Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 739: When Creepy Grandpas Rule The World

Episode Date: February 22, 2026

Douglas Rushkoff, mind-blowing author and dear friend of the show, re-joins the DTFH!Listen to Doug's podcast, Team Human! Available wherever you like to listen.Indiana family! Duncan is coming to Summit City Comedy Club in Fort Wayne, February 26-28. Click here to come see him on the road! Thank you, and we love you!!This episode is brought to you by: Get 10% off your first month of BlueChew Gold with code DUNCAN. Visit BlueChew.com for more details and important safety information, and we thank BlueChew for sponsoring the podcast. Go to Quince.com/Duncan for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns! Give yourself the gift of a healthier unwind. Right now, Soul is offering my audience 30% off your entire order! Go to GetSoul.com and use the code DUNCAN.

Hello, my dearest loves. It's me, Duncan, and you are watching the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast or listening to it to my sweet listening audience. I welcome you here today. Before we get going with this premiere podcast, I feel like I have to mention a few things. Number one, paternity leave is over for old Papa here, and I'm headed back out on the road. This weekend, it's going to be in Naples, Florida at the Opthoc Comedy Club. The next weekend, you can find me in Fort Wayne, Indiana. at the Summit City Comedy Club. And then right after that, I'm headed to the Pittsburgh Improv. And then, March 26th, the Comedy Works.

One of my favorite clubs on the planet. I hope you'll come see me. All my dates, you can find them at Dunkettrussle.com or just go to the website of any of the clubs I just mentioned. I've got dates all the way through the summer and the fall. See where I'm going. And I will be with you soon. resting my head in your lap after the show, weeping into your lap. So come. Also, I've been doing a new

experiment that I would like you to participate in. If you subscribe to the DTFH, obviously you're going to get updates about when we release a new episode, but I've sort of moved my solo episodes to the night. And you can find them on my night stream. It's my, it's the new solo stream of the DTFH. Usually I'm doing them around seven or eight o'clock. All you got to do is subscribe to YouTube and you'll get updates about when they're happening and they've been super fun. I hope you would join us for a night stream. For those of you who've been there, boom. Yeah. All right, We have got an incredible episode for you today. Whenever this old man's brain gets a little confused,

whenever this old man's brain feels a little overwhelmed by things happening in the world, I always reach out to my dear friend Doug Rushkoff. He's got an awesome podcast, Team Human. He's written so many incredible mind-blowing books. He has been plugged in to what's happening in culture and technology, in such a deep and brilliant and philosophical way that he always can shed light on things that... I mean, generally, the things that are having light shed on them now

are the same things that, like, burst into flames when light gets shed on them. What I'm talking about is the sum total of all the bizarre disclosures, the Epstein files, the various leaks and hacks that all seem to be happening at the very same. time how do we react to this is the culture rush cough has one of the most brilliant takes on what's going down right now that i've ever heard so tune in get ready strap in strap on wet your entire body and please welcome back to the d t f h Doug rush cough

Doug great to see you man how you doing I'm doing it's it's it's life right now I'll tell you I have, there are so many things happening right now that I am just, I really need you to help guide me through some of the quandaries I have related to what's going on right now. It seems like we have, I would say, like, three, four major world things happening right now. I'm going to go through them, you pick whichever one you want to start with. There are none of them. if you don't want to. We've got the Epstein files percolating through the internet. We've got potential war with Iran, which somehow seems to be on a lower tier as far as like focus goes, which is wild.

Then we've got the recent release of these like incredible AIs that are now semi-autonomous and can just code in your terminal window without you doing anything. And which also, um, chat GPT said the most recent iteration, it self-improved. It's the first time an AI improved itself. Uh,

and going along with that release, we have resignations from the safety, from engineers in charge of safety and AI companies, leaving cryptic tweets and shit that are quite ominous and unnerving to say the least. And what am I missing? We got Wother and then Samantha Guthrie. Those are the main ones right now.

It's just interesting, the ones people are focusing on. But yeah, that's what I'm working with. I don't know. I look at, I'm looking at this. And also because in a fractal way, I'm dealing with this personally, I'm looking at this from the perspective of fatherhood. Okay. You know, so we got in America,

we're looking at the end of kind of this fatherhood authoritarian stretch. Okay. That kind of colonial American thing. Gotcha. You know, so there's that one. There's, there, you look at, at AI is about how are we parenting this new form, this new child, right? Okay. And the second one, what was your second one?

Oh, and Iran, Iran is the other kind of paternalism, you know, is this, is this, you know, other extreme, you know, male-dominated Ayatollah thing that's coming to an end. So I feel like we're, we're, this sort of era of fatherhood, of, of kind of male archetype trying to drive the friggin car. I mean, is kind of ending. You know, in the healthiest among us, I think the healthiest among us, males who are driving, are kind of like, honey, you drive. Right. It's like, I'm going off the cliff, you drive,

which isn't necessarily the healthiest end response either, but for a lot of us, for a lot of us, and I mean, collectively as well, it's like, how are we going to hang on to this thing? You know, and the whole tech pro thing is also like, oh, well, you know, so daddy gets to take the ultimate vacation to the next planet, you know, and leave humanity behind or whatever. But it feels, it feels a little bit like the, the, the uncomfortable end of a certain sort of well-meaning, in some cases, version of paternalism. Again, even the Epstein thing that we're talking about is what is goes back to the Bible. It's the the fear and temptation that patriarchs had to fuck their own daughters.

