The Daily Zeitgeist - "Why Billionaire Apocalypse Bunkers Won’t Protect Them” 10.03.23

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

In episode 1557, Jack and Miles are joined by writer, documentarian, host of Team Human, and author of Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaire, Douglas Rushkoff, to discuss��  How Tech Billionaires Are The Cause Of... And Think They Are The Solution To All Of Earth's Problems, Circular Economic Models vs. What They’re Picturing With The Mindset, Addiction To Inventing The New Thing That’s Not Actually A New Thing, Digital Insulation and more! LISTEN: Queens Highway by Menahan Street BandSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me for I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shekinah Church. Listen to Forgive Me for I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is Season 4 of Naked Sports. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry.

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Hello, the internet, and welcome to Season 307, Episode 2 of Your Daily Zeitgeist Day, a production of iHeartRadio. This is a podcast where we take a deep dive into America's shared consciousness. And it is Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023. Yeah. It's National Techies Day. Kind of appropriate. Yeah, for our guest today.

It's also National Fruit at Work Day. I don't know what the fuck. I think it's a picture of an apple on a laptop. So, hey, bite into your favorite fruit while you're at work. And, you know, holler at your techies today. Yeah, that's a behavior, bringing fruit to work, a behavior that needed to be honored and defended with a national day. Yeah, exactly.

Absolutely. I feel like it's been maybe a decade since I heard somebody use the phrase techie. Yeah. It's so outdated. Yeah, well. Like 1980s, like, that there would be a movie about, like, tech people that turn into zombies or something called techies.

Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very outdated. Anyways, my name's Jack O'Brien, a.k.a. Potatoes O'Brien, and I'm thrilled to be joined, as always, by my co-host, Mr. Miles Gray! Hey, you know it's Miles Gray. I'd love to do a long AKA, but we got a lot to talk about, so I'll keep it short. It's your favorite Blackanese experimental visual artist, ya boy, Kusama.

Thank you so much for having me back. You're welcome. Welcome back, Miles. Miles, we are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by an author, a documentarian, who MIT called one of the world's 10 most influential intellectuals. He's published many, 20 books, including the one we're going to be talking about today, Survival of the Richest, Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Please welcome to the show dr douglas rush welcome welcome thanks for having me thanks so much for joining us uh yeah like we were saying before we're we talk like we always like to have experts on on certain things and one thing we

always keep hearing about is like the scaries that billionaires get when they think about the poor people rising up. And we've like, we've touched on like people buying properties in New Zealand and like these like billionaire escape bunkers and things like that. And so when we were wanting to sort of discuss this further, it was like, it was just great to like,

sort of see your work sort of completely overlap with that but also have like a larger look at like it's really not so much about the bunkers themselves but the flawed thinking around even wanting a fucking bunker to escape at all um so yeah we're really stoked to have you on oh cool no and thanks for that too because um you know i write this book and there's's this opening scene where I meet the billionaires who all want advice on their bunkers. And most of the journalists and newspapers and stuff who've covered it are like, oh, my God, the billionaires are going to leave us behind. This is happening. And it's like, dude, read the book.

These guys are pathetic. None of this is working. The whole point of that scene, it's a comedy. It's a comedy. This is laughable. These guys are nuts. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It kind of leaves that behind pretty quickly. Yeah. And then focuses on, you know, like tells the story of how we got here. Right. that we are here there is a 60 minutes piece i think last this past week where they were talking about sam bankman freed and like michael lewis was like man he's a great guy like i don't know we the world needs a sam bankman freed to like save us from ourselves type shit oh no he was saying that i know he's got a new book michael lewis you know he's like

money ball great writer yeah the big short and he he did he's got a book coming out like next week or the week after about sam bankman freed and people don't know that's the the crypto crazy he you know giant crypto crash he took zillions and billions of dollars of people's money with him on this uh basically i mean maybe he meant well but it was a crypto pyramid scheme that he was running. But the weirder thing is like he's an effective altruist. He's basically one of these people who believes that the human beings alive today, like the 8 billion people around, we're just like the larval stage of humanity. We're like the maggots on the original medium. And the ones that matter are the post-human AIs that are going to spread throughout the universe.

So if you have to make choices now that cause pain and suffering for these little 8 billion worms, it's okay. Because the super AIs are going to be happier. And we will become one big machine. Think about how many people there are going to be before, like after that. The direct quote from Michael Lewis,

there is still a sam bankman freed shaped hole in the world that now needs filling and i would say maybe not so but but yeah there there is i mean you talk in your book about when jeff bezos went to space and like this big media kind of orgasm that they had about just this idea of like a private person. We're now at a place where a private person can get so rich that they can go to space. It's like the the ultimate deliverance of the American dream on a cartoonish scale. american dream like on a cartoonish scale but yeah it's like people really it does seem to be of the zeitgeist to like buy into this shit still like we're starting to see some of the magic wear off thanks to elon musk being a public dipshit but it's it's still a mess so we're gonna dig into all of all of that stuff plenty more.

But before we get into the content of your book, we do like to ask our guests, if there's something from your search history you would be so kind to share with us that's revealing about who you are or what you're up to. Well, I don't know how revealing it is, but I looked to see what it was, so I would be honest. What's the last search history

right and it's not unfortunate it's not some cool porn thing it was um it was what and that wouldn't be on google anyway but um it was uh which covid vaccine has less side effects that moderna or pfizer because i had to go in for one today and they said that it seems that pfizer's got less side effects and i guess that's revealing about me because i'm like i'm so torn it's so i i i'm not even a covid skeptic anymore i'm just a covid confused nick right where did it come from is it bad is it less bad than they're saying is it more bad than they're saying so i figured i would i would kind of split the difference by finding whatever whatever vaccine I'll take it. But I want it to be the least.

The best one. You want the best of the vaccine. Which COVID vaccine the best. That would be how I would search. I get very dumb when I'm talking to Google. Like I feel like I have to talk to Google like I have frontal lobe damage. Yeah. Well, the vaccine pride, too.

Like, when I saw the thing about, like, Moderna being, like, slightly more, like, effective, I was like, yeah, yeah, that's me. That's me. Yeah. Got that one. You're like, yeah, it has less side effects, including working. Yeah. Pfizer doesn't work. That's what we identify with here at this show.

