Julian Dorey Podcast - #450 - “Sociopathic ELITES! - Billionaires Secret Plan for END OF WORLD | Douglas Rushkoff

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

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And it's pretty fucking alarming that they're having this conversation very matter-of-factly with you. Even if you are describing yourself as the entertainment. In 2017, this is before COVID, before the rise of AI, before the shit. That is wild. And these are people who would rather have sex with robots or teenagers than women, right? Wait a second. Please explain that. These are people who want to build sex robots.

These are people. The people you were talking to. This is. They said this? This is who they are. These are the Epstein kinds of people. These are, they're talking about the culture that we're talking about, right? The culture that we're looking at, the billionaire tech bro culture.

What are their values? What do they want? How many wives do they want? Who do they want the wives to be? How much power do they want those people to have? Right. Can you put the camera on Doug Rufus? Let me just write this down on my band.

Was that one of them? Oh, one of the, is that? on the camera it's not on the camera you're on camera right now yeah yeah we couldn't see it on that but let's make sure that's edited was that one of them if you want to know if i it's off record that's one of them that's so fucked but that's this that's so fuck though yeah Doug i see you join the club of rome what's going on there isn't that cool they asked me cool yeah club of rome we club we go clubbing You know, Club of Rome was this thing. They started in like 1970, 71.

They wrote this thing called The Limits to Growth. And it was this way early, like before people really knew about pollution and climate and all that saying, if capitalism keeps growing like this, there might not be enough planet to support what's happening. You know, and they basically predicted all this stuff that was going to come down the pike, you know, by 2000, 2010, whatever. And then 2020-10 comes and it's like way worse. Way worse than they said. Way, way worse. Now, aren't they based on like Malthusian economics in the sense that they think the

population will grow too fast for us to have sustenance, enough sustenance growing at the same rate? Yes and no. I mean, it's, I mean, Malthus went worse than that. I mean, he went to total collapse. But yeah, the belief is that, that, you know, in, in, and, you know, in, and, it's, I mean, it's, I mean, And theoretical systems like capitalism or mathematics, you can keep growing something forever. But that the belief is that the planet has a fixed amount of matter on it. You know?

Right. And it can only support so much that it's like one giant flower pot. Right. And you can only grow so much stuff on it before you crash it. Sure. How do you get invited into the club of the room? You know, I think I was, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, it. Either there's one, I have one of two hypotheses because now that I'm in, I've seen some of the

emails that they send out, like about finding new members. And in those emails, they're saying things like, find people that you wouldn't normally think to be here, you know, atypical people who have, you know, different media followings. And so I might have been part of that campaign. I feel more likely I'm part of that one than part of the one of find trusted, you know, scholars of environment. But no, I don't, I did, I mean, that's partly that book, that book, Survival of the Richest about the billionaires, because this, this was a book that really laid out the, what is this kind of awful mindset that leads people to want to just grow exponentially forever? Yeah. And why wouldn't that work? You know, why is the only thing in nature that grows

exponentially forever is cancer and it kills its host? So sort of, I was writing about that and I think You're like, oh, this is this is a good new way of expressing what they've been trying to express. You know. Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. And from a different perspective, not of, oh, we have to deny ourselves things.

But rather, let's get into the greeny fun of life rather than worrying about growing more towers. Now, what is the invite like, though? Did they just like a man in a black hat come knock on your door and be like, Douglas, coptivers. You've been surrounded. No. Well, they're like, it's mostly, I mean, it's a club of Rome. They're not, it's not like they have money in buildings. And it's not like Bilderberg.

It's more like, you know, a woman who was a former assistant to a UN person emails and says, you know, would you be interested? Is it in code? Like, what was John Keir-A-R-A-Co's code? Like, the Knights, the Knights and Fields and Poppies and whatever and Seeds and got it all. I wish. No, it's like there's not,

it's not like a secretive society. Everybody who's in at their names on the website, and they're all like... So I can go in? They'll let me just, like, walk in? Well, there's no in. There's no in. There's no place.

I feel like that's what someone on the inside would say. I wish there has a place. No. And so far, for me, it's been email. It's been email. No, and they had Zooms. You know, but it's not. It would be like there's someone in India, there's people in Africa, they're around, and they're

mostly people who used to be in politics, like the ex-minister of this or the ex-one of that, or people who've written books on the climate and the economy. But they're, it's not like, I've been to things that are way more interesting than that. Way more interesting. Yeah. Or been invited, I got invited to that Hereticon thing. That would have been way more. Oh, the Peter Thiel thing down in South America.

Yeah, but it was like, no, it wasn't. It was in New Orleans. Oh, not quite South America. Yeah. Very close. Yeah, close. Closer to there to South America than New York. But, uh, can we pull up the schedule for that again, Dief, the Hereticon schedule?

I was just talking about that. I emailed because I didn't go then because it was like straight smack in the early worst COVID time. Right. And I was like, I just, wife and kid, I didn't want to be exposing people to stuff. But I would have gone, it just was sort of an exciting idea. But that's like more secret. That's... Seems very secret.

I just, you know, Doug, when you look at stuff like this and you're like me and Dief and everyone listening pretty much right now and you're not a part of these worlds and you don't really understand it, you read things and all the different types of subject matters they're going through throughout the day and then the types of people who are attending and you're like, this seems a little, uh, a little odd. Exactly. That one, like the goal is immortality. Right?

I mean, fuck. That's like, that was like. Psychedelic tea party, Trist Burlesque, cyborg. Yeah. Where could a human be an ape? Exactly. Interesting. Where the club of Rome would be more like encouraging better water policy in the southern states of

of India. Right. You know, it's, and it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, really sweet, you know, that the, like the ultimate version of the kind of, you know, Eurozone, do-gooder, let's collaborate, international cooperation. And now all they're really trying to do is, from what I can tell, is really more almost like promotion publicity of green good stuff. Club of Rums trying to do that. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like, yeah, it's not like Bilderberg kind of. There's no. Have you ever been to Bilderberg?

No, but I've heard about it. All right, that's good. Yeah. That's good. That's a check mark. No, Marshall McLuhan, the great media theorist, the original. He went to Bilderberg. Great.

God damn. He was there. They get all the goats. I know. In the 60s. But yeah, no, they haven't. What have you heard about it? I met a guy.

I was at a conference and I was sitting next to a guy who was apparently a former president of Switzerland, which I thought was like really big deal, but it turns out they had a conference, big deal, but it turns out they had like a different president every year. They just like pick them from some giant group. Yeah. Really? They don't elect the president. It's like picked from like one of their parliamentary people. So he kept saying it's not a big deal. And I said, yeah, but you know shit. And he goes, yeah, what would you like to know? And I said, tell me if you ever been the Bilderberg group. What is that? Whatever. And he goes, ah, it's all has beens. Oh, it's all has been. Yeah. It's all like people who used to run things and used to be. I said,

I said, yeah, but there's ex-presidents in there. And he goes, yeah, ex-presidents. When was this conversation with him? Oh, my God. 2005, six, around there. Interesting. Yeah, the guest list this year had some pretty active people in there. That's what I think.

If they got the, do they have the tech people coming now? Yeah. Yeah, they had teal, they had carp. There you go. They had like Fareed Zakaria from media. They had the current head of MI6. Like, seems like they're up in their game a little bit, right? They're back.

Yeah. Something's going on there. But, you know, when you join something like a club of Rome or something like that, I think where people at home look at these organizations and go like, all right, what the fuck, it's more because they're thinking to themselves, all right, why is it all these people from all these different countries, got a lot of good diversity in these groups for sure, minus the, I guess, like, class diversity. But, you know, all these different people who weren't elected in any of these countries

get together to discuss, like, what popular. should be around the world and stuff. You could see why people run wild with that, right? If they did that, yeah. But you'd have to think, where is there a group of a few hundred people who've, a lot of them have touched government or academics, actually actively thinking about how are we going to stop this train from going off a cliff? In other words, if, if, I mean, maybe you don't, some people don't believe that, you,

humans have any impact on the environment or the climate. But some of us believe that there's like microplastics in the ocean. Some of us believe the water table is threatened. And those of us who do would love for us to have alternatives to that. And if we don't see, if we see, okay, you know, I would normally want to say, okay, my government could maybe do some of that. And then when I see, oh, well, they really hate solar and they really hate wind. They're discontinuing all that. They're really pushing oil. Then I think, oh, well, maybe it would be good to have a bunch of us promoting these ideas publicly

or getting some research funded. They could actually show, oh, look, the ocean's getting really hot. Yeah, I think this is, and this is what makes all these conversations hard because this exists on either side. of the spectrum with any of them, whether we're talking fossil fuels, whether we're talking some domestic political issue or whatever, you'll get research done, but it's always funded by a group that wants a certain outcome. So you guys want an outcome? And then, like, I had Randall Carlson in that seat a few weeks ago, who has the opposite view on climate change. I've had people from

both ends of that here who would probably want to fund something that has the opposite outcome. And it just ends up being a bunch of studies with a bunch of numbers run by a bunch of people in a bunch of places that we don't see and then everyone looks at it and goes, well, they say that and I say that and it's hard to make sense of it. Right. It's the middle of the summer. You're not sleeping well and chances are your mattress is a big part of the reason. Heed is one of the biggest disruptors of deep sleep and most mattresses make it worse, not better.

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who's behind what. Yeah. Right? So usually I mean, this is an argument I don't have to make. Usually when you look at the people who are funding the science that the environment is not

at all threatened are usually big companies. that are pouring stuff into rivers or taking Native American lands and building chip factories. Usually the people that are funding the studies to figure out if how the ocean is doing are people involved more in civics organizations,

kind of more humanitarian, whatever people. Right. I mean, you know, someone like me, I guess at best someone, a conspiracy theorist would just see me as a useful idiot, that I'm someone who, you know, bought into the fantasy that, you know, immune diseases are going up or that our food supplies gotten kind of screwed up. You know, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, are easy things you can do, though.

Like, it's not any college, any college chemistry class. could look at the amount of vitamins in a plate of broccoli today. And compare that to what we knew was in broccoli 50 years ago. Oh, you're right about that. It's not there. Oh, it's nuts. The minerals aren't there. It's nuts.

Then you can go, why aren't the minerals there? And again, you could disagree. You could say the top soil seems to be screwed up. You can go to South Dakota and talk to where I'm in. They talked to the farmers there. And they can say, well, you know, our soil is getting kind of eroded. She went out there and talked with them. Yeah, well, I was at a university there doing a talk, talk to a college there.

And I was talking about climate and all. A bunch of kids came up who were the children of farmers there telling me, you don't know the half of it. Yeah. And saying how they're trying to do no-till agriculture to try to preserve the soil and trying to use this. Can you explain that to people? Like when you, when you, so it turns out the soil is not just dirt. Right. That soil is this living matrix.

And there's mycelia, like these little strands and living things. Soil is this living, you know, it's more like a sponge than it is dirt. And if you, when you turn it over in order to make it easy to get more seeds and plants and stuff in it, if you use big gross agricultural machines, you break the soil matrix. You kind of kill the soil and it gets all dry, turns more like sand. Then you've got to pour more chemicals on it so something grows. So you go to Monsanto or Genentec or someone. pour all this crap and you get this kind of steroid growth things, but not, they don't have the

nutrients in it. And then the topso gets worse and worse and worse. And it gets closer to like the Sahara or something. Yeah. And Monsanto obviously has our best interest in mine for sure. Right. They don't. Right. Now, and it's fine and they're allowed to have their opinion, but Monsanto makes hundreds of millions of dollars, right? And they spend like the Koch brothers and a lot of other giant corporations spend real money on what you're saying to say the environment is find there are no microplastics. And even if there are microplastics and placentas of people everywhere in the world in Bangladesh, we'll learn to adapt. We'll go to engine. We'll do things. Don't worry. We'll have selective reduction of your wounds. We'll do all those things. And they've got

hundreds of millions of dollars. Selective reduction of our wounds? You know, whatever. You make it like seven babies so that you can see which ones have the problems and then get rid of, you know, it's basic eugenics. But they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars doing that. I joined Club of Rome and they asked me, can I please donate $500 a year to be a member to pay, so the 200 people in it or whatever it is, pay $500 each to fund the whole thing. The whole club. Yeah, because that's, duh, right. So.

Why don't you just call up Pete? I feel like he's got that on the ashtray. Because Pete, he does, but Pete doesn't like this thing. Pete's the opposite. Pete believes that we are Satanist. because what he says, and this is the interesting thing. He believes Club of Rome or saintness. Well, anybody...

That's the pot calling the kettle fucking black. Yeah, well, he says, he thinks... Well, Greta Thunberg could be the Antichrist, he says, right? I mean, it's a poor little thing. But the idea is he believes that the object of the game here is for a few humans to be Christ-like and transcend to the next level. And what happens to all of us? It kind of doesn't matter.

But as long as a few of us transcend, they've leveled up. That's why his book is called From Zero to One, That You Want to Exist One Order of Magnitude Above We're the Larval Stage, right? We're the larva, and they're the ones that sprout the wings. And if we larva are busy saying, hey, Peter, you shouldn't have a trillion dollars. You should only have a few billion. We want some resources here. We're going to spread some shit around, and we're going to give some money.

people in Africa so they don't die of Ebola and the Ebola doesn't come here and kill us too and all that. He would say, no, what you're doing by taking his trillions away, by reducing his ability to accumulate trillions, we're like dragging him back down into the, he was just about to get to ascend. With money. That's how he's measuring it. Money in tech. That's how you do it. you know Doug I'm a very very moderate guy and I think it's very conducive to being able to do this job yeah so in doing it I talked to fellow moderate people and then I also talk to people who want to give an issue or a lot of different issues maybe on one spectrum or the other and I'm always trying to see like well could you see it this way or devil's advocates see it that way or whatever and to me

I mean I just I guess it would be way too simple of a solution but a perfect world for me would be guys like you going into meetings, you know, that we can all get the minutes on out here or see with guys that, I don't know, fucking ExxonMobil or something like that. And being able to say like, okay, I think this, I think this, let's go there. I've tried that one. Well, there was a time before I was as out of the closet as a whatever the hell I am, these psychedelic hippie thinker. You had to come out of the closet for that.

Well, I mean, before it became, I was a little bit, actually, I kind of started out like that. I started out in the rave scene. That was my first books were on rave, so it was known. But I wrote some books on sort of the business of technology saying how the, in the original dot-com era, how these companies were going to fuck themselves over by going for growth and losing community and losing the kind of the real spirit of work. You were ahead of the curve on that big time. Yeah, I was like, yeah, 95, 96.

I was like, oh, no, this is the wrong way. Go back, go back. So they would invite me in. I mean, this is the reason I have money. I mean, not, I don't have Joe Rogan money, but I have money to pay for my podcast, you know? I know, that's the sad thing. I can afford.

I think a lot of us don't have Joe Rogan money. I know. But you at least have a profit of it. I have money to pay for my podcast. It's a kind of funny thing. That's success. But you know, but it's in a weird way, if you're doing it, the podcast for the, you know, to help the world, whatever, then it's fine. As long as I can fund it somehow, I'm teaching, whatever.

But they would invite me to do talks and things. I've talked like, you know, Pepsi and big companies and Uber, Facebook, Google. And I feel like they invite me partly as entertainment. or to check a box. In a way, you know, we can almost, I used to think it was like I used to call myself an intellectual dominatrix. Intellectual dominatrix. Like, thank you, sir, may I have another.

Like, I'll tell them about how are you fucking up the, you know, the minds of the children with your social media and why are you using an algorithm on a 10-year-old to make them, you know, it's like bad stuff. You're being bad, you're being bad. And then I realized that in some ways, having me there, it kind of helped them feel that was their that was their penance yeah that's a good way to put it that was their penance right enough i pulling up eyes wide shut this isn't what the initiation the club of rome look like right sadly no it was a zoom and they they weren't wearing mass and shit no but there was three or four

of the new ones there and they welcomed us and their little you know the little icon they go no no there's a icon if you ever use zoom it's i don't use zoom ever but you know what it is probably not no it's you talk to other people on the computer with it. Oh, I know what's the picture. Yeah, yeah. And then they can hit little buttons to like make applause or hearts or whatever. And you get a little applause on each other. The people that invented this in 68 if they were still alive would be like, what the fuck has

happened to us with falling so far? Yeah. No. They, I mean, it was sweet. I mean, the sad thing is in 68, 71, whenever when they came out with that thing, it was so widely ridiculed. Just like, you know, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. it to people didn't um they didn't understand that the kind of the whole planet is one big system that

you can't just do something in one place and have it not right impact other things right now you were saying early on in our conversation you were mentioning how there were a lot of different types of predictions that people associated with club of rome made and say the early 70s that then ended up being correct but also worse than they said by say 2000 2010 what are what are some of those things? Oh, the annual temperature increase, the condition of the ocean, the salinization, the pH of the ocean, ocean temperature, the size of north and south poles, the rising water, the spread of certain diseases. And it's interesting because you can look at those metrics, then you can talk to like one of the

like a real pro-tech utopian kind of guy and they'll say well yeah but to actually look at the annual rate of death from such and such diseases that's down yeah you know there's certain metrics that you can say I mean I can walk around New York and there's way less chance than me getting killed than when I was a kid in spite of the Trump says it's the worst and there's blood in the streets It's not like it was in the 70s. No, U.S. cities are safe and they're getting safer all the time. I mean, there's medical stuff we can do. I mean, our cancer rates are high, but our chemotherapies are better.

