Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Internet of All Kinds of Things (#018)

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

How is the internet changing our humanity, and what can we do about it? We explore these questions and more with Antonio Garcia Martinez (author of Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley) and Douglas Rushkoff (author most recently of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and host of the fantastic podcast Team Human). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, two, one. Hello and welcome to Into the Impossible, a podcast about how we imagine and how what we imagine shapes what we do. From the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. I'm Patrick Coleman, and today we're diving into the ways in which our technology is changing our humanity and what we can do about it, with Antonio Garcia Martinez and Douglas Rushkoff. Antonio is the author of Chaos Monkeys,

obscene fortune and random failure in Silicon Valley, which chronicles his turn away from a PhD in physics to Wall Street trading, a stint at the Y Combinator, and then being on the ground floor of Facebook's first advertising forays, with all the chaos along the way. Douglas is the celebrated writer of numerous books and documents, on the relationship between technology and society. Most recently throwing rocks at the Google Bus.

And he's also the host of the fantastic podcast, Team Human. Be sure to check it out. First up, our associate director Brian Keating in conversation with Antonio, followed by his interview with Douglas Rushkoff. Enjoy. And Antonio is visiting UC San Diego and the Clark Center on a combination tour and also discussion of what life is like outside of science. So before we are outside of the physical sciences where he began his career as a physics grad student at our sister campus, UC Berkeley, more than a decade ago.

But he left it and he went into a very different form of technology. And I wonder if you can give a quick description of your world line, as it were, what brought you to where you are today. Right. So Brian, as you said, I was a PhD student at Berkeley, changed thesis topics two or three times, and then made the fatal mistake of reading Michael Lewis's first book, Lyris Poker, which the same author who wrote Moneyball in the Big Short, which is very much of an insider tell all about what it was like working in finance. And, you know, he wrote it as a cautionary tale. And to me, it was sort of a siren song. And so I ended up somehow finagling a job at Goldman right at the height of the credit bubble and, you know, joined it precisely at the wrong time. and watched it blow up eventually in 2008. And it's a very common second home or, you know, home for failed scientists to sort of land on Wall Street. In fact, most of my colleagues were basically, you know, physical scientists of some sort or another who had wound up there. But I had one intuition, one of the correct calls in my career was betting that tech would sort of survive the economic disaster that was coming. And so I actually ended up joining an advertising technology startup, which might seem a little strange.

But at the end of the day, whether you're pricing credit derivatives or ad impressions, it's a question of pricing human perception, sort of at scale. And so I worked in ads technology for a while. I found in my own company, a small company that went through an incubator called the Y Combinator that's funded a number of companies. And we had basically every problem. We committed every mistake of startup could possibly commit. And then kind of randomly we were mostly because of the company's blog, actually. We're acquired by Twitter. And then a little bit of drama.

The rest of the company went to Twitter, but I actually ended up at Facebook. So I was an early employee on Facebook's ads team, which is what a lot of the book covers, actually, what I just described. So a lot of what we cover here, UC San Diego in the Clark Center is that kind of imagining what the future might be like for human beings on the planet that will hopefully endure and have arts and science but also culture. And in particular, you know, kind of besides fantasy, we also engage a lot in speculative. culture and what it might be like, you know, dystopian, utopian in the future. You've spoken a lot about the, you know, the future of tech and the limitations, both from a revenue standpoint but also from a physical limitation standpoint. I wonder if you can sort of sketch out whether or not you think the future of, say,

Facebook in particular is, are you sanguine on the future? Do you feel like there are any limitations to its cancerous-like growth? Or how do you see it proceeding in the future? Yeah, you know, it's funny. Facebook is a strange thing. I mean, it's particularly in the context of 2016 election, right? A lot of people are thinking about what Facebook's impact was in democracy. And, you know, Zuck has taken some pretty strong,

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, has taken some strong views. And it's funny, he came out with like a 6,000 word manifesto about a year ago about the potential centrality of Facebook and whatever new civil institutions kind of rise up to sort of try to patch up our democratic experience. experiment. And, you know, it's funny, he has an observation that I also kind of made. So I wrote Chaos Monkeys on a small, somewhat remote island in the Pacific Northwest called Orcas Island. And, you know, it's a very small, tight little island. And what I realized was that, you know, Facebook basically reproduced the realities of small town, small community living that humans are kind

of used to, but that due to the scale of large cities, you know, disintegration of traditional institutions like churches, unions, what have you, you know, Facebook kind of fills in the gap. But on Orcas Island, you don't need to check into the local bar because there's only one that everyone's at. If you're out, everyone is there. When you meet a friend, you've got eight common friends and you catch up on all eight of them. And that's basically you have this running news feed every time you run into somebody. And so Facebook tries to create some simulacrum of that sort of in this small little black mirror that's in your pocket. And so, you know, the future in some sense of socializing is kind of that, an ungeo-constrained social network.

I mean, if you actually look at, for example, the number of friends you interact with on most social networks, it's still kind of hues to what's called Dunbar's number, which is this observation that most humans basically can carry the state in their head for about 130 to 150 people, which is your sort of typical hunter-gatherer tribe. So even though there's whatever it is, 7 billion plus people crawling on the planet, and, you know, San Diego has however many millions of people population. At the end of the day, we really only care about 150 people. And Facebook kind of cuts down that noise to that thing. And so, yeah, I think social media is kind of the new town square. I mean, Twitter is the sort of new public agarra in a way, the new marketplace. I think it's one way of thinking about Facebook.

And of course, there's a positive spin to that. Getting back to Zuck's manifesto, in a typically ambitious way and also maybe easy to satirize way, he proposed Facebook being this new social nexus that people would organize themselves around instead of previous institutions like churches and unions and neighborhood associations and the apartment building you lived in all this stuff. And, you know, I don't have them quite as sanguine on the chances of Facebook. was filling in that gap. But, you know, Facebook, I think, announced just yesterday that they're having this sort of global leaders program. I forget the exact name. They're basically giving

money to people who run large communities on Facebook to try to make them tighter knit and create more like high-quality connections. And I think they announced their first prize winner, I think this morning, in fact. And so, you know, I think Facebook is really seriously thinking about that. I mean, I think Zuckerberg personally does actually care about it. I think the 2016 election really caught them by surprise in terms of what Facebook created there and some of the political polarization that you see in this country. No, but you were making the point in your physics colloquium yesterday that that type of political targeting wasn't, while used in a new or slightly new way, it wasn't strictly

speaking a new phenomenon that had been around for several years that at least the possibility existed, but the way it was engaged in this current campaign. But just broadly speaking, you know, so I think there is this possibility. ability of this, yeah, this device in your pocket that's around you that knows where you are and knows what you like and predict. And I want to get into your role and the uncanny ability that it has to forecast desire. But still, you know, the potential for the dystopian future I think is what concerns many of us that, you know, any entity, whether government or commercial or for profit, has this

so much knowledge, so much potential for abuse and manipulative. regulation and I worry and I, you know, be interesting to hear your thoughts from someone who's on the inside about this, you know, the potential for a, you know, perhaps only commercially driven desires that an entity like Facebook might have. And Facebook in particular, because they're just the largest by far. And if you combine them with Instagram, they're more than, you know, all the other competitors combined. But, and then also the potential for the, you know, kind of big brother type future where government

control could actually intercede using these tools to their advantage. Yeah. So on the ads targeting thing, just so, you know, my official role at Facebook was I was the first product manager for ads targeting. I was in a very early Facebook employee, but I was definitely one of the first 20 or 30 sort of, you know, employees on the product development side of the ads team. There was only six product managers of which I was one. And so, you know, in a nutshell, how does Facebook ads targeting work and how did it work?

