The Joe Rogan Experience - #346 - Douglas Rushkoff

Episode Date: April 2, 2013

Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian. He is best known for his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems, and also has written many books on topics including society, media, and technology. Rushkoff also had the first syndicated column in the New York Times on cyberculture.

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Sorry about that. Didn't mean to blow your ears off. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Douglas Rushkoff, if you do not know of him, would you call yourself a media analyst? What would you call yourself? Media theorist.

Media theorist. Author mainly. Author mainly, yeah. And your new book is called Present Shock, When Everything Happens All at Once. Is that what? Everything Happens Now. When Everything Happens Now.

I saw quite a few of your videos online. Really, really interesting conversations. One of them that really struck me was, well there were several of them that struck me, but one of them was your story of being mugged. of being mugged and you, you told people on an online room, like where you got mugged and people were upset that you, in telling them that you got, didn't telling the world that you got mugged there, it was lowering their property values.

Yeah, that was a, it was a bad one. Um, that's so crazy. Yeah. I mean, it was one thing to get mugged,

which is kind of freaky in itself. you know, and whatever, you know, shame and weirdness goes with that. But I guess what I was trying to do, I mean, deep down was probably elicit, you know, love and affection from people on my list. You know, so I put up, oh, you know, and there was a social, some social responsibility to it. So I put up where I got mugged because everyone should know this is maybe a dangerous stretch here we got to maybe get a light but um yeah so i sent i sent it out and then um the first two emails i got back from this like loving list of parents was how dare you say exactly where it happened you know we live right across the street you know you're going to lower our property values. I'm like, are you selling now? No, we're not selling. But it was a really weird time when

people needed their property values to go up because they were trying to get bigger mortgages and pay down and do all that. And it was just like so panicky there about that that someone was afraid, oh, what if a newspaper covers it and it's bad? You know, someone was afraid, oh, what if a newspaper covers it and it's bad? It's so weird when ones and zeros trump humanity. You know, and in that case, that's exactly what that is. That's ones and zeros trump humanity. Well, yeah, and two kinds of ones and zeros.

You know, the ones and zeros of money and the ones and zeros of sort of digital technology, which I think can create a kind of a distance that you wouldn't get. Yeah. You can do it anonymously and it's like these barbs that you can just send out and illogically, like in ways that you would never if you had to deal with someone one-on-one because you would feel it. You would look at them. You would feel their response. You would be like, why are you saying this? Like why are you being such an asshole? But because you are anonymous, so people are just like in this unnatural communication thing. like in this unnatural communication thing right but then the the part that then worries me after that is if you get used to doing it like that in an anonymous way online does that start to make the behavior a bit more normative when you're even with your identity you know yeah oh i guarantee

it has to it's it has to there's there's no free rides when it comes to that i really feel like your thoughts you're connected like there was always a thing. I remember when I was in high school, someone in my school newspaper wrote like a funny critique about the Boy Scouts. And one of the things that he didn't like about the Boy Scouts was that they wanted you to keep your thoughts pure. And he was like, you know, well, my thoughts are my own thoughts. As long as I don't do anything, I don't think there's anything wrong with my thoughts. I don't know if that was really smartly argued. I remember reading that going, wow, this kid's pretty clever.

But then I thought about it. I'm like, but if you're thinking about creepy shit, you probably are kind of creepy, you know? And it's not going to get any better. Just, you know, you're just going to eventually one day you're going to snap and then you're going to do something. Is it a creepy thing? Yeah. If you really are like the i don't know i mean everyone has their own definition of thoughts being pure you know like a more lenient person might allow a lot of like healthy sexual things in the idea of thoughts being pure as long as it's not creepy but there's other people that would just sit around and say well let me just think about creepy shit all day

and not do it and I'm fine. But you're not. There's no free ride. There may be though. You think so? Well, I mean what you're describing is the benefits of an absolute police state as long as it was always right. Yeah, that's the problem. That's the problem.