There's a lot of things. They're better? I think we got better at chemo. You think we got better at that? Yeah. I think there's like there's chemos that don't even make people, you know, as awful. You used to be on chemo. It would just be awful.

How many years have we had chemo? What? I never even looked this up. Was it 50, 60 years maybe? something like that. We can check it, Difa from all. I apologize. But like, you know, it's such a nasty thing. And obviously it's a nasty disease, but you got to wonder, 80 years. It's even longer. August, 1942 at Yale University when the physicians first did it. So I guess it probably went more mainstream in the next 10, 20 years after that. But either way, it's like, you got to

think they got some better shit than that that they're just not releasing. I really wonder that. Because it's like, look at all the, look at all the scientific achievements we've done since 1942. You're telling me, like, one of the number one killers of human beings, we're still using the same kind of treatment, even if it's more improved. Yeah, well, the, the, I may not to get whatever new agey or even Robert Kennedy on you, but there's other ways, you know, there's other ways. That's part of why we're so concerned about rainforests going on.

away is that there's a lot of plants and things in the rainforest that we don't know how to use, that some people there do, and that the people there will tell you, and we don't know they have, we don't know, I only know 5,000, you know, plants here. We're still learning more. We're talking, you know, we're talking to more plants to find out what they do and what they can treat. And the way that they treat them, and it's just a different, holistic kind of, uh, uh, I don't know what to call it. Any word you use is, um, gets like energetic whatever no i know what you mean we've talked about it with different people on the show like there's a phrase they have down there in in the amazon where they're like there's a sap

for that instead of an app for that right you know what i mean because i i would imagine you spent some time down there i only went down there for two weeks one time but like you talk to the people who have lived there all their life and are healthy as an ox and everything and they go through oh you can use this for that or that for this and then it'll just take it off bandage of wounds real quick you're like something's going on there Right. And there's stuff, I mean, and this is where, you know, scientists bless their hearts, they're sometimes slow on the uptake, like the gut biome. It wasn't acknowledged till really recently. And there's more of them than there are of us. You know, it's like, well, now we're just coming to understand the jet lag is more your gut biome than you. Because there's all these bacteria, they're so photosensitive, you know, or circadian. Really? And you go and the bacteria are like, wait a minute.

That's what's doing it? A lot of it. Yeah. Can we pull up that, I haven't seen that. Can we pull up that research? That's cool. Yeah, I get bad jetlight. If I can't go to the hotel and take like a 90-minute nap after like, you know, maybe

like a flight to Italy or something like that, like I'm fucked for a couple days. Yeah. Yeah. But it controls a whole lot of stuff though. I mean, our emotions. I mean, they're looking at almost, you know, all this different stuff. Jet lag doesn't just disrupt your sleep. It confuses your gut bacteria.

Here it is. When you cross time zones, your microbiome losing. it's natural rhythm. This microbial jet lag triggers dysbiosis and imbalance of bacteria, often increasing microbes associated with obesity and inflammation. That second inflammation makes so much sense. Yeah, yeah. Oh my God. Inflammation's everything. And now we're finding, I mean, all these diseases that we're calling autoimmune diseases, you know, a lot of them were tracing back to like a response to a bacteria that we didn't know how to deal with. Or you get all this dysbiosis and you're sitting there with the wrong bacteria and you're, I mean, wrong as a

strong word, but wrong bacteria for the human metabolism in your belly all the time. Eventually, you know, you're some gland or whatever is going to try to kick in, fight that thing. Yeah. And it's, I think I heard Dr. Amman say this once and it always stuck with me. He's like, the really shitty thing is like when you walk down the street and you walk past all these great restaurants that are usually run by great people, run a great business, trying to give you great food, through no fault of their own, they're all trying to kill you because of all the shit in the food specifically here in America. Yeah.

Like we just got back from Italy again and like, you know, you can't eat into gluttony there and not gain weight, but it's amazing when you go there for a week or whatever and you have a good time, you fuck around, you eat whatever you want. Maybe you gain a little weight, but you feel amazing every day. And you're like, how does that, if I ate this in America, I'd be, I get worse hangovers from food than I do from alcohol. It's wild. Those kids, I'll tell you, there's farm kids in South Dakota.

They came to me and they said when they realized that the, all this stuff was right was they eat the same foods at college and they eat at home. But when they're in college, they get fat and they feel sick. It's like same exact thing, same portions and they're like, oh, because the shit they're getting is packaged on trucks from the worst pink meat, whatever factories. I found out at college, I never looked into this, but a couple people had told me the first year when I was at school where we all ate out of like the cafeteria. there that the food there they would naturally pack with laxatives and then it made sense to me because

I was shitting all the I mean I shit all the time in general I'm pretty healthy but like in an unhealthy way I was shitting all the time freshman year and I'm like oh it just must be the party in God they used to do that to soldiers I know that in the army I didn't know they would do that in college they did that to soldiers to make them shit yeah salt Peter keep their food though you know what I mean like so they're already rationing out in the I mean but like they're already rationing food they're not getting enough Yeah, but they're not getting fiber. Oh, that's true. Yeah.

I don't know. They stop. Those MREs aren't great. Yeah. But, you know, you obviously, you've been talking about some of the people, you know, but some of your backstory is kind of cool because you alluded to it already. You came up in like the cyberpunk movement and everything. Yeah.

You liked raves and things like that. How'd you end up like writing about like the future of like dystopian tech? Like how did that become like, ooh, this is my focus. Here's how I'm going to predict stuff. and as we said earlier, like you've predicted some things with actors. Partly by being more utopian about it. I mean, I was a theater kid originally. I was directing theater.

No kidding. And I got really sick of theater, partly because I got tired of working with actors. I was just like, if you want to get a fucking psychotherapist, just go do that. Let's work on a play here, not your childhood trauma or whatever. And I understand they're using their sense memory and whatever. It's like, you do that at home. Yeah, you do that at home. Learn the lines in the play.

Can we just try that for once? You're preaching to his choir over here. But there was that. And also that the audiences were like so friggin' elite. It was like so expensive. I was doing plays in California. And even at the time, it was like $60, $70 to see a play called Three Penny Opera, right? About, you know, saw him this little lefty Marxist kid doing, you know, plays for rich, you know,

the rich, rich kind of, you know, blue hairs. And I was like, oh, this is not going to work. And just as that was happening, the internet was, it was before the internet, computers were starting. And my most psychedelic friends from college, I went to Princeton in, right here in New Jersey. It's a little flex right there, aren't there? Well, no, it's actually shame. Shame. I think of it as shame.

What do you think Princeton shame? Because it's like elitist, you know. Okay, I respect that. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, and it's so hoity there. And when I went, it was like Southern Rock Confederate flag kind of. Oh, Prep School.

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And this was like Reagan, young Republican era. It was a dark time. We were, we were, but we were married tripsters. and like three or four of them were calling me and saying that they're moving to California to become like to be computer programmers and I'm like computer programmer

like the people I knew as computer programmers were like pocket protector wearing you know geek guys from high school and I'm like why are grateful deadheads and psychedelic people and Brian Eno listeners and all these weird the weirdest most psychedelic people I know going there to do that So I went out to San Francisco and started spending time with them.

And they were like working at Intel and Northrop Grumman and Apple and whatever during the day. And at night they're going to Oakland and scraping the peyote buds off cactuses and tripping balls at night. In O-Town. Yeah. Rendering like fractals on sun micro, and then projecting the fractals at raves and dead shows and all. And I was like, oh, fuck, something's happening here, right? So I got really interested in the crossover between psychedelic culture and cyberculture and realizing that these psychedelic heads of San Francisco were taking originally a war technology,

you know, computers, and turning it into a consciousness expansion, weird-ass thing. Consciousness expansion. Yeah, like, you know, brain machines and fractals and 120 beat-per-minute music to imitate the fetal heart. I mean, a rave was originally meant as a spiritual union, like a thousand people in a field and have them dance. It was kind of like the original Burning Man thing. We modeled on what was called the acid tests, which were these psychedelic parties they had, and Ken Kesey and Grateful Dead, they'd go in a barn and have weird music and trip.

So all these kids, taking a drug-like ecstasy, trying to commune together and talk to the aliens or elevate. It was real sweet, optimistic, silly, but very pro-human, very heart-pro-human. Yeah, very heart-based. You know, we're going to use the technology to realize a new collective human organism. And I was excited by what they were doing. A human organism, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Human, grounded, dancing, it's us. You know, in sync together. There was something with a large group of people dancing together where you're not. No longer, it used to be when you went to a dance, you went, maybe today too, you went to find a girl, right? And try to pick somebody up or it was like, and they were, clubs were very coke, kind of coke and alcohol oriented. You know, am I rich enough? Am I hot enough? Who am I going home with?

It was very strategic. And the rave was you're just dancing with everybody at once. And one big, and you're on E. you really you're thinking you're thinking different about about about love and society had you ever done that before ecstasy before you went out and did raves in california yeah yeah yeah when i was 10 well it wasn't it wasn't he's like 12 sorry well no but we did as i mean we were doing acid at college acid was the was the easy thing to get at that the easiest thing of the things and i did ecstasy a little bit before that. I was more of an acid person. What, what about acid?

Like, what about it? Drew it drew it to you. I feel like it asks nothing of you. It asks nothing to you. Of the psychedelics? I mean, there are some even, acid is just like, this is you. Here you are. Here you are. This is it. You know, it was more like a mirror. You're going to get whatever, wherever you're, wherever you're, you're set and saying, this is it. It's like mushrooms are like, connect to the earth. The earth planet needs you. We're weeping. We're have compassion.

You know, ecstasy is love. You have to, you know, open your heart. They're these sort of agendas to them. And I always felt that acid was just like, pshh. Right in front of you. Right. Yeah. Here you are.

Interesting. Here you are. It's an interesting. It's an interesting. It's an interesting one. It's an interesting one. But anyway, so I'm meeting those people. and I'm starting to write articles about what they're doing.

Are you still in college at this point or is this right after you leave? After college, I went to college, I went to grad school, I went to Cal Arts, California Institute of the Arts in theater, and I went to American Film Institute in film. Oh, wow. Yeah, I didn't like film though in the end. I like theater because it's live film. Kept feeling like each stage of the process in film, you're getting further and further away from the life of it. Interesting. Editing and compromises.

and all that. And with a play, it's like every night it's new. You have to live it. Yeah. Yeah, every night it's new. And it feels like, you know, I used to say it's like directing a play, it's kind of like brushing a woman's hair, like you, because you run the whole thing. And they say, oh, it's not working right there. So how do we get through, you know, until you get the whole. And then by the end, you can see the whole two-hour thing. Yeah. You've made it work. So it feels natural. Deep here's written multiple movie scripts and then also a play that's still continue and it's run soon at a new theater. Yeah, Sacco and Van Zetti are dead.

It's a satire of Sacco and Van Zetti. Yeah, you'd like it as fucking, I'm gonna watch it. I'm gonna go. Yeah. But like, how do you feel about that description of the... I like that about the women's hair brushing it, like you're getting the knots out so that it's nice and smooth. Right.

You find out where everything connects to everything else, you know? It's like, until you're there and then you go, we're going to have to change this in order for that to work. You know, whereas with a movie, you don't... You can fake. it. You can make it all fit, but you've never really, you don't really do it. I mean, it's just, it's just a different taste. No, I think it's a great way to point it out too. And I think that it really depends who's making it. Like if you are, I mean, you'll see like Tarantino will do a lot

of these long dialogue scenes, right? And you'll read about some of them after. And there's two different ways it happens. Either one is like they have to cut a lot together and they're filming it over seven days or something like that. And others, maybe they film it over seven days, but he just does take after take after take and a lot breathes. Right. Or you're a Christopher guest in those movies he does. Those are the

sort of improvised movies. Or what was that thing? It was that really sad, horrible thing on like Netflix where they shot these giant scenes about this kid that kills somebody. Oh, adolescence? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah. I mean, and the the

the tour to force. I guess of that is they did these like 15 minute scenes. It's crazy. They just play them out. And you're like, they really, to work to get the whole thing. It's not just the shot. It's the, it's to be there.

But anyway, I got sick of theater because of elitism of it. And then the internet was happening. So I went and started writing these stories about virtual reality and there's new like hacker clubs and, you know. Hacker clubs. You know, like people getting together and just hacking, making games, sharing things. It was all communal. Everything was free. You made software, but it was called shareware. You'd make software and put it on a disc and go on your bus or your high school and share

it with other people. The idea was, how are we all going to communicate? So the early internet was like a rave. And like you made it free. It was DIY. And we're all just trying to build technologies to promote this sort of new human thing. And so as I was exploring that and doing journalism about companies that were giving, they were all giving drug test warnings to their employees because they needed psychedelic people to do. They all knew they had psychedelic heads building their stuff because psychedelic people were used to imagining realities, like, were used to hallucinating things that didn't exist. There was no internet. There was new, how to imagine, what would hyperspace look like? What is hypertext? How do you navigate these realms?

was what would an interface look like to let people surf through information? So it was that. So then I became friends with Timothy Leary, who maybe you're, people don't know. He was a 1960s Harvard professor who gave graduate students acid in these parties and gotten all this trouble. And he became like the high priest of LSD, you know, Nixon's public enemy number one in 1970. Yeah, we've had a few people on time. There was another guy called Terrence McKenna I was friends with.

He was into more, you know, mushrooms and DMT and all. And they, and there was a big magazine called Mando 2000. Mando 2000? Yeah, that was a round man. Were they afraid of Y2K over there? No, no, it was before people worried about that one. But yeah, so there was a psychedelic culture that was mixed with the internet culture. So I was kind of part of that hope, but they saw me, because I'm this like New York,

Ivy League educated journalist dude, they saw me as the cynic. The cynic. Yeah. So I'm writing these articles, right. I'm writing these articles that my New York people and the magazines I'm writing them for think that I'm like, it's crazy West Coast utopian. And the people who are living it are like, why are you being so mean and negative about everything we're doing?

And it's kind of funny because that meant I was doing the right job, right? I'm just saying, what if? What if? What if nothing else, I mean, I used to get my book, my first book on the internet, I wrote it in 1991 and it got canceled in 1992 because my publisher thought the internet would be over by 1993 when it was supposed to come out. How many people were like this is the biggest, like, joke ever? CB radio, they said.

It's like CB in the letter. They said, yeah, it's going to be like CB radio and we looked and it lasted about 18 months and it's not in the right time scale for a book. I know hindsight's 2020. I understand it's that way with everything. But that is one I look at and I go, you mean to tell me that a bunch of really smart people were looking at something where people around the world would be able to just plug in a computer and connect to, you know, someone in Montana could hypothetically connect to someone in Paris

for the first time ever. and that wasn't going to be used or mass adopted? What were the big arguments back then where they were saying no way? Didn't make money. They did a study in 1994. I don't think you can find it. Where they found out that the average internet connected home

was watching nine hours less television a week. And that's when they went, oh, fuck, this sucks. Because the internet had no ads. The internet had no way to make money back then. They didn't think, like, let's put ads on there? They did. But you had to sign. an agreement when you went on the internet saying you wouldn't use it for commercial purposes

because it was all paid for by the government and universities. It was a research thing. Didn't DARPA invented or some shit? Yeah. I mean, originally, and then they turned it over to the public, but as an educational kind of a thing, not as, and remember, when the first ads went up, I mean, there was a few moments when that's when I realized, oh, fuck, this is going. It's going to go the wrong way. Funny, this guy, Mark Andreessen, he's this big famous guy now, Billy and whatever. He took, there was this something called Mozilla, one of the first web browsers. And he did a version of Mozilla, which was a public free shareware app. He did a version called Netscape. And he, he did Netscape as a private company. And they did an IPO and made a zillion dollars. The day that

Netscape had its IPO was the same day that Jerry Garcia, the guitarist of the Grateful Dead, died. And I always thought that it's like, oh, this is the moment that we're going to really leave the 60s part of the internet behind and move into this other thing. That's interesting. And it was right around them. We started to do ads and all that when I started to say, oh, we've got a choice here. We can either go this sort of wired magazine business direction with the net. But it's going to be a problem because if we do, and this was where I was very present. I mean, this is where I deserve my whatever, if I get it.

