pressure that we and the people in our circles put on these institutions to give them some breathing space, buy less stuff, you know, take care of your neighbors. The more old people you're taking care of in your neighborhood or in the neighboring city, the fewer, the less they need from social services, the less they need from their welfare check. How do you find old people?

They're everywhere. I mean, but seriously, though, I've always loved this thing that you've said, and I think about it all the time. But I never really act on it because it's like, I don't know what old people live in my neighborhood. Do you go to door to door? No, well, in your town, there's probably still some civic reality. There's probably a, I mean, if we're in Austin here, there's probably an Austin town hall

that has a senior center. You go there and find the seniors, you know, you go to one of their, can I volunteer to help or is bingo night at the senior center. Yeah. Then you're doing bingo night and it's like, oh, look at that woman in the walk, can't even make it to her car. Right. Do you need a ride?

Do you need a thing? What do you write? That's so so actionable. That's so actionable, but you know the problem doesn't scale I Don't want to help anybody if I don't need the whole planet to see me help an old lady That's why I hate those videos the the altruism TikToks, you know what I mean where someone's like cutting a the altruism TikToks, you know what I mean? Where someone's like cutting a person's hair on the street. And it's just like, dude, if you're gonna do this, you better film the setup. I wanna see you set up your tripod.

I wanna see you get the lighting right. I wanna see the cuts and the takes before whatever you publish. But is it better? Isn't that still good though? I mean, is the idea just, just help? I don't care. I think you help however you, however you can.

It just, it, and the, the help helps and the, the, the spirit of compassion that's engendered by that activity changes everything. Even if you've got kids, oh, what's that? Oh, daddy, oh, it's Sunday. Daddy's going to be doing that thing he does. What's that, helping people? What is that? Douglas, I'm gonna leave, I'm gonna end this conversation on a very unfair question. And we will cut it if you want me to because it's truly not fair.

I think you're brilliant. I think you're maybe one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. And my brain, my rainbow wheel is spinning because when I ask like, are we fucked? I don't just mean like the obvious like global conflicts. I don't mean that. I'm saying like right now in the United States, over half of the country feels like the, you know, it's the beginning of the world. And a little less than half the country thinks it's the beginning of the world and a little less than half the country thinks is the end of the world and

So a little less than half the country has gone into like defensive mode. You've got people talking about like Poisoning their husbands. What's that shit called Aqua something? It's like a whole movement. You've got like a lot of like, you know fear leads to anger and You got you got a little less than half the country whether or not politically you believe this or not They're scared as fuck You've got a little less than half the country who are either completely confused and also a lot of them are humiliated They feel humiliated they feel manipulated or they just feel manipulated. Or they just feel outraged. And they also feel despair. Because they're like, what the fuck?

Over half the country is for a monster. And then you have over half the country looking at the despair part of the country being like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Everything's going to be fine. Stop. Just stop. And everyone's dealing with it in a different way. But when I see that, when my rainbow wheel starts spinning, and maybe it's because I'm an idiot, but I think there's got to be some way right now to articulate a story that both sides would hear that would lead to a cooling down, some kind of potential glue, something to, I don't know, throw cold water in the face of everybody to get us back

to that novelty, to the uncontrollable awe, the reality that connects all of us. Douglas Rushkoff, what is that? How do you do that? What is the way to express in the midst of such absolute political chaos and upheaval and terror something that will make people reunite? On election day it is written, on inauguration day it is sealed. Who will lead and who will be led? And the only way, the only way we can impact this at all is through compassion and mutual aid

and soulful togetherness. And we can lessen the decree of whatever has been cast. Thank you! Dude. You're the best. You're the best. And how are people going to find you? Oh, they're going to walk the streets until they see me.

They can go to my podcast. How about that? Teamhuman.fm. Yeah, just Rushkoff. Remember Rushkoff. R-U-S-H-K-O-F-F. Type that into a browser. I got this re-release of my book programmer be programmed It's very very short written for you know high school level people so we can all read it

Or go to team human.fm or go to Rushkoff.com come to New York. I'm there cool. I'll see you soon I can't wait. I gotta make it back out to New York. You're the best. Thank you so much. Love you. Love you Thank you so much. Love you. Love you. Bye! That was awesome! That was Douglas Rushkoff, everybody. Don't forget to order his book,

program or be programmed, 11 Commands for the AI Future, subscribe to his podcast, Team Human, and thank you all so much for watching or listening. I love you. I'll see you next week.