I mean you can always get your minority report just in case maybe they're wrong. I'm not really subscribing to that. I'm just saying that you really can't. It'd be nice. You can't have really shitty thoughts and get through. And I think that if you're really shitty online, you have those thoughts, even if it's only online, I really believe that negative energy is going to leak over. Genuinely shitty. I mean, it's just how do you online with your face and the meaner you can get in real life until you just got mean people.

Do you investigate people's Twitter? Like if someone says something weird on Twitter, do you go to their Twitter page and see just all their cunty shit that they write to everybody and go, oh, they's just a crazy guy. Well, I will admit I focus way more on the cunty tweets and emails and things than on the ones that are loving and positive. I'll get like 10 emails. Oh, your book was great. Oh, I loved it. You've changed my life. My children worship at your altar.

He's like, delete, delete, delete, delete. What's wrong with you, Reshkov? Who is this guy? Your book's hacked. What? Why did he say this? Yeah, this is the biggest piece guy? Your book's hacked. What? Why did he say this? This is the biggest piece of shit I've ever read. What?

And a thousand people loved it more than life itself. Right, but I'll spend the rest of my week trying to convince this one guy. Oh, no you don't. Why I'm not a bad guy. Why the book is actually okay. Oh, you've got to learn the internet. Yeah, well, now it's genius. That's new to me.

Well, it's hard. It's hard not to engage people because they're they're it's like a person saying it to you it's it's very similar and to someone who's public you know you're out there you have your name is out there the videos are out there anyone can find out about you and see you they can reach you too and reaching you on twitter you know they can send you some shitty thing just to get a a rise from you and then they're just making you dance. Then you're dancing to someone else's spell. So you've got to learn how to just look at yourself and go, does this make sense?

No, it doesn't. Fuck that guy. Yeah, and be able to leave it. But you've got to be able to do that to the point where it's healthy and not beyond. Because at some point, if everybody's going, Rushkoff, wake up! Your book needs to be this when it's, you know, you've got, you can do this, but you can't do that. Well, in the end, the sale, the market would tell me, I guess.

Yeah, the market would tell you, but you're not a dumb guy. You would never do that. You would never make a book like that that was so off and out of line. You would look at yourself along the way. I can tell I'm talking to you for 10 minutes. You're not that kind of guy. The kind of guy that would do that is like there's certain people that are functional crazy. And they can like figure some things out and chase some things down. And then they'll get stuck in some sort of a weird rut and you can't talk them out of it.

And, you know, you realize, oh, he was crazy all the time. He just figured out how to get through life. Those are the ones that will go off on crazy tangents, and people will go, what are you doing? Because the guy wasn't really nuts in the first place. You're not nuts. You're all right, man. You don't have to worry about that shit.

Get that one out of your head. You need to keep appossing people around you to keep telling you you're not insane. I think there's a good thing that comes from criticism though because the it's even really harsh criticism is because if they're ridiculous and if you look at what they're saying if it's ridiculous and mean and that it really reveals far more about them than it really does about you but look at what they're saying and is there any merit to it at all does it make any sense or is it just nonsense is it just a guy being an asshole or if you weren't you could you find merit in it like i've found criticism from the biggest assholes but it was like there was like a hair of accuracy

into it that made me like reconsider certain things yeah i mean and the most valuable thing about it for me entertaining it to some extent is just it makes me it makes me more flexible you know as a as a thinker you know if you can wrap your head around you know oh where am i wrong right it can make you a little indecisive because it's like well he's right and he's also right in this one right well but sometimes things are complicated i know but that's the whole that's you know for me the object of the game that's why i keep writing i'm writing about the now, present, being present. If you're actually present, you have to be present with yourself and you have to be present who you're with. That's the thing that everybody looks to be avoiding one way or another, whether they're doing it because I got to earn money or they're doing it because they got to check a device.