So until about 2012, right around the IPO, which is not coincidental, by the way, Facebook's ads targeting was, Facebook was basically a walled garden. You know, any data generated on Facebook never left. If you wanted to target ads at somebody, it could only be based on Facebook data, so stuff on your profile or basically pages that you've liked. And so you could target someone who's interested in BMW and that basically boiled down to someone who liked the BMW-related page, right? That was it, which is fine. But the reality is it's not very good for a lot of what's called direct response marketing. It's like I'm actually selling a thing online or want you to go look at a video. That association that that implies is actually not very tight.

I mean the fact that you like BMW doesn't mean you're actually going to buy a BMW in the next six months, right? Because it's kind of a brand, people associated with it. It's like a public statement, but it doesn't mean I can afford a $50,000, you know, a three-series BMW. And also Facebook at the time was having some real revenue issues going into its IPO. And so they basically made a call out for like what are cool new ideas that we can do. And I had a history in a little bit of the outside data space, the retargeting. space, the shoes that follow you around the internet trick that most everyone's seen, right? And so I built the first versions of the targeting tools that basically join what was a totally

closed Facebook community to this entire outside world of data that, you know, some of your listeners might be familiar with, probably most aren't. It's funny, everyone fears Facebook, but actually Facebook is like the company you should least fear, to be honest. There's companies, well, I mean, there's companies, I mean, not, you know, these are public companies and what they do is officially public even though not what publicly well known, and again, not to disparage them at all, okay, but there's companies like Axiom, companies like Experian, which, by the way, sells you credit reports, that's the least of their business. They actually have all sorts of other data on you, Epsilon, et cetera. And these companies, a lot of them come out of the direct mail world.

And I know mail seems really, you know, musty and old and like this ancient thing, but in fact, they've been doing, you know, household level targeting for decades now. So, you know, those catalogs you get or like Bedbath and Beyond selling, tending you the 20% off coupon. on, right? And you go and use it and they actually track that purchase, right? Or if you use a Safeway discount card with your phone number, they track that to an individual ID. This is this whole outside world. Right. Right. You go in and you buy a pregnancy test. Right.

Hit nine months later, you start getting ads on the back of the receipt for diapers. Exactly. That is not accidental, right? So some, I mean, a lot of the ads are getting conspiracy theories. We can get into that if you care. A lot of our conspiracy theories, but a lot of them are just, no, in fact, they, yeah, they are kind of tracking you. And so what happened in 2012 was that, you know, me and other people built the data union kind of between the Facebook user ID, the U that's on Facebook with that entire outside world of data, when before that link just didn't exist, basically. And so we just created that.

And, you know, as you sort of hinted at, originally it was considered to be a consumer thing, you know, selling you something. But there's no reason once you've done that union and you can upload somebody's email or phone number or name, which is basically how it works, and effectively get a Facebook user ID in return. effectively, then anybody can use it, right? So there's a whole world of political data that can be used to target people, right, which evidently, if you believe reports, and I have no inside data on it, but according to credible news reports, Trump used those targeting tools extensively, right?

Not just to target people to vote, but presumably to also get them to not vote and suppress votes, which is for my, you know, purely apolitical and, you know, sociopathic ad tech, you know, marketers's point of view is kind of interesting, that you're running ads to get people to not do things, right? which is a fairly unique use case in the advertising space. You're getting them to not buy a candidate. So anyhow, yeah, I mean, that's how Facebook targeting went from, you know, a fairly crude thing that it didn't actually work very well, to actually being, you know, actually very well-targeted ads.

But, you know, it's funny that, you know, within Facebook ads was seen as a sort of necessary evil, right? Like Facebook is not a very revenue-centric company, whatever rumors you might hear about it. But, you know, users never really like ads. And ads go from either being kind of crappy, like really bad. And if you remember, Facebook ads used to be crappy, right? These sort of iPad scam offers, things that you just have no interest in. And suddenly it's like the product that you just researched literally three seconds ago, right? And so ads are either creepy or crappy or creepy.

There's no Goldilocks solution. There's nothing in between, right? It's always going to suck. But, you know, the good thing about the creepy side is that they, cost a lot more. Now, you were one of the pioneers in the creepy side. Can you explain for the listeners, many of whom, you know, will not be familiar with how it works, but they are, you know, startingly familiar with the actual end and product

of your work. So if you could explain it in layperson's terms, it would be useful. Sure. Sure. I mean, so there's various pieces of plumbing that joined together, all these outside databases with your Facebook experience. One of the ones that I built that worked for several years, and they discontinued for mostly political reasons, but it is the industry standard way, is what's called real-time programmatic

ads bidding. And what this is, by analogy, it's kind of like the computer-driven stock exchanges, if you've read, speaking of Michael Lewis, like Flashboys, in which you have high frequency trading, you have hedge funds that have computers close to an exchange that sit there and trade stocks in like microseconds, right? It's kind of the version of that for the ads world. So believe it or not, every time, almost every time you go to a website or many mobile apps and you load an experience. Literally in that instant, there are internet signals going out to hundreds of advertisers

saying, hey, so-and-so is here. Of course, they anonymize you, but functionally, it doesn't matter to you, right? This person is here. They search the databases for all the commercial data they have on you, and they have all sorts of stuff, everything you've bought online, a lot of things you've bought offline, etc.

They come up with a product they want to recommend you and add to show you a bid based on what they think are the chances of you actually buying that thing, and they submit that to the auction. And it just happens in 120 milliseconds, like instantly. That goes back to the auction, you know, the publisher or the exchange picks a winner, and then you see that ad. And that just happens hundreds of billions of times a day via that program mechanism. And then Facebook, the other system they built is called custom audiences. The details don't really matter, but functionally it's the same thing. It's not the same real-time thing. Like, it's not at the moment, but at a logical level, it's the exact same individual level targeting that happens. And so that's how this whole world is kind of glued together with these, you know, instant real-time exchanges or some version of them, basically. So there's also a great deal of sociological or psychological, I don't say manipulation, but in order to manipulate you have to understand, right?