But Moderna is like, like you know 10 times the dose of pfizer so it's like it's more strong but it's like well maybe i don't i'll take the less strong it's like i'm gonna have the costa rican blend rather than the french you know dark french roast french roast right yeah sure sure sure not gonna get the vietnamese iced coffee version of it still haven't had it but i'm gonna love circling i'm still loving what is something that you think is overrated ai ai is really i mean honestly so far ai the chat gpt and all that it's like a it's like a a skin on a google search box it's like instead of getting the google searches it pulls like the

best paragraphs from the things that would have been in the search and throws them together into something that sounds kind of like Wikipedia, but it's actually like wrong. You know, if you type in Wikipedia without the fact checking. Yeah. You type in, you know, what weighs more, a pound of lead or five pounds of feathers? It'll say they weigh the same, right? Because it's binding the text. And most of the times people have talked about feathers, weighing feathers and weighing lead, the answer has been they're the same. And it just shows this whole, it's this whole reversion to the mean. It's like, let's get the most average possible answer out of the data. And that's really good for a society looking for innovation and new ideas.

Like, let's just revert to the mean, right? But the mean sucks, right, if you want to go there. And then, like, the other one is, you know, mid-journey, people are showing me, oh, look at this beautiful thing I made on mid-journey. And I'm like, it's kind of like listening to somebody's acid trip. It's like, I know it was really good for you, but to me it just looks like some airbrush thing on the side of a van, right? It's like, I'm sure- It looks like Tom Hanks' face on a bus. You're like, yeah, but it's Uncle Bus. Whoa. And you're

like, okay. Okay. Right. So I'm sure it was really fun for you to interact with that AI and get that stuff. But the result, kind of keep it to yourself, man. I just don't, I don't really care. So yeah, AI just feels like, and also I get interviewed so much about it lately. Like, oh, is it going to cost our jobs? Is it going to cost our consciousness and the future of human? I'm just like, oh, just shut up. I'm just tired of it as a thing. It's funny because we were on that same journey too. Like the last couple of weeks we've had specialists on in AI and we're like, I saw it's Skynet, it's Terminator. were on that same journey too like the last couple weeks we've had specialists on in ai we're like i saw it skynet is terminator wasn't like no no it's not oh okay great they're like at best it can do you know it'll it'll it'll crush it trivia night if you

have it on you right yeah on some like and then every seventh question it will just get completely wrong oh and yeah in a way that makes you wonder like makes everybody be like is he okay yeah what's happening with yeah if it's going to replace jobs it's going to replace shit jobs you know and if it's not a shit job it's replacing well then it's going to do a shit job on a job that needs someone good it's like you don't want to watch the AI movie or go to the AI doctor. It's like, no, thank you. But going back to the tech bros, they're the ones who bought in the most to it.

It's a tech bro. I was at one of those tech bro retreats and one of the guys who came up with one of the social apps that I'm sure everyone has used once or twice on their phone. Your kids used it more. But one of the guys who came up with one of those apps was asking me if I'm afraid because he's been looking at what I've been publishing about AI. And am I afraid that when the AIs are

in charge, they're going to come after me for saying negative things about them? And I'm like, dude. And he said he doesn't publish anything at all about ai online so that in the future the ais won't attack him and i'm like god if you think the ais are so smart aren't they going to be able to infer from your selective removal of all reference aren't they going to be able to infer how you think and he's like oh fuck you know no they're smart enough to hack the entire like world bank and you know the pentagon but they're not smart enough to infer subtext that's beyond them right and that was the tech bros or the ais i mean yeah that's right either it it is well like the i was reading that atlantic

article on sam altman and his you know the the fact fact that the guy who's the CEO of OpenAI and he's like, you know, he has his bunker and like all his guns and a feels like the like they are using this to generate hype because all publicity is good publicity because the whole thing is just monetized by stock market hype but the in the same article where he's like they're gonna come for all of us and in that moment i don't even want to be around to see what they do to my family. So I have fucking cyanide capsules. In that same article, he's like his one of his lead technologists is like, I don't think we're even close to getting the level of accuracy on Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia is known for and they're like, I don't know that we ever will get to the level of wikipedia and a few years ago wikipedia was known as like a thing that you can easily hack and like change the data to say whatever the fuck you want like that that is not a realistic like me you know way

to fact check anything or it was like shorthand for like the lazy way to fact check something. And now it's like, they're like holding it up as, as an unattainable gold stone. It's like mind blowing. Well, yeah, that's because the AI is, it's not,

AI is not about figuring things out. AI is, is this sort of weird imitation of language. It's more looking at, you know, how do you, what would be the most probable next letter? What would be the most probable next word? And it's a weird language game, but it doesn't,

that's the thing, it's not thinking about anything. The only thing that's weird about AI is how it might be employed, you know, in the service of whatever, capitalism or manipulation or something else yeah and i think that's it's clear to see those dangers like immediately i'm like oh yeah every every like business owner would probably try and be like all right how i get rid of workers by using this but again that seems to be like the most direct sort of feasible threat that i can see at the moment but yeah right and the only problem with getting rid of workers is if you don't feed the workers after that.

It's like I was doing this thing on CNN and they were like about AI and I was kind of poo-pooing the threat of AI and they're like, well, what about the unemployment problem? And I look, it was like Jake Tapper or somebody and I look at him and I go, well, what about the unemployment solution? It's like, since when is that?

I don't really need to be, I don't have employment as a goal, right? Yeah. I want stuff, right? Meaning I want to maybe work on things, but employment? Let's look at some of our underlying assumptions here. So it'd be great. I mean, the thing is that the discussion that AI could create is so much more interesting than the world it would create because it's not going to replace the jobs. It just, it isn't sadly. That's not,

at least not how we, how we would use it, you know, and we'll just create a new kind of work, which is like consumption, like going to the mall or whatever it is we're supposed to do to keep those things alive. Right. I could see a world where they like over rely on it like we're already seeing it in like i keep talking about this one headline i saw in the margins of a news article that was and i i used to write like headlines for a website that i ran called cracked and i would like i paid attention to headline writing so i'm like i have like a loose, I notice when headlines are well-written and I notice when they are shit.

I was a headline editor on my college paper too. I just loved it. I mean, it's a great thing to conceive of. Yeah. Yeah. And so I, you know, I've noticed an overall drop in quality of like the headline tease of late, like just a backwards slide. But recently I saw one that was a picture of Vince Vaughn and it said, it's no big secret why Van Vought doesn't work in Hollywood anymore. And it was just like, yeah, they have like I feel like they're already turning it over to AI. The AI is doing a shitty job, but they don't care because they get to say they're using AI and that powers their stock price.

And in the same way that before we had an actually functioning internet, we had the dot-com bubble burst, I feel like we might see an AI thing where they try to replace all the jobs with ai and it does an incredibly shitty job and then they somehow use that catastrophe to then you know hire fewer people back but yeah well that's always the name of the game is finding an excuse to devalue to kind of disconnect workers from their labor or to hide the workers.