I mean, that happens in the Bible. Lot has sex with his daughter. They get him drunk. It's a thing, but it's still Epstein Island biblical times, right? It's like it was still, it was still rape up. And again, it's like that it is a daddy. call me daddy thing that that it's like how do we uh and i'm not i'm not sort of through figuring it out but how do we you know evolve and kind of parent ourselves and become genuine adults here

rather than these kind of baby daddies uh that we are now right well that's scary i mean you know anybody who had to back up what you're saying anybody who's had an aging parent knows the first moment where you realize, wait a minute, I don't think they're quite all there right now. Like, I'm not sure there. This is a person who, you know, you had to obey. This is the person who taught you how to walk and talk. And suddenly the machine's breaking down a little bit. And you don't want to admit it.

So you can go, you can go, you know, a few years kind of acting like, ah, you know, it's just, they're probably tired or something. And then at some point, you do get to the place you're talking about, which is a seminal moment in an adult's life is when they have to tell their parent, no, you're not driving. Not because they're drunk, but because they're too old and they can't drive. And I've seen it happen. And it is a dramatic moment. I saw it at a party, a group of people standing around their elderly patriarch. some of them crying because he wanted to fucking drive and it's like no you you you could just look at him like that guy should not be on the road and yeah and so for for you are so right to draw parallel between

the national experience for the last two presidencies and that experience that any adult has which is wait a minute I don't think you should be driving the car you aren't making sense except in this case, the car has nuclear missiles attached to it. So it's a little different in the sense of, you know, if grandpa or pop-op drives the car and rear in somebody, that's going to suck. Yeah, well, he could still run over a line of kindergarten kids walking across the street. He can't drive that. It's not just, he doesn't have that aim. But, but, but, but, but it's interesting. When you talk, when you talk, what you talk about it that way, I feel like it's like, it's like in the 19. 16s, we kind of had that adolescent moment, that 13, 14, 15 year old where we were like,

oh, mom and dad aren't perfect. But now, you know, and then we went through our 20s or so and sort of tried to experience independence. But now we're kind of in our 30s, 40s, 50s where it's like, oh, mom and dad are not really competent. Daddy's not, you know, that it's interesting. There is that moment. That is that moment.

And let me add to it. We've all seen it happen. the billionaire elderly person gets a hot, super hot, super young girlfriend that is obviously in it for the inheritance, in it for the money, in it for the power. And generally when it's like the age disparity is that massive, it's less judged. It's like, yeah, I mean, shit, it's a pretty interesting business model. But in this case, in the daughtering elderly patriarchs leading the plan. leading the country, it's not some like blonde bombshell with, you know, fake tits, sucking their dick every once in a while to get watches.

It's lobbyists. I'm sorry, it's oligarchs. You have sidled up to this elderly. Yeah. And the, our participation in it doesn't have the qualities of consent. You know what I mean? If a 20-something model. wants to go out with a 90-something media baron,

it's like, you know, you're making your choice. I get it. You're going to put in the 10 years, get $100 million and still be 35 and hot and get your real husband then. Yeah. That's all. It's your choice. Yes.

You know, we as a society right now, I don't feel like we are, we are experiencing consent for our submission to this, you know, aged oligarchy. And I think that's part of why the Epstein story is so profound because we're looking and saying, wow, you know, this whole society, the power structures in the society that we're living in weren't really based in consent either. This is how sort of capitalism and European colonial, this is how they work. They would go to a place. Native Americans didn't consent, right? Africans didn't consent. Right.

And now it's like, oh, so the society, the culture, the sexuality, the fetishes that were built on top of this kind of civilization didn't involve consent. And the part I think that's so strange for many of us is, like the worst I could imagine things getting in this kind of society was kind of Bill Clinton-era stuff, where it's like, I'm going to use my power and charisma and charm to, convince young women to give themselves to me. You know, when you see the Epstein thing, it's like, oh, man, this isn't that. This is so many notches worse. No, no, it's like, yeah. It's, and, you know, also, when the Clinton stuff, who knows what other stuff, we didn't hear about with.

I don't know. Right. We didn't. But the kind of stuff that we were so upset about, and I still am, is like using a, using a framework of power to not to get to total like Harvey Weinstein me tooness but to leverage your power like professors fucking their students and things like that that are that are people say there's consent but it's like dude look at this dynamic it's very different from and this is the thing I've been interested in sort of the the permission structure right that allowed for that kind of rape to happen and I was I was I experienced the edges of that. What do you mean? And I had a, and I don't want to talk about names, because it makes things too searchable. But my literary agent back in the early 90s, when I was a just baby up-and-coming cyber writer, was inviting me to these kind of parties of scientists and cocktail

parties of the sort of the elite scientists. And I remember just initially just having, I wrote about it in survival of the richest, the experience of their atheism was so profound and so haughty and so patronizing. I would talk about human soul and attention and what, and they'd be like, oh, there's nothing, you're crazy, you're a moralist, you're nobody. And then of course, 10, 15 years later, I see those same scientists on the Lolita Express

going out to TED as funded Epstein scientists. And I realized, oh, well, of course, if Epstein is gonna do what he's doing to these people, He's got to believe that there's nobody home, that there's no soul, that there's nothing, that women are just vegetables. So there was that. But also, I was invited to these, I got, I can talk about it. We're among friends here.