And can you say something about, you know, Facebook's not all, you know, geeks and hoodies, programming and hacking all hours of the day, right? There are researchers that are studying social habits, sociological or reward mechanisms, feedback. Can you say some of what the experience is like? on that perspective? Well, so, yeah, I mean, one thing I feel the need, I feel obliged to clarify is, you know, it's funny, you often hear in ads, Facebook showed me an ad for, right?

And it's funny, people, part of the reason why I wrote the book is to hopefully clear up a lot of what are to me fallacies of how Facebook works. So by and large, Facebook is not showing you an ad for a thing, right? They provide the tools, the targeting tools that allow an advertiser to show it to you. I mean, Facebook is effectively the messenger boy, right? Just to be clear. But what you might be hinting at, I guess maybe is maybe less on the ad side, but getting you to use the app, like on the green.

team, right? Yeah. So inside every tech company that knows what it's doing, there's some version of a team called growth, right? And what that means, I mean, it sounds kind of fungal, and that's kind of, that's what you should be thinking. You know, it's the people who exploit

every little psychological trick to convert you into the sort of Pavlovian dog who sits there and salivates when you hear your phone buzz. I mean, that's kind of the point of what they do, and very overtly so. Like, I'm not even being hyperbolic about it. I dedicate a chapter in my book to the growth team actually because we worked a little bit with them even that that was not my area.

But, you know, they're the people who literally have like a map of the world showing, you know, Facebook's penetration or a fraction of sort of social market in every country. And they literally go country to country and just dominate it until everyone's on Facebook. That's what they do. And it's funny, at heart, they're actually the best marketers at Facebook by far. We're not on the ads team. It's the people on the growth team who actually knew how to use their, you know, Facebook as a platform to advertise itself and get you to do things. And, you know, it's, I think a lot of people are actually starting to raise objections to

this. You know, one of the early Facebook employees, Chimoth, who actually started their growth team, you know, recently went on record saying he's a little worried about how this is, you know, rewarring people's brains to get these little dopamine hits all the time and like, is that actually a normal thing to do? And so I think a lot of people actually having questions about it. I myself have a few questions about it. But, you know, nonetheless, yeah, I mean, that's, in Silicon Valley, it's not, people completely unironically refer to their growth teams. and driving growth and basically addicting everyone to their apps as if it's, you know, God's own work, basically. So, and then we've talked about how, you know, they've actually employed folks from the gaming

industry, from the, you know, slot machine industry to time the optimal amount of milliseconds that a person needs to, you know, be strung along before they get a notification before they get that beautiful little red icon indicating they have a follower or a post or something like that. And, yeah, it reminds me, yeah, we seem to be reaching a point almost where there's a backlash to the, you know, digital domain that we seem to live on and people talking about digital detoxes. I wonder, from your perspective, since you've kind of embodied that two different cultures of, you know, kind of the tech side, but also with literary, artistic side, journalist side, what advice do you have for parents like yourself or, you know, like me? For kids growing up with it. I mean, we grew up with Commodore 64s or whatever, and the experience was not altogether addictive, but, you know, had its moments, but still nothing like the 24-7 connectivity that people have.

So where do you see it going in the future if it's like this now for a one-year-old? My one-year-old can swipe left and swipe right, not on Tinder, but on other social networking sites that she falls access to. Yeah, right. I mean, I saw this viral video recently in which it was a toddler or a newborn. interacting with like a print magazine. And, you know, a magazine was like an iPad that didn't work to this kid. Right. This kid was trying to swipe to make it work and felt very disappointed and, like, threw it away.

Like, what is this garbage? The experience. The grow team would be. And so, yeah, I mean, and it's funny how quickly we go from things that seem like, you know, new shiny things to us that have more history and suddenly become the basics, right? Like, and it's funny, it makes you feel old. I have to explain to a 20-something what an answering machine was because they saw it in a movie and they didn't know what it was. I'm like, you know, back in the day, you used to just call somebody and it would just ring. And that was it.

Nobody would pick up. And if they didn't pick up, you just didn't talk to them. That's how it works. It's a real tape. So, yeah, I mean, I think it is kind of, I have kids, younger kids now. And I don't know if we have 100% no screen rule because they see me using the laptop and they get kind of sucked into it a little bit. But yeah, definitely I, there's no intent, you know, there's certainly no drive to get them to use these things very often. I mean, you know, it's funny.

on the one hand I work in the media world and obviously I use Facebook a lot but more than I should probably I don't actually consume that much media I mean I was raised my mother was a librarian I was raised in a library I was a book geek basically and yeah we had a computer in the home

but I wasn't super computer geeky sort of kid and I'm still kind of a bit of a Luddite that way there's a saying in the wire or whatever the best dealers don't use right so like I'm a guy sort of dealing ads and selling Facebook but then like half the time Like people drop pop cultural references and I don't know what they're talking about because I don't actually watch stuff on Netflix.

You were mentioning yesterday, you know, that this. So Arthur C. Clark or patron, you know, saint of the Clark Center said that any sufficiently advanced technology is basically indistinguishable from magic. And we're getting to that point, you know, where you've got literally wireless communication, instantaneous information, all the information in human knowledge being regenerated, reprocessed. I mean, billions of hours of elapsed human. lifetime every year being uploaded to YouTube alone. Where do you see this going? You spoke yesterday of this kind of analogy that you liked from the gods must be crazy, and I wonder if you can repeat that. Well, so the gods must be crazy was in the context of Facebook trying to provide internet to more and more people in the world. So the short story is that Facebook is running out

of people on the internet. There's something like three and a half billion people on the internet. A lot of them are in China. So Facebook has basically converted to everybody in the sort of free free-ish world to be a Facebook user. And so they actually, people don't realize, Facebook has an Air Force. They've actually bought an aircraft company that's going to fly solar-paneled, high-altitude airplanes

are going to beam Internet to the rest of the world. And it reminded me of this early 80s sort of viral indie film called The Gods Must Be Crazy in which the premise of it is there's a hunter-gather tribe in the Kalahari Desert in Africa, which, you know, actually does exist, although it's a fictional film. And then, you know, a Bush pilot

drops a Coke bottle into their world, which just completely rocks their world to see this bottle come out of. or nowhere. And it's got a lot of positive things, has negative things, and eventually they choose to, like, reject the Coke bottle and reject a majority, right? And, yeah, I mean, I was mentioning in the context of the uncharted frontiers of some tech. And, you know, what happens when you get the next global billion or two billion and put them on the internet? And, you know, people who have, you know, have lived many times a pre-modern, certainly at least pre-industrial

life. And suddenly, you know, they get live-streamed, you know, cat videos and memes and porn and God knows what, right? It's going to be an interesting, weird, anthropological change. I don't think anyone's seriously thinking about what impact that's going to have. Yeah. I wonder with this, you know, the Air Force flying over and, you know, beaming Facebook 24-7 and autonomous cars, which on one hand can be, you know, wonderful to increase productivity, but it's also, you know, clearly in a response to generate

more traffic to sites like Facebook and Amazon and other places where people can consume and spend more of their attention, not driving, but consuming. So it does seem to come with a lot of unwanted consequences. And I just wonder how humanity, if humanity's brain is really wired to withstand it. So it's funny. It's funny. There's this theory that I'm reading about, at least recently. I'm sort of that guy if I read something that morning that's interesting. I think it's the most important thing for the next two days.

