Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Douglas Rushkoff: Recalibrate for Human Connection

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Douglas Rushkoff (digital humanism author and documentarian) helps us break down human autonomy in the digital age and the social implications of the tech world. He takes us through his start in the cyberpunk movement, from goals of uniting humanity through the early internet, the intersections of psychedelics and counter culture with computer programming, through the big business takeover of the internet. Douglas explains the perils of algorithm technology, the evils of cryptocurrency, and how social disconnect can contribute to consumerism. He reveals ways politicians and corporations capitalize on our fears and insecurities to push their own agendas and the factors that led extremist movements like QAnon to become so popular. Mayim and Douglas break down the neuroscience and biology of human connection and consider ways tech physically primes our bodies for dehumanization. They discuss how to combat feelings of helplessness tied to digital media’s prevalence in our daily lives and practical ways to retrain your nervous system to disengage with tech in favor of human connection.  Douglas Rushkoff's new book, SURVIVAL OF THE RICHEST: https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fantasies-of-the-tech-billionaires/ Douglas Rushkoff's podcast, TEAM HUMAN: https://www.teamhuman.fm/ BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And it really goes all the way back to really the logic of capitalism, which is that the more alienated we are from each other, the more stuff we buy. Okay, say that again. Say that again. The more alienated we are from one another, the more stuff we buy. On my block, we could have one lawnmower for the whole block. It's bad for the lawnmower company for us to share a lawnmower. If you need the economy to grow, then you don't want people to share stuff. It's Miami-Biolic's breakdown

She's gonna break it down for you Because you know she knows a thing or two And now she's gonna- Hi, I'm I'm Bi-Alic and welcome to my breakdown This is the place where we break things down So you don't have to Do it some a little different today Jonathan and I are together, physically together

And we're in a new location We've broken free We've broken free of the podcast studio And we are here where Jonathan often records by himself But I am here with him I would like you to know that Jonathan has set up a beautiful ring light. I'm liking what it's doing for my complexion. That combined with this color glasses and my eyes, which are light.

A lot of people don't know I actually have light eyes. And like the lipstick, I did really well. Some people think I have dark eyes. Like they see my kids and they're like, they're blonde with blue eyes. Where did they come from? Like my body. And I made them that color. They should listen to the podcast.

They can hear all about it. Anyway, we have a very exciting. guest today, but first I should introduce to you the person literally sitting right next to me, who always is there to tease me in case anyone takes me too seriously, Jonathan Cohen. If we're not laughing, we're not having fun, everyone. If we're not having fun, we're not laughing. We're going to have a lot of fun today. This is an exciting episode because it started in a little bit of a similar way to many episodes, start. And by start, I mean the pre-episode meeting, which was, what should we talk about?

you really kind of synthesize like a lot of different kinds of information and you see how they come together. I'm much more like a specialized person. What's it? It's like a fox versus a... I'm a professional generalist. You're a specialist. Specialists are in their little silos,

doing their little work, in their labs, figuring their things out and they have very deep subject matter expertise. I kind of know a little bit about many things. This just became a really weird, arrogant speech that you just gave about why you're a better person than I am. Or maybe that's just what I hear. That's what you hear.

I can't do many of the things that you do, which is why it's a very good combination. I'd also like to note that the place that we are has a lot of allergy activation for me. So that's also a story. I'm not sick. It's just the pollen is accumulating. And just before you read Douglas's bio

for people who may not know him, at the end of this episode, hit us up on the Instagram. At Biolic Breakdown. And let us know if you think this, hit the mark for relating to mental health. We think it does, but again, I was skeptical. But we're going to welcome Douglas Rushkoff. He's been named one of the world's 10 most influential intellectuals by MIT.

But what's interesting about him, well, he's written 20 books. It's a lot of books. It's a lot of books. The upcoming Survival of the Richest, Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, which is going to be coming out in the fall. He's a person who, first of all, is trained in theater. Like has an MFA. He's like a director, a performer, a real communicator of important information that,

and he transformed that into a world of reading, writing, and thinking about some of the most important shifts in technology as an extension of an expansion of consciousness. Like, it's big stuff, but he's super. super, super fun. And he looks at how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, to money, to power, to one another. He's the guy who coined such concepts as viral media, screenagers, which I believe I may have two of them, and social currency. He's also been a leading voice for applying digital media towards social and economic justice. So he's a good guy

who understands kind of the implications on our, like the social implications, of the shift that we're all kind of taking it part in as an experiment to see kind of how much more tech understanding can we have. And he's a research fellow at the Institute for the Future and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY, CUNY, CUNY, Queens. He's a professor of media theory and digital economics. He's a really, really cool guy. It's such a pleasure to welcome Douglas Rushkoff to The Breakdown. Break it down. It's very nice to meet you. really an honor to have you on the breakdown.

You know, you're, you are a person who's at the intersection of a lot of different aspects of culture and kind of things that are, you know, in the water. And also, you're at the intersection of those things and what has sort of evolved into the mental health state that we are in. Yeah. And, you know, for people who may not, you know, kind of know, kind of know, who you are and sort of the academic circles that you run in, suffice it to say, and I'll have you elaborate a bit, you began in the 90s when many of us were either teenagers or, you know, possibly in our

20s, but... And didn't have iPhones yet? We did not have iPhones yet. I graduated high school in 93. So you're a bit older than me, but you were part of this, you know, kind of young, hip, for lack of a better word, kind of technology cadre of minds that were really at the forefront of what was starting to bubble up. For people who kind of maybe have no idea who you are, explain sort of what you're trained in and sort of how you evolved as one of these kind of cyberpunk voices in the 90s. Well, it's interesting.

I mean, I was trained in theater and medicine, right? I went to Princeton back in the early 80s. And, you know, George Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov. there's a great tradition of theater makers who are also medical doctors. So why not keep that up? But, you know, so I got out of college and went to Cal Arts and all. And I wanted to be a theater director. And I got really disillusioned by theater.