Yeah. Got invited to this cocktail party, an expensive dinner thing with all the scientists people. And there are going to be a lot of the like the owners of the early.com super companies, like AOL and those sort of things. The first dot-com billionaires kind of people. And the guy said, you can come. And, you know, because you're kind of cool in East Village, whatever, you can come plus one. Stop audio. This episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by Blue Chew.

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And we thank Bluechoo for sponsoring the podcast. So anyway, so I got invited to this dinner party of like famous scientists and the owners of some of the early technology companies, really high status. And the guy said, you know, okay, you can come plus one, right? You can come plus one, but don't waste it. You know, because these are really super people. And I was like, oh my God, don't waste it, don't waste it. So I invited the smartest woman I know.

She was head of one of the early literary websites. There were only like 50 websites out there. You're super genius Brooklyn, you know, knock. And I bring her there. I get there. And as soon as we get in, the guy, the host, grabs my wrist, pulls me aside. And he says, how dare you waste your plus one on a lesbian? Oh my God.

And I was like, what? And he goes, I invited you're young. You're the cool. I invited you plus one so you could raise the quotient in the room. And he's like, look. And then around the room were like a lot of guys with young, you know, arm candy women. And I find that later, like 20 years later, I realized that was one of the dinners funded by Jeffrey Epstein. Holy shit.

Right. The scientist dinners that he would fund in New York, you know, to have not with these scientists and bring in, you know, because he was also interested in life extension and all that kind of stuff and eugenics. But he was apparently smart, but he liked talking to scientists about these ideas to help kind of justify his, his own version of, you know, transhumanism and spread my genes as far as they can go. He was, you know. So he was probably at this party. He was probably at the party. But I was so punk and Gen X that I didn't want to sit at any of the tables with the billionaires. It's like, fuck all y'all.

I don't need to meet the head of AOL. Wow. Wow. And so they were mad because, like, Epstein's looking around. There's all these young dates that potentially he could poach. And then there you are. How dare you a Brooklyn lesbian, completely inaccessible to the other side of these parties? No. Oh, my God.

Because it was a marketplace. And it's like, oh, I get it. I'm invited partly because I can hold a conversation. I can keep up because I was like a new internet-e, whatever, like the kid at the table. But mainly because he figured it's a down, he didn't know me. He figured it as a downtown, you know, someone who lives on heaven you be. I would know, you know, whatever they were, hot gen X's. Holy shit.

That is so sinister. But anyway. So, yeah, it is sinister. It is sinister. But it's the, it's the, I could see it because that night, I mean, I went home, I mean, I was 28, 29, something, and I was still young and stupid enough to be thinking, what's wrong with me, right? That maybe he's right, that I should have used this for that and look at these asshole guys. This is why I didn't get laid in high school. The girls I hung out with and talked to and who confided in me, they'd always go out with the assholes, right? And they felt like not with, not with me.

And so there was a time, a good hour or two anyway, where I was like, am I going about this wrong? Am I not being masculine? And then I'm going to like, no, they're not, that's not masculinity. That's something else, right? That masculinity is a confidence to sure to hang out with your lesbians, with your guys, with your whoever, to not feel like you have to somehow leverage every, social advantage you have to the procurement of what high market value 20 something no hotness you didn't accessorize appropriately they it was it I guess right from that perspective it was a kind of like costume party but in this case it wasn't like dressed like your

favorite superhero it's like bring a meat accessory with you and work you know because you know you go to a costume party some motherfucker is invested to a thousand dollars in some insane costume. You threw on some shit you got at the Halloween store. And an inevitable hierarchy emerges based on costuming. In this case, they wanted you to dehumanize another person, right? That's the idea. And that runs through the Epstein files.

Right. These, they don't look, they don't look at the people that they're manipulating, exploiting, abusing, fucking trafficking as human. They see them as some kind of like Android flesh thing that is basically there for them to do whatever the fuck they want to. And so yeah, that's what you experienced, man. And it was a test. And it was a test. And by, and by it was a test.

It was a test from, from not from them. It was a test from a higher power, you know, and a great, a great learning lesson for it for me in that. and ultimately a confidence builder. But what it did, the reason why it's a threat to them in that world is because it kind of violates the permission structure that they've created. They have a permission structure where you're allowed to do whatever you want to one of these girls. You're allowed to live this way.

You're allowed to think about women that way. So if you're not, you know, it's like you're being a spoil sport to the game that you're supposed to be playing there. Well, yeah, you, and you could potentially create a crack in the windshield of the POV you have to maintain to be able to execute some of the shit that is being executed in those emails and files. Like, you know, the moment you let any sense of like, are we monsters? Is this? Are we maybe the worst people that ever lived? Like, we're really seemingly hurting people and lying to them.