So there's this concept, which I only learned about recently. I think it's been around for a few years called the Gutenberg parentheses. Right, so you haven't heard about either. It's funny. So the idea here is, and this is from, they're either sociologists or media theorists or something from Denmark, the idea here is that what we know as sort of the Western Enlightenment or what, you know, a university stands for,

the sort of solidity of a book with an index on it and the notion of an objective truth and, you know, editorial authority of some sort in the form of a professor or whatever. Like this is all a result of Gutenberg and the Western Enlightenment and the sort of Western paradigm, right? And we think it's normal because we were sort of raised in it. But if you actually take the longer sweep of history,

most of human society was not literate until relatively recently, right? And most of human society, I mean, came from oral traditions. I mean, Homer was some amalgam of poets, right? If you listened to the Odyssey, it would be read to you. It would not. You would not actually read it in any written way. There was no notion of footnotes. This whole textual society we've gotten used to

is actually pretty unusual in the scheme of human life. And if you look at a lot of Internet, I think a lot of the reason why the Internet is actually so attractive is because it actually resembles a lot of the communication and oral traditions from the past, right? It might be textual and takes place on the screen, but it's a femoral, right? It's like the gossip you hear in the public square.

It's non-authoritative. There's no appeal to authority. Anybody gets anything. And it's the sort of informal, like, town crier, you know, everyone has their little microspace. It's a sort of thing that we've kind of always lived in. Of course, now it exists at global scale, thanks to technology that's driving it.

But in some level, the pleasure centers of our brain that it's sort of hitting and keeping us sitting in the refreshing Twitter, even though I should just be reading a book, come from that same sort of atavistic sort of town hunter-gatherer tribe thing. And, you know, and that world. It's a throwback, actually. It's a thing. So the Internet's going forward, but we're actually going back to a medieval age, right? Things are a lot more tribal, right? I mean, it's digital. Right, right.

I mean, this whole Western Enlightenment was about universal standards of human rights and liberal democracy and all the rest of it. And whether due to postmodernism or whether due to, again, you know, reverting back into this medieval age, we've kind of given up on that notion a little bit, well, not a little, a lot, I think. And, you know, every tribe is just kind of reverting back into its online space. And conversations become largely mutually unintelligible in many ways. In the same way that if you plucked some Czech villager and plop them into, I don't know, an Incan city, circa, you know, 1450, even if you had a translator, they just almost couldn't relate to each. other they have completely different values, worldviews, everything, right?

And it seems like we're almost getting to that point. And I really do wonder if this Enlightenment age that you and I are old enough to have grown up in, right? I remember like computers were just not a thing when I was a kid. Like we might be the last generation that I even sort of saw that or lived with that or expected that. So, you know, I'm still trying to get my head around it. But it just seems interesting to me that, that, yeah, that a lot of the media we're

interacting with in some ways is actually a medieval experience. Part of the reason why I'm thinking this, and I'm working on a piece for this, were wired is the rise of like voice as the new medium. And I don't know how much you want to go in this direction. Oh, it's a podcast after. Yeah, so yeah. So podcasting is part of it. So I had like three epiphanies that convinced me that voice in many ways is a big part

of the future. So one is podcasts, right? So when I promoted the book, right, and you're going to do this too, right? Like I did network TV. And to be honest, it doesn't actually generate a lot of online engagement. I did NBC's this morning or whatever with Charlie Rose and Gayle King, like, you know, major thing, right? It was kind of a little blip there that lasted an hour.

And then I did, you know, a bunch of podcasts, like, you know, note to sell from WNYC, which is a very followed thing, which I didn't even know about it because I wasn't that into podcasting. And it got a huge amount all online engagement. It was a really good interview, too. And I was like, wow. And so, you know, I had like an idiot. SoulThought podcasts was something that some, like, loser guy in a basement about, you know, collecting lead figurines from his D&D game or some crap, you know, was like podcasting to like a thousand people. I had no idea that it was basically the new spoken word medium for, like, you know. And it's basically taking over radio

And even text And the same way that Netflix is like killing Hollywood Right And so there was that epiphany And then the other is I got one of these smart speaker Alexa devices Which I don't know if you've ever tried one of these Like I was always the guy who hated the voice button on their phone Because I never used it because it always so sucked

But I just finally You know I just got bought one of these things And I spent I think the afternoon that everyone spends Having a conversation with this damn box And you know trying to sort of Tell you jokes Right telling you jokes Getting to tell me dirty jokes

Square roots of large irrational numbers. Right, or like bizarre historical facts that it could actually manage to interpolate on Wikipedia or whatever. And, you know, it wasn't quite enough to make me fall in love with it, like in that movie her. Like, it wasn't that charming. But it was enough in the span of a few hours to reprogram my brain to just expect having access to, like, the internet in a spoken way. Jarvis. Right. And I remember, like, I spent the afternoon and then I got my car and I was driving along.

And like an idiot, I said, oh, Alexa, blah, like in my car. And like, nobody answered. I'm like, oh, God, what are you doing? But then I just realized that that's it. I had been reprogrammed to assume that I could just talk to the internet and it would talk back. And so, yeah, so anyhow, it's funny, I think, I mean, it's a slightly separate thread, but I think it's part of the same general trend, if you believe, this Gutenberg hypothesis, that, you know, humans are going to start interacting with the world that computers provides them

as a verbal medium in a way. I mean, you think about it, like, I mean, half my book sales were probably audible books, actually, like my readers were actually listeners. And, you know, they're listening to my book, again, the same way that, you know, the tribal storyteller would repeat the same story on a certain day around. on the campfire, and you would just sit there and listen to it, because that's what humans want it to do. Or the preacher, which were used it from the Bible.

Yeah, yeah. And it's funny, like, that aspect of it, it's funny, you see it in the way that podcasts even monetize it. It's a little bit wonky here, but just to give you a little taste of it, podcast, you know, and podcast must be the only medium where the ads that perform the best are the ones read by the host, like, right, like Ira Glass on This American Life, he reads his Lagunitas brewing ad or whatever. Some podcasters, and admittedly it may not be an objective source, published studies that

some users actually, when they removed ads, actually asked for the ads back. Like, it was part of the experience. Like, that was the close of this American life was... It's a signal. It's like, wait, where is it? It's like missing when it's gone. And in almost no medium, do users, like, miss the ads.