I was doing a production of three-penny opera where the cheapest seat was $40. And I thought, this is not a way to do Brecht, you know, to do Marx and Brecht and return the people. It was not. Theater was so anti-populist in so many ways. The structure of theater bothered me, too, where everything had, every story had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And you had to deliver that happy ending to people. And I wanted to send people out into the streets to change the world. And while I was particularly fed up with theater, my best friends from college had ended up, my most psychedelic friends were moving out to San Francisco to become programmers at Intel and Apple and Northrop Grummond. And I'm thinking, what the, why are grateful deadhead people becoming computer programmers?

So I went up to San Francisco and I started visiting with them and they would go to Intel during the day. And they'd come home at night and scrape the peyote buds off cactuses and trip and then sit at their sun computer stations and make fractal imagery and all. And there was between those people and I was friends with, you know, Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and Terrence McKenna, sort of the patriarchs of the psychedelic movement. And it seemed to me there was one thing going on, that the reason why these companies were hiring psychedelics people is because people who had experienced tripping were comfortable hallucinating things into reality. They would imagine a world and build it and then people would inhabit it. And that was a scary thing. So they could do it and kids could do it. You know, kids were comfortable imagining these things. So I became part of, you

this early, what we call like a cyberpunk, cyberdelic movement, where we believed that the internet, in particular, computers networked together would unleash the new potential for the collective human imagination, that we weren't going to be individual brains at all, but we were going to become part of something else. You know, and it was the same time there was the Gaia hypothesis came out that the planet is one big organism. So we thought human beings are like the, the the nervous system, the neurons, the brain. And so we believed that we could sort of launch this big collective rave party, if you will, that society would change. And there were all these different things happening at the same time. Fantasy role playing games and hypertext and

fractals and chaos math and physics and psychedelics and rave culture. It seemed that there was one big thing going on. So I started writing all these articles. I was like the first East Coast guy out west writing about virtual reality and, you know, and email. And I got a job to write these articles for a big magazine in New York. And two days before my plane flight, the magazine folded. But I had my ticket moving to New York. I sat on the plane and I wrote, I decided all the articles they would have me write are all part of one thing. And so I made a big list and wrote basically a book proposal on a legal pad. And two weeks later, I sold it. And so I made a big list. And so I made a big list and I made a big list and I sold it. It was called Siberia, Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace. And it was about this San Francisco

scene. And just to be clear, Siberia, like spelled like cyber. Yeah, like cyber. Although it's a nice pun for that too, because people think of computers as cold. And I was saying, no, this is actually the warm, new thing. But, you know, I wrote it in 91 and then Bantam canceled the book in 92 because they thought the internet would be over by 93 when the book was supposed to come out. There you go. That's the story of my life. But, um, No, so but I wrote that. And then I wrote a book called Media Virus, sort of where I coined the idea of this idea that, you know, well, now we all know about viral media.

But at the time, it was sort of this radical idea that ideas were going to spread laterally between people. I lived this very excited life about the new possibilities of digital tech. And then Wired Magazine came along and really recast the Internet from a cultural, sociological, human potential. story to a business story. And people became, once you're putting money on something, you become less concerned with the unbridled potential of humans, and you start to look at how do we increase the probability that our bets are going to pay off. And the way you increase your probability is by increasing the probability that human beings are going to take certain actions. So technology flipped in the mid-90s from tools for people to experience new things to tools to control.

human behavior to make sticky websites and increase what they called eyeball hours, which is the number of hours your eyeballs are looking at the screen. And once you take technology and instruct it, algorithmic technology even, to how can you get the most attention from people? How can you get the most data from people? How can you get the most, how can you trigger the most emotional response and engagement from people? They're going to do it in ways that we don't even understand. They're just going to do algorithms, do whatever they can to get us excited and upset. And so, you know, we've been living in, it's funny, Timothy Leary, when he went online for the first time, he said, Doug, this is as powerful as acid. This is more, this is going to be bigger than LSD.

And it is, but if you think about the net as LSD, we've been living on a psychedelic substrate for 30 or 40 years with a ridiculous set and set. You know, instead of a set and setting of peace and love and harmony, we have a set and setting of control and extraction. And, you know, no wonder we're having this bad track. My M.Bi-Lix breakdown is supported by superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine. Drink more water. There's no real data.

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but for a limited time, our listeners get an additional $20 off with the code break. Head to superpower.com. Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention my ambiotics breakdown to help support the show. That shift that you talked about at the end between this and, endless world of possibility and this, you know, I don't mean to call it capitalism in a bad way, but the capitalization of this idea to drive behavior, drive specific behavior to monetize eyeballs.

That's the thing. When we were hackers, we used to look at computer systems for what we called exploits. An exploit is where the kid finds, oh, I can get into the air conditioning system at the mall by going in this back door. I found an exploit. I can raise the temperature in there and have fun. Now we look for exploits in human beings, right? So we're training technologies to look for exploits in the human psyche, in the human personality. And then we wonder why people are so upset. Okay.

Can I slow us down a little bit? You know, the early 90s are very tender for me because that's when I was, you know, in high school, right? So it's really convenient that so many things happened in our culture. in the early 90s because in so many ways, I feel like it's like part of my experience. And, you know, I read Generation X by Douglas Copeland around probably somewhere around that time. And it really blew my mind.

When I entered college, I mean, we were given this thing called an email address. No one had personal computers at that time. And we had to line up in the coop, like it was like the co-op, you know, of the UCLA. And there was like maybe sometimes two people waiting and you would line up to get on a computer, like to check your email, but you so rarely needed to do it that you would just like drift in. And then, you know, within the five years of my

undergrad, it went from that to, you know, that weird Apple computer that had the blue dome in the back, you know, and it was like so exciting that it was clear and you could, I didn't know what I was looking at. So many things shifted. But what you're talking about is also like a coalescence of a concept about what we can perceive and experience. So if you can describe a little bit about how that culture then mixed with this kind of technological revolution, it's really an extension of an expansion of consciousness. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, from two perspectives. I mean, first, I had a similar college computer experience. You know, at Princeton, there was the computer center, and you would go and you'd be at a terminal. It wasn't a computer. It was a

terminal hooked up to some big mainframe somewhere. And there were graduate assistants that kind of showed you what to do. And I remember, I'm trying to type my senior thesis on this thing, so I wouldn't have to deal with all the paper. If you change a paragraph, people don't know. But if you change something early in a typed paper, what do you do? Do you go back and retype the whole thing? It's like a whole thing. No, you try and edit so that it doesn't change the page count. You're like, I really did. Can I say this in two sentences instead of three? Because otherwise the page count's going to change the bibliography. Exactly. You try to fill it in there in that same. space, right? So you only have to redo the one page. It's so funny. I mean, how many books were

probably written that way where it's like James Joyce? It's like, I would have put another paragraph there, but I'd have to read it. All of them. All of them. So I'm at the computer center and I do the thing. I type in like one of my chapters and then I'm ready to save it. And the woman comes over and she says, how do you want to save this? And what do you mean? She says, are you saving it as a read-only file or a read-write file? And I'm like, what's that? Read, what do you mean? She said, well, either it's a file that people can read or you save it that they can read it or they can change it. I was like, oh my gosh. And I walked out of there thinking all the media I've ever seen or used has been read only media. But why is it read only media? Why is this, this dollar? This is read only media. Why can't I turn this into a 10?