I'm giving it to you. Thank you. That if we go down that road, instead of giving technology to people to let them realize a wild new, collective, creative, possible human existence, we're going to be using technology on people to increase their predictability. right once you're betting on a technology you don't want the wildest possibilities to happen once you're betting on something what do you want the highest probability of your outcome so we use technology on people to control their behavior we become the product we became the product holy shit what a call yeah and it was again i was like don't do it and i wrote about in the end of this book called coercion why we listen to what they say i said we're taking all the techniques of 20 century advertising we're about to port it into the this new landscape, only the new landscape is not made of the real world. At least in the real world, you have the real world and advertisements in it. Now we're going to construct a world where the very

landscape is fabricated to be an advertisement, to be mind control. And I don't know if human beings will be able to maintain their coherence if they're living in that. Now, when you say maintain their coherence, what do you mean? Love each other. In the end. Yeah. That's kind of where I thought you were going to start. They're going to do everything.

We see it now. Yeah. Because if everything is a one or a zero, yes or no, before or an after, an if or then, we're essentially disconnected. There's no more continuity. It's like, you know, it's at 44,000, you know, 44,000 hertz, but it's still. And you can train minds, you know, you can. Yeah.

slowly, it's not like, it's like boiling a frog. It's not like you suddenly blare someone and, and light them on fire with gasoline. I mean, they could do that too if someone's that unaware, but like that's not really how it's done. It's one piece and then two pieces and then three pieces and then four and then five. And suddenly, whatever the issue is, you know, the opposite end of that will be something you don't see. And I've tested, like, I'm one of these people I love to test my algorithms over time, so I'll go do like crazy shit on there and be like, okay, I've had a bunch of I've had a bunch of tweets about people talking about Roe v. Wade and a lot of the people talking about are the people who are like against this being overturned or something. Now I'm going to go to,

I'm going to start at this person's page who's really pro life, scroll through all their tweets, see how it changes my algorithm, like a few tweets on there, see what I see the next thing. And you can literally see like the robot shift. And I'm like, oh my God, if I were reading this all day, I would agree with this 100%. If I were reading this all day, I'd agree. That is not, we have never had anything even remotely close to that in humanity. And it does, you know, it feels like we haven't made, I don't want to be a cynic on it, but it feels like we haven't made any real progress on learning how to deal with that.

Right. I mean, because we never really did. I mean, it's funny. In the old days, media literacy used to be being able to deconstruct the advertisement on TV. Right. That's what they taught us about, you know, that the advertiser's not your friend. They want you to buy something. They don't want you to be satisfied.

I mean, and that was sort of an easy landscape. I used to say, like, you know, who's the best customer for a blue jeans commercial, right? Is it, because the blue jeans commercial basically says all of them, one way or another, buy these jeans and you will get laid. Right. So who's the ideal customer for that? Is it someone who's sitting on a couch with his girlfriend? No. Someone who's sitting on the couch alone with potato chips.

You don't, you want the person not to be getting laid. Otherwise, they won't buy the jeans. So the advertisers don't want us getting laid. That means they're not our friends. It's sort of the simplest way to think it. Like from a group think scenario in the sense that it's not what you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is that it's not like there's one person at the top of a company saying we need to fuck all these people over. It's more like, oh, this type of ad worked.

And then that team reports to that team in the company that says this work because these are the people buying it. And then that team reports to another team who handles that and says, therefore, we're going to do more of this because they're trying to get profitability. And the end result is they're convincing people not to fuck. Right. Right. Or making them just making them pathetic. But and now there's algorithms doing it using techniques that we don't even know for reasons we don't even know. We don't even care. They're just like, like, oh, look, this worked on Doug. Why don't you try it on yours?

Oh, it's working on my guy. Try it on her. Oh, if I adapt it like that, it seems to work better on her. Oh, try that too. And there are millions of them all sharing, oh, this works, this works. And it's not, it's for what? Is it going to do whatever we program them to do, right? Get him to buy this thing by whatever means necessary.

They don't care what it's doing to our psyche or anything else, which is why. I mean, now it's funny. week in New York that's called the Summer of Ludd. You heard of this? You know what Luddites are? Luddites are people. They're not against technology.

Luddites are people who don't want technology to be used to... Like the Amish. Well, no, they can be modern. I mean, you can be a Luddite using cell phones and shit. I mean, but they have the same Amish or Amish sensibility that let's only adopt a technology once we understand that it's not hurting us. Right. Right.

But the Luddite distinction was technologies that distances us from each other. Technologies that make us hate each other and make it more difficult for us to work together are against us. Technologies that bring us together are good. Technologies that are used to hurt people and disempower people are bad. Technologies that empower people are good. So that was the thing. But it's Luddite.

It's this week in New York. And it's really interesting to see there's all these kids who, it's a movement that started like about five years ago in high schools that these kids are, they turn in in their smartphones for flip phones or not using phones at all. They're like hanging out during breaks and like reading, walking in nature. And I saw this girl speak on a panel that's just yesterday. And she's like, well, the weird thing, the weirdest thing about giving up my, um, smartphone, because she's only got a flip phone now, she was walking in New York a year or so ago,

and she got lost. And she said, her first feeling on getting lost was, oh, no, I'm lost, but then all of a sudden the city changed. And the whole city became this labyrinth of possibility that she could go anywhere. And she realized that getting lost was the best feeling she ever had. I used to do that. When I was a kid, I'd get on my bike and go to a neighborhood I don't know. and you try to get lost. I've always, and it's an easy observation of spot now when you talk to people for a long time, but to me, the generation or the subset of generations

born between 1990 and 1998 are the most interesting people to talk to in the current digital age, which I'm in smack in the middle of that, and so is deep, because we are the last people who in the context of growing up in some way, knew the world where there wasn't staring at the phone, you went outside and played, you didn't have GPS everywhere. And then I say, like, because the iPhone came out in 07, it started to catch on like real adoption in like 08. So like, think about that, 1998, you're 10 years old at that point. You've had 10 years where you're an infant and a kid and a child

grown up running and playing. And then after that, it's hard to put into words. It's very hard to explain in words and I'm definitely not going to do a good job. But when I'm talking to a kid born in 2000, 2001, there's a difference. Oh, yeah. There is a real difference on like, not even necessarily like worldview, but how they look at the world, if that makes sense. You know what I mean? And, you know, we haven't even talked about like COVID and what that did for development

and stuff. We can get into that later. But these are the kinds of things. I don't know if we're going to understand the downstream effect of what I'm talking about on society and like what that generation does as it comes of age and continues to get a more powerful place in society, we're not going to know that for 30, 40 years with the effects are. And given those effects, they might not be in a position to find out. Yeah.

Well, that's that's the dark view, but I mean, something else. At the same time, I mean, I'm living in the East Village now. and I feel like it's partly because of it's partly nihilism but they are out. Gen Z is out on the street every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday night. Yeah, we're locked up in high school, you know. Right. They're out. I mean, and not that it's necessarily good.

They are drinking. They're smoking. They're fucking, I hope. Yeah. I hope they're all the stats say they're not fucking, but they look to me like they're fucking. Good. They're there. And the guys, the guys, there's this like Gen Z guy type now, which is sort of like a

1970s porn look. I don't know if you've seen it. They got like a mustache and a mullet and the buttoned and shirt and the chains and stuff. And I'm like, whatever that is. Good. Good. They're doing, they're just like, there's like effort.

You know, I, it's like, I was always depressed when I would see like kids out. in the village on a on a Saturday night and the girl is like dressed to the tea and the guy's just like jeez and t-shirt and it's like but now there's just like guys you're trying you know what I mean there's like a thing it just feels like you know it's like when you see those 70s movies and the guys have the those shirts or the things and it's like we used to laugh at it because I was I was in high school in the 70s but I kind of admire it now you know the just that attention that that that I want to look good. I want to feel sexy.

It's good to see that like, again, a generation that was like locked up during really formative years is interested in going out and experiencing the world. And I don't think sociologically we have ever seen a generation like Gen Z. They got a little bit of everything there. You know what I mean? They got on, I'm talking on the spectrums of like you can go from like people that are furries to people that like Nick Fuentes and everything in between. Right.

is really, really strange in that generation. Right. But they're interesting. They're interesting. And I am seeing like, it's what I'm thinking. When this, you know, summer of Ludd that they're doing in Tompkins Square Park, I mean, I'm looking around. I mean, I had.

Can we pull this up, D, Steve? Summer of Ludd, L-U-D-D. God knows how much they're going to be online with it, right? Because it's the summer they're letting. Well, someone's taking a video. I'm sure. Yeah. But they, some students of mine did.

a, I mean, this is the kind of thing they're doing. They did a curse on Palantir. Love that. Right? And they have a zine. They have a zine. They made a little zine that they're handing out. They're doing like spells and shit?

Yeah. Which is a spell, a collective spell to like curse Palantir. It's really funny. Yeah, look at this. That even looks like very late 60s woodstocky, you know? I can like feel a Jimmy Hendrish guitar in the background. It's the summer. of Ludd in New York City, this is from Dr. Philip Fisher, with one new special protests, Ludd

from June 28th through July 5th, Tompkin Square Park host lectures and demonstrations. Free lunch included spanning everything from a Luddite history lesson to the perils of Luddite Riz and dating apps. I take up the Luddite revival in my forthcoming book I expected to become as consequential as social movement this century as it was in the 1800s, and a warning of the economic turmoil set to unfold over the next few years. You can already hear it in the booing by college graduates across the country loud and clear. Right. You know,

when people are doing their graduation speeches, the tech bros or the college presidents, whenever they mention AI, everybody booes. Now, that is just, it's really, that's the same thing as Club of Rome.

Just Club of Rome is like student government doing it. It's like the, the boring, ex-government-y, oh, I think the way to solve this is to, we're going to publish, a white paper that shows the thing. And I'm like, but that's part of why they have me,

because they know it's like white papers, oh, it's very sweet, but nobody's going to read your paper. And if they do read your paper, they're just going to stick it in Claude. You know, they're not read it anyway. That's right. But this, like Summer of Ludd, but the beauty of a a $10,000 a year budgeted club of Rome that's trying to figure out what's going on is that the smart kids who are at something like that, when they're doing their speeches and their lectures and their working groups and all, they're informed by that stuff. So they can say, here's why we don't want an AI company deciding how the land is used in our town. Yeah. And that's a big thing because they're being given authority over the water.

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if that's where your stock is, then you want that AI company to do well, even if some kids of a different race in some southern town are going to suffer. It's like, it's their problem. They're not rich. You don't have to see it, especially. It's over there. It's over there. I don't got to look at it.

I just look at it. But it's interesting. We used to only do this stuff. to people on reservations. You know? Yeah. At least we gave them casinos, though, you know? These people are just getting fucked and no water.

Right. No water. No casino. And Doug, it's, we can go to that now because it's obviously a soup de jour. Not casinos, but the data centers thing and stuff like that that you're talking about because it's a soup de jour topic right now because you see so many of them popping up out of nowhere. And like two things.

I understand anytime any new technology has ever come out, human race has always had a subset of people that are very, very afraid of it and dumer it, and then, you know, we turn out okay. It doesn't mean that every single time it's going to turn out fucking okay. And also this time with AI, this is the first time we're building technology that may be able to think for itself and I think us, which is certainly new territory. So it is a new normal in that way or in normal, if you want to say. The second thing is, I understand that you want, like even looking at it from an American-centric standpoint, you want to be at the front of the race and at the forefront of the world and be able to win and have the best tech. I get that. And in theory, I'm cool with like if

someone's going to do really well with it, if we can do the best, great. But to me, when you do that at the expense of thinking about all your people at a time where the wealth gap is at unbelievable, unprecedented levels, every chart can back that on that. And when you do it with companies that have proven time and time again to not care about fellow humanity, whether it be everything from Google to Palantir or whatever, who's going to be the tenants at these places. Yeah, I think everyone out there, including myself, who's like, hey, let's slow down with this and let the people have a say in this matter. It certainly has a good argument.

What do you think? Yeah. I mean, it's funny. It was Sam Altman that went to government and said, oh, we're in a race with China. you know and that was why we got to deregulate this stuff because we're in a race with china but the thing i would have said to him is you know since when has being first necessarily been the best america we were the first at having social media look how good that did for us you know china was second in social media but they went look we're going to do this another way i mean in chinese

ticot as you know is like oh the kids get educated yeah it's like it's like it's like the one good benefit of communism. They're like, we can turn this off at 9 o'clock and you watch math videos instead of tidies. Right. And what's it, what's it optimized for? It's optimized for that. And to say that it's totalitarian

to not have kids watching God knows what at night, Kardashians at night, is not totalitarianism. That's raising children. So there's the first mover advantage, I kind of question. The interesting thing is, you're right that when we say, oh, we got writing now.

And the ancient Greeks, when they got writing, Aristotle was going, oh, no, people are going to lose their memories. They were talking about their worry about what will the impact be of the technology. And some people say, we're going to get books and be smart. And other people said, no, we're going to lose our memory. And maybe both happen. With AI, you're right, you've got your doomers and your utopians. a utopian saying, oh, because of AI, we're going to be China, we're going to be able to

upload our brain to the cloud so that when the planet goes, we'll have artificial beings, they're going to have robots, sex slaves, it's going to all be beautiful. And you have other people saying, oh, no, when AI comes, we're all going to be programmed into oblivion, we're all going to do that, what I don't care about, well, this sounds radical, and maybe I don't care about what's going to happen, because the ends don't justify the means. I care about what are we doing right now. Okay.

If you're taking water away from a black child in Alabama in order to feed your data server, it's not right. If you're sending a kid in the Congo into a mine at gunpoint to get the, get the cobalt to make the thing, then the soul of the thing is corrupted from the outset. Yeah. So. The soul of the thing. Yeah. If you can, I send a guy. know it sounds religious or something, but I believe if you, I mean, and this, you know,

this is where the academics actually help, right? My professor thing, I'm a professor at CUNY. All right, there was this guy, Albert Camus. Albert Camus, right. He was a, see, see, see, the, but he wrote in French, yeah. You see, the theater guy. The theater guy knows. Theater people rule. That's virtual. Yeah, all right. We do. Theater people are smart. When you, you can't do theater without learning the history of everything. It's like so funny. Well, at least directors and writers. You have to read everything. But this guy Camus, so he was friends with the French existentialists, like friends with Sartra and all the Marxists and all that. And they were all happy about communism. Oh, it's great.

And then the communists started to make gulags and prison camps and all that. And guys like Sartra and the intellectual left, they said, look, you know, this is part of revolution. that in order to get to the communist utopia, a little pain on the way. 30 million got to die. Stuff that happens, right? And it's part of the process because we got so off course.

And Camus said, dude, this doesn't make sense. That's right. He's like, if you're not doing this in the moment, you're not doing it. Nothing. No amount of, no amount of supposed good on the other side, is worth doing the thing in the moment.

So even if you tell me, like as an effective altruist, they're the new ones who have this belief, the tech bros, that, oh, you have to let this one baby die so these tens of millions of babies live in the future because they're going to have AI? No, no. You will, the only morality you can have is in the moment itself,

in the encounter with the other people in that moment. And part of faith, and this is, you know, Christian or anything, part of faith is believing that doing the right thing in this moment will fractal trickle out to the everything. So no, AI, I think AI is cool. I think AI is cool. It's a cool thing. It could be cool thing. But the idea that we've got to sacrifice the environment, or if you don't believe in the environment, children, you know, if you don't believe in the children, water, if you don't believe in water, a town's authority over its own land. You know, there's something, you don't, there's a way to deploy this.

Oh, deploy it. Yeah, well, it's military. You know, military, love that. There's a way to deploy. Yeah. We can decamp and deploy in ways that don't necessarily hurt people. All right, so you taught this effective altruism thing, though. Yeah.

is a really interesting argument for sure. And yeah, I think a lot of the guys who have argued that are cringe and a lot of times happen to also be sociopaths. We can talk about Stan Altman in a little bit. But like, you've seen the show The Last of Us? You ever watched that? Yeah, I didn't like that they made the mushrooms bad guys. But other than that, it's very cool.