So it's just really interesting that, again, there's a different relationship between, you know, content producer and listener when it's a verbal thing. And I think the relationship between human and computation is also very different when it's a spoken versus a textual thing. So, again, I tend to wonder if we're about to start a new sort of slightly medieval age. in which humans' relationship with themselves, as media through computers,

actually regresses into like an earlier form, and, you know, no one reads, you know, a 15,000 word New Yorker piece or even a 500-page book like mine anymore. Do you think there is a future for these books, for books like yours? I don't know. Maybe not. So the Gutenberg maybe actually turning in his grave? I mean, there's a certain, there's a certain high-falutin literary culture for which books will always be a thing, right?

So like the New York publishing set, having a book is like a major feather in your cap and you kind of have to do it. Right. But in terms of the larger culture, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. What are millennials doing? That's the canary in the cage that every marketer says. Right. What are they doing?

Are they actually reading books in between eating tiepods or are they not? What are they doing? The eternal question. What could be more delicious than the tide pod? Yeah. Well, Antonio, I'd like to thank you so much for coming and visiting UC San Diego and being a part of this into the impossible podcast as part of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at wish you luck and your

next endeavor, which will hopefully involve the successful trans-Pacific crossing from California to Hawaii. So I wish you the best of luck with that. Please keep in touch. It's wonderful to welcome Douglas Rushkoff,

who's the author of 20 books and many articles and the giver of many talks and media presentations. And today we're going to talk in particular about his two most recent books, one called Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, which is just a lovely title. And the other one, Present Shock, which has a lot of, I think, actionable intelligence for those of us that are concerned about the future ironically and had to deal with issues of communication

of the thought processes of anticipating what the future will be like based on how we behave in the present. So I want to talk to you first and welcome you, Douglas, and mention also the fact that you're the host of the team human podcast. And I wonder, how did that name come about? How did you choose that? That's the name of your podcast. I was on a panel with some futurist technologists who shall remain nameless. And they were talking about the singularity and uploading human consciousness.

to the web or whatever. The cloud. Right. And they were really enamored of artificial intelligence and said that genuine conscious artificial intelligence with autonomy and agency and awareness was inevitable. And when it emerged, it would be really our evolutionary successor. And our job at that point was really just to. keep the lights on for this thing.

And after we're not needed anymore, to retreat, you know, to give them the stage and then be okay with our annihilation. You know, they really were telling the story of the history of the cosmos, really, as the evolution of information from simpler to more complicated state, sort of this antiotropic urge of information to find more and more complex. complex vehicles or media to express itself. So you went from, you know, quarks to atoms, to molecules, to organelles, to organisms, to humans, to culture, to computers. And then once computers are a more complicated home than us, pass the torch. And I said, no, but they're just computers. There's people.

I like people. You know, we've got to create, we've got to preserve humanity. And who knows what we're passing on? We vastly oversimplify with our digital technologies. The things that we're putting forward, we're not retrieving all of the human values. High resolution is not necessarily recreation of life or of everything. We only can put into high resolution the things that we know to resolve. And that humans deserve a place in the future social order.

And they said to me, oh, Doug, you're just saying that because you're a human. as if it was some supreme act of hubris for me to hope for there to be humans. And I said, damn right, I'm on team human, you know, guilty, guilty. And that's sort of where the team human meme came from. You're right. If I am not for myself, who will be for me, the robots and the AI, not likely. Not. And not even just for me, but for all the others, you know, the other people.

Right. So, I mean, I see you as a unique mixture of, you know, kind of Cassandra and also, you know, a very positivist about the future of humanity on Earth and technology and the interface between them. But with the caveat that you are more than well-versed in the dangers and the difficulties of achieving this, you know, either singularity being a tech utopia or dystopia. And I think, you know, the odds are maybe 50-50 for each one. But I think it's interesting that you really have focused on this utopian myth that kind of has subsubia. assumed much of our neighbors and northern part of this state.

And I wonder, you know, things have only gotten worse since you've written or better, depending on your perspective, since this book, since present shock. And even throwing rocks from the Google Bus, where you're basically describing, you know, the kind of strange battle between different cultures and different societies where the people that are providing these great benefits of technology are despised and, you know, for the practical whole dilemmas that they're causing the people that have to live in the neighborhoods where the Google Bus is traveling. So I wonder, I mean, do you see, where do you forecast in linear aggression fashion and where

do you see this going in the future since you wrote the books, these two books, which I, you know, explore different themes. But I think there is this core thread of being hopeful yet, you know, in some sense, realistic about what the future dangers could bring. Yeah, well, I mean, I wrote kind of lovingly and almost, you know, psychedelically. about digital technology in the early days, in the early Internet days, because the particular Bay Area culture

that was fostering and promoting this stuff, you know, from the late 80s through the early 90s, was a very kind of cosmic, in the cultural sense, group of people who were seeing, how are we going to enhance humanity? Right, and connect us all into the Gaian brain and take responsibility for our ecosystem. It was this beautiful vision that got sidetracked.

And I was really exploring for what was the root cause of this. So in some of the books, I start looking at, oh, why are we applying technology towards the submission of human novelty and why are we trying to replace cognition or, you know, just build an attention economy and manipulate people and their behaviors. And so I looked at that way. And then I realized, well, the reason that there was this operating system underneath it all, the operating system of kind of venture capitalism and corporate capitalism that was being accepted as a given circumstance by most of these poor kids who were, you know, dropping out of school. Yeah.

To start a company. Which has no future, you know, it didn't have the limitless future potential growth that they might have anticipated in their Econ 107. But even the Google kids, you know, who go to, they take money from Sequoia Capital. When they started Google, they were like, look, what's going to make us better than Yahoo is that we're not advertising based. And then they become the biggest advertising company in the world. So that's why then I looked at, okay, if I can deconstruct venture capitalism, corporate capitalism, show people that this is not a condition of nature, that libertarians are wrong, that nature doesn't actually work like this, that there's a marketplace with specific rules that were invented by very

specific people at specific times and defended with swords and gunpowder, and that there's other models that could be much more generative and sustainable. We don't all have to die. So I looked at that, and then I'm thinking, but now I'm kind of thinking that, that, you know, Even this economic model is the result of a particular almost combustion-based, cause and effect, linear understanding and way of time. And I started looking at what I'm writing about now, you know, the kind of the Judeo-Christian invention of linear time and cause and effect. And the positive aspects of it, like the quest for social justice and making the world a better place, but then the sort of negative aspects are looking forward to this moment of redemption. And, you know, because the problem is if you look at civilization as like this vehicle with an exhaust pipe, then all your exhaust is going behind you into some history that doesn't really exist anymore.

but it actually does. You're exhausting into other people's present or other people's future. You know, this willingness, I guess, what I'm saying, the willingness of technologists and venture capitalists to externalize the negative impacts of all the things they're doing is partly could be traced to this kind of false mythology that we have about how our world works. Yeah, you've spoken about these issues of, you know, the chronos, the world of chronos and the linear time flow.