Read right. You know, the television, you know, it was before VCRs. Television's a read-only medium, but why can't I read back into it, read right? And I started to look at the world. I remember going to New York City that night and seeing the grid pattern of New York City and going, you know, the streets are in a grid pattern. God didn't do that. It didn't grow up. This is not nature.

This is choices were made. And I started to look at the whole world as I've accepted so. many things as read-only that are actually read-right things. It was almost that constitutional enlightenment understanding of that everything is fungible. And if I'm going to now go into a world that's a read-right world, I'm liberated. So I started questioning everything, all those underlying assumptions. And I think a lot of people with computers did that. We started to believe that the reality in which we live is largely arbitrary. It's designed. We inherit a whole bunch of assumptions from our parents and their parents from the government, from our priests,

from our leaders, and they can be questioned. So that's happening. And then all these computer people, we find our kindred spirits in that sort of West Coast question authority, psychedelic, hate Ashbery group. They weren't dropouts at all. They were dropouts from consensus reality and building an alternative society, whether you're talking about the Panthers or the hippies or the yippies. They were all, all these countercultures were doing the same thing. But the weird thing was there was, there was actually a moment when, yeah, it was Stuart Brand, who was one of the Mary Pranksters. Great, you know, he was with Ken Kesey and had had all the psychedelic bona fides or whatever. And, you know, who was a Whole Earth Review writer and all. He went to a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, I think it was.

basically told the counterculture, these technologies are okay. Don't worry. The counterculture was generally afraid of tech and TV and, you know, back to nature with the hippies. He was saying, no, no, computers are different. So when he said that, it kind of, these two worlds came together and we got that great hippie explosion until right around 1992, 93, when a guy named John Barlow, who was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and we didn't know at the time, but it kind of libertarian. He wrote this thing called the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. And in that, he said, governments of the world, you know, we don't need you anymore. Get away. This is our space. And we're going to make it. And we all were like, yay! Get away, bad government. You know, we hated government

at the time, too, because they had been arresting hackers and Tipper Gore and the Computer Decency Act and they were scared about porn online and violence in video. Get away, government. Get away. And so we pushed them off. And what we didn't realize is that when you get rid of government, you just create free reign for corporations. You know, it's like government and corporations balance each other in a way like, you know, bacteria and fungus in your body. You know, if you use too many antibiotics, you get a fungal infection. It's like, no, you need both. And so we got rid of government and we just opened the whole thing to commercialization.

You know, it's like I know the end of the story. So it's so hard to like summon that kind of like excitement and enthusiasm, although that's incredibly important. And it's how we, you know, got all the incredible amazing things that we have. Possibly ridiculous question. But the stereotype of like the computer nerd is the farthest from consciousness expanding that I can imagine. Like when I think of who were the people at least, you know, on a more kind of low. level who were mastering this technology. I mean, my brother was, he was an editor of the Jewish News Magazine at UCLA, and he did a lot of the kind of early graphic arts design for a lot of

the papers at UCLA, because he was the one with, I think it was an Apple 2C. He was the one with this computer, and that's not how they made newspapers before that existed. So my brother was very straight-edge. like he was this just like he had the brain for tech. So I don't know what your experience was in far off Toronto, but you know the notion of kind of like this evolution in technology, I don't associate just in my sort of memory with like progressive politics and like all those things. I know that was part of it, but there also was this whole other world of just like the ability to just like geek out

on a set of information that was. accessible to a certain kind of brain, you know? Do you know what I mean? Like, but the freedom to geek out. That is the revolution. You know, it's not just Revenge of the Nerds, although it is partly that. And, and you know, from your own, from your own dramatic work. I mean, it's, we should all, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, cool is the enemy.

Cool. No one should be cool. I'm not cool. I'm hot, right? Cool is aloof. Cool was really a way for black people to avoid getting triggered. into conflict with white people. That's where the actual concept of cool comes from.

Then teenagers took cool as a way to not be activated by their parents and I'm aloof and I don't care about work and this and that. But the beauty of the early internet days was we started to see white kids and black kids and gay kids and straight kids. And as long as you could geek out and appreciate this, all are welcome. You know, it's like movies like freak.

became central to our culture. Freaks and slacker. I mean, so I do think there is something countercultural about celebrating your nerddom and your freakdom. But I know what you mean. They weren't acid-taking people. They were pocket protector people. Yeah.

Right, right, exactly. And, you know, they were like my friends in the chess club because some of us were in chess club. You know, one of the kind of interesting things when I think back, you know, to those. kind of, you know, early days of this sort of like consciousness and techability and kind of those humans, there were some individuals who I identified probably as early as junior high who I would probably, I'd put money on them becoming part of, I'm going to say,

this word that you spend some really good attention on in sort of, your writing and as an expansion of your thinking, there were certain people who had what I would define as a Q&on personality, even back then. And there was a certain amount of like healthy skepticism, right? And I think that's kind of what you're talking about, that like, along with this sort of emergence of the tech world. And by tech, I don't want people to be like, I don't like technology. Whatever you're listening to us on right now, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about that information is no longer just coming from your parents, your teachers, and like the news that your parents make you watch once a week. And it's not even just coming

from MTV, which was its own revolution, right? We are talking about the way that information is now essentially communicated primarily and for many people as their primary source of kind of connection, right, with the world and with other people. But there was an early kind of skepticism and outsiderness, which in many ways, and I don't want to make that kind of direct link, but you tell a story about a friend who you kind of give an anonymous term in your book, who essentially went from being a trusted colleague to a person who was part of a way of thinking that is very, very not only different from yours, but kind of a really great example of what has happened in this world of communication, information, and misinformation and I guess

disinformation. and your focus on, and you kind of mentioned it, the term is capatology, is that how you would say it? Yeah. How to manipulate, like this notion of how to manipulate human behavior with machines, right? And the repercussions of this, which obviously Jonathan and I have a strong interest in because of our, you know, mental health kind of slant, is very related to a lot of the things you talk about with the kind of personalities that are capitalizing, you know, on. this medium. Can you speak to that a little bit? Because it sort of feels like the bridge, you know, between then and now. Like this is what we've become. And I don't just mean QAnon, but I mean that that kind of shift in what we can do when we communicate this way.

