Soul Boom - Douglas Rushkoff: Can We Reclaim the Internet for Humanity?

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

Douglas Rushkoff joins Rainn Wilson on Soul Boom to explore the deep, often hidden roots of the Internet and how its original promise was hijacked. Delve into the psychedelic origins of the web, the shift to an attention economy, and the challenges of building genuine community in a digital age. Discover Rushkoff's insights on how we can reclaim technology for human connection and spiritual growth. This thought-provoking conversation will leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about the Internet and its impact on our lives. Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, writer, and professor known for his critiques of technology and its impact on society, advocating for human-centered digital experiences. Thank you to our sponsors! Pique Tea (15% OFF!): https://piquelife.com/SOUL Factor (50% OFF!): www.factormeals.com/soulboom50 LMNT: http://drinklmnt.com/SoulBoom Waking Up app (1st month FREE!): https://wakingup.com/soulboom Fetzer Institute: https://fetzer.org/ Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.substack.com SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom!! https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom Watch our Clips: https://bit.ly/SoulBoomCLIPS Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP Follow us! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Spring Green Films Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Voicing Change Media Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Soobo. How do we get people to blank? And even great social justice warriors, wonderful people, they're always dug. How do we get people to? And I'm saying once you're saying how do we get people to, you're in the wrong place. You're back above the people manipulating them, the way Mark Zuckerberg, how do I get people to spend more time on this? How do we get people?

That's manipulation of humans. So instead, what I try to do is first. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson. And I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. Doug or Douglas, what is it? When there's time, Douglas. Okay, I'll take the time. Yeah. You're worth the time.

Thank you. Douglas, you invented the internet. Talk us through that. What happened? I want to hear a little bit about your history. And part two is what was the promise of the internet and then how was that promise foiled. Wow, how much time you got. I got an hour and 35 minutes. My weirdest and most psychedelic friends were moving from the East Coast

to Silicon Valley to start working at these tech companies. And I'm like, what the heck are you doing? You guys aren't computer people. You're tied-eye grateful dead people. So I went up to San Francisco and saw them, you know, they would work at Sun, at Apple,

at Intel during the day, and they'd come home at night. Did you know anyone that worked at Mr. Jeeves or Ask Jeeves? It was too early for that. He didn't exist. Pre-p-asked Jeeves. I was trying to go, this is earlier than Friendster. Oh, yeah.

Okay. This is the primordial ooze of the internet. 89, 90, when the internet was still basically the ARPANET, it was like a military tool that no one wanted to use. I mean, it's actually the stories that no one wants to tell. It was a military network. But the people on the network, the scientists and the nuclear people who were supposed to be like figuring out how to defend the country, you're exchanging like Star Trek fan fiction on there. Right.

You know, and recipes for, you know, analogs of DMT. I mean, they're not, they weren't doing work. They were just socializing. So the government eventually said, we don't want, we don't need this. They offered it to AT&T who wouldn't take it. They're like, there's people are just, there's no way to make money on this. So AT&T could have owned the internet. Yeah, for like $6.

It was like they turned it down. So my friends, though, who are working at these companies, and then, you know, at night, I'd be at their houses in Oakland and Berkeley. They're scraping the peyote buds off cactuses and tripping out at night, you know, using their computers to do fractals, you know, fractals and other art. And then they were projected at raves. And I thought, oh, my God, there's something happening here that deserves our attention. And it seemed to me that this new thing, this internet, this hands-on participatory thing was going to be the kind of the people's response to top-down media.

We're not going to listen to William Randolph Hearst and Rupert Murdoch anymore. We're not going to just passively receive this stuff as spectators. We're going to make the media and faxes and email and all that stuff was going to lead to a new kind of citizens, people-driven media space. and create community. Community and more. I mean, these were psychedelic people. And this was a particular moment in history, an optimistic moment.

I mean, Nelson Mandela was led out of prison. The Berlin Wall was down. The Cold War was over. Gay people were okay. I mean, everything was happening at once. And we had this new internet, hypertext, connected network of James Lovelock had just written the Gaia hypothesis,

which said that the planet is one organism. And now the internet seemed like, oh, this is the way that we human beings, the neurons of the great guy in organism, are going to wire ourselves a collective brain and then manifest this thing that we've always had with us. But it didn't quite work out that way. It didn't.

All of a sudden, it was about Kardashian butts and credit scores and the rise of Google and porn leading the way. So some of the worst elements of humanity kind of took over from my perspective. But what's your insider's perspective? What turned in the 90s? My insider's perspective is that in around 1993, Wired Magazine came out and very consciously re-contextualized the Internet as a business phenomenon. This wasn't going to be about crazy psychedelic kids in Berkeley writing cyberpunk fiction

and taking mescaline and reading Mando 2000. But how did that psychedelic set see that the internet could help the common working man or someone in poverty in Sierra Leone? Did they talk about that at all? These early dreamers? The early dreamers, I think it would have been secondary.

Okay. To touching the cosmic beam, you know, most people. I had no idea of the internet's psychedelic origins. You know what I mean? It was very, so, whether they hired, they intentionally hired psychedelics people

because they needed people who were comfortable hallucinating a new reality. Right. Dreaming up a new reality. Right. A new virtual place where human beings would be.

So who else is going to think up, okay, let's make the computer a desk job. The engineers aren't going to do it necessarily. Right. Right. So 93, Wired Magazine comes and says,

this is going to be a way to make money. Yeah. It's a marketplace. It's an advanced marketplace. And they said, to make a long story short, that the internet is infinite. It's going to be infinite real estate and lead to what they called a long boom, a long boom of exponential economic growth around the world, everywhere, forever. The new paradigm, even Alan Greenspan, Chairman.