And I think, you know, just to maybe short circuit to a topic I was going to delay for later, but since you brought up the Judeo-Christian aspects of things, you've written and spoken a lot about your relationship with religion. And I think also, you know, one thing I noted that, you know, it was really one of the best vignettes and one of the best vignettes in some of you're writing. You talk about Twitter being basically an abject failure, you know, that it's such a brilliant idea and it has these great, great, you know, potential. But it's so future limited and, you know, that basically it's creators can't even afford

the luxury of enjoying the present, you know, when they have a valuation. And I'm wondering, you know. Because they only make $2 billion a year. Right. That's right. Right. So there's a limitation. So I wonder, you know, correspondingly, you know, is there a limitation to God?

Is it worth God getting a new Twitter handle? Because, I mean, has he reached or has she or it or whatever, has it reached this kind of point of diminishing returns where there's no more expansion in the future? Or maybe humans have grown this notion of a deity? Or do you still think it serves a purpose? Or is it some sort of scaffolding that got us to this, you know, exalted space where we do think about time in a linear as opposed to cyclic progression, as you've written about? Well, I feel like we Jews may have made some errors. And in a – we kind of – we kind of – we helped the transition from this idea of local gods to one big universal kind of generic, abstract God. And we did this partly in our self-interest because we had no home.

So if you got in a locality, you can't have a local god. And if you don't want those people to hate you or kill you for having a different God, then you say, well, look, there's really just one great universal God. I mean, that was a really good survival strategy. But what we did by scaling up God is created a society where people think everything has to scale up in order to exist in order to be. Right. So I don't think that we have to give up on God. I think that we have to learn to recognize God as less separate from our reality and our actions and what we're doing.

I mean, it was a good idea because God's had been so abused. God's had been turned into icons, into idols. You know, the Egyptian death cults would put the image of the God. God right on top of the ark. There'd be, here's the cow god, here's the goat god, you know, and what the Israelites did, and it's really a great passage in Torah, where God's describing what kind of arc to build. And he says, look, you build the whole ark, it sounds exactly like an Egyptian ark, except you don't put the God on the top.

You don't put the emoji on top. Right. Put two little cherubs on either side protecting the empty space. So the cherubs and little cherubs are not sweet babies. They're like little monsters. Protecting the empty space. And then God says in Tori, he says, there in the empty space between the two cherries, that's where I'll come to you. So it's like, oh.

So God is about not building an aisle, but creating an empty space and the interaction of the people where you gather that God is this thing. Filling in the space, right? Yeah. So it became much more verb-like than noun-like. But it's really hard for people to hang on to that. People want something. If you look at St. Paul's letters to the Pharisees, you know, he's saying, look, I can't. can't market this.

I can't people... It's not going to scale. Right. You need blood. You need a picture. You need a face. You know? It's like Quaker Oats.

Needed the Quaker on the box. You can't just sell the words that the text only... Text only is not enough for people to grab onto. You know, so it's tricky. I don't think we give up on God necessarily. I think, but I think we have to understand that for us here now, the most important thing about having a God is that it, God forces us to remember that they're higher values than the sort of small, lowercase V values.

You know, Horkeheimer wrote a great book called The Eclipse of Reason. And he talked about reason with a capital R, that you have to have reason with a capital R to do things, not these little utilitarian reasons. Right. So if you need real values, and if you're going to have real values, you have to accept that those values come from somewhere... If they're absolute, right. They have to come from somewhere else, right. So why do you go to school? Do you go to school to get the skills to get a job?

You know, that's not why school started. Schools originally started because learning with a capital L was a value. Because we wanted, especially poor people and coal miners, to go to school and have some quality of life be able to read a book when they're not getting black lung. And now we've turned school into a way for people to get jobs. So it's just an extension of the reality that we were. compensating them for. Back then, right. I mean, if you look at what's available now, and another thing you've written about is, I mean, basically, we can live, like, better than the kings of Europe did, you know, 500

years ago. I mean, if we want a mansion to stay in, there's Airbnb, if we want, you know, a chauffeur limousine to pull up for us, there's Uber. If we want to communicate to millions of people, we have Twitter, we have Facebook, we have the ability to do things that were only available to monarchs in the past. And I wonder now with the democratization of this technology, is it, is it, going to undermine, it seems from your writing that you believe, and I think it's justifiable, that maybe economic forces might just be the most powerful forces in the universe. I mean,

I like to think, you know, gravity is a pretty important for it. But, you know, in terms of what happens here on Earth, to the only, you know, civilization we know exists, what is it about economic forces that are, you know, kind of currently on avail, you know, that we can, we can partake of? And then the future, when maybe there won't be those jobs to train for, you know, as AI kind of increases in importance. This is something I know that's important to you. So what are your thoughts on sort of the changing of the economic landscape for an entire civilization that we're likely to live through in our lifetime?

Well, I mean, it's interesting. The economic forces are not the big ones. The economic forces, the problem with the economic forces is they ignore the big ones, you know? Things like whether it's, you know, climate change or topsoil erosion, you know, economic forces want to extract as much value as they can from every opportunity. If that means depleting the topsoil so there's no more left in 30 years, then so be it. Growth at all cost, right?

Yeah. You know, and it's that world where, you know, if everyone gets cancer, it's good for the GDP in the short term. Because they got to spend all this money on chemo or research, whatever it is. So, yeah. I mean, and what's going to happen now? I mean, in some sense, I feel like this notion of our transition to a jobless future, because robots are taking them all, is kind of a myth. Because we're not doing the jobs well.

You know, we're still doing, we're still, you know, people have to die for our iPhones to happen. And where do they go? Right. Right. So it's not like it's, there's no jobs. It's just we can, we seem to be willing, if we make enough people suffer, we can also have a jobless America. That's a trade where it seems to be. Because the we that are living better than the monarchs of the past is we, you know, not the slaves who are using toxic chemicals to get their fingerprints off.

The iPhones that they assemble for us so that we think that there's no human intervention in their creation. But, you know, what happens when whatever it is hits the fan? It's going to be interesting. You know, as I've written, you know, I don't believe that jobs are the be-all and end-all. Jobs are really an artifact of a moment in the early Renaissance when small businesses were made illegal. People had to have a monopoly, a charter from the king in order to run a business. And if you didn't have one, you had to go work for someone who did. That's when employment was born.