But, you know, spoiler alert out there, so skip the next 30 seconds if you haven't seen it. But there's one point in the show where Pedro Pascal has to make a decision where, where the girl Ellie and the show may have a cure, but for this disease, it's ravaged humanity and rendered most of the population dead and continues to do so and has been going on for a lot of years in the show. And she may have the cure because she's actually immune,

but in order to find that out, they have to kill her to make, you know, some sort of, you know, something that can be passed on to other humans to make them immune and maybe end it. And Pedro Bascow says, fuck that. And then kills all 40 people.

people in the hospital and rescues Ellie and takes her home. Did he make the right decision doing that? Yeah. Yeah. Especially because it's fiction. All right. If it was true, did he make the right decision? Well, if it was true, if it was true, there is no if it was true.

In the end, that feels like a cop out. No, no, there actually is not. Because again, does reality, you can set something up, like a prisoner's dilemma situation. Okay, you're in a prison and here's the game. And this is that it's a setup. So I guess if you say a setup, okay, there's a trolley, you know, and the trolley, you know, do you run over the one person in order to save the people in the trolley? Do you send the trolley off the cliff and whatever?

Those are hard moments, right? And what you're going to do in those moments is probably follow what your heart is telling you to do rather than logic. and which do you think is the right answer or both the heart i'm doing what the heart's saying in that moment we know pedro pascal has a what buber would call an i-thou relationship with that girl he's he sees her as a human being right and these other people in that hospital have dehumanized her right and he sees them as dehumanized agents of they're going to and you could say oh my god you're going to kill 40 people to save one and it's like it's my person i mean now i'm i'm personally i'm more of a pacifist i would probably uh he would have talked him down to death that's i would have been a little bit more

i mean uh i don't know i would try to talk them down but you know god forgive you forgive you for what you're doing and you have to understand that what you're it's not actually going to work because of what you're doing this is not in the long term this is not yeah the solution to the real problem now i'm not saying that you'd be as good with a gun as pedro pascal was in there certainly on some great aim hitting everyone to moan him down i took a gun lesson once and the guy said me at the end he said you were good he said you're a regular john wick that's fucking great okay so but let's say you are half an hour. But in,

but in, what, yeah, his name was Anthony Leiberg. But if you, let's say you were,

you were good with it, all right, you have your 22, you got ultimate reloads and everything. And I'm right up next to him. Right. You're trying to piece him

to death across that hospital and the first security guard who might be a Russian guy or something says, go, go fuck your side. Yeah, okay, yeah.

In that moment, though, this is one of those things where it's like, if you truly are someone who's like, I see, I see that girl as a human being, you don't think, you'd be like, well, fuck it, this piece ain't working.

I don't know. I don't know. That's a good answer. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I feel like I, I mean, someone was going to attack my daughter or something. I feel like I've got the instinct to shoot somebody in the head or do whatever. You know, I mean, in the end, I'm an animal. I got teeth. I got nails.

That's right. Got throwing stars and nun chucks. That's right. You got non-chucks, too. Yeah, I mean, I got the rubber ones because I kept hitting myself in the back of the head with the wood ones. I could not be trusted. They're hard. You're truly ready to try to really Bruce Lee with those things?

Oh, my God. Yeah, no, I stick with the gun. I got them. I got them in high school. I still have them somewhere. Okay. All right, let's not take those out. Yeah.

I believe you with the 22. I feel like you. You got to be apparently. The guy said you got to be really up close with the 22. Yeah. It doesn't have stopping power is what they say. No stopping power on that. We're going to have to go on people in the comments way in there. But, you know, when you're talking about these people who are talking about these things and like the Sam Altman's and stuff, I get really concerned when you hear what's his name, Mo Godot. I think, Dief, who used to be a really high up guy at Google. I think he was on Diary of a CEO's podcast, I want to say recently.

Yeah, okay, where he mentioned he's got this documentary coming out. And I saw this clip on Twitter from that podcast where he was saying that Sam Altman. quoted in the documentaries, I guess saying with like a straight face going, yeah, AI is probably going to end humanity, but we're going to have a lot of fun making cool shit on the way. Yeah, he did say it. It's like, it's only like 80% chance according to him. I think that it ends us. But like what do you see why people out there look at this and go, who the fuck are you, pal?

Like you're the guy holding your finger on the trigger of this thing and that's how you look at it? Like no one elected you even do that. Yeah. Well, the way he would put it is well, humanity was going to end. Anyway, sooner or later. Okay, what gives them that idea? Sooner or later, when is that? Well, you know, because the sun burns out or whatever.

Yeah, and maybe like a million years or something. And maybe we got off the planet by then. And maybe we got off the planet by then. So who died and elected him? And if I was going to bet on anyone getting off the planet kind of thing, I would think it's like the Kogi, you know. They're the ones you do ayahuasca in Colombia or the Buddhist or something, you know, that we'll get there.

through like Monroe Institute astral projection out of body that I just think yeah I think the way I would think an interdimensional travel feels to me more probable than making spaceships that let us go through the universe and not get irradiated and destroy every sperm in our body let's play it this way then let's not think in the lifespan of say like an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos who's trying to do this stuff. And let's say, you know, we're not the immortal generation. 10,000 years. Okay. Yeah.

I think we could, I think there's things that can happen in 10,000 years. There's ways off. But I think the ways off are not going to involve like solid rocket fuel and metal canisters. In 10,000 years, it won't. It'll be something way beyond that. But you don't think it would be the ability for us to literally physically go off? I feel like we'd have that at 10,000 years. Yeah, but I think it'll be more like quantum folding space.

Quantum folding space. You know what I mean? Like, it'll be something. Some weird ass... Get the weird ass... I could tell you we're friends with Terrence McKenna. Like Google... Google figured out.

Google was like experimenting with the very beginnings of proto-quantum type computers. And one of its proto-quantum computers solved this math equation that was supposed to take like 100,000 years to solve. And they were trying to figure out how did it do this? And the only way they can understand it is that the computer got the answer from an adjacent reality, right? From an adjacent reality where the problem had been solved.

Can we Google those things? An adjacent reality? Right. So it's like those are the that's, if you want to, you want to travel first class, you know, it feels like it's going to be,

it's going to be shit like that that's, that we don't quite understand yet, you know, closer to stuff that we're playing with, remote viewing and ESP and we're aliens and what's going on and why are those things moving around, you know, sort of like 3D to 4D.

Once you, if you lived in flat space, you wouldn't understand what's going on on the other side of the page, on the other side of the plane. How did you get there? How did you pop up there? It's like, oh, well, you don't get over in 3. We actually are in 3D. You're thinking like Philip K. Dick.

Yeah, more of that kind of stuff. And some of the stuff we've done is as magical as that. And usually the people who figure those kinds of things out get like the Teslas, you know, And who was that guy that was like balancing rocks and stuff using, this guy did these giant experiment? John Claude Van Dam? No, no. This guy balanced rocks and things and he understood how the pyramids were made.

And it was all about, you know, reversing the, you know, magnetism and gravity. And they could never. And when his things fell, they couldn't get them back up. They didn't know how to do it, even with cranes and all that shit. There's just, I feel like the... I'll see. Deep's looking for that right now. Deep did pull up what you were talking about, though, a second ago, Douglas, just so people

can get into context. Google's quantum AI team, right. Yeah, Google's quantum computer experiments have sparked intense discussions about parallel realities in the multiverse while the computers are simply running highly complex math algorithms, the unprecedented speeds have led some physicists to theorize that the computational workloads are being distributed across alternate realities or dimensions. Yeah. So the Willow chip and the multiverse, I love to find the universe ship and the multiverse hypothesis.

The breakthrough, Google's quantum AI team introduced Willow, a little bit of the 105-cubit processor capable of completing a random circuit sampling benchmarking task in just five minutes. Traditional supercomputers would theoretically take 10 septillion years to complete the same task. The adjacent reality theory. Because the computations explore such a massive number of quantum states so quickly, Hermit Nevin, former head of Google's quantum AI team and other theorists have suggested this performance aligns the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics. The idea proposes the quantum computations actually unfold across parallel realities, meaning the computer is tapping into multiple versions of reality finest solutions.

So, Douglas, this actually... Is that crazy? It's crazy, but this reminds me in something. So an old friend of mine, this guy, Marcelo Cabrera, remind me to check, just make sure he's cool with me saying his name, Dief. But I remember, I want to say it was early January 2018. I'm going for a walk with him in Central Park, like midday. It was snowy out. I'm wearing, you know, I was a very, I've worked on Wall Street at the time where I was making

about 65K a year and I had to wear a Joseph A bank suit and pretend it was something better. So I'm like wearing these shitty shoes that are getting wet. I'm freezing. But Marcello's the kind of guy that, you know, if I could describe him in a cartoon way, he's the kind of guy that maybe sometimes would get a call from someone that says be at this bench at, you know, 12.05 tomorrow. And when he's there, they pick him up. They put a bag over his head, drive him six hours away.

He saw some fucking computational thing somewhere. They hand him a bag of money. They put the bag back on his head driving back to the bench and that's that. Really fucking sharp guy. And so we were talking about the whole blockchain revolution at the time because people were just tossing blockchain as a keyword on everything. This is right when the crypto market was like starting to crash after the first big boom there in 2017.

And he was like, this blockchain stuff, you know, it's interesting. But if you get to the quantum, the quantum, the quantum. Because way beyond it. And he was explaining, I don't remember 6, 8, 48, whatever it was, but he was blown my mind explaining how we could be in a reality where a country has already had quantum and has already effectively hacked all this stuff and therefore hacked reality and we're not even living in the space that we think we're living in anymore because something is actually controlling the world and it might not even be a country.

It could be like some unelected fucking government. And I just remember sitting there going, wow, we've lost him like he's crazy. And then I saw all some of the stuff play out, and I'm like, maybe he's not crazy. Right. I mean, it's a matter of figuring out what it is. So there's this guy, Nick Land, who's like a real darling of the far right guys, like Peter Thiel and Mosquitoly. They love Nick Land. He's this theorist.

And he says that capitalism itself is a strange attractor from the future drawing us toward it. That capitalism is like this living thing. And that it's inevitable that we're going to go into there. And that's why they're promoting these kind of racist, hierarchical things. Because it's like they want to be the ultimate capitalists. You think it's racist what they're proposing? Yeah. Well, it's a kind of survival of the fittest eugenic thing.

Yeah, in the end, it's, it's... Do you think that's their intention or you think it's more like... No, it's just part of it. You think it's just a downstream part of it? Yeah, part of being... But doesn't that assume then that if we assume that that's a part of, and trust me, I'm no fan of Peatiel and guys who think in endgenics, but if we're assuming that what they're doing is racist, we're therefore assuming that therefore there are races that are less superior to other races? Like, I don't buy into that at all. In their model.

But what's to, have they ever said that? Yeah. In so many words. In so many words. I mean, and you, and it's partly. I mean, if you're raised under apartheid in South Africa, you know, and when you're a kid, your parents, you know, lock the downstairs and put a cage on the steps before you go up to the bedrooms at night to keep out black people, you know, you're actually afraid are going to come

in storm when you got a helicopter in the courtyard of the house to escape when you lose control of this place, I think you do get indoctrinated in certain things. You know, it's tricky. Right. Can I, can I pee? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll be right back. You can just keep running it. No, we're good. All right. We're good.

Take your time. All right, we're back now. So you're trying to get more muscles? You're saying, I am. I see the veins popping right there. I'm trying. I'm trying. No, my doctor said he wants me to get to 140. What are you right now? I'm up to 136. All right, 136. Okay. 136.

It's easy to add on muscle when you get into the flow of things. You know what I mean? You like lifting? No, what I'm liking is, and I think I can develop a whole thing. I'm sure someone has. I'm liking like pull-ups and dips and push-ups and then push-ups with weights. There's something about the non, I don't like the clunk. There's something about the clunk that's just like, ugh.

But if I can find ways to, and I'm liking these, I got these, giant rubber bands. I kind of liking that feel better than others. And I've got really this guy, he actually lives out here, was showing me, like if you do them really slow. Oh, yeah.

It's like, it's brutal, but it's like they're great. And I feel like wayless, you know, I'm over 60. I don't want to like rip a ligament or do whatever. Right. You know, and doing like less weight or these kind of these, these stretchy things or even functional weights, like kettlebells and things.

I was just going to ask, so you do some kettlebells. They're amazing. That's what I got instead of the little dumbbells. And it's like, oh, it's a whole different thing. Yeah, Deef got me back into kettlebells last year. I used to do a lot when I was younger and then got away from it. But like, oh, my God. I mean, that's how it's meant to be because it is a combination of a lot of things

depending on how you do your workout. Like if you're working in sets, then it can be a little closer to dumbbells and stuff like that. but it's like functional training, athleticism, high intensity training, and also like strength training and weight training. Right. At the same time, it's unbelievable how much better and more athletic you feel. Like, it's helped me on the heavy bag a ton. Like, moving.

Punching a bag. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes, I love boxing. But like my movement on the bag since going back to kettlebells has improved dramatically, I'd say. It's good stuff. Yeah. Definitely keep hitting that. No, I do that.

I do yoga. And I do a lot of yoga. You do a lot of yoga. Yoga's amazing for you. Well, it's also for core, you know. Absolutely. Huge difference between abs and core. You got to have a, you got to have a strong core to be able to do anything really athletic, for sure.

Yeah, and it's another duh, you know, like when you find your core, you're like, oh. There it is. Oh, I get it. And then it's like core, your core is everywhere. You know, when you're lifting something with your hand, it's like your core is there. But back to what we were saying before the breaks. You were talking about some, yeah, alternate universes. So these other guys you're saying like the teals of the world, they have.

There's not that many of them, but yeah. Yeah, there's not that many. And I think that's the problem. George Carlin, I always say that you had this famous line. It's a big club and you ain't in it. Amazing observation. But like I always say it's a small club and you ain't in it. Like it's a very, very tight club.

And so these guys who are looking at it like they can transcend. I want to come back to that in a minute. But like, you know, you're a same. saying it's at the expense of everyone else and they just don't care. So you were raising the point, and this is interesting because I was having a conversation, my friend, Ty Martin, about this the other day. It's very hard to think about. But like that ultra-capitalism view, right, where someone can be a trillionaire and stuff like that and then just, you know, let everything lie where it is, including like if people, that means people die off because it's too much winner take off. Fuck it.

That's how it's supposed to be. I disagree with that. I don't think it should be like that. While I look at all economic systems and I objectively say, like, yes, capitalism has been the best system proven over time over the other ones. I always say it doesn't mean it's perfect. That also doesn't mean you throw the whole thing out. So I was talking with Ty about like, yeah, I don't really see a good need for someone to be a trillionaire. But at the same time, to require someone to not be a trillionaire would require a governing body to come in and determine that when you get to a certain level of wealth, you're not allowed to have more, which means they could then use this. slippery slope and set that objectively anywhere they want. Like in the Reagan era.

How so in the Reagan era? In the Reagan era, anything you made over like a million dollars was taxed like 80%. Oh yeah, yeah. And Eisenhower was like 90 or something short. Yeah, and Reagan we look back at as if he was some horrible conservative and it's like, no, the tax policy then, they prevented that. They really, once you had over a million, a few million dollars, why did you need more? And they looked at it wasn't, it's not beneficial to the country, to the nation for one person to take that much of its currency and store it away.

So taking a trillion dollars of value and taking it off the table, it doesn't make for a good poker game. Yeah. And there's something about these guys. And I, you know, I've never known any of those dudes personally. Not sure I really want to. But like, there's some crossing point that happens. some day or maybe it happens slowly like a boiling frog where they separate themselves from the average person. And I wrote about those.

There's studies. I mean, when you have a billion dollars, you have less empathy for other people. You wrote about that. Yeah, yeah. There's studies. I quoted them in the last book that once you have that kind of money, it's either because of what you had to do along the way or, you know, and some people theorize it's because you need a kind of sociopathic type personality to get there to begin with. Now, the thing about capitalism that I would say is, who says we should only have one economic system

for all places at all times? It's like, I could say marriage is good. Marriage is cool, but is it the best thing for 11-year-olds? Is it 14-year-olds, 70-year-olds? It's like, does everyone have to get married? Is that the only system of romance that we have? No, there's others. So, like, capitalism is really good.

good if you're trying to grow an economy. It's not really great if you're an economy that's kind of fully grown and is worried about how are we going to manage remaining resources. That's when you might want a commons. And we've had different kinds of economy. Late medieval Europe had a commons. You can use a commons to organize fisheries or a pasture that a lot of different cows are going to use. There's all these different other kinds of things, other kinds of money systems that you can use. Sometimes you want expensive money that's loaned out by a central bank at interest. So all the money we use, we got to payback to the banker more than we borrowed. So our economy has to grow just to keep the bank in business. That's fine for the Goldman Sachs economy.