But they were kind of right. In a way, it could promote a kind of exponential growth. But what they also said, which was also right, was that even though the internet has, infinite real estate, there's a limit of human attention. So they said, we're going to move into an attention economy. And the metric they used for the attention economy was called eyeball hours. Eyeball hours, the number of hours that someone's eyeballs would stay stuck to your content. So the object of the game became, how do you create what they call sticky websites? Remember that term? Sticiness. So you're stuck. I mean, where's your internet? Where's your information superhighway? No, now it's like fly paper.

Even at ads showing fly paper. I get my weekly report. Six hours a day. Sometimes this phone is on, six hours a day. Now, that can be podcasts when I'm driving and YouTube videos of really interesting lectures. Nonetheless, the algorithm has won. Oh, yeah.

I mean, and think about back in the day, when you would go online, you were actually, the person you were online was smarter than the person you are in real life. Because to go online back then, I know this is like, this is old time, kids. You would have your computer and a phone.

I said you were Grandpa Internet. That's what I said. You'd plug the computer into a modem, which plugged into the phone. It would dial up to a computer. It would download the conversation that happened. I remember when you had to pick the phone number that you would dial to go, yeah, yeah.

And then you would disconnect and you would have all the time in the world to read the conversation and to compose your own one or two paragraph response to, it was like chess by mail. Then you'd log back in and upload them and then wait a few days to see what these smart people had to say about what you said.

So it was this slow, global conversation about everything. And yes, that's where you would talk about kids in Sierra Leone and how are we going to help this and do that and a new economy and a cypherpunk this and new currencies. And once we were in an attention economy, it shifted. You see, the original psychedelic internet, if you want to think of it as psychedelic, you know, and use like Timothy Leary's model of psychedelics.

He always said that William Gibson to necromancers in that realm. Exactly. That the quality of your psychedelic trip depends on your set and your setting, right? The mindset that you have when you're taking the drug and the setting in which you do the drug. So the original set and setting of the internet, which is arguably an almost psychedelic level. Even Leary said it. I took him online the first time. I took him on Mosaic, the first time he went on the web.

You took Timothy Leary online for the first time. Yeah, on the web anyway. I think he'd used some internet, but not. a browser. And he said, Doug, this is more powerful than acid. But remember, Tron? The original Tron blew our minds. And it was a Disney movie, too.

No less. They did well with it, though. They had that first one like, oh, not only is, it's a whole, it's a parallel world, you can go into it. And there are people living in there. And it's an alternative reality. So that mirrored, Tron mirrored that psychedelic reality. So that's kind of fantastic voyage thing.

But the original set and setting of the internet was the creative capacity of the connected, collective human imagination. It was more about what is possible. Once Wired came and said the internet is something you can bet on, something you can invest in. Investors don't want infinite possibility. They want high probability, right? High probability of return. So they didn't like possibility.

They wanted predictability. So the internet was reversed. instead of the internet being about letting human beings do crazy new possible things, the internet became about how can we use the internet to get people to be more predictable. So we started using the technology on people instead of letting people use the technology. Oh, yeah. And the rest of the story of the internet, oh, so instead of going online, let's give them a device so their state of being, you're always online.

Let's give them a phone that's going to interrupt them no matter what. They're going to live in a state of perpetual emergency interruption that no one has endured except maybe air traffic controllers and 911 operators. And people tortured in a, you know, in a prison, in a Viet Cong prison with like water torture or something like that. Unpredictable. The lights are going to blare and thorns are going to be under your fingernails at any given point in time. Right. Yeah. And you're going to be constantly reminded of things, horrible things happening in other places that you're going to feel bad about but have no ability.

to do anything about it. That's a really healthy way to live. Yeah. So at least in the old days, you went online. It was like you took acid. Yeah. I'm going to take a trip. I'm going to do this.

You had some. There was a certain degree of patience, too. When downloading porn in the early days, I don't know if you remember this. You had to assemble like six files together. Yeah, and it would load, to get like one feeble image. You know, it took some moxie.

It was a moment. I'll tell you, there was a moment. in the early, I mean, going to New York editors and saying, the internet is coming. I remember there was an editor at Dell that I was trying to sell a book on the internet. And I said, look, someday, you're going to have a computer on your desk. And you're going to be communicating with people through something called email. And the guy was like, get out of here, kid. And didn't you, you were going to sell an early book on the internet? My first book on the internet, it got, it was called Siberia. And I wrote it in 1991. And it got canceled by

bent them in 1992 because they thought the internet would be over by 93 when the book was supposed to come out. They said, you know, we looked, we just saw, you know, CB radio kind of came and went, it was a three-year cycle. We figured the internet's going to have about the same thing. They compared the internet to CB radio. Yeah. That's fantastic. Oh, wow. I want to talk a little bit about cryptocurrency because I bring that up in my book, Soul Boom. Heard of it. And crypto started in the same way. You yourself referred to crypto as coming, out of like Occupy Wall Street. It was this whole idea of like, we're going to make a, you know, we're going to make a currency that's not beholden on any central banks or any,

any wars or anything happening on the national realm. People are going to be able to just trade just like seashells when they were, you know, fishermen in the iron age, in the bronze age. And there's going to be so great for those farmers in Sierra Leone because they have a phone and they'll just trade. There's no central bank. They don't have to write a check. have to have a minimum deposit, et cetera, like that. And it was like, again, this world of possibilities. And there were a lot of dreamers that started. And then, of course, what happens? Well, because our systems are built on greed and one-upsmanship and altruism is kind of like seventh on the list of human endeavor, crypto became the biggest pump and dump scandal in

human history. Yeah, partly. But there's a other reasons for that too. You know, the, the, the, it's true that the crypto pump and dump recapitulated 30 years of internet history in like 18 months. Okay. We got to see it happen. I'm not, I was hoping this time. So it was the same thing as the internet. It was like a shorter lived mirror. Right. A little recapitulation, right, a teeny. And I was hoping that it would happen so fast and so visibly that people would go, now I recognize this pattern. Yeah, there's a pattern here. Right. This is what they do. right? But there's a very specific thing that happens in digital spaces. And it's hard for people

to grok this. Digital spaces are prone to abstraction, right? They're prone to going meta. So you think about like the stock market. Stocks are not product. Stocks are meta pieces of companies. Derivatives are meta pieces of stocks. Derivatives of derivatives. So you can keep going meta on it. So the internet happened. People originally, in the dot-com boom, they invested in internet companies that had things. After the dot-com crash, the new product of the internet. This was 2001. Yeah.