That's when people started to sell their time instead of selling the value they created. And we got used to it over 400 years, just like the Israelites got used to 400 years of slavery. But then, so now we need a generation to sort of reinvent that. You know, and say, oh, okay, it's not the jobs that we want. It's food. It's stuff. It's a sense of purpose and meaning. I want to contribute meaningfully to my society.

That doesn't necessarily mean employment. So, yeah, we can start looking at things like universal basic income that give everyone a livable wage just for being here. And then if you want some luxuries and iPhones, then you've got to figure out a way to create value for others. A career of the future that is perhaps questionable in terms of its profitability is journalism and writing in general. And you, as I've said, are the author of over, you know, 20 books and innumerable writings and as a teacher of the craft of writing. Where do you see the future of writing? I mean, do you think we're still going to be printing on pieces of dead trees in 100 years? Or are we going to, or is it going to endure just sort of a historical, you know, legacy artifact the way that you can get the vinyl LPs nowadays?

Where do you see the future of the written word? And how do you see yourself? Do you classify yourself as a writer, as it more as a thinker, a speaker, a journalist? You have many hats. I think, you know, writing will stay around. I mean, it changes form, you know, as it went from, you know, writing on tablets and papyrus to, you know, the printing press was a big one. And what's happened digitally is as big as, certainly as big as the printing press in terms of what it's done to text. But it's also as big as the printing press.

in terms of what it did to TV. You know, the, just Marshall McLuhan liked to say, when you get a new medium, it turns whatever the previous medium was into the content. So now, you know, television is itself the content of the internet, surprisingly. You know, we thought it was going to be, we thought it was going to be text, but no, it's TV. I mean, all that traffic is TV.

It's bizarre. I don't think writing goes away, but I think writing will end up being, retrieved or rediscovered for what it offers that video or something doesn't. Right now, I was just experiencing this. I feel like in most people's lives, writing is noise. You know, the disagreements that people get in. I watch, I'll look at a Facebook feed and an argument. And I realize these people, they sound so terrible.

They don't know how to read and write. Right. They really don't know how to think. I mean, thinking and writing are intimately connected. Sometimes if you can't think clearly, you're certainly not going to be able to write and communicate clearly. Right. Well, we're not clearly. I mean, we're differently.

You know, so they can write down what their amygdala is telling them. It's telling them. Yeah, exactly. But it's really hard. You know, when we're using media that have been intentionally, consciously designed, by your friends up at Stanford. I'd just say your friends because you're a professor in California. By your friends up in Stanford to bypass the neocortex and go straight to the brainstem.

That's a terrible thing to be doing to people, especially when they've got all this leverage now through these digital media. Yeah. So I think, yeah, you're going to scale up on the micro side, but that may not drive the content and the quality side. Yeah. I mean, in terms of me, I don't know. I've been telling people I feel like this is my last book, this team human thing I'm doing now. But it's less because I think books don't matter than because writing books is really lonely. You know, and I've spent 20 books worth of time, which means 20 years alone at a keyboard.

Yeah, writing these things. And it's not fair. You know, it's not fair. I want to go out and play softball with people. I want to experience more life. And also it's enough of me. I feel like now if I have a platform and I do have some fame and whatever, my job is to use that platform to promote the people and ideas that you've already, right. You know, of people of the next generation.

That's why I started the Team Human podcast, so it's not me. It's them. Right. Yeah, I think it might have been this guy, Derek Severs, who said, you know, if information was the only thing we'd, needed, then we'd all be billionaires with six-pack abs, right? So it's more than just having the knowledge and having, you know, it written down somewhere. But I think you with your platform, as you're saying, you know, can really leverage the ideas and actually implement them. And that brings me, you know, to one of the final topics I wanted to discuss with you is this notion, you know,

that in your experience as an educator in New York and mine here, you know, we've discussed this earlier that, you know, we basically never get taught on how to teach. We never get taught. I was never taught on how to be a professor and how to speak in front of hundreds of young people and inculcate the education that they are paying for so dearly. But also, you know, to convey this profession that's been largely untrained in a thousand years since the first university in Bologna in the late 1,000s. And you know, we have a single person standing up on a stage and it's professing knowledge. The only difference is that, you know, in the old days, the students would go on strike and then the professors wouldn't get paid.

So there was a, you know, perverse incentive. And I hope to God that's not. That's right. I hope to God that barbaric practice never resurfaces. You know, I don't want to be unemployed again. But I think, you know, this notion of the craft of writing, of teaching, is that something, you know, that can be taught? Is it something you can really communicate to somebody? And if so, I mean, how do you go about doing that?

How do you go about crafting people that are going to take your best parts and hopefully not have any of your mistaken qualities? Yeah, it's interesting. I only arrived at the university as a professor of professor like four years ago. And I was kind of surprised that it's just like, oh, now just go in there and teach. You know, that there is no – I mean, there are teachers' colleges, but that's more for elementary. school and high school teachers and they don't really yeah and professors don't really get that and I'm sure there's a center for teaching if you were like I want exercises for my class but you could go and watch me teach yeah I'm sure that's part of the the someone's paying for that um but what makes

me I mean what makes me think about what works about teaching is when I look at the way that people try to create computer platforms that accomplish the same job. It becomes really easy for me to see, oh, look at these computers. They are teaching the subject, again, in terms of its utility value. They're teaching it as these specific skills. What's missing here? And what's missing, back to God, but what's missing is the experience. of mimisyses, you know, of one human being modeling another human being.

So I'm not, you know, when I teach propaganda to my communication students, I'm not just teaching them, oh, here's Chomsky's model of propaganda. I'm showing them, I'm reenacting live my experience of, look at this article, look at what this article, look at what this articles doing to me and look at how I'm going to take it down and watch it and see not just the process but see the visceral right the visceral this is a human being you know responding and that to me is what teaching is it teaching is a subversive activity teaching is is inviting young people into the conspiracy you know that's the way socrates taught it was a conspiracy. Conspire literally means to breathe together. And you only do that in a space. You don't

do that over audacity. Right. You can't. You're in a room. The door is closed. All right, let's talk. I find it interesting. I started, not sure you know this, but I'm a pilot in my spare time, which is very minimal nowadays. But, but, but, and I, I wanted to continue the learning process. So I reached the highest level of, you know, kind of private pilot, and then I became a commercial pilot, you know, which means I can, you know, charge you to fly you around the country in a tiny little plane. But then the next level up, to keep my education going, to keep, you know, perfecting the craft such as I can of aviation was to become a certified flight instructor. And I find it very interesting that the way that the FAA and the Federal Aviation Administration, they have a very regimented series on pedagogy and how you actually teach. a student and bringing in things which, you know, I'm sure from your field but are very unknown in my field, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, physical safety, emotional,

you know, and then the only way that a student can learn. And I was thinking, you know, this is what we're doing. And again, it's kind of the model of, well, we're training in that case for a very specific job being a flight instructor. Right. It's a trade, you know, in a certain sense. Well, right. You're interfacing human beings with the industrial age. Exactly. Right. And more, you know, more so than almost any other field. Checklists and protocols and everything. But they actually do get into, I mean, it's probably the only part of the federal, you know, I can't imagine the IRS has a section like the psychological safety of your, of your, you know, customers is really important.