Well, it's weird. There's a confluence of a few different things that have led to this. You know, the first, and I was writing about this in the late 90s and certainly in this book I wrote called Present Shock in 2013, which was looking kind of at the, the, what happened. when everything's happening now and you're in this onslaught. And one of the things that happens is the Aristotelian story that I was rebelling against with theater, you know, that Aristotelian arc beginning, middle, and end, the beautiful thing about the net and hypertext is it breaks that down. You know, you're here, the opener drawer, you're in another universe.

Now you're here, now you're there. You know, everything gets Rick and Morty, if you will, on the internet. You're moving into alternate universes all the time. Everything is Punta list. And when your facts are here and there and here and there, and you don't have a story being given to you, it doesn't mean that you adapt to that automatically. Oh, there is no story. I'm in an existential ontological relativistic haze.

Oh, this is fine. No, it's like, you know, it's like, oh, no, I need a story. So what you do is you create a story, the same way that, you know, the ancient Greeks would look in the heavens and create a constellation, we create a narrative because it's scarier to believe that no one's in charge than I'd rather believe that there's some, you know, malevolent dictator group of whatever protocols of Zion group of horrible people running things, then stuff just happens. That's scary. So one thing I was writing about was I called it fractal noia, which was trying to see patterns

where they don't exist because it's reassuring. I was already noticing that there was going to be that tendency. Plus, if we're living in a non-narrative world, people really ache for conclusion. They can't just live in the present. It just, what do you mean? Life just goes on. There is no salvation. This is it.

I mean, I used to say, you know, the Christians had the good news. The Jews have the bad news, right? The bad news is this is it. No, this is it. It's fine. Just this is it. You know, no, we're not getting anywhere. There is no.

You're not. No, no. Just it's now. It's here. it's now. If you're not being nice to someone right now, you're not being nice. You know, that's really hard for people. They want the ends justifies the means. Let's just go up this hill and go up the thing a little bit longer and then we get there, right? So people are aching for conclusion. When there's no ready conclusion, they get apocalyptic about their conclusion.

They'd rather the world end in a fiery apocalypse than there be no end to the story at all. You have pattern recognition being done inappropriately. You have people yearning so addicted to narrative, that when narrative is taken away, they ache for conclusion. And apocalypse, it's very ripe for a Q&ON to happen. Now, the beauty of Q&N in some ways was the first great interactive novel. You know, they drop something. There's a Q drop, which is just a cryptic little poem or Q, and then they say, do the research.

It's like, what does this mean? Number three, and a mountain, and this. You know, I'm like, oh, and you get all these people, and they're playing what, what improv people call yes and. You know, they're doing everything someone tweets, they go, yes, and Bill Gates is this, and the Rothschilds are that, and the space aliens, and the this. And you end up with this giant, totally inconsistent, but a reassuring collage of stories. And that then combined with this thing, it's a long-started thing called Gamergate,

which was basically a bunch of angry young men. got corralled into a fake news conflict about, you know, the women and social justice and nonviolent things that were, that upset them. So there was this sort of preexisting angry gamer culture online that Steve Bannon and some right-wing people looked at and said, ah, these could be our troops. And very consciously said, let's use that anger. You know, these, if you want to go psychologically, what it is, is, you know, young men who, who, who need a non-castrated male role model to feel okay about themselves. Let's get them. And they kind of banded that combined with the paranoia, combined with Jeffrey Epstein and child abuse, to create this giant, almost

appropriate metaphor. You know, there's kind of a, there's almost a poetic analysis, right, of our existence as humans being indeed like either, I don't want to say treated, well, yes, treated like children or spoken to like children by this sort of like parental and patriarchal entity. But what has happened is we've kind of like transformed it into like people abuse and torture babies and drink their blood, right? Like it's such an extreme kind of distortion of what, as you said, starts as almost a metaphor for our existence, all of us together. Yeah. Well, people feel appropriately, they feel shafted by neoliberalism. And the people who are espousing the neoliberalism, the sort of Clintonian politicians, are at the one hand, they're saying that they're doing social justice and social

service, and they're the ones helping and creating all the great welfare programs and all that. But they're also promoting this corporatism and neoliberalism that's screwing us all over. and that feels a little bit like a parental abuse. Wait a minute. Oh, I'm your favorite, but you're chafting me at the same time and you take care of me, but I have to pretend. It does trigger, to use the word, it does trigger that feeling of kind of parental abuse. So in some ways, the idea that they're fantasizing that Hillary and Biden and all these and Bill Gates

have, you know, harams of thousands of underage, children that are being abused, it makes a certain psychic sense, if not a literal sense. And by not dealing with that, by not actually addressing that, you know, we end up vulnerable. And then you have the internet and people making connections and you show a picture, some kids that they find in Alabama and a trailer and all of a sudden. I do want to emphasize, you know, especially with the Jeffrey Epstein case. It's real. You know, the right, like the trafficking of, in particular, teenage girls, is a thing and human trafficking is a thing and the trafficking of children is a thing. But the conversation that we're having is specifically around this sort of, you know, ritualistic,