Maybe we're bad. The moment someone comes in with any kind of just normal conscious, the whole game is at risk. It could spread like wildfire. Then there's going to be a rest. Someone's going to snitch. And you just saw, you just saw, because you fucked up from their perspective, because you didn't pass the first test, you just saw the very driveway of whatever this gated, horror pleasure dome is right i know like tom cruise in the in the uh eyes wide shot i only got to that first gate yeah didn't get into the party i mean thank god i didn't go to the freaking party

uh because who knew you know you'd get on an airplane oh we're going to go see a bunch of scientists on an island and talk about evolution you know who know i would have hopped on a plane to go with a bunch of scientists to talk about evolution of course you would have i mean that is and you know you know know that's the sort of like discernment i i think some this this is going to i feel like before like just because someone's in those fucking files like stephen hawking for example i don't know what he was doing over there but my guess would be i mean i just think back when i was a young comic if epstein had been in the fucking audience and had been like why don't you guys come do a show on my island i wouldn't of I would have like probably in most comics I know 10 grand a pop 10 grand business class air

or private jet to go to that you wouldn't know you wouldn't know until hopefully what we have and this is what we're supposed to have is like agents and managers and others to look at things and always be like oh duncan you know that might not be the island to go to don't go to the island or or they're like hey off I'll see you on the island. It just so happens I'm booked there that very same week. I mean, this,

because this is, to get back to your original brilliant analogy there, the, what we're looking at is archetypical. And I think that's where a lot of people can take comfort. Because like it would be easy to see what's happening and feel like you don't have anything to compare it to. Or what,

what handle linguistic handles can I use to break down? what's happening. And I think what we're witnessing is what you're saying, elderly patriarch, losing control, family in this ridiculous position of having to safely withdraw power from this person who used to be the most powerful thing in their minds. But then you have to add to it. But also you're finding out that not only should the grandfather not be driving the car, the grandfather has been fucking your sister for the last five years or something you know what I mean like you you have to add the other side to it which is that what's emerging with the Epstein thing is identical from what I've seen in families where there's abuse which is yeah the victim is quite

often maligned called a liar called you know overreactive or you know basic it's like you're you know you're going to wreck our entire family if you if you say anything about what your grandfather did to you you know that right like you're going to realize our family's reputation you're going to destroy relationships will never and it's true it's true and i think it was pam bondie or one of these people said it out loud if we release everything you know basically it will destabilize the united states it's a security threat because of what it will do if all these names come out it'll fuck up the economy It'll fuck everything up.

It is the nationalist version of, listen, your grandfather, he's a complex man, and he regrets what he did. And he's not doing it anymore. So don't you talk about this to anybody ever. It'll destroy our family and our inheritance. You know what I mean? So you have these defenders emerging who did the exact thing. fucking thing that happens in systems like that tried to lie about it tried to uh shame the victims the whole thing is identical but it's yeah and it's it's it's also metaphoric or analogous

to the american project as well it's like america's this great place and we came here but yes we did a genocide of the natives who were here yes we used all these enslaved people to build it. Yeah. And it's like, but you know, we it's really hard. I mean, that's the thing. And I get it, you know, and, and, you know, wokeness may have attempted to reckon with that karma in a primitive, childlike way that left no room for reconciliation. That was just, you know, shame and and casting out rather than casting in

and actually having the conversation. You know, and then while we're having, while we're dealing with that, and in some ways as a country, we kind of pushed back against that, we look on the other side and say, oh, no, but these guys were actually doing way worse things. Now! That, now!

This is now! Oh, my God. We were freaking out about what's his face, you know, going on the woman's tinnies on the plane, Al Franken, you know, it's like stuff like that or, you know, Louis C.K. jerking off in front of people, you know, and it's like, that was like, these were the crimes. Not that they're not awful in their own ways, but it was like, and it's like, okay, we can't just, we can't kick these people out of reality for the rest of their lives for those things.

And we kind of overpushed then against that. And it's like, okay, now we can't have any class with the word feminism. any university in the United States for it to keep its funding. It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait. And then we look on this side and it's like, oh, my God, these guys did such worse stuff than we were even upset about before. And then you think, which is also dark is, you know, and I was friends with Genesis Peorridge, who was this musician who inspired a lot of industrial people. Yeah, and Trent Reznor and all. And Genesis always used to say, oh, you know, the kings and queens and parliament in England, they've always maintained these, you know, population of children that they do,

you know, sex rituals, too, this horrible stuff. And I was like never, I like wink, wink, yeah, yeah, kind of, maybe like Tower of London, Queen Victoria, Jack the Ripper era, you know. And then like scandals came out in the 70s and 80s and it was like, oh, kind of true. And it was. And that's almost, you know, like the Catholic Church sort of. of stuff, but worse in some ways. And then this, and I start to think, geez, this has been a continuous thing.

This is not like some weird, you know, 1980s, 90s, aberration. That was just, you know, some Galane Maxwell Mossade, Jeffrey Epstein, Honeypot, trap anomaly. This is the continuity of what people do when they get in extreme power. And of course, in a world where now the disparity of wealth, where there's fewer people that own more stuff than ever before, right? When the fewer richer people own more, human beings, regular people, the 99% own less than they ever have before in America. It's that extreme that, of course, that same sort of abuse is going to get more extreme. It's going to come to a head. Well, I mean, this is, so this, this place that you're pointing to is, I guess you could call it a kind of like cultural Niburu.

The Sumerian planet that supposedly exists out there and has a weird orbit. But whenever it gets close enough to the planet, it fuck shit up because of the gravity of the thing. This is a, you know, and, you know, astronomers and stuff have seen things out there that it seems like there's some massive object that could be. be out. Maybe that's what they were talking about. Maybe it's myth. But the Nuburu in this case is the story Genesis Peorich told you. That's the invisible doom planet. And we've heard it before. We've seen it in all kinds of depictions from Rosemary's baby to eyes wide shut. There's some sort of not just depraved cobble of sex maniacs out there, but it's ritual. It's intentional.