You know, AI is great at making things look like they're appearing automagically, you know, like from a replicator. But there's tons of people that tagged all the data for the AI. There's tons of children who went into caves to get the rare earth metals, to make the processors, to have the AI. There's the cobalt that they're getting from the rivers it's like the amount of human labor and suffering that goes into the you know a chat gpt3 response is immense right it's just it's just camouflaged it's just further more layers away it's like you know the dumb waiter it's like no no the slaves were still there making the food and huffing and puffing the stuff but we

don't want to see them we don don't want to see them. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, Thomas Jefferson, what a kind man. He's like, I'm going to spare everyone, you know, the tragedy of having to look at the fact that I rely on chattel slavery. Yeah. But how is that?

How's your dinner? How's your mac and cheese? Okay. All right. They weren't serving Kraft mac and cheese at his dinners. Oh, sure. What is something you think is underrated? Right now, at least I'm trying to think this way.

I don't know if I really believe it, but I'll say it like I do. I think that the human capacity for change is underrated. You know, what I'm starting to think is like, I've been looking at all the kind of techno solutionist climate change and policies and this and that. And I'm like, oh, fuck, man, none of these look like they're so reasonable to me. Like we're going to throw sulfur dioxide in the space or, you know, iron filings in the ocean or get special plankton regenerators. And, and, but, but I started to think that, I mean, in my own experience, I've had sometimes sudden rapid transformation where I see the whole thing, everything without acid or

anything. I just like, whoa, it all looks different to me now. And I start moving through the world differently. And I feel like our best, our last best chance for, for sustainable survival is some kind of almost like a global human mind shift that people just go, whoa, what were we tripping on here? And change the way they live. It's like, oh, I want to make friends with my neighbors. I don't need to consume all this shit. I'm not driving to work. I'm going to work right here. That kind of flip would change everything.

to work right here, that that kind of flip would change everything. And I do. I think, especially when you look at the tech bros who think that human beings are the problem and technology is the solution, and they're going to create a new stack or a new this or re-educate us and all that. It's like, no, we are not the problem. We are the solution. These systems are the problem. And I'm just trying to kind of help people see that we are underest solution you know these these systems are the problem and and i'm just trying to kind of help people see that we are underestimating our own capacity as humans to to behave our way into a different reality yeah because i mean i think like the pandemic felt like the closest i've seen to people having that moment like we talk about that on the show where like once the the toil of it all slows down for a

second people were able to be like wait what the fuck are we what the fuck is this like this is fucked up and then suddenly it's like hey get back to fucking work fucking think about what the what what the exit strategy could be from this version of like working for the economy um rather than the economy working for people but yeah like i yeah i i hope to see something like that i mean i feel like you know as like organized labor becomes more and more you know as more ascendant that people are like in their own way incrementally beginning to sort of shed at least at the very least what they believe is owed to them right and yeah that may be opening like a much more a much larger door for

some from for bigger changes for sure i hope so anyway i'm just so tired of like fighting against the system and the man and fighting against the corporation and all and it's like you know fuck them all if if if we borrow stuff from our neighbors that's the best protest against walmart and home depot and everybody else you know you have one lawnmower on the block. You borrow a drill from Bob instead of buying another renewable, rechargeable, you know, piece of crap that you're going to put in the garage. You know, it's like pretty easy. And I know this is how, you know, middle and upper middle class people can respond. But, you know, those middle and upper middle class people

are kind of the ones responsible for whatever happens you know it's it's you you're not going to be asking you know the the oh the the 10 million you know pakistanis who are up to their waist in uh climate change water it's like oh well you guys have to change something you know they just kind of try to walk and what are you guys doing about it yeah yeah right all right let's take a quick break and we'll come come back and kind of dig in a little bit more to the new book we'll be right back i'm jess casavetto executive producer of the hit netflix documentary series dancing for the devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed.

Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and L.A.-based Shekinah Church, an alleged cult that has impacted members for over two decades. Jessica and I will delve into the hidden truths between high-control groups and interview dancers, church members, and others whose lives and careers have been impacted, just like mine. Through powerful, in-depth interviews with former members and new, chilling firsthand accounts, the series will illuminate untold and extremely necessary perspectives. Forgive Me For I Have Followed will be more than an exploration. It's a vital revelation aimed at ensuring these types of abuses never happen again. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions, like how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed?

Or can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes. Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do, like resume specialist Morgan Saner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job

and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote. What is it, like you miss 100% of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've been thinking about you.

I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session, 24 hours. BPM 110, 120. She's terrified.

Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this?

We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. And as we were talking about,

so the book opens with this. We are on a different space-time continuum than the listeners. Because, you know, for us, that break was like three seconds long. We're in a different time continuum. They've got to catch up somehow. We tell them that to, you know, feel.

It's fine. To identify with us, we tell them that we keep it real time. We just sit there and listen to our own ads. All right. So say come back. All right. You can start again. I'm sorry.

I'm just joking. So your book opens. I'm sorry. I'm just joking. So your book opens. You've been asked to come out and speak to a bunch of super wealthy people. It's not really like a conference. Or is it a conference?

It's like just a gathering of the wealthy? You know, in all honesty, I'll tell you what it really was. I mean, we're amongst friends, right? No one will talk. Nobody. Nobody's listening to this. Good, good, good. All right. What one will talk. Okay. Nobody. Yeah. Nobody's listening to this. Good. Good. All right.

What's on the satellite? So what could they do? Musk is secretly listening. It's probably somehow related to Starlink or something. But no. He's obsessed with me. I thought I was doing a talk, right? That they were inviting me.

And I get invited to kind of do this kind of intellectual dominatrix act basically you know they bring out right this leftist anarcho-syndicalist cyberpunk asshole you know to speak to bankers and tech bros and say you guys are fucked up you're doing the wrong thing stop stop externalizing your harm you know and they oh thank you sir may i please have another you know and they do that for a little while then they just you know oh we had rush cough because you know we're cool and we can take it and then they go back to doing whatever they were doing before anyway you know and maybe take some of my language and throw it on onto the right so it looks less bad so i thought it was one of those but then it turned out to be this thing and i didn't i didn't realize it till after i mean i thought i was i was getting ready to go on stage

i thought i was in a green room to go on stage i thought i was in a green room and they were going to come in with a little they bring a little clip on mike and they put you out but instead they brought in these five guys who sat around this table to talk to me now the people think as i told the story that oh the whole thing was for this five guys no the whole thing wasn't for this five guys. The whole thing was some really wealthy people technology hedge fund thing run by one of those big places that does these things. clients and family fund people to a like a weekend at a resort with a bunch of like i was like the only one like me there was like a celebrity chef there was a pga golf pro there was a guy who did tennis swings there was like a like one of those painter guys like the guy with the curly hair who died one of those kind of guys was there.