you know, behavior on the part of the liberals. And I actually, I pulled a quote that I sent to Jonathan. You said, you know, what we have is we have a system and a reality of oppressive governments, corporations and wealthy individuals, intentionally fomenting, fancy word, or seizing upon, in particular, natural and military disasters to establish neoliberal policies and trench particular business interests and build gated communities. So can you speak a little bit about this sort of, you know, I usually just like, I just call it elitism because I'm like an old person and that's just what we used to call it. But can you kind of explain this sort of like shifting when you talk about neoliberal policies. Can you sort of explain for those of us who think that we're liberal, but it turns out

maybe we're just moderates? Can you explain what that process is by which governments and corporations and wealthy people, you know, are kind of capitalizing on our insecurities to sort of push their own agenda and kind of what that does to us as a culture? I mean, there's two kinds of liberal. There's liberal, and we talk about like liberal values, you know, oh, you know, I think people should be able to smoke pot or be gay or whatever, you know. And then there's liberalism, which traditionally means like libertarians, like free market, you know, neoliberal is that as long as corporations are making money, it's all going to be okay. And that's, that's a problem. We live in a world where when there's an ecological disaster, an environmental disaster, we count that as good for the economy. because the amount of money you have to spend to clean it up increases the GDP.

So, you know, when the international monetary fund or the World Bank does a loan to a corporation and they go and they destroy the topsoil in an African nation, they count it in the good column financially. Right. So when you realize that this kind of math has no values, you realize that, oh, if everybody gets cancer and we have to do this much chemo to heal them, Good business. And the pandemic is a great example. How many billionaires were created, you said, like from the pandemic? A lot.

I mean, it went up by like 20 or 30 percent. Exactly. The people who knew how to bet on it. I mean, the conspiracy theorists will say, oh, therefore they created it. But neoliberalism or this kind of capitalism does create the preconditions for it, which is kind of the problem. But no, I don't see it. And maybe this is because I'm still so benevolent or I can't bring myself.

I don't see it as consciously creating disasters, but certainly there's a willingness to capitalize on them and to predict them and then and prepare to seize upon them, you know, when they come. You know, it's the hoard toilet paper before the monkeypox come, right? I mean, it's sort of that. Well, and also, you know, for those of us, you know, hippies of the vegan variety, this has been something we've been wringing our hands about for years, a health crisis that essentially is perpetuated by the companies that are selling you food and a government that makes it inexpensive to eat the food that then makes people sick, that we then have to

pay for it to make people better. So it's this kind of like sycical insanity. Yeah. Right. That the more, right, the more Monsanto roundup destroys the topsoil than the more Monsanto genetically modified things we're going to need that can grow in that sick topsoil. And then the more drugs we're going to need from the other Genentech to deal with the cancers that we're getting from these foods and so on and so on. And that grows the economy. And then you look at, well, wait a minute, what the heck is going on here? How have we gotten so far, you know, from anything? And it really goes all the way back to really the logic of capitalism, which is that the more alienated we are from each other, the more stuff we buy. Okay, say that again. Say that again. The more alienated we are from one another,

the more stuff we buy. On my block, we could have one lawnmower for the whole block. But everyone has their own lawnmower, right? Because it looks bad to share or I'd have to, if I share his lawnmower, then I got to invite him over for Hanukkah cookies. It's like, why can't we all, you know, well, I sound like Rodney here. Why can't we all just get along? But it's bad for the lawnmower company for us to share a lawnmower. It's bad for, you know, if you need the economy to grow, then you don't want people to share stuff. You don't want people to hang out. You want people consuming. And the only reason we need the economy to grow is because the underlying operating system of capitalism, which is interest-based central currency, it's the program that Jack Dorsey and Peter Thiel and nobody's

willing to look at. They're all willing to deconstruct Mac OS or iOS or the Windows, you know, and they're willing to disrupt an individual industry. But as soon as they've disrupted, they run to Daddy at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs and say, oh, get me my IPO. Right. But it's like, no, look at the underlying operating system, which says you have to pay back more money than you borrow. Therefore, the economy has to keep growing just to stay still. If you need your economy to grow, then you're going to have to use more resources, use more stuff, speed up more things. And you never get to rest. You never get stasis. You never get to a sustainable equilibrium. You've got to grow. And we can't grow anymore. And this is sort of where like you use some initials, I don't know. get the idea. These are really big concepts. And like, I don't know that, I mean, if I was assigned

to read one of your books, for example, like for a college class, like, I would get through it. But on a daily basis, right? Like, I'm trying to understand the practical implications of what you talk about. And I'm going to just be super honest. It makes me feel helpless. It makes me feel despondent. It makes me want to, like, literally run for the hills. It makes me want to say to my teenagers, no one gets a phone anymore. We're going to live in a cabin. And it makes me feel like how do we... How are you going to buy the land and pay for the cabin?

How am I going to buy the land? I don't know. I will sing for my land. But what I wanted to sort of also like, you know, harassed Jonathan to sort of talk about is like Jonathan is one of my favorite people who's an example of someone who lives very deeply immersed in these ideas, these concepts. It's like he gets it. He thinks like that.

You can't say it doesn't depress me. Well, right, but you also have a real appreciation for human contact and human interaction. That's something you crave. How, I'm happy to ask this of both of you, but like, how do we live if we have this information? Because I kind of wish I didn't know. You know what I mean? I kind of wish I didn't understand the massive implications on how this impact. us socially and like I want to think that when Bill Gates does something good he's just good and I want

to think that when the pandemic happens like everybody's going to help each other and then I see like oh people of color and people of a certain socioeconomic status are just like not being helped you know and it makes me really depressed so I'm happy to turn it over to either of you like what are we supposed to do I'm going to let Douglas answer most of this the little caveat that I'm going to throw in, though, is because Ma'am and I are often in this conversation, she's like too much information, like it's overwhelming, what am I supposed to do with it? And my message is, if we are not unpacking, as you described, the underlying operating system for how incentives are being created and our behaviors being driven and the tools that are in front of us and what they're

driving us to do, then we're blindly going along with, I guess, these, you know, whatever current is being created. So maybe we should burn it all down. Is that the solution? Just like burn it all down. No, well, that's the banning solution, right? That's what they want. It's called accelerationism.

Bring on the end, the end times. No. I mean, first, it is true that these effects are totalizing. They seem to be everywhere in every action you do. The beauty of that, it means that in every action you do, you can undo it. Every single thing. Capitalism is everywhere.