The new product of the internet was no longer actual internet companies. It was internet stocks. You're buying the symbol system, the meta thing, or derivatives on those stocks. When crypto came around, the actual value of crypto is this. this blockchain, which can coordinate transactions and trust between people, or in my, in my parlance, it's substituted for trust between people, which is not, we don't need to, we need to engender trust, not substitute for it. It was secure. But what did people do with these blockchains? They bet on the blockchains themselves through the tokens. So it wasn't

about the Bitcoin blockchain negotiating transactions with people. It was, how can I bet on which one of these blockchains is going to dominate? And you buy, you. You buy tokens. And it's like, and then when tokens didn't make sense to people, oh, well, let's call them NFTs. So now you're buying a token, but it's a picture of a monkey, right? It's a picture. You're buying it's art.

It's art. Oh, and I'm supporting all these artists. That's what I'm really here to do. That's really why. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic.

In a lot of ways, the crypto is way worse than, you know, buying ownership in the bank of Switzerland or... I know. At this point, I'd rather someone just go buy an S&P fund than buy another crypto. It depends on which. But if you're buying, you know, Bitcoin or something, I mean, Bitcoin really is the process

by which we convert matter of the real world into a symbol system. It's pure. You take planet, you burn it through electrical current by solving problems, and you end up with code. Yeah. So it's like shucking the resources of the earth

and you end up. with digits. Right, because the abstraction matters more than reality. Right. Right. And that's where it's like, ass backwards, right? This is crazy. I mean, think about the Martian anthropologist looking at Earth. Oh, they are burning their planet to prove their faith in this token. If you were a member of an alien species and you are super advanced and super mature, you have created a beautiful, vibrant, loving, compassionate communities throughout galaxy. and have had the wisdom, and you've seen species come and go. You are big-hearted and big-brained, and you're looking down at planet Earth from one of

these many, you know, spaceships that have been, you know, absolutely 100% documented, by the way, that there are these saucers, you know, unidentified aerial phenomenon zipping around. And, you know, you've got, you know, heads of state have seen them in Admiralty and Air Force generals have seen them right in front of their airplanes and can attest to their reality. They're looking down on humans on planet Earth. What's the conversation they're having about where we are in our current level of, for lack of a better word, I'm going to use spiritual maturity, but you might say sociological maturity at the same time. I think what they would say

is these poor humans can't allow themselves to feel safe, that they spent so much time in prehistory, like the half-like ape people in 2001, Space Odyssey. There's this one scene that stuck with me from the time I was eight and saw that thing, where the monkey people, they're like, it's nighttime, and they're sitting huddled under this little cliff, and they can't sleep, because you hear in the background, there's like a saber-tooth tiger or something, and they're just sitting there huddled. And I remember thinking as a kid, how many thousands of years did human beings sit huddled like that? How deep into our DNA is that being? Yeah, yeah. And so then, you know, by the time we have science and technology and metallurgy, it's all about how are we going to keep nature and this stuff from hurting us?

At bay, yeah. How do we, how clean can I get it? How much chemicals and plastic and stuff? You know, and then I read, you know, Francis Bacon, who is the founder of empirical science. And when he's selling empirical science to the church, he says, empirical science will let us take nature by the forelock, hold her down, and says, and submit her to our will. Right? It's basically a rape fantasy.

Right. That nature is the scary woman in the woods, worms and moon and soil and fairies and diseases. Right. Hold her down and submit her. And I feel like that's where we're at. We're still just pave it. More pavement.

Much dirt. More antibiotics. More guns. More things. And I think if they looked at us, they would go, oh my God, they don't feel, they don't know how to just look into each other's eyes. They don't know how to put their feet on the ground.

They don't know how to breathe. They're like Lawrence Olivier, you know, is it safe? Is it safe? He's going to drill the guy's teeth. I mean, that's us, right? Is it safe? You know, and then I don't know what the aliens would tell us to do at that point. Either, dude, it's not safe and it's okay.

Well, before we get to what the aliens would tell us to do, what are they saying about, like, what are the next steps for humanity? What are these aliens saying? Forget Douglas Rushkoff. What are the aliens saying to each other about what humanity needs to do? Because you also have half of the planet

living under authoritarianism where, you know, not that democracy and certainly like social, liberal, kind of materialist philosophy is a hell of a lot better. Capitalism is a form of abstracted authoritarianism. I mean... Okay, explain for our viewers. I think I know where you're going

because I'm familiar enough with your work? There's so many assumptions people make about the world that are really forms of social programming, of capitalism. So you need a car to get to work. Well, why do you need a car to get to work? Really start asking, well, you need a car to get to work because your house is far away from work. Well, why is your house far away from work?

Well, because GM lobbied change zoning so that your house would be far enough from work that you would need a car. You used to work even in the early industrial age in America. You'd work in a factory operating heavy machinery for eight hours. The whistle would blow. You'd leave the factory. You'd get a beer and a newspaper. Go on the streetcar. Get drunk. Talk to your friends. Read the paper. Have a great time on your way home. Somehow they had to convince people. After eight hours of operating heavy machinery, instead of sitting on a streetcar, drinking a beer, and talking with your friends, we want you to operate another people.

of heavy machinery for another hour on your way home with a high risk of hurting people. You're going to need insurance for it. And you're going to have to work an average of one day a week to support the vehicle that you're now going to use. So how do you do that? Well, now we're going to have to do some rezoning to make sure they need it. And then we're going to have to lobby to get rid of the street car so that that's not there. And you're born into that world. And you just know, oh, well, of course you need a car. And of course you need a job. Where did jobs come from? I was just on what to see it at Jake Tapper talking about AI.