But to be a pilot certified by the federal government to train other pilots. And I was thinking, you know, what if there was this applied to, you know, not just something worth someone's physical safety and the safety of people on the ground is at stake, but what if you took that same kind of theory of pedagogy and applied it to diverse tasks, such as learning how to solve Schrodinger's equations or, you know, how can you really translate these basic theories of the theory of teaching and education in a way that you can kind of utilize this accumulated, received wisdom of education and actually apply it and would it do any good? In other words, is someone just an innate teacher? And this will dovetail to my final question about, you know, the creative imaginative process. but you did kind of hit upon something. I once asked an artist, a painter,

how do you teach someone to be a good painter? And they said, you can't teach it. But the first step is to paint all the great masters. Don't get out there and start thinking you're the next, you know, Muro or Pollock or whatever and start off on your own craft. But first get down the Picasso's, get down the bengos and get down the Renoirs, and then you can call yourself an artist. I mean, is it similar in your field?

I mean, do you feel like by, as you said, you know, kind of laying hands on or, you know, recreating is that process? Or is it just too inherently, as you said, subversive and that, you know, subversions and conspirators don't lend themselves to, you know. I'm probably irresponsible to some extent to, you know, not living up to my obligation to learn more about pedagogy. you know, especially, you know, teaching in a public university, I end up with a college classroom where 10% of the kids are functionally illiterate, at least as I would. At a college level, certainly by college standards. Yeah. And that's scary. And so I start teaching them, you know, I started teaching sentence structure and subjects and predicates.

And I wanted to get to the place where every student in the. class could write a one paragraph email that had no mistakes and had four sentences that built on each other. You know, it's a basic sixth grade essay form of. Yeah, literacy. You know, and I couldn't get there with all of them. But then I start thinking, oh, so I'm not really a good teacher. I got to find out this.

I got to learn what's the pedagogy of writing and all that. It's like, no. Because I'm not saying just put. push everybody through no matter what, but that's not what I'm there to do. What I was there to do was to teach these kids propaganda and how it works and whatever and whoever they are. So this is propaganda on TV, this is propaganda in writing. If you don't know how to read, you're not really going to get much out of this unit.

But I'm, and perhaps it's inappropriate, but I'm seeing myself as a special case. that they brought me in at 50 years old to instill a communications program with some understanding of our transition to a digital media environment. And that that is so important and so central that spending 80% of my time on that and figuring out different ways to articulate what's happening. to us to people in a way that they can understand it is more important. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment and that there are people you can't read or write. There's a place on campus you can go and get reading and writing. All I can do is tell you you really, really, really need to go there and do that. Now I'm going to do the specialized thing that I do. Interesting. So the last part I wanted to talk about is just, you know, we're kind of, we typified this, I think it was

Marshall McLaur, maybe it wasn't, but this notion of the two cultures and whether or not there's a third culture that could be sort of the symbiotic union of the two. And you've done work in fantasy and graphics and all sorts of other media. And I wonder what role does fantasy or science fiction, if any, play in both our projections of the future in terms of technology and, you know, living with iPads and teleporters and things like that? but also does it contribute to our anxiety or collective neuroses of the future? Does sci-fi in film on the web and in journalism? How does it afflict us? How does it affect us as a net benefit? I think the real purpose of science fiction is to interface the humanities with the sciences.

And the people we're actually talking to as science fiction writers are five to 14 years old. because what we're doing is laying the templates where we're putting in the architecture of mind through which they will make their decisions. So we were lucky to be raised with highly optimistic or at least balanced views of what technology could bring. So, you know, even at 2001 and Arthur C. Clark, I mean, what was the problem? The humans lied to the other humans about what was going on on the moon. And when Hal looked at that and thought, most people don't even realize this, but when Hal thought about it, Hal thought, well, shit, if they're lying to the humans but telling me the truth, then I must be the superiors. your life form. That that's it. That's right. And so what was, what was Art S. E. Club really talking about there was, look, if we're going to move into this space, we've got to be honest and transparent.

Or we're going to magnify something really screwed up. So, and is, is 2001 a nightmare or a good dream? I mean, it's a little of both. But when that is the foundational myth for so many people going into the sciences, we end up with guarded balances. Is it this? Is it that? Is it this? Is it that? You know, now, I was only recently thinking, well, gosh, science fiction has gotten so dark, so negative. You know, that it's tricky. On the one hand, we'll criticize at Disney for making that, what was that movie with Futureland, Adventureland, Tomorrowland. Oh, Tomorrowland, you know, we criticize them because they've got George Clooney. and they're basically saying the theme of that movie is don't think too much about climate change

or you're going to make climate change happen. Sort of the thing. Be optimistic. Cheerful assessment. Yeah, but it was cheerful. They're all young people and believe that you as an 11-year-old Pakistani refugee can stand in the field and come up with the solution to the bioengineered future or whatever it is. while we resent that kind of capitalist expansionist optimism, it's like, doesn't acknowledge.

On the other hand, we better put forth some narratives for how things can work for a positive human future or what is the structure of these young people's brains going to be when they get your job. Exactly. Wow. A fascinating way to conclude this really wide-ranging and just so interesting conversation with Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock and most recently Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. And his newest book was the forthcoming Team Human, which will be published by Norton. Yes, by WWW.Norton. And based on the beloved podcast of the same name, you can go to TeamHuman.fm.com. and listen to wild stories of the human potentials. And people, if they're interested in following you on Twitter,

your Twitter handle is Rushkoff at Rushkoff, and your website is Douglas Rushkoff. Oh, just Rushkoff.com. I got the Rushkoff. You got it pretty much everywhere. You got it all. Not that many. That's right.

It's been a pleasure and a real rush to interview you today. Thank you so much. Thank you. This has been Into the Impossible, a podcast of the Arthur C. Clark, Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. We'd like to thank our guests, Antonio Garcia Martinez, and Douglas Rushkoff, as well as to acknowledge our generous patrons and sponsors, including Viasat Inc., members of the Founders'

and the James B. Axe Family Foundation. Your support is much appreciated. To find out more about the Clark Center and our other exciting projects, programs, and research, as well as how to support our mission, please visit imagination.ucsd.edu. Audio production is by me, Patrick Coleman, produced by Patrick Coleman and Brian Keating. And thanks to everyone who's been listening and sharing the podcast, please continue to do so. We really appreciate it. And if you're local, be sure to check out our website for some exciting upcoming events. Thanks.

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four. and