It means that revolution is everywhere. You know, it really is the undoing of it. So, yes, the dark fact of it is that there is a lab at Stanford University in capitology that teaches engineers how to take the algorithms from Las Vegas slot machines that addict people to the one-arm bandit, put it in your phone to addict you to something or to get you to have a bad behavior or to make you worried about fear of missing out or to screw you up in one way or another. Yes, that is there and they're paid for it and then they make more money and all that.

Easiest way out of that? Well, the Israelites figured it out in the desert. First thing they gave themselves. Shabbat. Shabbat. One seventh rule. After six, they take one seventh of your time, extract yourself from those systems of oppression and celebrate the fact that God put you

that something that you are on, whether you, whatever you want, that you are here and you are a sacred being with a soul and your own purpose and you, and you're entitled. You have earned the right to be here. You don't need to produce anything or consume anything in order to justify your existence.

Also, every seven years, the land has a sabbatical. You do not take food from the land because it also has its own system of cleansing. Okay, but sorry, keep going. Send that email to Monsanto, let them. They have a seven-year spray that you put on so you don't need to take that time. Don't worry.

We got to seven. This is the seventh year. Just as a nanobot seven. So reclaim your time. Second, you don't have to understand about the way that early Renaissance kings took away our right to make our own kinds of money and to trade things and forced us to borrow money from a central. Treasury and Interest and pay buck more than we borrowed in order to support a banking industry that makes money by simply making money. You know, you don't have to understand that to understand that, oh, in order for us not to burn up our planet, rather than earning more money so I can

buy a Tesla to replace this car, which is just going to have some African kids going into a mine to get rare earth metals to stick in this thing and it's going to carbon footprint of this thing is going to be just as big as the damn combustion engine and all long term. But maybe we'll support the R&D for a future Tesla that won't. Just drive less. Just drive. Just drive. Keep the car you have and drive less. So if you're going to drive less, what does that mean?

Well, on Sabbath, you're not going to drive anywhere. And maybe on Sabbath, one of those Sabbaths, you'll meet a neighbor, rather than driving across town to the person you already like, you'll meet a neighbor and then find out that you like them. And then maybe on Tuesdays you'll hang out with them. Every moment that you spend engaged with another person, person is a moment you're not buying or selling anything, that you're not transacting. These devices are intentionally decalibrating the human nervous system.

You can recalibrate as easily as making eye contact with another person. You know, you know, all about that. As a neuro person, you understand about how, you know, you create rapport. So when you look at somebody's across the table in real life, you can see if their pupils are getting larger or smaller as you speak, if their heads are making microemotions, if their breathing is sinking up. And when the breathing sinks up and their pupils get larger, the mirror neurons flash in your brain, the oxytocin goes through your blood, and you start to experience such a, such bonding and health and rapport and even the beginnings of solidarity with this other human being. You know, look at a landscape of any kind.

We've started doing this, looking at the horizon. We talked to Dr. Andrew Huberman. He said, we are meant to see the horizon in the morning and at night. Like it orientes your nervous system. It orientes your brain and your space. And it's funny because there are times when I'm talking to Jonathan when I can see that he's still in his phone. And I'm not putting this on you, just you particularly, but it happens with teenagers also. I'll be talking to them and I can tell they are calculating when is the time until I can pick that thing up again.

When is the time when I can check my rewards? It's like what I could be scrolling right now. And I'm saying it like it's kind of funny, but it's true. Like it's worse than that. It's not even that we're trying to go back to the device. When you live on Slack all day, jumping between messages and channels in a large organization, or you're a kid and you're living on social media where you're scrolling, scroll and scrolling, when you switch to a human conversation, your brain is still processing at the speed of those very, very fast,

inputs. And so what you're talking about, when you say in the phone, they're like, what you're seeing is that my brain cannot slow down enough to have an actual conversation because I'm got a check, got a check, got a check, got a check. And I'm like a squirrel looking for the next thing that I need to accomplish or the threat. Yeah, there is that kind of mere cat consciousness, right? Because, you know, you can't actually multitask. The brain doesn't multitask. We don't have parallel memories. We need to know the brainwave state that we are putting ourselves in during certain behavior, if only so that we can build in transitionary times or know how long we're, like, for example, if I go running, I know how long I run for and I know that if I run for,

you know, an endless amount of hours, that's going to have an impact on my body and I'm going have to recuperate. We don't think that if I'm just scroll endlessly and have endless inputs, that that's also going to be a tax on me and I'm going to have to recuperate and change back to being able to interact with people in a different way. And the people who are worst at that are the tech billionaires, the guys who've actually made these companies. And so if you have a tech, a tech bro billionaire guy who is already doing these technologies to people, and then he meets with everybody by Zoom. So he's having all these conversations where he doesn't see if the pupils are opening or closing. The other person says they agree with him, but his body didn't feel they agree with

him. So then all of a sudden it sets up a sense of distrust. You know, the person says they agreed with me, but my body doesn't say they agreed with me. And that just magnifies the potential for dehumanization. I get concerned that the main way we talk about healing people who have been so confused. and disturbed by digital technology is, oh, where there's an app for that, right? So you plug in and this app will calm your brain or here's a stack of programs that will help you or just, you know, as if just sitting, you know, in a yoga pose with somebody else is not going to do that more rapidly. There's, you know, there's these places like there's the place called the, you know, Center for Humane Technology. And, you know, God bless them.

They understand that social media is bad. But their solution is, they, say, oh, we've got to upscale humans for the digital age. It's like, don't just leave me alone. Don't upscale me. Don't replace my software. Don't reprogram me for the digital age. You know, I want, you know, technologies to come to me rather than always asking me to adapt to the technology. The new book I've got, the idea for it came to me because I was doing this, what I thought was going to be a talk to these bankers. And it turned out to be five tech billionaires who wanted advice on where to put their bunkers for the apocalypse. Can you tell this story a little bit? Can you, can you flesh it out for us? You were doing

what you thought was like a speaking gig and like that's something you do and you speak and obviously like your background in in theater like you're very charismatic. You're a great speaker. Like great. So you go, but it's not a it's not a speaking engagement. No, I went right. I thought it was they said to talk about the digital future to what I thought was an investment group, you know, like venture capitalist, whatever they were. And, you know, I don't like speaking to them. I like speaking to radicals, but they were paying so much money. It was like literally half my annual salary at CUNY to go to, you know, this resort to speak. I'm like, what the heck? So I go and I'm sitting in this beautiful green room, you know, and I'm like, wow, this is like, I've never had a

dressing room even quite like that before with the views and, and, and sense coming out of a a thing. And they don't take me to a talk. They bring these five men into the room and they sit around this table and it's like, this is the talk. You know, and first they start asking me these, you know, the kind of stock market questions like Ethereum or Bitcoin, you know, virtual reality or augmented reality. Like I'm supposed to tell them which to bet their money on. And then it got around. They finally said, Alaska or New Zealand.