And I'm like, I don't really care. And he goes, oh, you know, but what about the unemployment problem? And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, well, you know, AI will take people's jobs. So why do you consider it a problem? What is unemployment isn't a problem but a solution? I don't want a job. I want stuff.

I want meaningful work. I want to participate in society. but a job? When do jobs start? Jobs started in the industrial. We didn't have jobs. We were craft people. We made and traded stuff. With jobs started when when these things called charter monopolies came, put all the small people out of business by law. There was one monopoly. If you used to be a shoemaker, now you've got to go work for His Majesty's Royal Shoe Company. Instead of selling shoes to other people, now you're working by the clock, right? By the hour. That's the same moment. They naturalized this by putting a clock on the tower of the medieval village. So everyone looks up

and you see the clock, everything's fair, you've worked one hour, you've gotten your money. Nobody worked in time before, except indentured servants and slaves. But now you wake up, oh, you need a job to have meaning, you need a job to have money, you need a job. No, a job is a very recent invention that's become completely naturalized.

Well, this is why, let's cut to the chase here. This is really why I wanted you on the show is I love how your brain works. I've been listening to you for years. I've been reading your book. I love this book, Team Human. and I haven't read Survival of the Richest yet. Very excited about that.

This whole idea of team human I want to get to because we at Soul Boom are on team human and we want to support the team human movement. But I love how your brain doesn't accept anything as a given. Like you don't accept even a car as a given or the fact that we have jobs as a given. And this is why I wanted to bring up the alien analogy too. is like aliens looking down on planet Earth

are you gonna see it from a whole other perspective. Like for me, it's more about compassion. Like I move more towards the spiritual side of things. Like, oh, these poor humans, yes, they don't feel safe. And by the way, I think cars, part of cars, is they were sold as freedom. Right. So, because we also didn't have freedom.

Those apes that are huddling under a ledge with the Sabreto Target, they don't have a freedom to go, I think I'm gonna go over there to that oak tree or that waterfall. They don't have. that freedom to be able to do that because of the fear. They need to stay huddled and stay together and keep their clubs and whatnot. So a car provides this idea of freedom, even though we get more and more tied down to all of the things that are like these albatrosses hanging from our necks

that are supposed to give us more freedom, but in fact are enslaving us more and more. But I love the way that you think on such a large scope and big ideas. And this is where I'm I think our two worlds coalesce is in the essential idea that to change the world and make the world better, we're not talking about a different piece of legislation. We're not talking about tweaking some laws. We're not even talking about like gerrymandering or fixing overtime or even paying teachers more or whatever. All of these things are super important, super important, not downplaying them. But what you're talking about in Team Human

and in all of your work is a systemic change that is so radical as to defy how the human brain works. Right here you've been sitting lecturing like, why do we need jobs? The thesis of soul boom is kind of like

our systems are based on the very worst of humanity, on the fears and needs of those ape people. at the beginning of 2001, with their clubs huddled under the ledge. Greed, fear, one-upsmanship, backstabbing, every man for himself, power struggles, the idea that increased power then will allay the fear that you're talking about, that primal kind of human anxiety. So I'm talking about spiritual solutions

to flip systems on their head. Can we base systems on compassion? altruism, service, and draw on our better angels rather than our day-to-day demons. We can. It's hard for people, though. It's hard. So, like, the one I've been trying out lately is for just this, is borrow a drill. That's what I've been telling people.

So I had to hang a picture of my daughters. Graduated high school, got the picture, got to put it up. I don't have a drill. So what am I going to do? All right. If I'm thinking like me, regular American dofus, we go to Home Depot, get a minimum viable product drill, right at the $79 rechargeable, riochi, whatever they are,

and come back, use it once to drill the hole in the wall and put it back, stick it in the garage. By the way, that's exactly what I did. I moved into a new house. I went and got a Miata drill at Home Depot, $139, the full drill set. I used it to hang a couple of pictures when we first moved in. It sat in my garage.

It hasn't been touched in three years. And you take it out of the garage in three years. When you finally need it again, you're not going to get the damn thing to charge. It's not going to work. And you're going to throw it out. So what have you done to hang that picture? You've sent kids in the Congo into a rare earth mine to get the metals, right? To get the metals to make the rechargeable parts of this drill.

You've spent all this carbon to construct the thing. You've used it twice. And then you've thrown it out where another kid in Brazil is going to have to go on a toxic waste dump to find the renewable parts, to sell them to Apple to stick in a phone so we all feel good that we used a phone that used renewable shit. What you could have done, and this is the hard part, I could walk down the street to Bob's house. Bob's always got his garage open. He's laving things and routing.

He's doing things. I don't even know what it is to doors and windows. He's listening to baseball games on AM radio. Exactly. My God. I could go, this is the hard part. Bob, can I borrow your drill? right? Think about all the problems with that. All the problem. First, I'm asking, what's Bob

going to do? Bob's going to, first he's going to say Rushkoff, I'm not going to let you bar. I'm going to come over with the drug. You don't know how to find a stud. You're going to ruin the whole frigging thing. I'm going to come up. And he's going to come over with a metal drill that plugs in the wall like God intended, right? Make the hole, stick it up, put an anchor and a thing in the stud. The picture's going to be up there. Thou shalt use plug-in drills. None of these rechargeable drill nonsense. But then what?

But then what? Is Bob going to ask me to then maybe the next week? His daughter's having a problem on her algebra regents study. Doug, you're a nerd. Can you come over and show her how to do quadratic equation? Or I'm having a barbecue at my house the next weekend? Bob's going to see I'm having a barbecue and I got someone from two blocks over coming and he's going to think, wait a minute.