Teach you how to paint. Right. There was like a tantric massage person. So the idea was they got- Just optimizing your life. They got a menu of things, right? And then it was like, oh, you know, Wednesday from 12, you know, to one, you could learn to make an omelet

with the famous chef, learn to pluck a guitar with, you know, Kenny Loggins or whatever, or, you know, do that. Or, you know, to pluck a guitar with you know kenny loggins or whatever or you know do that or you know spend an hour with you know mit's you know top 10 futurists or douglas rushkoff and so five of those dudes decided oh we'll do rushkoff right so that was sort of what the the premise of they came in and i thought I'm doing a talk and they're just want to sit around and ask me questions. So it started out like innocently, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, which do we bet on or augmented reality or virtual reality, you know, or, or, you know, whole language models or real language model, you know, all these kind of binary questions of which I'm the person you don't ask that. Actually, I'm always right about the shape of the thing, but always wrong with the brand. Like before your time, I was like Betamax, right?

Not VHS. I'm like, CompuServe is better than AOL. It's going to succeed. But you knew that like home video was going to revolutionize. You just didn't know it. You thought it was going to be Betamax, which a lot of people don't realize. Like in retrospect, Betamax is like we,

when I worked at ABC News, we worked with Betamax because it is a better product. It doesn't degrade. It's much easier to work with and rewind and like move around with. Yeah, it's better. It's just bigger. It's better. And also it goes over the tape head faster. So there's more tape per frame.

You know, there's more data in it. More information. Yeah yeah because it but there were two problems with betamax one they um didn't give their stuff to the porn industry which vhs did and two the vhs on super slow you could do like a six hour tape and get a whole you know you can get two nfl games you know if you're gone for the day you can get the whole thing and uh so you know shitty quality tended to win. Like AOL, look at them. Yay, AOL.

I mean, I'll fucking stop. Right. It worked for a while. So anyway, they asked me all those. And then finally, you know, I'm answering those as best I can. And then they get to like Alaska or New Zealand. You know, where should I put my bunker? And I decided I put on my, I don't know, court jester tweak the rich which is what i do my dominatrix hat so i'm like okay so you got your bunker and they one of them was showing me the

plans for his bunker and it's like it's got this heated swimming pool i'm like oh you know there's a guy up the hill from me who's got a heated swimming pool and there's always a truck in front of his house with like a new filter new heating element how are you going to get like parts for that heated pool after the apocalypse he like opens his little moleskin book parts for heated pool these guys are really any other brain busters rush cough so then i was asking them about how to you know didn't you guys see the twilight episode twilight zone episode where the people have the bunker and everyone's banging on it? How are you going to protect your bunker from the likes of us who don't have a bunker? And that's

when they're like, oh, well, you know, we got Navy SEALs on call. Mine are, you know, standing by a juiced up helicopter that's idling and ready to, you know, go at any minute. Like, okay, so you've got Navy SEALs coming to your to your island i didn't ask why you know it's not why isn't it army rangers i mean sure didn't you see the marky mark movie army rangers are like yeah they saw zero dark 30 yeah and that was that was good i want them i want them protecting me thank you very much some of those guys some of the delta force guys are like they're going off on missions i don't want mission mission people. I want protecting, big, protecting, brutish men. But anyway, so how are you going to pay your Navy SEALs?

They're like, oh, what? We've got billions of dollars. No, after your money is worthless, after the electromagnetic pulse or the, you know, whatever, the atomic war, the climate event, your money's worth. How are you going to pay them to say and they're again they're oh you know i didn't really think of that and then they're like going into crazy stuff like well what if i'm the only person who knows the combination to the safe where we keep the food like well navy seals they've got no experience getting information out of you're gonna get

waterboarded from here to the end of your life. I mean, that's your apocalypse. It's not fun. Or they were talking about having implants in everybody that could also be used as kind of electric shocks if people are doing wrong things. Wow. Navy SEALs are going to go really, they're going to like that. So I was just amazed that these guys, right, they're smarter than us, right? They own these big companies. They're billionaires. They're supposedly smarter, but they're so dumb. They're so panicked. And that was really what made me want to then go write a whole book or think about this longer, because it's basically, here are the richest, most powerful men I'd ever been with, yet they feel utterly powerless to influence the future. The best they can do is predict the inevitable event and then prepare for that. So they don't think of the

future as this thing we co-create. This future is this inevitability that you then build for. And the idea, the hubris to think that they can build a technology or a spaceship or a metaverse or a bunker and quite literally leave humanity behind was crazy. But what I realized, and this was the thing, this was the techie nightmare of it, was that it wasn't just, as I always thought, it wasn't just capitalism. It wasn't just, oh, look, they came to my beautiful net, Wired magazine, announced an attention economy, and then used the net to abuse people and make sticky websites and surveil us and all that. No, it's that these kind of, there's a tech bro psychology that kind of came from the beginning,

which was about getting away from people. And I realized they weren't, you know, climate change was not the reason why they were building their bunkers. Climate change was the excuse they're using to justify building these, you know, solo paradises. The excuses they have for going to live on mars away from everybody else or to build you know robot sex slaves instead of real people you know

they that that they this is not the nightmare for them this is this is the dream right yeah there does seem to be a fantasy about it rather than a like they love thinking about this it's like it's a i mean i think everybody kind of does at this point just i think for a lot of people the dream of the apocalypse is like i don't have to go to work like you know right uh like because you know it's the thing that people have said that you know it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism and like so how do i get out of this system that dehumanizes me uh let's just go with the zombie apocalypse because i can't picture anything else yeah but it for them it's the same thing but but in a different way it allows them to have the ultimate kind of control the ultimate blank slate where they can build their own society,

which seems to be what they like. You describe it as the mindset that is sort of epidemic in Silicon Valley. Yeah, which is kind of like a colonial urge. I mean, it's a colonial urge where just like, you know, even it was it was Hobbes that told the like British East India trading company people when they were coming to the Americas that you don't have to them it's think of the new world as as as a clean slate as as you're working like ex nihilo as if from nothing and that's the way the tech bros think of it so yeah going to the dark side of the moon going to mars go somewhere like that or seasteading right putting out all these little rafts into the ocean and make your own nation it's kind of like the little rascals when they'd make their little clubhouse like no girls allowed right i'm gonna make my

own place with my own roles and i can clone and i can have sex with with teenagers and do whatever i want because i make my own laws you know i'm self-sovereign i'm a self-sovereign individual with my own cryptocurrency and my nft based society it's like, okay. And that's the problem with, they got plucked out of college when they're freshmen, right? By VCs, they didn't take enough life. They didn't even finish intro to philosophy. Exactly.