It has history that is not broken. It's not like every, when there's just power disparity, suddenly people start raping children. It's that no, no, no. That is the way it has been and is. Right. And if it is, then you start to wonder. And in the place where, and I haven't decided yet, that is there even? as a thing and by ignoring the existence of evil do we let it manifest and grow in other

words me being sort of hippie person to think the only energy is light the only thing is love and evil is just the absence of love a place that love hasn't reached and filled and warmth sort of like like heat and cold there's no such thing as cold there's only lack of heat in physics maybe you know that that good and evil are like that or you know uh which which way is it so are these guys is this stuff evil like evil evil evil or is it a permission structure that slowly like Hannah Arette the one who wrote about the banality of evil wrote about this after world war two I was just following orders and everyone else was doing it and it kind of seemed that you just slowly go down that slippery slope which is why that that that Epstein funded party I

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And then, you know, oh, so but, but is this okay? And it's like, well, there's the Prince of England, right? There's a president of this. There's no job, no Jopsky. Right. It's like, they're all saying, right? And he's like my, he's like my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my name of life. It's like, you know, it's like, it's, it's like, it. It's like, the, the age of consent in Japan was only 13 years old until a couple of years ago. This is, this is, this is, this is. This is. the way societies have always been. If anything, the anomaly is America and this Puritanism that you have to be 17, 18 years old. She's getting something from you. You're getting something from her. You're always going to make sure you're going to get her to college and a good job. This is ancient Greeks and ancient Romans. And you're on ecstasy. And you're on ecstasy. Or you're drunk. Or you want to get the job or you just got $100,000 funding for your scientific project. And it's like, geez. And so, Is it that?

Maybe these guys just incrementally fall into this thing, like, you know, because of the permission structure around it. Now, Hannah Arendt says we have to think of it that way, because otherwise, you know, if we so look at these guys as alien from us, then we're in danger of falling into the same thing. Rather, we have to realize we are all potentially sinners. You know, we all have that gene, that tendency. And we do have to be, you know, not on guard for doing evil, but listening to that,

and that's the thing. Going back to that night, I got in that room, the guy grabs my wrist and says, how dare you bring a lesbian as you're plus one? Something in my solar plexus really did. say, this is wrong. This is this is fucked up. You know that right. This is off the same way. And when I was like 14 years old in a play, the adult director of the play kind of grabbed me in a way that I knew was wrong. And I got that feeling like, oh, this is right. Oh, bad thing happening here. You know, that just the beginning of being kind of molested, that same feeling came up when I was in

that room. And we got to trust that thing. The temptation. in that moment is to suppress it and go, yeah, but I'm going to get money. I'm going to get this. I'm going to do the thing. I'm going to perform on the island, whatever. I just do whatever I have to do to get to the next place in my career or with this woman or with money. And it's that moment. And we all get those moments in our lives that we got to listen to it.

It's hard when you're backed into a corner or where there's a big temptation. Yeah. But you kind of have to. Okay. So again, what you can, you know, what's, I think the moment you just draw the connection between, I mean, what you just described, that feeling when an adult is trying to fuck you is, you know, sadly, I think a lot of us have had that feeling as children or something adjacent to it. Yeah. You got to, if you can remember that feeling, um, some people don't remember that feeling as being entirely unpleasant because what's going a lot of, with it is you're special. I think you're, you know, you might be young, but you, I think you're so smart that you're like, you're old enough to understand some things that kids your age can't.

So right there, you have, why do you pick me? Yeah. Why did the, why did the, why did the Illuminati pick me? You know, you, right there, you have the identical structure, the perfect structure, the, the pattern of abuse is weirdly equivalent. to the way people get drawn in and initiated into all kinds of nefarious sociopathic systems. It's whatever the system may be might be. Right. You know, it might be start up, startup culture for that matter. Oh, I did my pitch for Y Combinator and they picked me.

I got $50 million valuation. Why me? I don't know, but it's me. Therefore, I must be great, right? The question is, are you cool, man? You're not a cop, are you? And like, so depending on what system you're entering, the way of verifying that indeed you are not a cop and you are cool is usually by in front of the people you're wishing to be included by breaking some law, doing something that makes you bound to them by the fact that they've all witnessed some variety of crime, whether it's taking a hit of acid, whether it's like, you know, in some gangs. you've got to do a crime like you have to beat somebody down or rob a fucking store some

shit it it you know one of i i'm trying to think of a way to not connect i just will be very i had a friend you like literally went through the initiation process of getting into a clandestine gang and uh right um you know the it was fascinating to hear the steps uh the steps you're yeah like the yale secret society and stuff. You know what they do. They got to like lie in a coffin and jerk off or something. I mean, something that's that's that's sort of irretrievably embarrassing. And it's just like the compromise that Galane and Jeffrey were, we're gathering for all the guys going to that island. That's what it's for. Listen to the, the, I've been listening to the audio book that, uh, that movie,

that famous mob movie, uh, was based on a wise guy or something. It's basically this. Yeah. It's fascinating because the guy who's now in witness protection, he was born right next to a cabstand where the mafia was like one of their bases of operation. And, you know, like at first he just gets a job parking cars. But then of course that's this great Rayleigh Otto movie. Yeah, there. That's real. That's biographical. And so then, you know, you're not just parking cars anymore.