I just drill. I'm a drill. And now he's an asshole. I'll invite Bob over, right? It starts to get complicated. Now Bob's over. And now the other neighbors are thinking, well, why they have? And before long, I'm going to have a block party with all these people over.

And then we're going to start talking about, well, why did you invite Bob over? Well, because, you know, we borrowed this drill and all that. And he goes, well, you know, someone's going to get the idea that maybe we don't all need to have our own lawnmower. What if we had, like, three lawnmowers on the block, and we shared it because no one really uses a lawnmower more than two or three hours a week. And all of a sudden, now we're going to have a sharing library. We're all going to be friends. We're going to be each other's faces. Bob's going to want to come over to my Hanukkah party

and invite me to the Christmas party. They're going to make brownies. The nightmare is the dream. So I talked about this at a talk and said, and then we're all sharing stuff. And someone got up, some banker type got up. And you said, yeah, well, let's just say your scenario works out. What about the drill company?

Right. What about the jobs of the people at the lawnmower company? Because they're not selling all the drills. What about the old lady who's dependent? only one-tenth of drills. Right. Because everyone's sharing drills, God forbid. God forbid. Yeah. Right. So again, I mean, in this case, it's our, our misguided belief that capitalism, that the growth of market is actually a real thing. We don't realize that's just an artifact of central currency, which was monarchs replacing local currencies with central currency so they could lend money and get money back

in interest for doing no work. Again, it's another crypto scheme that we've accepted as the operating system of our economy. So we've got to unwind those things. And all of those systems seem to be devised to prevent us from socializing for real, to prevent us from being friends. If we actually allowed each other to support each other in the ways that we can, think of how many industries would be threatened. How much less LexaPro would be sold, right? But even backing that up, like my wife and I moved to a little town outside of L.A. Three years ago, three and a half years ago. And I have interacted with every neighbor.

Some of them I've even visited with for up to 25 minutes. I have their numbers on the texts in case a tree falls or a fence has a hole in it and we need to get in touch with each other or a package gets delivered. but we have never assembled. Forget borrowing the drill. We've never even sat down and had, you know, a cup of coffee together. But that's what you're talking about is building community, right, at the grassroots in a new way. And you mentioned accepted operating systems. And that's where both Team Human and Soul Boom are challenging accepted operating systems and saying,

let's throw these systems out and reimagine systems based on, for lack of a better word, higher principles. Right. So where does humanity go from here? I think it's hard to do it in the way you're saying. In other words, let's imagine a better system. I feel like that's what the 20th century was all about. We got Marxism.

We got anarchism. We got capitalism. We got boomerism. You know, we got all the different, all the great isms. are wonderful, almost like techno-solutionists, SimCity, top-down. They're very tech-brough, right? That's what they do.

I've got a great, you know, the new renewable energy system. I've got a, the second book that you're talking, The Civil Vival of the Richest, I met these guys who were talking about building eco-villages, right? They have everything with education and solar power and special tubes that you do, the agriculture and all that. All you have to do is clear-cut this forest and build the eco-villages. It's like, right?

So you don't, I think it happens in these small ways by, well, I want to be a part of a CSA, you know, a community supported agriculture group. And then it's like we all want to be. And now, wait a minute. Now, this community supported agriculture group can't grow enough vegetables for us because some of the land has been set aside by the corn industry for corn only to get a subsidy. So now we start pushing against the law and think, okay, how do we do that? But if we thought about it from the top, I'm going to develop a new agriculture.

agricultural system for the nation where you end up incentivizing the wrong thing. So whatever metric you put on the wall that you're trying to optimize ends up being the one you go for. So that's why I'm, I went back to team human saying, I think it's, it's more a matter of helping people be that little bit much stronger when they're making their moment to moment decision. What are the five key precepts of team human? What are the foundational five pillars of team human? Being human is a team sport. that we've bought this fiction of individuality and individual achievement, that we've bought the survival of the fittest

bastardization of Darwin. If you read Darwin, he talks about survival of the fittest in like one paragraph. It's very specific. What origin of species is actually about is Darwin marveling at the way species cooperate and collaborate with each other

to ensure mutual survival. That there's this beautiful, dance of interdependence going on with nature. So it's the same as, you know, we, you look at trees in the forest. I was taught in middle school. Yep. The tallest tree gets the sun and the little tree dies. And it turns out that's not at all what's happening. The big tree is sharing its nutrients through the soil, through the mycelia in the soil, who take a service charge, sharing his nutrients with the little tree during the summer. Then when it loses its leaves in the winter, the little tree shares back with the big tree, that they're, the forest is one thing. It's like the hair

on your head. It's like, it's an organism that's working all together once you pull back and you can see. The human body is the perfect analogy for that. It's all of these different disparate forces and elements that all have their jobs, but working together. We're just carriers of our gut biome. It's not like, oh, the, the eyes, survival of the eyes are more fit than the ears. Right. It's all part of the, and we're just, we're just gut biome anyway. You know, you're just, the medium for this colony of bacteria. The other day, this is going to get really gross. I was thinking like, really what we are is we are a tube and we're walking around protecting

this tube. And the tube starts here and it ends there. And, you know, our lungs are bellows to help get oxygen to help the flow of the tube and our heart beats blood to help the vessels that surround the tube, get nutrients out. and the brain is there to help us gather things to feed the tube. But really, we're just a walking tube. Yep. And in that tube, the bacteria in that tube hold hundreds of times more information than

everything we've ever thought. All right. There's more DNA, more memory, more history in there. What else is Team? What else is Team Human if you had to distill it? Right. I mean, the message is right on the back of the book. It's find the others.

you know, that you're not alone. You know, however alone you feel, you're not alone, find the others. But you say let's remake society together. Right. How are we going to do that besides borrowing a drill and having a, you know, a little community farm? I mean, it's one way. That's nice. I mean, some of it's so simple as to seem crazy, right?