It's like, oh, jeez. They're like, no perspective. Yeah, you started too soon. But yeah, like the guys in, there's this place called Neom. Have you ever heard about that one in Saudi Arabia? It's this giant multi-billion dollar city they want to build. It's like a mile wide and a hundred miles long and some part of the desert that they

think is going to be protected from climate change for some weird reason. They've hired like Hollywood studio chiefs and architects and agricultural specialists to build this thing, this perfectly high-tech, modern, like Dubai-like, renewable city that's going to be totally sustainable and perfect. The problem was there were these 20,000 Bedouins living back and forth on that land sustainably for the last, what, like 5,000 years. Right. We just got to get rid of those 20,000 sustainable people. Who know exactly how to survive anything.

So we can plop down our sustainable, you know, software solution stack. So they got that. There are these other ones in Solana. That actually pollutes the hell out of the earth and makes it a worse, like more likely, the apocalypse more likely, right? Well, they externalize the pollution, right? It's like it's all run with microprocessors and sensors and solar this and that. But where did you get the solar panels? Where did you get the rare earth metals for them? They never look at what happens before and what happens after. They stay right, you know, in their little in their little bubble. It's like 3D. Oh, the 3D printers are going to save the economy. It's like, who's making the 3D printers? Where are we getting the plastic goop that we stick in the 3D printers?

You know, remember when daisy wheel printers and printers came around? Then we got, every time there was a new generation of printer, you'd see printers on the curbs of the sidewalks of New York get replaced. It's like, no, it doesn't quite it doesn't quite work like that. But yeah, this, this mindset is the idea that with really, that you can earn enough money to escape the, the, to escape the damage that you're creating by earning money in that way, or that you can build enough technology to get away from the, the externalized harm created by building that technology. So you, you have, you know, even you look at it in the real world, like you've got all these apps that are leading like teenage girls

to like cut themselves and hate themselves and vomit and be depressed and all that. It's like, oh, don't worry. We have another app that's going to solve the problem of that app. Here's a wellness app and a mindfulness app. And it's like, good luck with that. Right. You're just adding on more and more, more and more screen time into people. like just keep iterating no matter if it doesn't make sense or not it's like like you say like just go meta on something and keep going meta so there's another thing to hype up to get more capital into the stock market and it's always ignoring like this simple truth which is like

but what if you like what if you actually reckoned with what what we're doing right now rather than like well the solution to pollution is this pollution credit that you can now get and we're doing right now rather than like, well, the solution to pollution is this pollution credit that you can now get and we're selling it on this exchange and you can also invest in this exchange I've created. And it's never about sort of like dialing it back. It's always just about how are we going to just keep adding and piling on to kind of, you know, to feed this insatiable hunger to keep just extracting and expanding. Right. And it's partly because they understand time purely as forward motion, as progress, as linear. And there's great things about linear time, you know, and great things about progress and understanding history and a future. But if you don't have any kind of circular sensibility, if you don't understand anything

about, you know, how soil regenerates, how people learn, how societies go through cycles, if you have none of that available to you, then all you can do is you put your blinders on and move forward, forward, forward. So you start with something like central currency, which we don't have to go into why or where that happened, but central currency is basically one kind of currency that we use, which is interest bearing. So because we use central currency as the one currency, our economy has to grow, right? You've got to pay back the bankers. Every time money is issued, it's issued an interest to pay for its expensive money. So

where do you get the more money? You need your economy to grow. And once you need your economy to grow, well, then you need it to grow faster tomorrow than it did today and faster the day after that. So all these dudes, everyone's looking for exponential growth. And you're right. You don't get that just by selling more pizzas. You could only sell. There's only so many mouths.

What you do is that rather than sell pizzas, you buy stock in the pizza company. All right, now I got stock. And I just put in some money and that's going to grow. As long as the pizzeria grows, it's fine. If the stock doesn't grow fast enough, I'm going to buy a derivative of that stock, which is like I could buy the pizza stock three months in the future. So now I've compressed all that time. And yay.

Now, if that's not enough, I can get a derivative of the derivative and so on and so on. You just keep going meta on the thing before. That's basically, that's what financialization is. But financialization now is way bigger than reality, right? The derivatives exchange of the New York Stock Exchange, they had the New York Stock Exchange and they had a derivatives exchange. Derivatives exchange got so big, it actually purchased the New York Stock Exchange, right? big it actually purchased the new york stock exchange right so it's like the tail ate the dog it didn't wag it it consumed it right and it's good and and where does that leave reality that's how you get you know mortgage crises and and all this other stuff so you've got that going on in finance and then the same thing going on in technology

where you've got you know businesses and then businesses get aggregated by this website and then that website aggregates the aggregators and so on and so on. You get Mark Zuckerberg going from Web 1 to Web 2. Web 1 was websites. Web 2 is Facebook. He plays out Facebook. Where does he go after that? Web 3. You know?

Literally changes the name of his company to Meta. Meta. Literally Meta. after that web three you know literally changes the name of his company to meta meta literally meta saying we can just keep going meta on whatever was before but meta isn't isn't real meta is getting further and further away from from terra firma from from the real world and further and further away from the externalities meaning the harms that are created by these businesses you go to facebook, the campus is gorgeous and they got a great coffee there. It's like, not Pete's, it's another one. It's like really good.

But if you look on the edge of campus, there's a tent village there of the people who've been impoverished by the very same companies. Yeah. All right, let's take one more break and we'll come back and kind of keep digging in here. Let's take one more break and we'll come back and kind of keep digging in here.