Now they give you one little cutesy little criminal thing to do. And then over time, you become like a maid man. You're literally in a crime family. And so these are the, when you look at the thing as an organism, this is the cellular wall that determines a threat from a non-threat. And that cellular wall has a mechanism of not just determining that you're not going to be a threat to the organism itself, but changing your DNA over time. slowly so that you then become part of the organism. You're absorbed into it. So what you're talking

about is absolutely correct. It's a it's a childish idea that suddenly you just become evil. It doesn't happen like that. And it's also a childish idea that you good, you evil. It's like, no, man. Like people find themselves in all kinds of predicaments and pickles and they're there, they need money and they all the, it's, it's a whole like gumbo of neuroses and it. And it's, insecurities and ambitions and pridefulness and that mixed together to make you a perfect mark to get sucked into this shit. And, but all that being said, weirdly, it's somehow, you know, it would be better to, like, shoot a stranger in the face than to abuse a child. Like, if we're looking at a hierarchy of where that you're not like you know you can listen to wise guy this guy

talks about killing countless people his friends killing countless people and you listen to that and somehow he still sounds like an affable dangerous man you know he's a mob guy yeah but if you replace those moments with hurting children you it would be unlistinable yeah exactly but that's why you know my and my my life project this whole team human thing even has been about how do we extricate ourselves from this. And I get there are, there are people, you know, who are ambitious and smarter in certain ways than I am who are looking at how do you do it legislatively, judicially, punitively, and systemically in that way. And where I'm looking at it is more, how do we do it kind of socio-emotionally ourselves, right? So some of us, 2% of us, 5% of us,

whatever can go and march and write laws and do all that. But as a society, what we've got to do is learn to operate from this other place. It's almost like we need to do a kind of a collective 12 steps, not from our addiction to alcohol or a drug, but from our addiction to this this this this this need to to somehow uh control or or silence the that inner voice that thing how do we you know how do we move through our day and it's going to be a slow meticulous process how do we move through our day and in a way that unwinds the the more exploitative dehumanized relationships. How do you un-numb?

It's tricky. How do you un-num? Right. Because it's like you, something has happened, something has happened where I guess the equivalent to emotional ozempic has been injected into people's brains, like where you, you're supposed to feel horror, where you're supposed to feel like, no, it's, it might be there, but it's, you get a sense of like, man, it feels like if I saw some of this shit 10 years ago, I'd have a more powerful

reaction than I have now. I feel like many of us have been numb down. And just because we wanted to survive. I mean, again, I don't want to keep going back to your family systems thing, but it's so brilliant. It's like in the same way that if you were born into a dysfunctional alcoholic, codependent, fucked up psycho family, dude, good luck keeping that human thing going You know, when you're watching your fucking dad hold a gun on your mind, good luck doing that when you don't know which version of the parent you're meeting that day. Is this the crazy dad or is this the nice dad or is this the drunk dad? So you numb it down. Now, if this exact thing is mirroring in some kind of weird Jungian, the projected shadow of millions of dysfunctional families ripped apart,

by PTSD from multiple fucking wars the United States has been in and now that dark shadow is being projected into the political class if that's fucking happening of course you're numb down right now

of course you're not feeling it anymore of course when you hear warships have moved towards Iran you're not like what the fuck no no more fucking stupid wars in the Middle East of course you're just like I guess I'll go get a coffee.

You know what I mean? And that is the national, that is this callous that has grown on many of us. It feels impenetrable, you know, and anyone out there is, you know, survive some fucked up childhood. You know what I'm talking about. It's not like you can just be like, I want to feel again. And then suddenly you feel. Right. It takes time and work.

Yeah. Yeah, but you do it exactly, but you do it a moment at a time, a teeny thing. It's like you're walking down the street. Do I feel safe enough now to look up from my phone and just look at other people going by? See if someone makes eye contact with me. You know, do like a 30 second practice. Yeah, that's cool. You start really, really little.

And you just start to notice, you start to notice. you start to notice things. I know it sounds pathetic. Okay, we're invading Iran and Rushkoff saying, take 30 seconds down the street. But I promise that's where it starts because you are part of the greater human organism. I'm not saying if you meditate today,

you'll save the whales 2,000 miles away. But part of that is true. If you move through the world differently, it does change the organism. It's got to start to start. somewhere because if you're doing it and then the person you you extra nice to one person for 30 seconds and then they're extra nice to another person for 30 seconds my god that moves so quickly and and trickles up up and around and you know in all different in all different places yeah yeah i know

first of all i do not think what you said sounds pathetic i think for maybe for some like i don't know i doubt for anyone listening to this you sound pathetic to me actually anyone who's done the exercise or talking about anybody who's tried to do that. It doesn't even have to, I mean, do it with like your own family. Do it with like, you know, just notice how uncomfortable you might feel doing what you just described. No, like for me, I, like, I've been noticing that, that thing where you fully open yourself up to another person you're not familiar with or somebody that, you know, you're never going to run into again probably and how it feels weird. Like it feels like writing with your left hand or something.

There's a like an initial offness to the experience, vulnerable, potentially dangerous, potentially like, you know, uncontrollable. All the things that you have adapted a skill set for to survive in a world where if you aren't being literally confronted with violence, aggression, and shittiness, you're getting it from your screens. and your brain is being. And that's the other thing. It's not to say that the things on the screen aren't happening. They are happening. They're real. But there's not necessarily a lot you could do about those things directly today.