Oh. And that was the whole thing. Where to put, where's the safer place to put their bunker? And they started asking me about all these kind of fear of the walking dead like scenarios about, you know, about the event is what they called it. The event to them. It's like QAnon people. The event is the inevitable collapse of society. Either, you know, there'll be a germ or a nuclear bomb or a drought or a climate change or whatever that will force them to go to their retreat, you know. And these are, it was funny. I said, well, why don't you just go on your

rocket ships? And they're like, oh, no, we're mid-level billionaires. It's like, rockets say, Bezos and Musk get rockets. The best thing could do is get a seat on it, right? If they're lucky. But no, they're still here, right? They're mundane billionaires. So they were building and they started to ask me the question, the philosophical question that took the rest of the hour was, how do we maintain control of our security force after

our money is worthless? And it was like such a beautiful question because it's like, you're right. Those Navy SEALs that you hired are going to kill you and eke you. You know, why do they need you for? anybody who's depending on a military group to protect them from the masses is going to get eaten by their military group. You know, that's the way that one always goes. I told them that I think that they're trying to solve the insulation equation, which is impossible to solve. And the insulation equation is, how much money do I need to earn in order to be able to insulate myself from the

reality I'm creating by earning money in this way? It's like, how do I build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust. You know, eventually you come back around into your exhaust. And I was trying to explain to them that it just, it doesn't work. That it's much simpler. You know, and these are guys who understand exactly what they're doing. These are people who are making the programs that are addicting your kids to the iPad, yet they're not letting their own kids use an iPad.

You know, these are people who are building the, the crazy friggin' urban Google sidewalk reality, but their own families are up in a, you know, goat share, organic farm going to Rudolph Steiner's schools. There's a sense of disdain that I think a lot of people have, you know, for this kind of structure. I'm not saying the individuals, because I don't know any of these people individually, right?

But there's a sense of kind of like disdain, but I've noticed especially in my older teenage son, who's, I'd say, very kind of, he reads the news, he checks the stocks, like it's something, he's like that kind of teen. There's a sense of awe and kind of reverence that I think a lot of young people have. And I see it in you sometimes, where I feel like there's this like, oh my God, but they got so rich. And like, oh my God, they get to do whatever they want and they own islands. And, you know, there's something about that that like, you know, the kid who was raised by, you know, like civil rights activists

who were first generation Americans, like I automatically distrust. wealth, you know, like that's how I was raised. But there's a certain notion, do you know what I'm talking about of like, wow, like if I could get there, I'd be different, you know? Do you know what I'm saying? I do. I also know that no matter how much money you have, everyone wants more, or is that study that like, if you ask people from a variety of different wealth categories, you know, what would it take for them not to worry? It's always like 25% more than they have or more. And then, you know, having crossed paths with some fairly wealthy people, like, they're not happy. So for me, it comes back down to security because people want security and they want safety and they want to know that they're not going hungry and they want to roof over their head and they want to not ideally, you know, be caught in a tornado from a natural disaster.

And they want to have freedom and flexibility to travel if they want to travel and have an enriched life or enriching experiences. We also want to be able to have human connection, which I think we've failed at generally, and the structures of our society have not bred the incentives to, again, share the lawnmower or know your neighbors. And that's the thing. Once you have to add an incentive to something, it means that people don't want the thing. The beauty of socializing with someone is you don't need an incentive. It's Lechma.

You know, you do it for its own sake. That's the beauty of it. It's very hard to teach that to teenagers, though. Yeah. But, you know, in terms of the idol worship of Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or somebody, I mean, you walk around New York City in the in the 90s and you'd see kids wearing scarface t-shirts, you know? And I'm like, guys are a frigging drug dealer.

And you're wearing it's like as if this is your hero. It's not even Che Guevara. I mean, there's not even some political pretense. It's just a mobster. And this is like your, that's your role model? I mean, so I think when you look at a musk more than a Zuckerberg, there's people, it's the same reason people like Trump, you know, or Steve Bannon. There's like a bad boy not going to listen to anybody thing that a teen boy in particular is going to admire, you know. He didn't take no shit from nobody, you know.

I think there's also one more component to that, which is we're not great at doing things or even knowing what types of activities and how to spend our time in a way that provides us enjoyment. And so in absence of that, we're left with this massive hole and we're like look externally to people who either have success or have an FU attitude and we're like, oh, that's what's appealing. But at the root of it, if we were really engaged in hobbies or activities or filling. our curiosity in a way that was truly fulfilling, we'd really be seeking a lot less of that. And it may be coming around. You know, I remember a few weeks ago there was some news report that Netflix subscriptions were going down. And I was thinking maybe people just got sick of it. I mean, how many Viking shows can you watch? How many of the same science fiction post-apocalyptic? They're all the same. It's like every year there's one or two interesting things. But we're just,

We sat there just next streamed through as if it was work. It's like, oh, can I stay up for one more? You know, and it's like, it's not giving me anything. And then, you know, I mean, as you know, you play Lego with a child for half an hour. And it like, oh, it fills every, I mean, every spiritual genetic, whatever thing I've got. And I think people are going to find that. I mean, we almost did with the maker movement and people like making their little craft beers and knitting and sewing and making stuff.