Like being nice to each other and such. But I mean, a lot of it. I'll give you an example that I use in my book. And I've used more examples from my book today with you than I have with any other guests. And my apologies to your listeners. But I talk about in the Baha'i faith, there's no clergy. There's no rabbis or priests or mullahs or gurus.

So it's completely democratically elected. But, and there are elections in the Baha'i faith, but they are spiritual elections. So right now we're filming. this in Agora Hills, California. The Baha'is of Agora Hills get together every year. There's no yard signs. There's no campaign contributions. They assemble in a room at a certain point every year.

And prayerfully and through meditation, they pick the nine people, the nine Baha'is in Agora Hills that they feel have the most spiritual wisdom to lead the community. And on a silent ballot, without ever talking about it or saying, I think Veronica would be a great person, prayerfully put it in a hat and the top nine vote getters are the assembly. That happens then on the national level and it happens on the international level.

And, you know, I bring up the example of like, couldn't you do that in the town of Pancake Flats, Colorado? Maybe Pancake Flats, Colorado gets sick of all of the campaign contributions, the vitriol, the backstabbing, the negative campaign ads, the yard signs, the wasted money. And they gather at the local soccer stadium and silent ballot style meditation. They elect 5, 7, 9, 27, you pick the number of community leaders that are true public servants. And couldn't one envision that happening? Because I think that's remaking society together.

And it's not eliminating elections. it's not eliminating democracy. It's a form of democracy, but it's a spiritually founded, funded, foundationed form of democracy. So that's the example that I use. I'm wondering if that's in alignment with Team Human. Yeah, it's definitely in alignment with it.

I mean, what I do with Team Human, I mean, the main point of that book is to convince people that we are even a team, right? Because we're living in a highly individualistic society where people are emulating people like Elon Musk, whose primary goal is to escape from reality before it breaks, right, and leave the rest of us behind, whether on their rocket ship or upload their consciousness or do that.

So I try to convince people that individualism is itself a crock, you know, that you're not an individual, you're much more part of something, that anything that helps us socialize and brings us together as our friend, anything that distances us is kind of the enemy of human. And I really, I do call. for people to kind of get their feet back on the ground, to learn to make eye contact,

to be aware of the fact that when you have a conversation on Zoom, you can't see if the pupils are getting larger or smaller. You don't see if they're breathing, sinking up. So you don't actually... I'm really good on Zoom at pretending to be on a Zoom meeting while looking at the next score. That's even worse. So I'm pretending to be on my little screen.

I'm like, uh-huh, uh-huh, but I'm actually reading about Jalen Brunson and how many points he scored. I'm good at that. Well, at least you're a Nick fan, which is important. What happens on social media or on Zoom or any of these platforms is the person says they agreed with you, right? Oh, yes, I agree with you.

Great job, Doug. But the mirror neurons in my brain never fired because I didn't see the pupils. I didn't get the cues. So my body goes into a state of dissonance of confusion. It's like, wait a minute. They said they agreed with me, but my body didn't get the oxytocin rush. Therefore, they're probably lying. So I leave the Zoom in a state of distrust rather than further, rather than cohesion, bonded or rapport.

So, right. So I'm sort of arguing that rapport is something that happens in real life when you actually find other people. And rapport is a prerequisite to the solidarity we need to act together for mutual benefit. So here's an idea, Zoom meetings, but they're in person. Right. What about, what would that be like? Right. And in person, then you end up like with the Quaker meeting hall or.

or what we in Occupy, you know, called a general assembly, you know, where you're not just voting one side and the other and who wins gets everything, but you're actually trying to build consensus. But I guess the main, I'm prescriptive, but not in Team Human. I'm not trying to set policy because there's this strong technosolutionist urge among a lot of my peers to come up with, well, how do we get people to blank? And even great social. justice warriors, wonderful people, they're always dug. How do we get people to? And I'm saying, once you're saying, how do we get people to, you're in the wrong place. You're back above the people manipulating them, the way Mark Zuckerberg, how do I get people to spend more time on this? How do we get

people? That's manipulation of humans. So instead, what I try to do is first, if I had a path, the embedded agenda of the team human book, which you can see if you kind of read between the lines, is the first thing I try to do is denaturalized power, which is what we were talking about before. How do you get people to see that central currency is not money? Central currency is a kind of money invented by 12th century monarchs in order to make money off other people's transactions. There used to be all these other kinds of money.

They killed everyone who used it, made it illegal, and now you wake up in a world with that as money, you think that's money and it's not. So how do you do that for, for everything. And that's what computers did for me originally was it changed the way I saw the world. I realized, oh, this, I've been living in what computer people would call a read only reality. Right. The media I see is read only. You can't change a television show. You can't, it just came to me. Once I had a computer, I remember the first person who was teaching me how to use it, she said,

do you want to save your file as a read-only file or a read-write file? A read-write file means someone else can change it. anyone else on the system. That's a Wikipedia page. Right. Read, right. And I go out into the world. I'm like, wait a minute. I've been told I live in a read-only world, but everything could be read-right.

The money, what if the money was read-right? That was the cypherpunk movement originally. What if money was read-right? I walked out into the streets of New York, and I said, this is a grid pattern, not because God made it a grid pattern. Someone decided to make New York. That's not city. That's this city.

So the first step is to denaturalize power. Then to trigger agency. Once you see that the world has been coded in a certain way, I'm hoping to trigger people's agency to go, like you read off the cover, we can reprogram this differently in a way that helps us. Then when you realize I have agency to reprogram the world, I realize I don't want to do it alone. So it gets to the third one, which is resocialized people. You know, resocialize people, make them less afraid of each other, encourage them to borrow a drill, invite them over, make icon It's okay to accept favors. No one wants to accept a favor from anybody

because then you owe something to them. You know, and in capital, no, I owe you. Owing something to someone as a gift. When someone moves into a neighborhood when they used to when we were kids, what do you do? Everyone brings them like brownies and stuff. Yeah. Why are you bringing, because they need brownies.