I mean there's the constant assessing and it and it's just i see so few people i walk into rooms now and i feel like you know i don't feel like i'm in a room with these people there's no sort of social cohesion they're not really present they're each in their own little segment you know interconnected with the internet and their friends yeah and then not connected with with each other you know i i am you know i'm a net fan i I've been since the late 80s. I've been a pro boing-boinger, cyberpunk type person. But I keep feeling like rather than using these things to reach out to other people and connect, we're using these things for business. They've gotten super aggressive. The behavior's gotten way worse. and I don't even think it's our fault. I honestly think it's, in these cases, it's because we're living on this, an operating system, an economic operating system that just needs to feed off the net when it should be our space, not the economy's space. Yeah, it's, I feel like we're in a stage of progression,

this interconnectivity progression where we're starting off with just regular telephones and that has moved to cellular phones, which everybody carries, which is going to move into some Google Glasses type thing, which is going to eventually, I mean, down the line, if you extrapolate 100 years or whatever it's going to take, there's going to be some really crazy interconnectivity that people share. And I think this stage that we're going through right now, the anonymous stage of being able to make a Twitter account

or some fake name and just start saying mean things to random people, that ability is going to go away. You're not going to have this anonymous portal like i i just think if you look at the way things i feel like the way i look at the future is like the thing that's going to be really scarce is secrets i think we're going to be able to connect with each other in some way that we probably can't even imagine right now whether it's some neuro chip or something that you embed into your body, whether it's nanotechnology, whatever it is, there's going to come a day where we're like completely interconnected with each other. But the beauty of that though is if it really worked, it would bring us back to the now that we've been avoiding all this time.

To the face-to-face live interaction where you can't fuck with each other because you're here. You know, there's this guy. It's a strange way to look at it. I met this guy, this show guy, you know, a stage magician guy who could tell when people are lying. I don't know if you've ever seen this guy. He's like worked for the FBI and stuff. And he can like – he does all these tricks. He lines up ten people and he says, OK, one of you think – and he can really tell, period, when people are lying.

And I was thinking if he can tell that people are lying because he's got this talent, it means that on some level we all know – we all have that ability. So we all on some level know when the other one is lying to us. So it's kind of been – if you're actually in the moment, it's all exposed anyway. Yeah, I think there's a weird feeling that you get when someone's being deceptive. There's a weird feeling you get where you're like, there's a sense of disturbance when you're communicating with them. But you can't put it in a tangible, there's nothing you could say, oh, it was X amount of weight.

So here, I know this is a real thing. Here, I put it on a scale. But there's some weird thing that happens when you're with someone. You can tell if someone's upset at you and not saying it. They can be saying all the right words, but there's a certain – there's a coldness or a lack of warmth or there's a little something. I wrote about those women in – what's it called? The Housewives of Orange County. I got obsessed with them because they were just having all of these awful

disagreements all the time. The young communications guy, I'm trying to figure out, why is their communication breaking down? So, this is what I do. So, I concluded in the end that it's because they've put so much Botox in their faces that they

can't actually execute facial expressions in an honest way anymore. in a way that the other person organically can react to. Oh, my God. So these women, in trying to kind of freeze time at age 29, ended up making themselves inaccessible to the now that they're in. Wow. Because, you know, you see one, they'll say, oh, you know, my daughter, I think she might have cancer. And the other one's like, oh, I'm so sorry. But she's frozen in a smile, right?

So then they go to the first one and she's like, I can't believe I told her my daughter, you know, has cancer. And the other one, she says she's sorry, but I can tell she's not. You know, and that's sort of, I mean, that's, it's just a metaphor, but. But it's true. They're like stuffing cotton in their mouth and they can't, you can't understand what they're saying. Right. Like they're, they're ruining the facial communication, the expressions of facial communication. Right.

And then the question is – What a weird world we live in where they're shooting poison in their face to freeze it. Right. But to freeze it in time is the thing. They're trying to stop time. Yeah. And that's like a – I understand the urge to stop time. But when you stop time, you lose the moment.

That's kind of the whole point I'm making. It's like the net it can stop time in a certain way but you're going to lose certain moments that you know so i'm i'm all for being on the net and having a net moment but you know even here you know i've heard you do those ads before for those sponsors and you could just cut and paste you know you could cycle seven of them and maybe people wouldn't even know it's the same ones you know you could cut and paste from another show and throw it in but you decide no i'm actually going to sit here and read these three ads with my friends well if i didn't do it like that i'd be really bored you know i i would never want to just read an ad so i we always do it that way.