But are there any others? And could they coexist? Can we have an economy of our little town, how it works? Like we're going to share one lawnmower on our blocks. Yes, exactly. Great point. So there are a bunch of different things. So it's like, like capitalism's great among other things. Yeah. I, so there's a deeper conversation there and I'm not trying to get off and I'm trying to relate it to something else too. So I'm not coping out from that.

But I remember he said it way more eloquently than I can remember it. But like Sebastian Younger, when he wrote the book Tribe, really explored like how humanity began in a way in the sense that we existed in these mathematically smaller groups to where. Or some. Dunbar groups or whatever. Yeah, I think so. Where basically, and I'm not even sure he intended to do this, but he showed that elements of libertarianism and socialism can work below a certain number. And so now you look at it, like think of America. We've got 330, 340 million people here. And think of a smaller country. It's got a million people or something like that. That's not how tribes worked back in the day. They were 100 people, 200 people. Everyone knew each other. They knew what it was. So the idea that some government and some capital in some city of said country, whether it's a million people or 340 million people, that's not how humans were evolved technically to be, which I'm not saying we shouldn't be now. But what I am saying is we have to understand collectively that that's not our natural state.

So however we're going to coexist together and create opportunities for people needs to be like actually, I don't know if the term is like studied or whatever, but you can't just assume we'll figure it out. Right, exactly. That's where this idea of something called anarcho-sindicalism. Anarchosindicalism. Right. It's like anarchism, but syndicated. So the idea is you have these small communities like cabotses and towns that do stuff together. And most human beings really only focus on the few hundred people that are in their thing, but all these little things are

networked with each other. And there are some people that help them communicate. But it's like, we're really good. Oh, we make, you know, we make shoes and our, community us what we do and whatever and that one over there they make beds and that one over there they do farming and we all trade with each other so you have a community of people i mean something i started saying of people when they're talking about alienation and the all these big problems and i'll say you know what if you start with think what are the do you know the first name of the 20 people who are closest to you when you're sleeping at night. The people who are physically,

like when you're sleeping in this, this apartment. I know 10. You know 10 of them. Right. So 10. Because that's, that's your people.

Who's closest to your body when you're sleeping at night? That's interesting. They're the people who are protecting you, right? But they're, there. And it's like, wow. And I thought about that.

And it's like in my building, I know like five or six of the one, but those are, you know, then we're all sleeping together at night. I don't even know. know who they are right through those walls. And it's like, that's your tribe. Whether you realize there or not. They're in proximity. And maybe not your only tribe, but that's kind of where it

starts organismically. If you believe that there's like electromagnetic fields and our hearts and, you know, that you're breathing and co-metabolizing with other people, they're your first unit of, of community. But we have a warped thought of this note, though, now, Douglas. Because It was like right when we were on that break right there, I was texting someone in Hawaii. Yeah. Right? Like,

she's nowhere near here. But that's what we raveers were into. That's who you're talking with. Yeah, but that was the whole rave thing. It's like, oh my God, we're creating a new neural network

of human beings across the planet. We're going to be Gaia's brain. Gaya's brain. Jesus Christ. Remember the Gaia hypothesis? It was this, again, around Club of Rome, you know,

in 1970s, 80s, a guy James... James Lovelock. Yeah. Well, they just invited me. I only learned about it. them, you know. Oh, you didn't know about them? I mean, I knew that they existed, but I just knew the initial, the initial report. I don't like that the club of Rome isn't in Rome. I'm very sketched out by that point. Yeah, I wonder, what does Rome have to do with them anyway? Well, they

started in Rome. They did. Which is the great city on Earth. Oh, because they did like a meeting or something in Rome. I guess they did a meeting in Rome. And now they're in fucking Switzerland with Klaus Schwab. And I'm like, are they? I don't think. You're supposed to notice. I don't think it is. Klaus Schwab is the guy who wants to, that's dark fucking shit. Yeah. No, no, Klaus Schwab is World Bank and that kind of stuff or or World Economic Forum. No, that's dark. Okay. All right. That's a very different thing. Club of Rome are like environmentalists. This guy is like, is like, is like, is like AOC on cocaine. I'm having fun. That guy, it's a different thing. Yeah. But like, but like, I think. I mean, if I found out Club of Rome was evil, I'd, I'd want to know.

You're going to shine the light on the dark. Yeah, but I'll shine the light. Are you going to shine the light? All right, good. No, but they're not. No, they're like little policy wonk sweet. Yeah. Like educators really thinking, how do we promote?

But it's interesting, and I get it, that people who are concerned about the well-being of the planet and its people are the enemies of those who want us to disregard the planet. in the planet and the speedball. Now, here's the dark argument here. And I could see this being a scenario where people are in it and don't even know it, by the way, unless it's two sides playing against the middle while acting like they're playing against each other. Because there's forces at work

that use group think as a weapon to where they could be like, ooh, Doug Rushkoff, he's done research on this, this and that. He's a great guy. He'll never fucking know this because he just wants to do his research. We'll invite him to do this. So he'll come over here and say this.

And then this other group over here is like guy X thinks the opposite of Doug Rushkoff. He believes in actually all the bullshit. He said, we'll pull him in here. He'll fucking fight about it. Write a bunch of papers and everything. And then everyone will fight about it in the streets while we all do the real shit out here and take over the world. I wonder about that sometimes. Yeah.

I mean, I'm a bad target for that. Because I'm just like thinking and ask questions and explore. Sure. So I'm not like, yeah, I take it as a positive sign that that side, if you want to call it that, is into my message of like heart and humans and all. But interestingly enough, Steve Bannon was asking me to be on Warham a bunch of times, right? He don't like me too much, I don't think. He doesn't. What was he asking you about War Room? He wanted me to be on War Room to talk about my book, Team Human.

That I'm arguing that, you know, human, it was sort of against the technocracy, but she's against that too. You know, he's against, he doesn't like those guys. Yeah. He's like for true MAGA against, he doesn't like, he didn't like Doge and those things. Because, again, it was the AI billionaires running things. He was, you know, the populist. He's a guy I'm very sketched out by. I don't believe anything he says.

And what's why I didn't want to go on it in the end? because I think not just that he's probably smarter than me on some level. Oh, he's a genius. Yeah. You know what I mean? That I felt like I probably would end up getting just used. Yeah. No, I think that's a good thought, man, because he has been everywhere all at once for the last four and a half decades.

And one place, two place, three place, four, okay, five places, six places, seven places, eight industries, at some point, that's not a coincidence. And I can't sit here and say for sure this thing or that thing. But like my friend Henry Abbott, you know, he did some amazing research on this years ago and got no credit for it at the time. But like he was tracing out a lot of Bannon's life and like the people he interacted with and the banks and the finance and this and that. He's like, this is a spy kind of novel.

No, he's an interesting guy. I mean, he was, I mean, talk about, you know, the, Club of Rome type. He was a CEO of the Biosphere project. Now, Biosphere, which was this, they made this fake greenhouse earth. It was the most weird-ass environmental experiment thing. So he's doing that. He was like, he like owns like Seinfeld or something. Well, he, so what he did is he came and he did a financing round on Seinfeld. So now since then, like back when he did it in like fucking 1991 or something, whatever it was, we could check it. He's paid a royal on every episode. Right. It's fucking insane. Right. I mean, so he's done. He's interesting,

interesting cat. Yeah, you're right. Steve Bannon served as the CEO of Biosphere 2 in 1993 and 94 bought, brought in by billionaire Ed Bass to cut costs to restructure the failing ecological project in Oracle, Arizona. His tumultuous 17-month tenure involved sweeping management changes, aggressive lawsuits, and significant alterations to the scientific mission. Bannon was hired as an investment banker and consultant to manage the facility's floundering finances. He quickly ousted the original management of the project's founder, John Allen, fearing Bannon's management would jeopardize the cruise safety. Two former Biosphereans broke into the facility in April 1994 to expose the situation.

Let me tell you this. We wanted to throw coincidence. Yeah. In April 1994, I was at Timothy Leary's house when the two people, the two people who broke into it came to Timothy Leary's house and talked to Timothy about this act and they did it also because they thought the people in the

biosphere were going to run out of oxygen. And they went and they broke the actual glass of the biosphere to let oxygen in and undermine the experiment because the whole idea was that biosphere was a closed environment that could we have plants and people live together and make oxygen?

It's almost like an experimental Mars dome or something and they just couldn't do it. Yeah, people were just dying in there. And so they went and broken, but I was at Timothy Leary's house that the night that they came, and then they let, they were at his house in L.A. and then drove to the biosphere and did that like the next day. Were you doing psychedelics or something at the time or just chilling? And they just walked in?

Well, it wasn't on psychedelics. It's not like you go to Timothy Eries. It's not like everybody just, you know, well in Rome. Yeah, well in Rome. Yeah, well in Rome. Yeah, well, in Rome. Back to Rome. back to Rome. No, we were not. Okay. All right. So you remember this very clearly. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but it was that so funny, April 94. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And again, you look at a career like his and that's another guy where I go both sides against the middle. I remember there was an article that for the life of me, I cannot fucking find. I swear to a guy that's been pulled off the internet. But back when Bannon was named the chairman of the campaign for Trump in summer 2016, when they fired. Paul Manafort. So this is like maybe early August 2016. There was an article on him. And I can't remember if it came out right then or if they reprinted it from like a year before. And I want to say like the photographic memory saying it was in something like Bloomberg Business Week, but I'm not sure. And basically the author of the article was given full access to Steve Bannon to just shadow him for like a couple days or whatever in Washington, D.C., where he's got the townhouse where I guess now he does all these years later, the war room and stuff. At the time, he's the head of Breitbart

and so Bannon has this big party with all these D.C. Acolytes and everything the author's walking around with him and Bannon's given a tour of his place and they go to some I don't know like the fireplace or something and they're looking at some pictures I don't remember what they're looking at but the guy turns

to Bannon and he goes what do you believe like what what do you who is an amazing question like what is your political philosophy and he goes I'm a Leninist and the author's like wait like Lenin like the Bolshevik

you're a conservative influx like what the fuck that doesn't make it sense he goes no no no not the actual solutions of the policy is like a Bolshevik but I'm a Leninist in the sense that he burned it down right I want to burn it all down and that's all he said and the author was just like well that's

that seems and to me I remember clocking that going that's interesting now you get it so that's why he would want January 6th So that's why he'd be in the war room for that. Because it's just tear it down. And what would be, if you're not left or right, if you just tear it down, who's more likely to do more tearing it down? You know, Biden, Kamala or Trump?

Of course Trump. There's more just, it's more incendiary. I disagree with that. And I'll tell you why. I think it's both. I make no distinction. Biden Harris is a passive destruction. Donald Trump has more aggressive destruction,

meaning like he'll tell you that he wants to do this and rip it down, whereas Biden and Harris will tell you there's no such thing as a gender and some fucking memo that they put out. Right. And I think both... But they're not tear...

But they're Biden and Harris are institutionalists, though. They're trying to prop up the systems. Right. And they're propping up systems that are broken. Of course. But if you're going to tear it down, you're not going to go to the people

who are building... Biden and Harris are more... more like... But you don't think institutions have torn down society in many ways by getting out of control. Oh, they're hard. Like World Bank and all those things. Yeah. It's...

World Bank was colonialism by another tool. It's like, okay, instead of going to those places with armies and enslaving your people, you're going to borrow money from us and you're never going to be able to pay it back, so you're going to open your markets to us and we're going to put our big agra there and do all that. Right. It was the same... It's the same stuff. The only difference I would argue is that at least in government constitutions, there are ways of recalling things.

There are ways for people to intervene, to vote in ones who are not going to do those things. Whereas if you really do have a monarchy like Musk or Tiel want, then you want that? Yeah, yeah. They want a monarchy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm the president of Peter Thiel hate club, but like he wants a monarchy. Yeah. Yeah.

Look. Can we pull that up? Yeah. Yeah. That's what they, that was what Nick Land and, and who's the other one that they like? I'm Curtis Jarvin. That's what they're all about. See how that makes no sense, though, with, with, how do I want to say this? Like, quote-unquote, libertarian conservative politics that Peter Thiel claims to love, if that is the case.

Does if you think we are in a might makes right universe? Might makes right. Whoever's the strongest wins. We're all just fighting all the time. We have these laws, but the laws aren't real anyway because the people who control the laws are just the strongest people with the biggest guns. So if that's what's happening anyway,

then just have the most mightiest person be in charge and get over all this bullshit democracy voting. You know, we're just going through the motion. Democracy is just there to convince people that they're living in something other than might makes right when they're not. And they would say the happiest. Oh shit. I don't remember that at all. But God damn, you're cooking. In his 2014 book 0 to 1, Peter Thiel declared monarchy as the best form of government. I read that book twice. I don't remember that, but that's wild.

He argued the capitalism and democracy is diverged, a shift he traced to the expansion of voting rights. his ideal society, wealth-based, and male-dominated. Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. And there you go, libertarian. He embodies, at times to a cartoonish degree, the contradictions of the libertarian movement. You're perfect. You see?

See, you're a good study there. Yeah, but I forgot that. I should remember that. He also praises monopolies, right? Wow. So you're right. Yeah, the monopolies thing that's, like, I remember when I just looked at Peter Thiel, like, as a businessman and didn't know all the shit he did and everything, and I read zero to one.

like wow this guy's a genius not to say i agreed with all of it but i'm like whoa the way you can see why he's so successful which i don't think you should ever underestimate your enemy he's a brilliant guy but like you know then you see what like some of it obviously came out in that book and i'm forgetting it but then you see like the actions taken and what what he might want and you're like this isn't this is a world that leaves so many people behind and you know maybe he really is malthusian and he's like you know what fuck it a lot of people are going to die Because they need you. Right.

He is Malthusian. He does believe in the limits to growth. Actually, the right-wing extremist, like the Koch brothers and Thiel and Musk and those guys, they believe more in the limits to growth than Club of Rome does. The difference is the right-wing guys, like those guys, believe that because of the limits to growth, there's not enough for everybody. Then why? So we've got to let those millions and billions die.

Why does Musk argue that people need to have kids way more than? He is at the forefront of that movement. And like we do have a birth rate problem in America now, for sure. It depends if you... It's a problem. It's a problem. Well, partly it's economic expansion. They want more customers, although now they're realizing,

Sam Altman's realizing, future of customers are not human. Their future customers are going to be AIs. How does an AI pay you? In crypto. In other words, if... Think about this way. You're a billionaire sitting in your house. You don't interact with people except your servants and your family, right?

So you're up there on the hill. Yeah. You want there to be consumers. You want there to be people working because you want workers and you want consumers. You want them buying and selling and the money going up to you, the profit going up to you. Why do you care if those consumers and producers are human or AI? I think it's just so foreign for me to even think about something that's not human exchanging currency. Exactly, but you think of an AI, right?

An AI, in order to do its job, it needs energy, it needs data, and it needs processing power. Oh, fuck. So where is it going to get those? It will earn money doing its AI tasks, and it will spend that money buying processing power and memory and data center storage and all that from these companies. So they are your consumer at that point, and then they don't need it. Defe, can we Google how many current AI? data centers does China have and how many current AI data centers? Well, China just built one that's as

big as like 100 of ours. You heard about they built this giant giant giant, how many square miles worth? Yeah, there you're square foot. Yeah. So that's a yeah, good point. They built this really big one. Okay. So the United States leads the global AI infrastructure race with roughly 4,000 to 5,400 total data centers compared to China, which has approximately 350 to 450 to publicly tracked facilities. While the U.S. has a quantitative lead, China is rapidly scaling its infrastructure and state-led computing hubs to close the gap. And part of that may be exactly what you're saying, which is where we're building one that's 10 square miles.

They're building one that's 110 square miles. Okay. So this is, I want to bring it back around to this too because we got off this and I think it's important. This is where I like see the idea that, you know, you worry about if China got to like AGI first, would they use it for worse than we? would. I also don't necessarily trust the people we got in charge of that to use it for good either. So that's a problem. But I remember, this is like a full circle kind of thing too, the very first episode I ever

recorded for this podcast, which turned out to be episode six, because I put out 10 episodes day one, was basically a lot of it was discussing Kai Fu Lee's 2018 book, I believe it was called AI Superpowers. Did you ever read this? So Kai Fu Lee, Chinese American technologist guy, In the venture capital world, I believe he was laying out what this race looks like, where it stood and where it could be going between China and the U.S. And so I see where it's like you'd want to have an advantage. And I was raising this point earlier. That said where like it could be such an example of the road to hell is paved with good intentions where the people that you use, the devil you make the deal with to get that advantage then fucking eats the whole population. You know, you have pallioteer running these fucking places.