So it's like, yes, Gaza, yes, the Kurds, yes, Uygh, yes, Epstein. And this episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Seoul. Look, you know, maybe some of you out there sleep like little babies. You just lay your head on your pillow and close your eyes and just go to sleep, a nice, dreamless sleep from which you wake up feeling refreshed and overjoyed to meet the new day. But it could be that some of you out there struggle with sleep. And if you want to add to things to worry about as you're trying to fall asleep, look up the data on the effect.

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are we going to invade friggin Iran? And what am I going to do about it? And I got friends who are on that base. Are they going to be sent over to Iran now? Like, I thought we've, this guy was the one who was not going to get us in any wars. Just wait a minute. You know, And it's like that's all real, but limit your day. You know, in the old days, we used to watch the news at 630 to 7 every night or 6 to 7, like Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather, Peter Jennings. The end of the day, it was everything there. They kind of made sense about it as much as they could.

And then you went on. And we kind of need to do that. Otherwise, if we're focusing on the figures on the screen, we are becoming less engaged with the ground on which we live. They own the figures, Paramount, Larry Ellison, you know, Trump, Elon Musk, whoever it is. They own that landscape, and it's not real. It feels so much bigger. It feels so much bigger than the real world in which we live.

But it's smaller. It's smaller. Digital will never be bigger than reality. Listen, man. It's a teeny thing. I this okay this popped into my head because I wish I could cite where I got the source of this somebody wrote this sort of brilliant paper on um my algorithmic propaganda and mind control uh how subtle it could be and so um which is fascinating just basically talking about if you wanted to control public sentiment you could do it and like tiny little drip drops of uh with an algorithm based on what you already know they're like. Now, let's add to that what Kim.com

just tweeted. I don't know if it's true or not. But apparently Palantir got hacked, right? And so Palantir, Palantir got hacked. And of course, what you would expect the hacker would find at Palantir, surveillance of all world leaders. Everything of everybody. Everybody's dick size. Everybody's, everybody's dick size. That's all that was at Palantir. That was the only information. They knew that's all they needed to control the world. I know. Stuff, though.

We don't even know about ourselves because Palantir, they know whether to measure from the top or the bottom. They got it all down. So, so, you mix that in with the other. And I think it's worth noting how all of these things are happening simultaneously. The Epstein files, all of these things that are these kinds of cultural disclosure moments for whatever reason they're happening at the same time. I guess when Doge went in to the social security department, somebody just put all, everyone's social security numbers on like a thumb drive. They took everything. They took everything. And then Larry Ellison is building, what's it called?

Stargate, Project Stargate, which is to gather all of our DNA, get DNA on everybody in the world. There you go. So from just these things that we know are now, not, I wouldn't call them publicly, accessible, but theoretically accessible by people who could figure out how to get the data. It would be so easy to connect a profile of somebody based on all this data that's been vacuumed up by all these various nefarious organizations and people and plug that in to a person's social media account and then let an AI determine algorithmically what tiny tidbits of content you might need to feed people on an individual level to shift their opinion on certain policies that you need in place. And at that point, it is, the word Orwellian gets thrown around, but this is infinitely

worse than Orwell, because in that dystopian nightmare, you know, you know you have to put yourself in a state of denial and just believe that 2 plus 2 equals 5 to survive. In this case, there's nothing to resist because it's no longer big brothers watching you. It's tiny drip drops based on BF Skinner and based on everything that's known about you and based on everything you've posted that are very, very slowly, slowly pushing you towards an epiphany. Yeah. This is what I started writing about this in 1999. Ah, it must feel good to watch it happen. In a book called coercion, where I said just that, that we're building a skinner box of behavioral control that will use sort of the feedback

loops of each thing we do, it can adjust and tune, adjust in tune. And every interaction is another training opportunity until we are that. Then what brings me to two questions, though, It's like first, in that sort of frog in the water example people use, in reality, when the water gets hot, the frog always jumps out. Is that true? It does. It actually jumps out. It doesn't boil in there. It jumps the fuck out. Yeah, duh. I mean, is there a place where we will jump out where we go, oh, you know, this killing it, raping of people and stuff is really? just not something in me right i'm getting stomach aches why am i getting stomach eggs oh because i don't like killing um it's like or or whatever that i mean we would see if that happens you know the the other

scary thing the more primitive thing they can do with these systems is they can very easily predict who's going to resist who's going to make a podcast that talks about some of these things and warns people about that And then you, the AIs can very easily just go, oh, let's give a few tax audits over there. You know, let's do a few insurance denials. You know, the easy stuff. It's like you want to keep Duncan Truzzle off the playing field for a while. Jump two or three audits on that guy. He's not going to be talking that much for the next year.

You know, it's like the systems they have are going to be, I think are going to be more penal than they are high level mind control. No, they don't need to get to the audit. I mean, they don't even need to get there. They're just like, you know what? Don't just shadow ban the. The threat of it. Shadow ban the episode.

It's enough for most people. You can just suppress. You can do like something worse than censorship. Right. You could just shadow. Yeah, they own it. I know. The censorship is great.

Getting censored puts you on the math. Fuck, yeah. Belche or somebody. Band book. Band book? I'm on a band book shelf. But yeah, in this case, yeah, just like, you know, just, you don't even have to fully mute the fucking thing. Just like give it a tepid sort of engineer response.