You make more money. That's the model of the industrial age, of course, is to print out more. Yeah. And the only way we could even do any of this stuff the way we're doing it is because we don't have anybody that we have to approve with. I don't have to go to NBC and say, hey, this is what we're thinking of doing. I know you have these commercials, but we're just going to talk shit and occasionally we'll get to the point of the commercial. But ironically, on the long run, it ends up making more money. I mean certainly more money for the people who are actually doing it.

Maybe by the other system you can make more total money, but it's going to go to God knows what, to some institution anyway. So the fact that it is live and it is what what, an MP3 mainly? It is mainly a podcast. You think on the first hand because I'm looking to make a kind of radio choice myself. And it's like, well, I can do this for the man and make this amount of money kind of guaranteed. But I'm going to have to stay between these sight lines. Or I can go this other route and actually do the thing i do you know yeah there's not even a choice there yeah not in this day and age it's not necessarily it's there used to be a time where you you would have to choose you would well this internet thing who knows if it's going to work out but that's crazy like you

you have an option to immediately jump in and get a gigantic group of people that are going to start retweeting and tweeting and listening to your stuff. And you'll develop a giant following in no time. And as that's happening, all you're doing is selling ads for companies that you actually believe in. Right. That's the only way you should do it. Fuck working for some company that tells you not to swear or not to do this or not to discuss that, or, you know, that's not the stance we're taking on this particular complicated issue. You know, fuck that. It's just, that's the enemy of real thought. The enemy of real thought is committee. You know, I don't know what you're really thinking. If everything you say has to

go through a committee before it comes out of your mouth, I want to know what the fuck you're thinking. And especially in like the sense of a radio show you know a guy on the radio that's like the whole thing it used to be like even djs it used to be this dj likes this music so this is why it's awesome or was broadcasting from the same city that you're in yeah remember when the then clear channel took over and it was like oh my gosh so we're getting a recording that's done by computer 3,000 miles away. This is my local rock and roll station. Well, they have those Jack FMs, which is essentially like playing shuffle on your iPod.

It could be anything of a number of things that they approve and they pretend we're wacky. We just don't have any rules. Like, oh, we're Jack FM. And it's like a standard model. There's like 100 Jacks across the country and probably even more than that. It's weird. I think radio is completely on its way out. I think they're fucked.

I think that's like a silly way to do it and no one's going to stick with it. After a while, you're going to have internet access in your car within no time. That's easy. They could do that right now i already get that with podcasts on the iphone because i have my iphone bluetooth to my car so i'll just immediately say oh i'd like to listen to a duncan trussell podcast and in i've done it at a red light yeah where it's so easy at a red light it's one two duncan duncan boom there he is so the one aspect of radio that i feel like i would miss is that local terrestrial quality of it because i mean yeah we could still have like you could you know you could have a la channel and i could have a you know this part of new york channel

and you know we could do that technically with with digital you know where you'd pick your your so-called regional thing. It will be local stuff. But the medium is not biased towards that. The medium is – it's all equivalent. And I wonder, would we drift further away from local and kind of the things that matter to us in the here and now? Or would we choose that stuff? I think, you know, instead of like a local radio station, something like that someone puts together or whether it's podcasting.

I just think the idea of a local representative was always gross. It was always gross. Wolfman Jack was always gross because for every Wolfman Jack, there was a million other dudes that probably had interesting ideas as well and they had no outlet. So you have one guy has this outlet from this particular time. That's crazy that that idea sucks the idea that we're dealing with now is way better it's like a billion outlets six billion outlets and and there's no local anymore there's people that are in that town that'll tell you about things but everyone's more connected than ever before right and because they are i mean the

economy as we know it also has to go away too. Right. You know, once you have 6 billion people doing podcasts, I mean, and you've got 2 billion left doing farming, it's like, where did all the businesses go? And you also lose those iconic figures like the Wolfman Jack or like Howard Stern or like, you know. Well, I mean, I think you could still choose. You would just have major, every once in a while, something major would happen.