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And just to kind of summarize what we were talking about before, because I did find the book ultimately hopeful because like it really clarified this idea that i think we all assume that there's something happening with resources and the earth that is inevitably leading toward a climate apocalypse and you talk about how that assumption is purely based on like their mindset of like this extractive kind of their addiction to 10x growth is really what's driving this inevitable move towards a unsustainable world and climate and like if if people are able, if like the zeitgeist is able to switch over to this more, these more circular economic models, we have enough water, we have enough resources. That's what we've found over the past decade. Yeah. But it's hard, you know,

I mean, I get that it's hard, you know, and I talked to, you know, middle-class people and they're like, yeah, I'll do the kind of things you're saying. Once I've got like a million dollars in my 401k plan, then I'll stop. Or just I just need to work two more years at this bad job that I know is destroying the planet. Then I can stop. And when I listen to them, they sound like addicts. You know where it's like, dude, I i just gotta drink until this project is done just until this just until the next thing and there is no it actually it's it's now it really is now there is no next first there's no next big thing that's going to save us i was talking to a

billionaire who says oh i've got this carbon capture device we're going to put it right on the back of the car and right on the back of the truck. And it's going to suck the carbon out. So we don't even have to go to EVs. Like, oh, good the fuck luck with that. You know, or the eco city thing. It's like a pill and you drop it into the water and that city is going to grow out of it. That's, you know, magical crypto perfect city for children and regenerative agriculture. And there's a stack for this and a stack.

There's no thing. But it's hard to tell people like right now how do they start you know and that for me if we talk about it and i've given up with this if we talk about it as oh a new economic system or a thing then they're like oh no it's a socialist or something oh god yeah you know and if we could sort of take the ism off socialism and just make it like social. Yeah. Social.

Like, and it's interesting. You end up in the same place, but you win the argument. So I do that thing about, you know, instead of buying a drill from home, minimum viable product drill from Home Depot and making all this waste and using it once. Go to Bob's house, knock on Bob's door and say, Bob, can I borrow your drill? Right. go to Bob's house, knock on Bob's door and say, Bob, can I borrow your drill? Right. And Bob is going to bring a big, thick motherfucking drill that plugs in the wall the way God intended.

He's going to come over and say, Doug, you're a fucking nerd. You don't know where to you don't know where to find a stud. I'm coming over and drilling the hole for you. Right. He's going to make the hole. It's going to be great. But then like three days later that weekend, I'm supposed to have a barbecue at my house. Bob's going to smell the barbecue and Bob's going to think, wait a minute.

I went over and helped Doug drill a hole in the wall and he didn't invite me over to the barbecue. So now I'm going to have to invite Bob over. All right. So I invite Bob to the barbecue. That's fine. And Bob turns out, oh, it turns out he's nice and his wife is kind of nice and his kids are cool. And they like my, all right, well, that's so bad. But now the other neighbors smell the barbecue and they're like, wait a minute. Why is Doug inviting Bob to the barbecue and not us? Before long, we're going to have a block party.

Everybody's going to be having fun at this barbecue. Right. That's the nightmare. Right. That's the downside. The bad thing. But now that we're all together and talking, how do we meet? Well, you know, I borrowed Bob's drill. Now people on the block say, you know, I wonder I was going to need a new lawnmower. But instead of me buying a new lawnmower, what if we just like use two or three lawnmowers for the whole block and we just share the ones we have? Because I don't use it more than a couple hours a week. So now we're buying less lawnmowers, buying less drills, and we have more money to start doing stuff. I'm teaching Bob's kid algebra because I'm paying him back for the favor that he gave me, and it's all working out. Someone invariably gets up when I do that in a talk and says, well, yeah, but what about

the drill company? Yeah, bad for sales. What about, right? And the person who has the job at the drill company and the old lady, someone said, what about the old lady who has a pension fund that's dependent on the stock in the drill company for her to, for her to survive? It's like, well, luckily we're going to be taking care of that old lady because now we have a neighborhood,

and hopefully we're going to wind this down. That's why we're not doing it in revolution. I'm not saying, everybody today, stop buying drills, right? It's not going to work like that. But slowly and surely, as we replace some of that activity, the power of these giant megacorporations kind of diminishes. These huge, ridiculous global supply chains end up kind of shrinking down. And we slowly kind of turn the corner towards something more social, more circular, more on the ground. We take some

of the weight of government and social service programs to take care of us. We, we take some of the weight off the climate, off the economy and all that stuff, all at the same time. Then that's what I meant by, you know, I have more hope in people that people could kind of flip and go, Oh, this is fun. Right. I'm okay with this. What if life was actually fun? Like's yeah kind of a crazy idea but how many drills do i have but i need drills i need drills there's this uh david wayne movie the 10 where like he and his neighbor or two two characters like two neighbors get in a cat scan buying frenzy where they just like that they get competitive about buying cat scans

anyways i don't know why but yeah you like just to the point of the socializing you reference a couple times in the book like these powerful unconscious connective forces that are happening at the level of like mirror neurons right and you also mentioned that like the powerful the more powerful people get the less likely they are to have this exchange to engage in the mirroring of others so it almost feels like that we're being delivered from this very powerful you know way that we become part of a network connected to other people made up of other people like that's very natural very human like how humanity got this far we're being delivered from that by these powerful people who are like mapping onto us their weird thing that is like that that doesn't value that

that doesn't see the intrinsic value of that. And it's making us miserable, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the way like a Marshall McLuhan or somebody, a media theorist, would look at it is what you're talking about are the values of the television age, right? television and we use television to paint pictures of the world that made us feel inadequate about where we are that we need to get that other thing right the television is sort of what put us in competition with each other and kind of de-socialized us because the the less you know the less satisfied people were the more likely they were to go buy stuff so television was this really terrific

influencing machine and it supported markets and companies and consumption and all that. And now we've moved into a digital age and we're kind of using that same industrial age television era. Oh, let's use it to influence people and get them to buy more stuff and all that. It's like, well, maybe that's not the digital thing. I mean, it's not sustainable. It's too, when a digital algorithm can, can reconfigure itself in real time to influence your behavior.

It's like, this isn't going to work anymore. This isn't just going to get people to buy Ford cars, right? Because people don't even have jobs at Ford that where they can afford a Ford car. It's like, this is that where they can afford a Ford car. It's like this is this is flipped in a different place. So I think we have to stop kind of using media to get people to do stuff and start looking at using media and technology to provide people, you know, some of what some of what they need, which is it's a it's a big it's a it's a big mind shift. But, you. But you know what I mean. This is like a very

different media environment, that this stuff works differently than industrial age stuff. We're not just coaxing people. It's as if television was more like social media, which is more like, say, the missionaries. They go to a population and they propagandize them. They get them to worship the new God and they do a lot of intelligence on them. And then the missionaries send the intelligence back to the crown. And who comes next? The conquistadors, right? They know how the native population works. They've got the intelligence. They go in and they get them. That's kind of what the AIs and the digital things are. They're the conquistadors, not just coming to influence us, but coming to annihilate and replace us. And that's, wait a minute, that's not going to work.