I feel like we may come around to that. I'll also say, I forget the name of this app, but there was an app that was like a barter-only app and you could only barter within your neighborhood. That's right. So as much as we're saying technology has all these faults, it is a tool that can be used for increasing human connection when it's not trying to extract all of our attention

and the parameters are right. I happen to work in tech and emerging tech and believe that there are definitely not tech solutions to everything, but that there are responsible ways to change the paradigm. And that has to be a main goal for us because we can't remove it entirely. No, we don't want to. Imagine what it looked like to someone who didn't know how to speak when they saw other people using mouth noises. It's like, oh, wow, that guy used mouth noises. Then the other one got up and brought him something. What happened there? You know, that's crazy.

And you could use your mouth noises to, you know, direct people and control people and be mean to people and lie to people with your mouth noises. Or we can, so sure, and I look at all technologies just as none of them are really more complex than language itself. And but we live in a world where if we were inventing language today, it's like if every time you use the vowel E, you'd have to pay Zuckerberg like 0.2 cents, right? It wouldn't be language. It would be IP. And that's the issue.

It's how do we break that paradigm and develop technology for the things you're saying, for sharing? There's technologies you could develop that would reduce spending. eBay, for example, was in some ways bad for the market because now everybody's finding the crap from their attic. Oh, I could buy one. He's already got one. Or Amazon used books. I mean, there's ways to unwind problems with tech. I've got no problem with tech. You know, it's when we build a technology like, say, Bitcoin, which is basically a money that we worship by burning things.

It's like going back to the temple, right? We're going to burn as much of the planet as possible in worship to demonstrate our faith in this phantom currency. For what? Well, we're going to figure out a good use for it soon, right? It's like we still don't have one, right? It's been such a pleasure to talk to you, and you make so many difficult things easy to understand and accessible. And I really, I appreciate that as someone who doesn't easily kind of come to this sort of language and thinking. Because like I said, it mostly just depresses me and it just feels like I want to just run away from it all.

But thank you so much for also, you know, your decades of service to kind of a larger good. We really, it's really an honor to speak to you. And Jonathan's been talking about you. for so long, and it's really just wonderful to get to talk to you. Tell everyone about Team Human and what you're up to there and how to find it. Oh, Team Human. Team Human. Team Human.

It's a manifesto. It's so funny. I didn't put blurbs on the back. I just put Find the Others. You know, and it's like, just find the others. Team Human. Team Human is my book and my podcast and sort of my reason for being. You know, the humans, we got some problems.

We've done bad things. But human beings are better together. is really the whole idea that being human is a team sport and we have a lot of things we've done a lot of institutions we've created that have convinced us that we're on our own but we're not

and then my brand new book when I'm excited the one we were talking about is survival of the richest escape fantasies of the tech billionaires and it's like the first book where I kind of name names and tell stories and I got this great new literary age and she was like look you write she sounded a little bit like you in the conversation

you write these great books with these great ideas but people relate to stories. People relate to people. If you write a book that has real people and real stories, I will sell that for you. So it was like two years later, I'm like, okay, you're right. And it starts with that story of the billionaires. And then my friend who became QAnon and these ones. And it really, people do need, I should take my own team human lesson.

People need to see other people experiencing something in order to be able to relate to it, not just me saying, you know, in ancient Rome, the government used this. It's like, no, that doesn't, for me as a heady person that works. But finally, I wrote a book that's stories of people. And the funny thing about it is when you tell stories about real people, it ends up so funny. People are so crazy, funny, pathetic. And when you write about the wealthiest tech billionaires as who they are, all of a sudden, oh, they're just clowns like anybody else. They're so deluded. They're just trying to create robots because they're afraid of women. It's like, oh, okay.

I mean, if that's not the tagline, they're just creating robots because they're afraid of women. On that note, thank you so much for coming to the breakdown. It's been really a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. And thank you so much for what you do. You know, we watch you on Jeopardy every night that you're on. Oh, thank you. And it's so, but what you're doing is more than Jeopardy.

It's interesting because Alex did more. than Jeopardy 2. It's an excuse to create a welcoming space for people. You know, and you're, you're, the way you respond when someone really screws up a daily double or something, you're so there. You can't, you break their fall. It's so, it's so beautiful to watch. I don't know if you're doing that, you're just like, it's okay. It's so nice. You should see her in regular life. She's doing that same thing. I do that all the time. I'm just like, I will hold for everyone. I will break myself in the process. Thank you so much, though.

That's very kind. It's great to watch. It's just you're modeling a beautiful behavior for people to see. You're modeling something. You know what I mean? It's not about winning. It's not about winning. It's we're here together playing a fucking game for God's sake, you know?

Well, again, there's my personal motto. I'm modeling something. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for having me on this. I appreciate it. It's so good to meet you after all these years. years. The thing about Douglas Rushkoff is, you know, he really does combine the ability to speak

about these things in a way that I understand. It does make me depressed. But he does have solutions and he's a kind of practical person. And while this wasn't like a, you know, a mental health kind of focused conversation, these are the things that are actually going on every time we engage. They are. And this is the narrative that we are being fed, which it's true. It contributes to my sense of overwhelm with the internet. It doesn't jive with me. And, you know, I always had this feeling like I was born in the wrong time. Conversations like this really emphasize that for me. I think I was made to live in a time when we didn't have to negotiate these things because it's too much for my small brain. I've heard people say it. I wasn't meant to be born.

in this time period. Like it's, it's kind of unnervy how many people I've heard say that. So either there's big... Why are you trying to make me not special? Sorry about my am ears. What do you hear? I just hear that. I'm not special. You're the only one who was

born in the wrong time. Everyone else. Total right time. Just one small clerical error in the cosmos put you here accidentally. No, but what What you're saying is a lot of people are feeling that sense of overwhelm. Correct. That or a lot of people believe that there's been an error in the cosmos. Well, if you believe in past lives or that you've lived at other times, this is not the most comfortable time my soul's lived in for me.

But the black plague was way better. I do good in a crisis, Jonathan. I do good in a crisis. The streets of London in the turn of the century where we're... can't even see because of how thick the coal smoke was, was much more comfortable than putting down the phone before bed. I was selling potato canish in the corner. I wasn't cleaning up coal.

I was like, here, have a canish. No one could see the canish because, well, the snub. Hashtag but for the smoke. Jonathan, I really did enjoy speaking to Douglas. And from our breakdown, for the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time. It's my and Bialik's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you.

She's got a neuroscience Ph.D. or two. One, fix you one. And now she's going to break down.