Their kids are going to sleep their first night in a new house. You really want them wired up with them. No, you're bringing them brownies so that they owe you something. You're inviting them to become part of the, fabric of obligations, of indebtedness. Indeadiness is a gift. It's not a burden. And then finally, though, once you're re-socialized to cultivate awe, that awe has been

almost systematically removed from our society. A person who experiences awe, whether it's looking over a canyon or being in an ecstatic dance with other people, or just being in a Quaker meeting hall and experiencing that group, when you're in a state of awe, it means that you've experienced yourself as connected to something larger than you. And when you have an experience of awe for like three days, your immune system is better, your cytokine response is more balanced, you're more likely to be generous with other people. So it's really those four things. You denaturalize power, which triggers agency. It requires people to then re-socialize and then they experience awe and realize, oh my God,

I've been self-a-hastiff. But you know what I would say to you? Yeah. Coming from the soul boom perspective, that is absolutely brilliant. I'm, my jaw is dropped. It's amazing. And I would say that from my perspective, spirituality and faith does all of those things. And we have lost religion for a very good reason. Religion, spirituality being different things. Because most of the great insights of Jesus or Moses or anyone, they get institutionalized and you use them against people.

And there are universal truths among all of them. But you're talking about building community, fostering engendering a sense of awe, you know, reducing kind of like materialist power dynamics, like all of those things are done in a spiritual movement in its purest form. Not, you know, not in the papacy, you know, but in any Christianity. Certainly embodied everything that you were talking about in the first two, three hundred years of Christianity. Yep. And you go, I mean, for all their problems on other levels and their exclusivity, racism and other things, go to a Mormon town.

Yeah. And people are. They're sharing drills. They're sharing drills. They're sharing drills. You need a job. We'll find a job in the hardware store. Yeah.

You know, and that's like, that should be. And the same thing is happening at 12-step meetings. Yeah. Well, 12-step. I'm just thinking of the next book I do to do 12-step-4 society. In other words, can we, can we call this bottom, please? Can we... We're not there yet.

We're not there yet. Douglas, we're not there yet. No. We're not there yet. But keep going. If we can call this that we've hit bottom, then what do we do? Start, okay, this is God and out of control. Right?

Second, all right, there's something bigger here. Right. Then even just go to the serenity prayer. You know, help me tell the difference between that which I'm doing, that which I have control over and that which I don't. If we really did that, honestly, we'd go, you know, 99, of this stuff I don't have control over. Life, life of what I've realized at my old age now, life is what has happened in spite of my best efforts to do other things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. But for me then, and that's where it got spiritual for me is, I mean, the most profound experience

I probably had in my life was sitting with my mother-in-law as she died in the hospital. until I was like her death dula, essentially. I happened to be there at the end, holding her hand. And I remember first I was thinking, why am I the one? You know, she got three kids. Why is it? I'm the one here at two in the morning dealing with this. And then something transformed to the point of,

I'm experiencing the greatest honor, the greatest mitzvah a human being can have. that I am here holding her hand as she goes over the threshold, metabolizing just as another nervous system in the room. I'm compassionately metabolizing whatever fear, whatever trepidation, whatever's, I'm bearing witness, I'm here. And I was like, this is spirituality.

This is the essence of it. And I look at the kinds of experiences and people are groping towards it. They're learning about mushrooms. What are mushrooms? Mushrooms are the great metabolizers. That's what they do. They metabolize death and fertilize it into life. That's what they do.

What is it when now when people hold space for others? When they're these people that hold space for you when you have a trip. What are they doing? They're just sitting, bearing witness to you, metabolizing. I'm starting to feel not like non-interference, but on a certain level, there's almost nothing we can do for each other except, you know, the most profound thing we can do is be there, be present with each other is like 90% of it. We're not.

We're being manipulated further and further away from that reality. Right. And the substitutes for compassion, the substitutes for bearing witness, is to like somebody's tweet. Yeah. Or to put a heart at their Instagram or say, looking good, L-O-L on someone's Instagram, and that's a connection? Right, it's not. And it's the dopamine substitute for oxytocin, right?

You get the thing, but it's a different, it's different. In your path, you are Jewish upbringing? Yeah, but regular Jew. Regular Jew? Yeah. Not fancy Jew? It ended up seeping in anyway. Yeah.

But it was, you know, regular reform institutional Judaism until I really figured it out. How did any Judaic thought or, philosophy or even cultural adhesion inspire your work, investigating and building you towards building team human. I mean, I ended up writing a book about Judaism called Nothing Sacred. And for me, Judaism is in some ways in anti-religion.

It's an anti-religion path. So Jews get out of, in the story anyway, the Jews get out of Egypt, you know, where they were worshipping all of these kind of death cult gods. And they get to the desert. And because they're in the habit and they've been just in those.

They make a golden calf. Well, before that even, they make an ark. They want to make an ark. Just like, and so they're going to make an ark. And God says, okay, you can make an ark. You can make an ark. But when you're done with the ark, you can't put a god on the top of the ark.

What you have to do is put two cherries. who are little sort of monstrous little angel things. They're not the happy little funny thing. Put one on each side. It's really Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey are the contemporary cherubin. There you go. Keep going.

Put one on either side of the top of the thing to protect the empty space. And there in the empty space when you gather, I'll come to you. So it made me realize that Judaism. Isn't that where the book goes, though? No, it's inside. You, you, you, you, you, it's

But I'm saying instead of a god, it's a book. Well, inside there, you put a book, but to go on the road, that was when we had to go on the road later. But in the Ark of the Covenant, there really wasn't even a book. Okay. We didn't have to do a book until we lost the temple. And then it's like, okay, we've got to take this thing on the road. And everybody freaked out because the rabbis were like, no, no, no. Judaism is a social phenomenon.