And then we're living in a surveillance 1984 state. That would be a total L. So how do we try to advance, progress, do good for humanity, also like get America in a good position without sacrificing everything that makes that purposeful in the first place? I mean, the easiest way would be, it's funny, I even go here, but have citizens assemblies making decisions about things. I think people picked it random, not running for office. People picked it random in groups and giving them agency over their own regions. What's allowed to happen there? You know, it's interesting, China's AI policy, I would think, is, I think, is superior to ours.

Why? Because they realize that hand in hand with AI development, they've got to do renewable energy. of all the, you know. But they emit more smog than like... China does, yeah, but that's why they've been working on it, though, but they're also... You know, working a great fucking slow.

They're the global leader in solar, wind, and geothermal and all these other kinds of energies, and we've put an intentional stop to it. You know, the other thing, they're funny. You were talking before about crypto and about how so much of crypto was bullshit.

And I started to look at crypto as a way to an excuse to sell chips and energy. An excuse to sell chips and energy. So Bitcoin, basically, the main thing that Bitcoin is, if you look at Bitcoin as a Martian anthropologist looking at Earth, you say, oh, so they're burning the planet to prove this money has value. Right?

Crypto, Bitcoin is we spend energy, we burn fuel in order to value this thing. And we buy chips in order to mine more of it. So the main economic activity of Bitcoin was Nvidia chips and energy. And then people like, oh, this Bitcoin's that doesn't seem real. And then we did NFTs and we got this last burst. Oh, let's burn more, burn more chips.

RIP to an era. Right. That was an era. It was. But we could burn, burn, burn. And then when NFTs died, what happened? AI. And what is AI? A new excuse. More in Nvidia chips. More burning for you. More building. So it's like, who's really making money on this? Yeah, the AI companies are getting invested in. But what are they

spending it on? Chips and oil. Chips and oil. That's where it's all and now water. Yeah. Now, all these guys we've been talking about today, not all of them, but, you know, the way that you recently came up on the radar again was because I had played that video on one of our weekend episodes with Defe and I where you were talking this back in 2020 pre it was I believe right before the pandemic you did this interview where you very matter of factally explaining about how you had been advising these billionaires on how to deal with the end of the world and you know building bunkers and hilariously explaining like how to be nice to your security guards so that they won't fucking kill you when you know money doesn't mean, it was hysterical and also very sad to watch, but I appreciated you like totally outing this kind of thing right here. And then ironically, you had been on my friend Danny Jones show. And so I was like going to hit up Danny like, oh, can you connect me with with Doug Rushkoff? But then you texted me. Yeah. Let's do it. So I'm like, great. But this whole concept of you long before the pandemic even happened and people were thinking in certain ways like that, obviously before

the complete rise of AI and everything, you are somehow thrust in a situation where you're meeting with very wealthy people, very powerful people who are asking you existential questions seemingly about the future of humanity, not with the idea that like, hey, maybe this could happen, but more with the idea that, yeah, this is going to happen. So how do we deal with that? First of all, can you just take me there and tell me how you even got into this conversation or what happened? Yeah, like I said, I used to get to do talks for like corporations sometimes or rich people,

whatever, and this was a, turn out it was a hedge fund that invited some of their biggest investors to this resort out in the middle of the desert, and they had different speakers and stuff. And I thought, they said, oh, we want you to come and do a talk on the future of the digital economy, you know, because I talk about that shit. And so I was ready to do this talk, and I'm sitting in the green room, and instead of bringing me out, usually they'll come, you know, you do talks, you know, they come out with them. I've never done talking about. Oh, they come with a guy comes with the microphone, usually they clip it on, And then you go out. And I said they brought these five guys in.

They sat around this table. Five guys. This is your talk. This is it. And I'm like, okay, I'm ready. He said, no, no, you don't have to talk. And they start asking me all these questions. Like the really binary tech bro questions.

What's the lighting like? Is it dark? No, it's a green room. It's in a resort. It's like a, it's normal. They're serving refreshments. It's bright. It's daytime.

It's the one in the afternoon. They're not wearing masks and shit. No, no, no, no. It was making sure. Before COVID or anything. It was a nice resort. I had a private hot tub in my unit. It was like a bungalow.

I like bungalows. And they go around, they had little golf carts taking you around. I mean, it was nice. Like the electric golf carts? Yeah. It was a whole thing. Environmental and friendly. Very cool.

So, but they come in there asking me like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Okay. Like where to place their bets, you know, alternate or augmented reality or virtual reality. Oh, I remember. when that was huge, that argument. And then finally, it was like Alaska or New Zealand. And you're like, what? 2018.

So it's 2018 this happened. Like what? What's the better place? Assuming climate change happened to where's the better place to put our bunker, Alaska or New Zealand. So were they only asking you in the context of climate change? No. And I was like, but that was for that. And there was like, where do we put our bunker for the event?

The event. That's what they called it. The event. What did they think it was? Climate catastrophe, a pandemic. economic unrest, nuclear war, mass migration, you know, whatever it is, that makes life as we know it unlivable and forces them to go to a special place and write it out or live there forever. And so I then got in, then I did get into my intellectual dominatrix mode.

And then I was like, oh, so you're going to have a bunker that's going to somehow, you know, And one of them showed me these plans he had of this underground thing that all these shipping containers altogether and he had a heated pool in there. That's the first thing I would think about it. Yeah, in his thing. And I'm like, dude, you know, there's a guy I know in my neighborhood who's got a heated pool and all summer there's always a little van in front of his house with like the guy with the spare parts and the fixing this.

It's like a heated pool is a hard thing to maintain. I'm like, where are you going to get the spare parts for your heating? pull after the apocalypse. And he's like, opens this mall skin book and he's like, porch for the heat. Like, he hadn't fucking thought of this. It's like, these are like walking dead level scenario. When they're sending up billionaires,

then that's sending their best. God damn it. So then I'm like, okay, then they're like, like, your water table, your water's contaminated from the nuclear fallout. How long as you're going to last? You're going to have filters.

Oh, reverse osmosis is going to do the fucking benzene and the radiation and whatever. whatever. And then, so they're like, oh, no, we've got this. We got scientists on that and this and reverse this and the top water in the landfill and the blah. We work that out. I'm like, okay, so who's going to protect your bunker from the rest of us? You know, from all of us? The ones that are still alive. Yeah. It's got, oh, cement gate things, blah, blah, blah. And then the guy's like, oh, you know, I've got, I've got Navy seals on speed dial. They've got helicopters. They're going to come. They're going to pick us up and go. bring us out of that. And I'm like, oh, is you got Navy SEALs? How are you going to pay your Navy SEALs after your Bitcoin is worthless? Why are they going to stay? And a world for money don't matter. Right. Exactly. And they're like, oh, uh, uh, then they're like, okay. So, so, so we can control, we could have a, um, what if I'm the guy says, what if I'm the only person, she says, how smart they are tech pros, billionaires who are richer than us? What if I'm the only person who knows

the combination to the place where we keep the food? It's like, oh, Navy SEALs, they don't have any experience getting information out of people. You're going to spend the whole apocalypse getting waterboarded for your fucking thing. I've had a lot of Navy SEAL sitting in that chair. Let me tell you. It wouldn't take a lot. No. No. Or they said, you know, we're going to have chips. Chips that'll, like, control everybody's access to different things. And if they got out of hand, I could always, like, use it as a shot. Yeah, it's like, oh, they're going to yank that thing out and fucking kill you in a second. Just even knowing that you're saying that. You've already lost your Navy SEALs. Oh my God. We are so fucked. You know, I'm funny because I told

that story and someone said, dude, they should get Army Rangers, not Navy Seals. How long was this meeting? Less than an hour. Less than an hour. Less than an hour. Less than an hour. Well, because the whole thing you've got to realize I was not like being called into the lair by the wealthy guys. I was the entertainment. The entertainment. There was, you said they had mold skin books and shit. Yeah, I know. Well, some of them knew I was going to be there. One of them definitely knew because he had his plans. But it was more like, first, I don't know if they all really had plans. They could have also been trying to impress each other. Like, oh, I got this going.

I got that. You know, and there were other speakers at this thing. It was like a weekend long. So we used to learn to make an omelette with this famous chef, improve your golf swing with this golf pro. Spend an hour with a futurist. You know, so. Build your bunker. Yeah, exactly.

And everyone dies. And I'm like, why are you asking? I mean, a fucking anarchist media theorist about how to build a bunker. You know, I'm just like, love each other, man, you know. I love that where you're explaining how disconnected these guys were. And you said in the clip where they're asking like how they can build goodwill with their future security guards. And you're like, I don't know, pay for the kid's birthday party of their bar mitz for some shit. And they're like, oh, wow.

So I got to be nice to them. Pay for your head of security's daughters by midst for. my God. Yeah. Because then they were like, I said, be nice to them, be nice to their family, be nice to their friends. And then one of them, this was one of the last things he said. He's like, yeah, but where does it stop?

Where does it stop? The being nice. How do you, where do you draw? And I'm like, dude, that's the whole thing. We're all in this together. But for me, the thing was I realized that the people who, the richest, most powerful people I've ever met felt utterly powerless to impact the future. That the best they could do was have someone like me predict the future.

and then just, you know. But they're assuming that future's happening. And they're assuming that's inevitable. Inevitable. They call it, they have a name for it, the event. Right. And there's multiple, whether it be some climate disaster, whether it be a nuclear holocaust,

whether it be a pandemic, or AI taking over. AI taken over. Like, these are people that have access to people, whether you like them or not. They have access to people who have a lot of information and a lot of simulations and a lot of things that could point to what the actual future is.

And it's pretty fucking alarming that they're having this conversation very matter-of-factly with you, even if you are describing yourself as the entertainment. In 2017, this is before COVID, before the rise of AI, before the shit. That is wild. And these are people who would rather have sex with robots or teenagers than women, right? Wait a second. Please explain that?

These are people who want to build sex robots. These are people. The people you were talking to. This is. They said this? This is who they are. These are the Epstein kinds of people. These are, talking about the culture that we're talking about, right?

The culture that we're looking at, the billionaire tech bro culture. What are their values? What do they want? How many wives do they want? Who do they want the wives to be? How much power do they want those people to have? Can you put the camera on Doug Rufest, Steve? Let me just write this down on my band.

Was that one of them? Oh, one of the, is that on the camera? It's not on the camera. You're on camera right now. Yeah, yeah. You couldn't see it on that, but let's make sure that's edited. Was that one of them? If you want to know. If I, it's off record. That's one of them. That's so fucked up.

But that's this. That's so fucked up. Yeah. You know, and I had, I did have a brush with the Epstein crowd. Interestingly enough, through the science people. Yeah. So, so did you ever meet him? I don't think so You don't think so You didn't meet Palm Beach Pete

I don't know who that Oh that guy No no no no no but I I was invited to a party in New York Thrown by a literary agent Who is the literary agent Brockman? Yeah Of the scientist stars

You know Dawkins and all those kind of guys And Dennett and Pinker and all Every single one And really really smart super smart Smarter than us people When is this? Late 90s. Late 90s.

So it was before Epstein was known, before he had gotten arrested the first time, before any of that. But it was basically called like the Millionaire's Dinner, the Billionaire's Dinner. And I got to go to it because I was one of the kids writing about the internet was new. So I was like cyber boy. And I got into this thing. And the guy who was throwing the party said, this is a really special party. I'm going to give you a plus one. Make it count.

And I'm thinking, these are the smartest people in the world, I invite the smartest woman I know, this woman who runs a website at the time, the literary website. Not a looker? It wasn't beyond that. She was the smartest woman I know. Yeah, I know, but they were thinking of something else. Right, and I bring her there, and I get to the party,

the guy grabs my wrist. I can still like almost feel like, grabs me, pulls me aside, and he goes, how dare you waste your plus one on a lesbian? and I'm like, huh? And I said, this is the smartest person. You said, make it count. And he goes, you've, I invited you, you're, like, so I said, 27, 28 years old. I invited you to raise the quotient in the room.

And I'm like, what do you mean? And he goes, look. And there are these, all these, like, middle-aged guys with, like, 20, if they're lucky, 20-year-old, gorgeous little model people. And I'm like, that's the quotient. Duh, you know, because I was so worried about not being, you're going to go to a thing with Dawkins and you're a young writer. You're thinking, I'm not smart enough to be with these people. I'm going to impress them with a fucking genius, you know?

And, oh, my God. And so that, it turned out that that dinner and all those dinners were funded by Epstein. And I got in this fight with Donkins. How many people are here? At that thing? Yeah. 40, 50? And where is it?

In New York, in some... What kind of place? Townhouse, rich person thing. There's some townhouses... Yeah, but not his place. No, I don't think. I don't think. You would think I would, but I really wouldn't because he wasn't famous yet. Was it on East 71st Street?

Could have been. God damn it. It could have been. I just don't know. It was so far back when. All right. I don't know. I don't know. It was a very rich person's big, big place, though.

But anyway, so I get in this argument with Dawkins about whether or not there's like a soul or any meaning or anything to this. And he's basically saying that human beings are just basically computers running memes and we're all just, we're all, you know, like memes are like genes and we're just sort of automatic. How did he say you reach that conclusion? because that's what there's only evidence of that there's no evidence of anything else and i was arguing my my felt experience is that you mean beings have souls and that the universe is leaning towards you know morality and we're trying to make the world better and we're we're reaching of that there's a there's an effort there's some kind of a a love or something animating us and he dismissed me finally he said oh you're you're a moralist i don't even know what that meant but it's like it's a

dismissed thing you're a moralist and then It's like 20 years later, I see their pictures on the fucking Lolita Express, you know, heading out to the TED on Jeffrey Epstein's plane. And I'm like, okay, I'm the moralist, you know, guilty. I'll take, I'll take that. And it's like, for all the, for all the 20, 30 years that I was said that I never got rich or invited to the right things or being one of those people, I realized, oh, there's a, there's a deal you make. It's a price to pay. for going there. And that was the only time you ever went to one of those things that you know of that was

funded by him, were you invited by Brockman? Yeah, yeah. When's the last time you talked to Brockman? I saw him at a thing. You know, it was weird because then after that he represented me for a while. And then I saw the article come out that those parties were funded by Epstein. And there was a guy, Evgeny Morozov. really smart guy, kind of anti-tech, anti-capitalist.

You know, he would call me pro-tech because he's like anti-tech. I'm critical about it, but he's like more critical. And he wrote this piece in the Atlantic exposing all that. And I was like, oh, fuck. When was the? Whenever Epstein was exposed and all that. Back in 2019, 2019. Yeah, when everyone was exposing those things.

and I was like, what the fuck? And he wrote this piece and he said, and he was more philosophically educated than me and better sort of figuring out a moral conundrum because he's this great agent. I'm at this agency. He's not even my agent. I'm at the agency.

And he said, you know, the agency needs to make some public acknowledgement and of, what happened, some commitment about, or give back the money that the foundation got from this guy, make some repair, and I can stay. And the agency never acknowledged it at all, never did anything. So he left, and then I left the agency then. Because it was just like, you do something. Yeah, that's one thread that kind of gets ignored these days. And it's been a thread that's been open for a while. because to be clear, you could run through, I don't know if it's still on there, but, you know, two, three years ago even, you could run through, like, the organization of everyone who's, who's at least related to Edge Foundation run by Rock was fucking everybody.

Like, there's literally no one. And, and you have to be objective at that point, and you're like, okay, obviously all these people, all of them aren't down on Epstein. No, with the Being in the Edge Foundation meant there was like 500 of us. I think there was more. Oh, really? They would send in, what it meant was you would get an email once a year. Just like club of room. No, but they would have an email with a question.

And it was like, what's the greatest invention of the last 2,000 years? And you would give an answer. And if they thought the answer was cool, they'd put it in a book of the edge. That's what the edge was. And then there was. But you get access to stuff too because you're in the fraternity. I didn't. I didn't.

But the people who were really in it, they would get to go to, it was interesting. They would have like seminars. Like they did a thing on, and ultimately, it turned out they were into kind of dark stuff. Behavioral Finance. They gone into that behavioral psychology, behavioral finance, which is sort of how do you get people to make financial decisions that are best of their own, against their own best interest? And it was like, oh, that's what you're interested in. But so there were inner things.

Or if you were, you know, Dawkins or Daniel Denners, Stephen Pinker, you got invited. They would like take a cruise around Ant. Antarctica or go to Galapagos, you know what I mean? They did cool things if you were, but I wasn't. You didn't get to go to Antarctica. No, I wasn't. Pyramids under the ground. No, I'm just, I was more perfectly. But there were, they were, I mean, I met Alan Alda. He was in there because he got really interested in science. He did narration for some cool science things. But all you, from, from that one experience at the party you went to that you didn't know was sponsored by Epstein. You remember having an intellectual argument with Dawkins and that was kind of it.