So that's why we have to flip the script and say, well, how can they serve us instead? And this technology could. And this technology could, you know, I once you start saying, wait a minute, once you get out of the framework of how do we retrain people for better jobs once the AIs come and start thinking instead, how do we retrain people for lives of meaning and pleasure and leisure? And it's like, oh, that would be that'd be kind of fun. Right. Because I feel like so much talk, even like with like universal basic income, it's always just like offset the damage that tech innovation is going to do it's not because humans like we just because we're so productive we should begin shifting to something that resembles more like leisure time or family like right the ability to just commune with nature because you want to it's always like well yeah man when this tech comes online everybody's fucked so the only way we can keep them at bay is by giving them like a pittance every fucking month

and that's universal basic income. And it's always interesting to see, like in your analysis, like a lot of these things that we are, we're getting preached to us by like these tech people. It's always like it's never actually to solve anything. It's it's a solution that is just it. But it's it's a it's a new product packaged as a solution that is never actually intended to address what's happening. So we're in this snowball, like this constant, like this never ending thing that only leads to increased, like to your point, depleting our resources, you know, degrading the environment, which for them, it's like, well, that's the end game is then it's going to all break because I'm too good at capitalism and then I got to shoot the pores. I know. It's like for programmers who are so big on disrupting systems, you think they would consider disrupting corporate capitalism. They would consider something other than running to Morgan Stanley with every new invention they have. But they're ultimately so reactionary. They're so conservative. They don't challenge the underlying assumptions that their

companies are based on. I'm going to go disrupt the taxi market. I'm going to disrupt the book market. But what about disrupting the market market? Imagine that with abundance. It's like this is so much easier than writing another kludge to make this current system you know churn another 10 years while you look for a uh a way out and and the other side you know like the coke brother side of this thing you know those guys are the big climate deniers you go to an actual coke brothers conference they all believe in climate change they've got all this stuff on what's going to happen and the methane gas and the this and the that. But their objective is let's us be the only ones who know what's happening so we can prepare for it while the rest of society is told

that this is a myth. Yeah. The very elitist thinking that's happening. It's really cynical. And the more that yeah and the more that that happens and the more paranoid people get then they get into q anon and 5g towers and the great reset and that covid was here to reduce the population of the world and you know because i get it it's comforting to believe that there's like an avengers style dr evil super villain george soros jew you know who's who's controlling the world with his you

know from the italian embassy with space lasers or something but it's like i know however comforting that is it's time to grow up and say no no we are we are in charge here we're actually this is much simpler uh this is much simpler than it looks the only time we really get into problems is when we're trying to operate at scale, you know, like Zuck or Musk or whoever. If you want to operate locally, like 99.9% of us can operate locally and we could, let's just dedicate 1 million people to thinking at scale. You know, is that enough? We want 10 million people thinking at scale. And it's like, let them go do that so we can just take care of each other yeah and it's like funny too because like for for all of like the ways i think we're

just you know propagandized into thinking oh you know there is no salute like the only solution is to just hit the fucking pedal harder and go through this rather than like slowing down or looking at it like we have so many, even in our recent history that shows that like, you know, like you, you bring up, uh, the Greenwood district in Oklahoma, like black people were completely excluded from the mainstream American economy. So they figured out how to do it on their own outside of it. And it was something that was cooperative and was just like, well, if we only have us to rely on, then like, let's make this work.

And sure enough, it got to a point where it invited all this resentment that we had that race massacre. Right. Well, because the whites were confused. Wait a minute. If these black people were cut off from the economy and they're not allowed to participate, why are they doing better than us? Right. Right. So they went in and killed them. Right. killed them right that's right but we got to look back at that and go oh they were doing better than than the the blacks are doing better because being cut off forced them into local circular economic activity they started relying on each other and yes doing better now do you need to be cut off no there's a balance right you shouldn't have to be completely cut off either but boy oh boy when you when you see a lesson like that when you you see the way American farmers got out of the Depression, you know, through stuff that really looked like communism and cooperative land ownership and local currencies, you realize what we need is a more balanced set of economic instruments. instruments, different ways of operating, where we're doing favors for each other doesn't look

wrong on some level. These days, we want to do a clean transaction. We'd rather have someone we don't know come in and clean our house for money than the neighbor's kids are trying to do something. Yeah. I mean, the dumbwaiter effect, which you've already made reference to, like the invention of the dumbwaiter by Thomas Jefferson, which in, you know, elementary school history classes is claimed to be. to walk up and down the stairs with heavy plates and it's actually no he wanted to hide the fact that he had human cost slaves behind the you know hide it from people on a lower floor um there's this anecdote in the book that really drives home like what we're up against where so it's the the people assembling our iphones for Apple are made to use this toxic fingerprint cleaning solution to make the new product to just make sure there's absolutely no smudges on an iPhone when you open it in the box, when it comes out of the box. It is toxic. It poisons them.

They get premature babies come out of them and stuff. I mean, it's really bad but completely like but it's such a good example also of the genius of capitalism as this like singularity like erasing even the subliminal clues of the exploitation behind our most beloved products so it doesn't even like enter into our minds like they're they're doing this like five levels deep thinking because and it's like you know the people like these harvard educated people are like going to work for apple and coming up with that innovation of like we well like what we found is that if they see the smudges then then they start to get a vague sense of unease with the world. So it has to look like this perfect gleaming cube

that was just delivered down from on high. And Amazon does it less artfully, but more blatantly. It is their entire business model to remove the workers at the store from our lives by replacing them with packages that just show up and you know i mean and they're not hiding like they have a company called the mechanical turk named for like that that's a historical event where like a robot beat everyone at chess but was really just a chess master in a like suit that was made to look like a robot so

like it's we're up against a lot of very complex thing that like knows exactly what it's doing that is really going out of its way to try to deliver you from having the thoughts that you're talking about of like maybe i should like hang out with people in my neighborhood. Like maybe, you know, maybe this isn't as simple as, as I want it to be. Maybe the thrill that I get from opening this box and having an iPhone there that looks like the object from 2001 you know like that that isn't a a thrill that i should be pursuing but that they're they're working hard but it does feel like we're getting further and further away from like just fully being absorbed by their bullshit but i i don't have like a ton of evidence for that well i mean that's why i tried to write a book about them that makes us laugh at them. So we can see, OK, if these are little nerd people who are scared of human beings, then.