Throw in some, you know, bots posting shit in the comments. It's just like, yawn. And then you will just eat away at that person's psyche. Right. But that's why, right, but you don't want to be depending on the algorithms. There you go. For your news or for your career for going out. You want to try to get a, you know, when you're doing this, you get a loyal, you know, a community of people and Patreon or subsect, wherever it is, you know, your own, your own group of people that aren't being swayed by whether you're in their algorithm or not. There you go, man. And you have to, I mean, I feel like if you're making anything, anything, like, you should be, your online, anyone's online hygiene right now should be like akin to somebody working with cadavers in the 1800s.

Like, when you're going online, you need to make sure, you need to do the same thing that people who practice ceremonial magic do, basically. We need like a lesser banishing ritual of the Pentegras. for the lesser banishing ritual of the algorithm or something. We need some mechanism within which you can shield yourself and understand whether you like it or not, you are being nudged. It might not be by state entities, but for sure you're being nudged by corporations,

by lobbyists, by, you got to know that and so that any opinion you're forming based on your algorithmic feed, you need to scrutinize that. you're testing gold before you start blabbering about it because you got to watch out right now. I know. Going online in the old days was so much more like that because you had to plug in your modem and dial in and, you know, until you were on, it created this sort of ritual of immersion.

Now I'm going online and then you'd go offline. And just having that threshold was it accounted for. psychically anyway, the idea that I'm now entering a different space, but people now, they live, you know, in that perpetual online state. So it's, it's really hard to distinguish it from reality. So, I mean, look, every, it seems, I think at some point, the next time we podcast, like, nanobots are going to be flying around like us or, like, I think every time, like, is we, every time we podcast, each time shit has gotten exponentially more fucked up. And so, again, like, I think most people are even past thinking that there is, I'm not saying

that everyone's blackpilled or anything like that, but I think most of us now have gotten to the point where we do recognize. We can no longer cling to the digital reality. if we're interested in having any sense of stability or if we're interested in harmony and society. Like it's not going to, it's not doing that. So what outside of looking at people when you're walking around, what I'm really would love to hear your thoughts on these claw bots on the ability to vibe code. And within that, how there theoretically could be a potential to start building artificial intelligence bots that actually thwart the algorithm or like at least at the

very least like inseminate the online space with ideas like the ones you're proposing today like team human style ideas revolutionary decentralized ideas have you thought about that at all yeah i mean the trap i always fall into is i recognize the sort of revolutionary or pro-human potential of a new technology once it's in the people's hands. But what I sometimes fail to recognize is that the technology that's now in the people's hands is one level less deep than the one that's in the elite's hands.

So I was excited about, you know, blogging and things like that. But you know, we were blogging on platforms built by Google and this one and that one. So we're all blogging and thinking we're going to exchange our ideas in these new ways, but it basically became shouting on social media algorithms for attention. So we might have controlled the content, but they controlled the context to the point that our company, let them eat blog. So now with AI, I feel like we can use AI to vibe code and build stuff. that's looking pretty friggin powerful to me. You know, I've been playing some with Claude and building something.

And it's, you know, it's easy to be fooled and think I've done something great in the morning because it works. But then it's like, yeah, but it's actually a shitty piece of software. So there's that, you know, you've got to really iterate. You've got to work. You've got to really do it. But if you do, the ability to make a Hollywood-level animated movie, the ability to make a piece of software that can, that can undo a lot of what we're seeing out there. Like, you know, fine.

You could do different kinds of searches and things and create dashboards for activists and anarchists and everything that are quite interesting. Yet, all of the stuff that I can finally do now, now I can program in a way I couldn't before because I have AI letting me do that, but I'm not building the AI systems on which that is happening. my AI activity is still circumscribed by Sam Altman and Elon and the people and Gemini,

the people that are building those platforms. And I don't fully understand the probabilistic logics that they are using to steer all AI activity towards certain kinds. But what about Olamo? What about the LLMs that you can run on your computer that are not? Those are cool. Yeah. No, those are cool. And, you know, and there's like, there's a, who is it out in the desert?

What is it called? De High Mountain something. They're taking a Raspberry Pi computer. It's like a $9, you know, a tiny little computer and you hook it up to your local libraries database of information. And then you use a mesh network to access it and to share processing. Interesting stuff. I'm really into decentralized local AI.

But I was also into CyberCats. as a way for people to get online. You know, I was into, you know, a lot of things that that, that didn't win in the end. But yeah, I'm really into watching and seeing whether or not people are willing to play in decentralized ways with these powerful technologies, because that would change the equation, I think. I do too. Thank you so much, man. I love chatting with you. You're so brilliant.

Thank you. It's just every time we talk, it's like months and months and months of like contemplating what we talked about. You're just such a genius. Yeah. Oh, well, thanks. I think about it. I'm really, really glad we're friends too.

I mean, these are conversations like I don't have elsewhere. And I also progress. So I'm going to be thinking about this parenting thing. And what does it mean for us as people to become the parents rather than the abused children? What will that be like? Can we do that? With a nonviolent revolution. I mean, it's like, you know, how do we do that without doing the thing those rich kids did to their parents, you know?

Yeah. It's like it's raised. Stop the cycle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Hey, well, thank you so much. Team human. Okay, be good.

All the links you need to find. Yeah. Yeah. Link, go. Watch. Play. I love you. Love you.

That was Doug Rushkoff, everybody. Come see a live show, won't you? And join. one of my night streams. I'd love to see you there. Definitely subscribe to Doug's podcast, Team Human. All the links will be down below. Or if you're listening to this,

you can go to dunkett rustle.com. Just check out this episode on my web page. You guys are awesome. Hara Krishna. I love you.