Two strikes. One strike against them was that this is a party where I was supposed to bring a hot woman. Right. Is like, oh, this is some weird misogynistic thing going on here that I don't understand and creepy and whatever. And the second was that these guys are calling me a moralist and laughing at me. for believing in something, in anything, that as if believing, having faith in anything, I'm not saying there's God, don't worry, I'm not saying, I'm not saying there's God,

I'm just saying that there's, you know what I'm gonna, it's okay, it's okay, you know, I'm not gonna be that radical, I'm just saying, you know, that there's, you know, because I'm among scientists, you know, talking about God things, like, oh no, you're, you know. There's a lot of scientists that do believe in God though. Yeah, I know. A lot.

I know, but these ones, it was a hyper, vigilance against any of that and that's because if you believe in the in in the sacredness of the other human and you can't do that shit to them right oh my god great point you can't rape a 12 year old girl if you believe human beings have souls and so what happened was people like epstein ended up admiring very staunch atheist scientists. Because these scientists were giving, we're creating a permission structure. There's nothing going on here.

There's nothing inside that person. It's just genes. It's just memes. They're not real. You just unintentionally, in my opinion, made the most fucked up but legitimate other argument, just another one added to the list of believing in a higher power because of the way you just described those people.

And I don't think you're wrong at all. And I think it's pretty telling too that you as a younger guy, among the other people there went to something like this. You say you didn't know the context of it and everything. and all that, but even back then when you knew nothing about what they actually really do, walked away going, yeah, that just... And it's Spidey Sense. It's all Spidey.

We all have it all the time. And you know, there's so many things we can do that repress your Spitey Sense. I mean, I feel like being online all the time is probably bad for spiky sense. But that feeling in your gut, it's so real. You can trust it. You can really trust. You know, you know. You meet a person and it's like...

You know, man. It's, you know it. You know it. And the fact that you know it means that everybody knows it on some level. So don't lie because people know you're lying. Even if they don't know consciously you're lying, inside they know you're lying and they know what's like. So it's like it makes life so much easier in the end. Right.

If you're just like, oh man, I don't have to worry about anything. I'm just going to spidey it out. Yeah. Now go and so you never went to something like that again as far as you know, like some party like that where he's involved and you don't remember. seeing him or anything like that. No, that's why he could have been at that one, but it might have been something that he like funded and wasn't at, you know. Interesting. And that's the crazy thing, man. And then I spoke at MIT. You spoke at MIT. Right. In what context?

I went to a media lab to talk about a book. And then it turns out, you know what I mean? But yeah, a lot of people, but that's the thing. A lot of people have been in club of Rome. A lot of people have been at Harvard. You know, like, yeah, it's, it's, there's some line there at some point where it's like, okay, you know, we're probably making a reach. And then there's things where it's like, you're not. And it kind of is like, whoa, like what? Right. Is everyone around that poison?

And that's the thing. That's unfortunately what made Epstein and Maxwell while they were operating so effective at their game is that they knew all they had to do was take a picture with you. And there would always be the question. That's all it would be. There would always be the question. Yeah, I wasn't important enough for anyone to want to think. I wasn't a bestseller. Either way, there's people who will listen right now and be like,

oh, you went to a party with them or whatever, and they'll be like, maybe, maybe. And that's a really tough thing because they knew so many people. Right. And I didn't know them, but that's the whole point. For me, the whole point is you're going to run into some time in your life. You're going to run into sketchy people, especially if you start publishing or, I mean, look at you. You're going to run into sketchy people. Of course, it's going to run into sketchy people. Of course, it's going to to happen. And the only thing you've got, the only thing you've got is your spidey because they'll have money, they'll have opportunity, they'll have women. I mean, whatever they have, they'll have. And it's like, I mean, for me, I mean, I was lucky. I was a Gen X counterculture, determined to stay

poor. You know what I mean? There was a bunch of us. We were like slackers. So we were optimizing for something else. So the traditional temptation. patients didn't quite apply to me, you know, it was like, I don't know what. It would have been something else, you know. No, to go back to it, though, that less than one hour meeting, as you describe it, would say, five billionaires out there. I'm still mind. And I think it was four billionaires and one almost billionaire when I tried to look them up.

I'm sorry to hear that for that guy. But you say so matter-of-factly, I guess that they, first of all, did you know any of these guys before they walked in the room? No, I knew of one of them. You knew of them, but they weren't like, no, there weren't like Zuckerberg level. But, you know, because I asked them even that. I said, I thought you guys were making rocket ships to get off the planet. They go, and we're low level. We're not there yet.

We're low level billion. Only like five, six billion. But like, you said it in a way that would suggest they were extremely open about it, that they were into sex with underage girls and robots. No. They weren't open about it. No. You picked up on that.

I picked up that they're of that culture. Now, what made you pick up on the fact that they were of that culture? that they, I mean, morally, that they were perfectly okay with leaving humanity behind. You know, they just seemed, I mean, and I guess it's a, I'm drawing them with a, with a, with a, inaccurate non-journalists brush. That's okay. Right. So I've brushed up against these kind of folks two or three times in my life, right?

once at that party that's it only two were things that's kind of low for a guy if you're like the types of things you talk about I would imagine they're all over you

I know or giving money to my team human show like what a rude sponsor it's like I got like 200 two or 300 people paying two bucks a month

it's like where's one you know one tech bro they're not they're not uh no they're not but two or three times you were you were obviously I feel in presence of those kind of people

you know and it's energetically and what it's just they're they really they just really don't care yeah you know and I guess it's more like it's not that they are it's more like they could be like I talk about I talk to people who've um who've met like James Dolan or something and they just go Oh, he gave me the creeps. I feel like that's everybody. You know, I saw, I saw Harvey Weinstein once at a party. And I was like, when? Oh, in late 80s?

Late 80s, early 90s. Yeah, he was the merchant ivory. They were big producers in the men. And he just like the only other, he looked like a Mossad agent or someone. You know, he's big, you know what I mean? Like he could just. No, I don't know what you mean. He was scary.

He was scary. You pegged him as a Mossad agent? Well, like, not like a Mossad guy that, or special forces, Massad, you know, like an Israeli guy who could just crush my neck, you know. It just, he was a scary, he had a scary imposing presence. So you picked up on that in the late 80s, early 90s. There's guys. just there's certain guys. They got to look in their eye.

They do. And you're just like, oh, stay away. Stay away. Stay away. Good for you. Yeah. It's funny because it. But everyone has it.

What do you mean? I think everyone has, everyone would look at those same people and go, ooh, I think we all have that instinct. But here's the thing. I think enough people didn't or subconsciously look the other way with a guy like that. Because he's got something else I want. Power. He's got some power. Yeah.

Yeah. God, it's so, oh, it's dark, but it's also fascinating to just like consider. Yeah, I got to pee again. Okay, we'll be right back. All right, we're back on air. We were just talking off air on this. You said you got into 12 steps, but you're not an alcoholic. Right, 12 steps. Well, we're something else anonymous, right?

Okay. I call it capitalist anonymous or ego anonymous or we as a species, we as a civilization, are addicted to something, right? some sort of disconnection from nature, accumulation of money, saving stuff, security. We're addicted to this abstracted way of dealing with the world. And when you look at something like 12 steps, it's just the steps that are involved, it's like a Quaker meeting. They just get together and fellowship and share

they're at, the first thing you do is you accept a higher power. It doesn't have to be God, but the kind of stuff we're talking about before, that there's something else going on here. You make amends with other people. You know, it's like the things, they sort of, it feels like we could almost take Western civilization through 12 steps, and we'd get to a better, we get to a better place. And I just like the way it's organized. It's that anarcho-sindicalist thing we were talking about. There's all these individual groups. They're all, all their little meetings run themselves, but they're also part of this big network

doing sort of the same thing. You can go anywhere in the world and find a 12-step meeting and go and do your thing there. Right. So I just like it as a, a lot of things about that model I really like.

That's why it's funny. Like at the beginning of Fight Club, remember how they meet? They're all going to different self-help meetings because they're looking for that loss. And a common connection. Of course.

That's interesting. No, because it also goes back to what you were first writing about when you were getting into the tech scene and like thinking about what the world was going to be. You were thinking about a world where humanity could integrate correctly with tech for the good of humanity rather than tech taking over humanity and rendering it obsolete. Right. Which has been a theme of other parts of our conversation as well today. But like, you know, now that we are 30, 35 years down that. role from when you were first right down that road from when you were first writing about it. Like how do we make sure that in a world of where there's people like Sam Altman's and

Peter Thiel saying, yeah, you know, we, a few of us may transcend, but humanity itself probably won't survive. It'll be something different. How do we make, like what are the ways that we make sure collectively is even like a world population that like that thought process doesn't win and a tool like AI can be a great use case to us and something that takes us to the next level and allows all of us to enjoy rather than people to die off. It's a loaded question.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things. First, I think it's good to be able to distinguish between technologies that bring us together and technologies that pull us apart. Okay, what would be two examples in your mind of that? I mean, social media doesn't really bring you together, right? Social media, when you know now how it's designed, it doesn't. But you could look at something like Reddit.

and it's interesting and it kind of does and then you think well what are the difference between Reddit and social media? Reddit has moderators in each subreddit so they're sort of the moderators are there to try to help keep it cohesive and social

that's sort of one thing and think about I mean think as much about are you going to bring an app into your ecosystem I know you worry about your phone if you're going to put an app there is going to fuck up my phone

but is the app going to fuck up you What are you bringing into your day? And really to think about that. And the other thing I started to advocate is for, this was like a 99. I said we should do a tech Shabbat. Tech Sabbath. Tech Sabbath. One day a week where you don't use screens.

I think that's not a bad idea at all. One day a week. It's like the Israelites gave it to themselves. First thing in the desert. We got one day off. You don't have to produce or consume. Because the idea is, the idea that they did it then was to say a human being is sacred just the way you are

that's enough you don't need to do anything in order to justify your existence so to take one day a week where you say i can just be i don't have to swipe anything i don't have to send an email i don't have to and to get off the screen too and then you see other people what are you going to do you know play games fuck walk around pet your dog i mean there's all these other things besides the app one. So there's that sort of on the one hand. And the other for me is I think the path to the kind of empowerment you're talking about is local. You know, it's like the simple stuff. I used to do this talk called borrow a drill. Borrow a drill. Yeah, it was based on this story. It happened to me when my daughter graduated

high school and we had the picture of her and I had to stick it on the wall and I got these plaster walls. So I can't just put a nail in there. So I need to get a drill. So first thing I'm thinking I'm going to do like any America, I'm going to go to Home Depot, get a minimum viable product, rechargeable drill, charge it up, drill a hole, stick it in the garage and maybe never take it out again. Or if I do, it'll be a year from now. It's not going to charge and I'll throw it away. So I sent one kid into the mines to get the rare earth metals to make the rechargeable lithium battery for this thing and the carbon footprint. Use a thing once and throw it out in some other kid. It's going to pick at it on a pile of toxic waste in Brazil to get the renewable part to sell it to Apple so they can say they make green computers.

Or I can walk down the street and knock on my neighbor Bob's door. Bob's always ratting doors and things in his driveway. And he's got, and okay, Bob, can I borrow your drill? And why am I so reluctant to go to Bob and say, Bob, can I borrow your drill? And it's because I'm afraid if I go to knock on Bob door, he's going to see. say, not only can you bar my drill, but actually I'm going to come over and drill the hole for you because you don't know how to do an anchor. You don't know how to do this stud. You're a fucking nerd. You're going to drill the hole, put it in the anchor with a butterfly thing, whatever it is I need,

and get it in there and put up and put up the picture, you know, with a drill that plugs on the wall like God intended. And go home. Then that weekend, I'm going to have the barbecue party for my daughter, the graduation party. And smoke's going to go over to Bob's house. He goes, he's having fucking sirloin steaks over there at his house. Graduation party for his daughter. I hung the fucking picture and you didn't even invite me, right? So I'll invite Bob. Right, now I invite Bob.

And now, you know, Helene over on the other side of the book. What? Since when has Doug friends with Bob? He invites Bob. So now I got to invite Helene. And if I invite Helene and Bob, I'm going to have to invite everyone on the block to the graduation party. So my whole block is going to be there at graduation party.

And that's the bad thing? that's the bad thing that's the good thing we flipped it we flipped it we flipped it oh my god we flipped it and then when everyone's there at the barbecue party we're going to say oh why did this happen oh because I borrowed a drill from bobby's oh

I wouldn't have to buy one myself because I don't really need a gentleman and use it once every two years then someone's going to say well you know I only use my lawnmower once week how much do you use yours what if we had two lawnmowers for the whole block and all of a sudden we're going to start sharing things

and be friends and I gave that talk and told that story and someone got up at the end some business guy and said well yeah but when you're all doing all that what about the lawnmower company what about the lawnmower company how are you going to grow this economy if you start sharing lawnmowers with each other god forbid we helped each other out god right we weren't suspicious like even below the final point there of like the guy thinking from an economic standpoint before you even get there the social dynamics of that we used to live in a world

you know, pre-internet even, you know, forget pre-phones, where the block raised the kids, right? Everyone in some way could parent. There was a trust. There was a social contract and bond. People didn't have this extremely suspicious outset at you for everything. And what I feel like technology has done specifically social media is we had all these apps that were built to connect us, but they really divided us mentally because they made be suspicious of every other fucking thing

that someone else could be doing, thinking, or even acting on about you. And it also made you personally narcissistic without you realizing it. And I'm not even getting to the points of like posting yourself and stuff like that, but like you're constantly thinking people are paying attention to this. Everyone is focused on me right now for out of the crowd,

wondering about every little thing I'm doing and judging me for it to the point that then it affects you in the real world so that you could see people or come across people that you know but don't even really know a lot, but you assume that they're making assumptions about you and vice versa. And it creates this almost like, I don't mean to make this too meta, but like electromagnetic force field between people. And I have watched this get worse and worse and worse over the last especially 10 years.

And I don't really know how we put that rabbit back in the hat when even if you look at like kids coming up right now like, you know, in high school who are getting into dating or something like that. they're growing up in a world where they have to make assumptions about, oh, my God, what is that group text going to say about me? And what is, what is his group? The girl's like, what is his group text going to say about me to where you can't just like feel each other out? You know what I mean? Like it's, it is, it is totally, it's like anti-evolutionary. Yeah. I mean, there was always peers involved, I guess, you know, you meet someone and your, how does your gang feel about

them and, yeah, but it wasn't viral ability. It wasn't exactly. And it was. It was, you It was, in some ways, there were positive aspects even to that, different generations. He's no good for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a little that, I know, it's hard. And the thing is, it's not just tech. This is older. I mean, I did research back when I wrote this book called Life Inc.

And I was looking at sort of the corporatization of America and how people were turning into corporations and corporations were turning into people. Oh, wow. It was really fun. And dark, but fun. And I found out, you know, like, have you ever heard of Levittown? It's this giant, the first giant suburb development in Long Island, Levittown. No.

It's one of the first one. And it was built by these guys, the Levitt brothers. And you can see there are these letters that the Levitt brothers were writing to Franklin Delano Roosevelt about they're going to build this suburb, and it's going to be a way to prevent a rebellion by the returning World War II veterans. We're going to have all these houses. They're all going to be zoned just a little far apart. Men are going to have to work on the lawn.

They're not going to have any gathering places, no social gathering places. They're going to all have a mortgage. So it was calculated you have a mortgage that forces you to keep your job and always you're a little bit in debt. G.I. Bill. Yeah.

The GIBET. You're going to have a yard that you're going to have to take care of. So you're going to be busy on the weekend. The woman is going to be a little bit. to be in the kitchen in the back and the kids are going to play there. And it was designed to promote social alienation so that we wouldn't gather. Oh, wow. And, you know, and I get it. Men are dangerous and we might have labor movements and, you know, whatever. But they thought this would be, they thought it would be benevolent. Everyone gets a house and a wife and their kids. Yeah. Yeah. Road to

hell. Yeah. Paved with those wonderfully good intentions. You know, there was a movie Brando did in the early 50s called The Men. You ever see this? Where we can pull it up, Dief. But he plays a wounded, disabled veteran a World War II. And, you know, the movies obviously covers a lot of that and dealing with that.