It is an oral tradition. The stories are oral. And when they're oral, they can always be changed. They can always be adapted. We're yarning together over centuries. If we're going to leave and write it down, you're going to lock it down. You're going to redact,

the story's going to be stuck. So they fought and fought and fought, like 800 years over that. But finally, yeah, they put it in a book so that we could take it on the road. It's portable, yeah. Right, it's portable.

How is it in anti-religion? That's what you were. Because nothing is, because you don't, you don't get your God. What's God? Well, it's abstract. You can't worry,

you can't, you don't know, in the name of this God, you don't see it. It's almost God trying to say, grow up. You know, it's very Joan Rivers. You know, first, can we talk? Can we talk? That's Judaism, right? Can we talk? It's a discussion. So you don't, when you get confirmed in Judaism, it's not, you don't fall into water and say, I believe. What you do is you prove that you can read the book. That's a bar mitzvah. Can you read this? Yeah. Can you read it? Can you speak intelligently about it?

Okay. Now sit around the table and argue. And you know, and, but in order to have that argument, The can we talk moves to Joan Rivers second thing, grow up. In order to have this conversation, you've got to actually grow up. You've got to, there's no one here to protect you. You are the adult. You humans are the adults in the room. You've got to learn to take care of each other. And that's a difficult spiritual path.

Because everyone wants to be superstitious. Oh, God's going to take care of me. It's all going to be okay. You just do eat this wafer or do this thing. It's okay. There's a ritual. It's like, no, sorry. we got to, you know, it's up to us.

And so that informs Team Human? Yeah, what forms Team? Informs Team Human, the Sabbath, first thing they do in the desert, they give themselves a Sabbath one day off. What does that say? That's sort of Mr. Rogers' message as I see it. Sabbath is saying, take one day a week, one seventh of your time, don't work, don't consume, don't produce, just be. You are okay. just the way you are. I think you're special.

You, you, just being born is, is worthy of your existence. And one, if you take one seventh of your time to remind yourself that you are sacred, just the way you are, without any utility value, it speaks to me, it speaks to team human, to say that we are a sacred collective. You don't need to accomplish anything. You can just be with each other. You know, and that's, sorry, that to me is, is the spiritual path. You know, and can you even these, can you even tolerate just being with somebody, you know?

It's hard, yeah. It shouldn't be, but boy, it is, to be truly present with another, you know, and then. And then, and then trying to do something as a collective is so hard. If you have a group of people, let's say you have 11 or, you. or 27 or 42 people that are trying to raise money for a wing of a library or plant trees or plant a potluck and there's no one in charge? Like it's one of the hardest human endeavors

is true grassroots work. Yeah, but Jews aren't even allowed to read Torah alone. You gotta have a minion there. Why do you want 10 other people there when you're reading Torah? So that you're arguing about it, right? So that you can't, the few times in history, when Jews were allowed to read Torah alone, they were like in medieval times when they were persecuted,

so they hidden their addicts. They went crazy. They went nuts. They started worshipping, you know, whatever, you know, crazy Kabbalistic cults. And they went nuts. You need the group. You need the others. Nice.

It's less a religion than it is a way of being, a sacred way of being in community. And when it becomes a religion is when it's gone off track. And you know what? I always used to say that to Jews. Oh, you want to have a religion. religion just like everybody else on the block. You know, you know, what made distinguished Judaism I always thought was that it was not a religion with another building. Okay, let's make a,

you know, but I understand why they did. They changed it because they were getting persecuted. James in the Bible said faith without deeds is dead. And in the Baha'i tradition, it's let deeds, not words, be your adorning. So it's really, I believe that what you, where your faith is, is what you do. Exactly. It doesn't matter what you believe. Like I believe that Gorgax is the god of this galaxy and that if I drink, you know, three ounces of maple syrup every Sunday that I, my soul will be illumined. It doesn't matter what I believe. It only matters what I do. Yeah. The proof is in the pudding. And Judaism had that in it, but people, over time, it becomes really hard for people to hold on to that. And then they go, oh, no, no, no, we believe in Mount Sinai. We believe

in a God like this. And it's like, eh, you know, you look at the really smart ones, Rambam and Hillel and those guys, they're like, no, it's actually right. It's about appropriate action. The talks are the best Buddhists. And they're like, oh, no, no, it's really, it's about the path. It's about action. Yeah, the eightfold path. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the whole, that's all, that's all we've got. You know, and if you can believe what you want and we can argue about what God means around the table or what the Moses, could he talk, could he not talk, what was Aaron doing? But no, it's, and it led to a system of laws. You know, Jews tried that one, you know, which is a good idea. It got a little granular. I mean, Jesus was smart about that saying, look, you know, getting a little

stuck in the weeds. Yeah, yeah. Be nice. Which is a clever response to that. Douglas, this has been such a special conversation. I love how your mind works. When does it start? This is the end part? I thought this was the intro. I know this was how. Because there's so many questions.

I wanted to get my full spiritual awakening during this interaction with you. That's not going to happen. You don't have Shakti Pot or anything you can transfer to me. We'll figure. We'll figure something out. I wanted to talk about AI. I wanted to talk about both of us raised teenagers during COVID. I wanted to talk about morality, like where it comes from and how it works.

And do we need it? And there's so many topics I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about all the terms that you've coined, viral media, digital natives, social currency. I'm sure there's three or four others that are in the lexicon. Yeah. That you brought up. But I feel like this has been just such a scintillating conversation.

And I feel like it's let's end on top and let's just have part two. All right. Well, how does that sound? Great. Okay. All right. Douglas Rushkoff, thanks so much for being on Soul Boom. Thank you.

Thank you for Team Human. I'm all aboard. I'm all aboard that team. The Soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.