That's why they project onto us the fear of a fingerprint, the fear of knowing, you know, the fear of the people and the dirt and the women and the nature and all that stuff. It's like, I get it. There are pills that can help us emotionally survive in a world where we don't have that human contact, certain whatever SSRIs and antidepressants and all that. But there's also ones that are sort of encouraging complexity. There's all the new people out microdosing and trying mushroom therapy and doing other things. Although I'm still confused that you could take a fucking tech bro, send him down to South America and have him do a bunch of ayahuasca and you would think it would bring the great reckoning and they'd go, oh, I'm, you know, I've got to reconnect with the world and the

people and the thing. oh, I'm going to reconnect with the world and the people and the thing. But it's like somewhere between their ayahuasca trip and their G5 flight back to San Jose, they reverse engineer that the frigging social network they've made is that solution. Yeah, the product they're already working on is actually the thing. If they can just find this one tweak to the algorithm, that's actually what is going to work. Right. But when their focus is on post-humans rather than humans, which for a lot of them it is, post-humans don't have those fingerprints.

Post-humans don't have the aborted fetuses the post-humans are are this sort of idealized idea of the human the kind of the tech bro idea of human as information as perfectly auto-tuned soulless you know abstraction yeah abstraction right yeah which which i understand i i understand the yearning for that you know anybody who's fallen in love with an anime character knows what that is. But it's a stage, right? It's a stage of adolescence, not a fruitful place for us to go as a civilization. Yeah. Jesus.

Well, I truly feel like more than ever, this episode could go on for seven hours and we could keep talking about this. This is so fascinating. Thank you so much for writing the book. And thanks for coming on our show. Thank you for reading it. I'm happy that people buy my book, but I'm even more happy when they read it, which is rare. It's a subset of a subset. Right.

It's not just like, yo, you see what I got on my wall? I got that new Rush Huff. Yeah. Did you read it? Nah, not yet. I read the introduction. Yeah. Yeah. On our wall, I have the dawn of everything over there and I really appreciate it. I think more people need to hear what, what they did to Pinker in that book. It's so great. He deserved every bit. Yeah, he did.

And also, yeah, just for listeners, you got to check them. I mean, like, it's so expansive because, like I said, my sort of experience with the book was being like, OK, we're going to talk about bunkers. And for a second you do. But then, again, you sort of zoom out to really understand why it's it's that's the bunker isn't the fuck the bunker is just another manifestation of this thinking that is actually the such a destructive force right now and gets into everything from the momentum we've carried into like our our our perception of science and nature and you know like returning to the womb using technology and things and all these other things. So it's a really great book.

And yeah, encourage everybody to check it out because it doesn't disappoint, especially if you enjoyed this episode, which I'm sure you did. Free yourself of the bunker in your mind. That's right. I'm just digging a hole in the mud in my backyard. I think it's going to suck, to be honest, for my family. I told you, they just

look like shallow graves, to be honest. I'm sure your family's really encouraged by that. Dad's making a bunker, don't worry! He's building a bike out of old hangers. Yeah, I might be smoking meth at the same time good luck thank you uh where can people find you follow you all that oh god don't follow me but um i mean i got tweeting but i'm so over it you know the most people following me now are

these little fake stripper accounts have you seen all these oh yeah it's like bot accounts yeah these bot but they're not even real real stripper accounts they're like fake right they're bot stripper it's like what is that i'm trying to what do they want why why retweet me of all things but whatever retweet me um no come to uh uh buy this book survival of the richest escape fantasy of the of the techest, Escape Fantasy of the Tech Billionaires. Get it at your local bookstore if you can or your library or something.

I got a podcast of my own called Team Human. You can check that out. Team Human. Get it? We're on Team Human. Yeah. I'm a fan.

Yeah. I got a website, rushcuff.com or come actually play with me. I'm teaching. I started a new master's program at Queens College,

which is part of City University of New York. And we're just doing this kind of stuff. So if you want to get a master's in theory in media studies or tactical media, come and we'll play live. Amazing. And is there a work of media that you've been enjoying? Well, you know what I'm just really enjoying? Yeah.

There's a woman named N really enjoying? Yeah. There's a woman named Neshe Devano. It's hard to say. N-E-S-E Devano, D-E-V-E-N-O-T. And she tweeted this thing about, you know, Toscreal is this word that's basically, it's a word that means kind of the mindset. It's like techno-utopianism and life extension and effective altruism. There's this paper she wrote called Tesquerelle Hallucinations, Psychedelic and AI Hype as Inequality Engines. And what she does is she compares the sort of the new psychedelic industry hype to the new AI industry hype and shows how they're kind of the same thing and both of them are designed to do the same old thing,

to keep the poor down. And I was just like, dang, I really hadn't seen, it's the same thing. What they're gonna do to psychedelics is the same thing that they did to the internet in the 90s. They're about to do to psychedelics.

Just watch. Amazing. Miles, where can people find you? What is the work of media you've been enjoying? At Miles of Grey, all over the place. Check Jack and I out on our basketball podcast, Miles and Jack Got Mad Boosties. If you want to hear me talk about 90 Day Fiance,

you know, something a little bit more elevated than the discussion we had. Talk about trash reality where I escaped. That's my bunker. Check out 420 Day Fiance. And The Good Th good thief where we talk about the greek robin hood who was kidnapping millionaires and doing some good old-fashioned wealth redistribution i love to see it uh a tweet i like is from uh mike caplan at mike caplan m yq

k-a-p-l-a-n who tweeted you never hear about people who are good to the bone guess not like to hear to hear more about them. Tweet, I've been enjoying just anything from Jimmy Butler's new look with the Miami Heat yesterday at Media Day and particularly whoever came up with

the nickname Ball Out Boy for that. He had the emo wig. He came with an emo wig and announced, I'm emo now. I think when asked to which nickname

for his new look was his favorite, he did have the good taste to say ball out boy. He also had a bunch of facial piercings and stuff. It was really fun. He's making Media Day actually interesting for the first time. You can find me on Twitter at

Jack underscore O'Brien. You can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at The Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have a Facebook fan page and a website, DailyZeitgeist.com where we post our episodes and our footnotes. We link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode as well as a song that we think you might enjoy. Miles miles what song do you think people might enjoy uh the dude

meanahan street band uh brooklyn band that i love so much they've got musicians from like l michaels affair who we've done uh sharon jones the dab kings anti ballast uh and this is a track that just just something nice and easy and just musical and funky to get you into your week. And it's called Queens Highway by the Menehan Street Band. I don't know if I completely botched that pronunciation, but either way, check it out. Queens Highway. All right. Well, we will link off to that in the footnotes.

The Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's going to do it for us this morning. Back this afternoon to tell you what's trending, and we'll talk to you all then. Bye. Bye. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult.

And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shekinah Church. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is Season 4 of Naked Sports. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. Every great player needs a foil.

I know I'll go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Listen to the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Elf Beauty, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jermaine Jackson Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's

a lot to figure out when you're just starting your career. That's where we come in. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.