But it shows a lot of amazing imagery of exactly what you're talking about, this almost like ant farm system that's set up white picket fence house white picket fence house they all look the same it's open no trees just grass and each unit lives here and you just live your life you save up for a 401k that's the american dream and you die you know it's like they could they systematically yeah there you go created that plan and listen there were some good aspects to like there was more nuclear families back then there was but you know you didn't have technology separating each other as much yeah but you only had room for the nuclear family in there. There wasn't room for grandma in there.

So they took away the tribe. It did because the tribe's going to share stuff. If you have all these different families, you're going to have more consumers. Everyone's going to need their own everything. And at the time, again, at the time, it didn't seem like a bad thing because the economy could grow forever, the factories would grow forever, until around

19609 or 70 when the club of Rome came out and said, you know, everyone having to buy one of everything forever, forever may not work. There may be social limits to growth. There may be physical limits to growth and economic limits to growth. That maybe everyone having an individually air-conditioned home is going to backfire on us in some way. We're going to make the world hotter than it's going to require more air-conditioning. Well, here's the other thing there. This was a creation, was a unnatural creation in a way of a post-World War II middle class, which began okay because there was a burgeoning middle class that built the boom years of this country,

no pun intended there. Then you get the official going off the gold standard in 71, 72. That had already started really with FDR and you could go back to 1913 with the Fed. And, you know, Pinker in Enlightenment now, I know Picker gets a lot of bad press, right? so these days. He says some really smart guy. You ever read the book in Lightningman now in 2018? So, you know, it's a positive book in the sense that he's showing, listen, things don't always

work on a straight chart up. But over time, it's provable by every statistic from sustenance to all the basic things. The humanity is in the best part of history right now overall on a rolling 10-year basis or whatever it was at all times. That said, there was one alarming chart. And he pointed it out as alarming in that book, which showed specifically, since the beginning of the 1980s, the wealth gap and the destruction, as you can call it, of the middle class. And it also then correlates with a more technological society where it used to be

winner take all would be, you know, yeah, like a John D. Rockefeller could control oil and that would certainly be a lot, but they'd break them up with trust busts and like, you know, someone who was wealthy wasn't a billionaire. They were worth 10 million or something like that. But as technology came out and global scale came out, someone could be worth 10 billion. 20 billion, 100 billion, a trillion eventually. And they become a country, like a powerful. Elon Musk is a powerful country. As a man, we've never seen that at scale in society in the highest parts. And so when I look at that and I see this going away and I see that, what is it, 54% of Americans don't have $500 in their savings account, eventually if a trend like this

continues to bring it back to like that end time type scenario, if a trend like this continues and people can't eat while other people are trillionaires. One event that could happen, and I'm not rooting for this, I'm throwing this out as an analytical possibility, is that people get in the streets if inflation gets to 40%, 50%, and they can't fucking feed their families or they don't have a job and AI's taken over. And now you have real class revolution warfare like French revolution style. Right. And I think that people like, I hope that doesn't happen.

That could be the intent. But that could, like the fact that people think that can't happen, oh, it can't happen here. brother it could do you ever think about that is the possibility that that's what brings down the house of cards oh yeah bloody revolution bloody revolution and it's then then the question is will alan musk have his droid armies in time oh Jesus Christ it's droid armies well that's what when someone asked him why do you need a trillion dollars and it's when he said it's something I've got to have enough money to control the armies. I can't even

I'm glad he didn't say it against us necessarily. But still like the idea. I can't even think like that. No, I think it goes somewhere else. I mean, there have been there have been peaceful revolutions too. Where? Like in Czechoslovakia. That was peaceful?

Yeah, well, they had they had candles and held hands and stuff until the guy left. They did? Yeah. Not Yugoslavia. That was bad. Okay. That was a war. I have my, I have my Slavias mixed up. Yeah. It's because I feel like there were a few genocides. The Czech. It was called the, he could look it up. It had some great name. Czechoslovakian candle revolution. They did these vigils. They just stood outside. Basically, everyone went into the streets and they just stood with a candle. Good for them. So it was peaceful? You know, yeah, you do general strike. There's ways to do it. All right. So the candle demonstration or candle manifestation on March 25. 5th, 1988 was the first mass protest against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia since 1969.

Around 5,000 peaceful believers gathered in Bratislava's, I'm not going to be able to say it right? They got slabs square to demand religion, civil rights. And we're brutal, this is a point though. They were brutally suppressed by police. So all right, the protests, thousands of unarmed citizens gathered quietly with only lit candles and a conscience. The reaction state security violently dispersed a non-vermed.

violent crowd using water cannons and batons detaining dozens and injuring many injuring many and so like then it turns into like they had to do real revolution after that's my point like they didn't though they didn't they gathered quietly they kept doing it they still do all right let's go down they got there they got the velvet revolution in nineteen eighty nine the velvet revolution widespread democratization in chekyll savaki is formerly known as the velvet revolution which took place a year and a half after the candle demonstration another okay another peaceful student demonstration in prague was severely beaten by riot police spark a massive nationwide outrage created movement. Millions of Czechs and Slovak's joined daily strikes and peaceful protests, heavily utilizing candles and chants. The result was the Communist

Party of Czechoslovakia surrendered its monopoly on power in just over... Wow. Okay. Wow. That's when they got Vaclav Havel. By December dissident and playwright, Vakl of Havel was elected as the new president. So it's possible. That's good. That's cool. It's like we... Well, I mean, we live in a country that had a violent revolution that worked. And like when you see like afterwards, like it worked and they made something pretty amazing in the constitution. But when you look at most violent revolutions that happen around the world, it doesn't work. It doesn't. You just you, you, when you're a violent revolution, are you often just recreate the oppression? Yeah. You become your attacker. What do you make of, I mean, we've been talking about some of these billionaires and stuff

all day, but like you've been in these circles where people talk about, you know, the idea of like transhumanism and ascending to some other type of, I don't know, race of species or whatever. Number one, I guess let's just start with. What do you make of all that? And do you think any of that is legitimate at all or it's just like a dark, you know, cop out? I mean, we're all transhuman already, you know? What do you mean? We use glasses.

You've got stitches on your. arm. I mean... How does that make me transhuman? I'm still human. You're still human, but I mean, transhuman is just that you've got technology embedded in who you are. We've taken antibiotics. We've, you know, we've used technology to be here. Where's the line on that, though, that stops you from being human? It depends. I mean, it depends. Where is the line on it? You know, if you lost your arms and replaced them with, you know, bionics, you're still human. You know, if you're, you're, you're, you're,

heart and then your liver then you know where where does it where would the line be the thing is it's like i feel like it's one thing it's one thing to like repair yourself with whatever is around right and it's another to seek to kind of leave your humanity behind to see to see to see the human as in need of upgrading, you know? Upgrading. You know, there's, again, it goes back to faith, but I think there's some built-in challenges to our existence that are part of it, like breathing. Okay.

Right, we breathe. And I think breathing is really fundamental, not just to our respiration, but to kind of who we are and how we are. Yes. So if the air starts getting really bad, and then the tech bros or whatever come up with, oh, we've got this new thing, you won't have to breathe anymore. It's a new blood thing that'll somehow pre-oxygenate your blood. I think letting breathing go may, you may lose other things with it.

You know, when we talk about genes and all, a lot of the genomics bros talk about junk DNA. Oh, that's junk DNA. Leave that behind. It's like, none of my DNA's junk. That's, it's, it's the past. It might be stuff you don't know

what it's there for, but that's, it's there. It's resonating. It's, it's the library. It's, if we were chameleons or monkeys or whatever, I'm keeping that history there.

It's not that heavy. Right. Not that burden. So it's like the, the risk is where we start oversimplifying or start optimizing for very particular values of the moment rather than a little bit of accepting what this is.

Like you could say, oh, we're living in a moment where we have all these feelings about other people and it's making us really hard to kill them and eat them, you know? So what if, you know, let's get rid of those feelings. Let's engineer that out. It's engineer that out, engineer out empathy. Well, in a certain situation, I could see why you wouldn't want that anymore. Yeah. So it's like there's a balance and where do you find the balance is in your spitey.

Yeah, but hold on a minute. I'm going to splint my arm or replace my finger, you know. But getting rid of that, hold on. Getting rid of that takes us back evolutionarily, in my opinion. Like if you got rid of empathy as a gene, what makes you different from a T-Rex dinosaur at that point? you just fucking eat things you don't care you don't feel you inflict pain you don't view it as inflicting pain

it's survival right and that could be the birth of the true superhero turn off that empathy well you get a super soldier that way anyway yeah well that gets scary some of these guys though whether it be the Peter Thiel or the whatever who are going to ascend

and all that you know what do they view as a breakaway civilization if it's not multi-planetary like what does it look like i don't know uploading to the machines like the matrix yeah but in a good way i guess in a good way where they they you don't have to die they don't want to die you know that's that's what it really comes down to but other people need to die for them to not die and for it to be worth it because they need to have the resources to live and be able to subsist forever oh it's they think of it more as a whatever a what it's not other people three people have to die than they do but whatever yeah all things being equal no they don't have

to die but they can live as long as i get to get up to the next place but the more of them that are around the more people around that could unplug the thing that i'm living on did any of these guys believe in god i don't think so yeah so why does peter till go around and lecture people about the antichrist right right he might he might but he's got a interesting or take on god What's his take on God? Oh, it's sort of like, certainly God's not, it's not the God of Jesus that blesses the meek, you know, and it's the God of the Uber Manch. Yeah. It's the, as if somehow Christ-likeness is an achievement, you know.

Rather than a previous example. Or I would think that becoming Christ-like would involve more of a surrender to this, you know, more of a surrender. I don't think guys like that surrender though, right? They don't. They win. Yeah. What is this, Steve? We got a quote from Emil Ciorin. Oh, yeah.

I had this up earlier from when you guys were talking. Ambition is a drug that turns its addicts into potential madmen. Yeah, you were talking about. about like there's something we're all addicted to. I think it's that. That could be how he used God, the God of ambition. I'm pierced back, obviously. Yeah.

Ambition. More. You know? More. It's almost an addiction for addiction's sake. It's kind of dopamine without the other reward chemicals. How do I keep feeding that? And it's fear of intimacy.

If you really can't be, if you're really going to be intimate, you end up in a state of surrender. You know what I mean? The boundary between you and the other person kind of disappears and you just, you're there. And if you're there, if you don't like that feeling, then the only way you can get something like it is by dominating. Yes. Kind of controlling over it. Squish the bug, burn the worm, you know. that you create a similar, a similar kind of clutch, but without the vulnerability.

How do you stay like so happy and optimistic when you have had access to some of the most powerful people who give you every reason to be otherwise? I'm not optimistic. You're not optimistic. I'm happy. You're happy. Can you explain that? Yeah.

if you were on the deck of the Titanic and you're a musician and you know it's going down would you choose to pick up your violin play music for the people as they go down and would you be in a state of bliss having realized your life's purpose you are celebrating life you are you're there. Or you're the soundtrack to the end. At least you're playing music on the deck of the Titanic as it goes down. You know, if you're the people, and there were in Auschwitz, there were people who were taken from the barracks and being brought to the gas chamber. It's a famous, I'm sorry, I forgot which, uh, uh, exactly who it was. And they, um, as they were being taken, they were forgiving the guards saying it's okay

it's going to be okay we understand that that was their impulse to be that person you are you are living in infinity at that point you are living in the compassion

and I don't I'm not saying we're doomed I'm not saying there's a great possibility humanity can survive another century or two we could that's not exactly

like fucking positive if another century would be alive to see it end. Well, it end. What is it? Right? But no, the humanity could, could, some amount of humans could still make it. You know, and there's, we could flip.

Yeah, but that's the thing. Low bar, low bar. It's so much easier to be happy if you have a low bar, right? Ha! Oh, man. Like, oh man, I got another meal today. I got a meal. I got a meal.

Now, that's different though. Hold on a minute. That's different. To be grateful for the little things and be happy by things that are otherwise expected on the daily. Yeah. And built into just what you know, I think that's a good way to live. But to have the bar so low for like the hope of the survival of like the human race and how we exist on this crazy fucking planet. Yeah.

But it makes it easier to a good way. adopt the, let's call it strategy that I'm talking about. And what's that? The small things, your neighbors. Who are the 20 bodies your sleeping closest? Who are the people living next to you? Why don't you take joy in helping, in sitting with an old woman who doesn't have company, in teaching a kid how to read, and it's that's where you find the joy.

Not in amassing a billion dollar empire. It's not where it is. It's not where it's at. And that's the thing though, Doug. I don't think that, like that quote is great, thief. Ambition is a drug that turns its addicts into potential madman. I love that it says potential madman because it's two ways, Western man. You can either have ambition to create something and bring something better to the world

where then you're compensated in a good way for it and then you put that forth in a good moral way within the world. You don't do evil and you treat people well and I don't know, create jobs and environments. Or you say, give me, give me, give me, more. more more, let's go, let's go, let's go, I need it. Fuck you, I'll take it from you. Those are the two potentials of ambition and there are a lot of people out there and I believe this who are ambitious and they'll go the right way with that. The problem is when you get really ambitious people who are sociopathic and will just amass more and more and more, they get such a big piece of the pie that they can put their finger on the scale more than the rest of us. Yep. Or for ambition, you know,

You could look at the Bolsheviks who started out ambitious for universal justice and ended up putting people in the gulah. That's right. See it again and again and again? Again and again, which is why you keep pulling it back to the moment. Look at what am I doing right now? Yeah. And you can really figure out if what you're doing right now, how good or bad is it? That's right.

What do you think happens when we die? I wonder. You know, I wanted to do a book at one point where I asked, like all different, like religious leaders. What happens when we died to figure it out? Oh, you should do that. I did a drug recently called Bufo, which is like a frog venom, DMT, 5MEO DMT.

Bufo? Yeah. And I think, I think that's, I think that's what happens when we die. I think we have the opportunity to really exhale. To exhale. So let go of this.

You know, to diffuse back into the quantum hole. And I think we're more conscious than ever, but it's less, you're not there anymore. More conscious than ever. Right. You're part of something that's way more conscious than we are. What does that mean? But you lose the boundary of self. You know, you...

it's it's hard to explain i i think we do the closest i could say it is we dissolve back into the whole like re and does that and the dust aspect of it though is steve saying back here does that imply that there's some sort of then we i think that's from the ashes and reincarnation i think that stuff i think that stuff recycles but it might not be your stuff that recycles that recycles as a single unit again Meaning just a piece of it? You might dissolve into the, like if you're a droplet, you go and you go into the cloud of droplets, and then another droplet rains. So some of your droplets in that droplet that rains, but it might not be you, your droplet. Wow.

That's heavy. Yeah. You go back into the mix. Butterfly effect kind of thing. Yeah, you mix into the stuff, but you dissolve again into the stuff. You should do that book asking the religious leaders. Oh, yeah. That would be fine.

That would be great. Do you think that we are alone in the universe? Do you think there's other intelligent life out there? I don't think we're alone. You know, I don't think we're alone. I think the whole, I think the whole universe is conscious. You know, I'm kind of more, whatever, an animist or something. I think the whole thing has an awareness.

Meaning it's a body in and of itself. Yeah, there's some, yeah. So we could be cellular membranes. Yeah, we're doing biological life. Is this one experiment it's running? So in this simulation of the simulation of the simulation, we could be the white blood cells. Yeah.

And just the sum whole of every action that happens on this earth creates whatever that cellular action is. I'm interested. I mean, there could be other than carbon-based life forms. I want would that be, you know. You know, but there's probably, because there's so much stuff out there, there's probably some other place. But what we've got to realize is this is special, almost more special temporally than spatially.

We've had a really good 20,000, 40,000 years of temperate, perfect little earth climate thing. It doesn't last forever. Unless we innovate a way to. do that. Maybe. Yeah. I feel like we could do that. We could. You know, and life was a great innovation to do that. Life is really good at homeostasis. The getting rid of so much life on the planet at once is really bad for trying to keep that balance that Earth has managed. But yeah, there could be, could be ways we'll see. Well, Doug, this has been awesome, man. Dude. It's good to meet you. It's great to meet you as well. And we had a wild, very far-ranging,

far-reaching conversation. I'm out to think some more about. But a lot of years are like this, though. I appreciate that. We do a lot of different topics in here, which I like. But you're a lot of fun to talk to. You've obviously known a lot of people good and bad in your life, which is interesting to hear about it so openly here. And, you know, as an optimist, I'd like to think we figure this thing out and maybe some of the people that are trying to figure it out for us, don't get the chance to do that. Right. Yeah. All right. We will link your website, your socials. Team human. And team human. Yeah.

And any books down below, so everyone go check that out. Cool. And let's do this again sometime. Right. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is? Give it a thought. Get back to me.

Peace. Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you.