Right, but it wouldn't be that one guy who's your town's guy. I grew up in Boston. It was Charles Laquadera. Charles Laquadera and The Big Mattress was like this – he would call this like morning show. It was called The Big Mattress. He was a great guy, Laquadera. Really nice guy. I met him too eventually.

But he was like the number one radio dj in boston everybody knew it you would go to when i was doing construction i go to job sites people would turn on turn on the big mattress listen to lockwood era and like it was that was a show it was like that was the show and the only way to get a show like that is to not have a lot of options. To have a show that everybody agrees we're all going to listen to. It's got to be only like three options. Disco? No, we're not listening to disco. There wasn't like the internet quality options. That changes the whole game.

There's never going to be a CBS radio on the internet. No, it does. It does, it will, and it's going to replace everything terrestrial. I mean, on that sense. So if you're saying, if we're saying everything's going to be replaced, everything terrestrial is going to be replaced. First it's radio, then it's other stuff. All we have to make sure then is before we lose all those things, which we're going to

inevitably lose, to say to ourselves, what is it we value about those things that we want to bring into these digital things before we're untethered in there, before it's all the way? Yeah, what we want is our cake and we want to eat it too. We want the digital era and we still want mom and pop stores. We're trying to keep it all together. And that's the question is can you get both? So can you have this very traditional narrative 20th century industrial age culture live right aside this sort of steady state economy and peer-to-peer currencies and local CSAs? Can we have an iPhone and organic chard and no slavery in Africa to get either?

Yeah, is that possible? I'm hoping so. charred and no slavery in Africa to get either. Yeah. Is that possible? I'm hoping so. We move towards it or not. It seems like that's what a great percentage of the world would like. But we've made shockingly little progress in moving towards that potential utopia. But then – but as long as we got a hope or try to envision, I would say, OK. But this shift that we're undergoing now from an analog era to a digital one is a bigger shift than just that.

There's a whole different digital media environment that we've gone into. So we've gone into this from this time is money, expansionist economy, live by the clock universe to one that's potentially asynchronous. It's just off that thing. I remember when the net first came up, it was people in Austin and slackers and cyberpunks. The idea was that the net was going to give us more slack. Right. And it's ended up for most people kind of doing the opposite because they're always on and working and being monitored and all that and distracted. But I mean I think if we take command of the way we're programming these things, then we can use them to sort of – to create the gorgeous culture of slack, to create what a few of us are kind of discovering we can do, like you're doing with this, right?

You're just doing your thing. Yeah. I think we're trying to resist the inevitable, and that inevitable is a symbiotic computer relationship. There's going to be some sort of biomechanical connection. There's one man talking through through a microphone to another man with headphones to a million people listening in their car or wherever the fuck they are asynchronously yeah right it's i i really don't feel like we can stop that it seems like the things that we got so excited by as as these higher functioning primates

are these new things that we've created that input us or give us input in a way that our body's completely not designed to get. Like through your earphones, like listening to a podcast, like a computer itself, the ability to watch a video, the ability to go to the movies. It's all, this is the stimuli that's coming at us.

It's just, we're not designed for it. But it's reconfiguring itself to be as seductive as possible because it's not – that's what it's for, right? It's to seduce us into itself so that the companies behind it can make money. And because we move constantly in a path of progression. And if you look at the technology, it's always going to move into a stronger – we're never satisfied with any particular result at any particular time. We want more choices. Yeah.

We want more choices. We want it to be powerful, more fast. We want better graphics. We want bigger booms. That's not realistic enough. Let's take it to the next level. It's in this desire to get these experiences. We're pushing the technology.

Ultimately, that's what's getting pushed. But then what's interesting to me about that is while all that's pushing ahead, what we get in a digital media environment is we end up retrieving weird medieval values. You get Burning Man and Etsy and people doing peer-to-peer stuff, trying to have their local currencies, which they haven't had since medieval times. You see the stuff that gets retrieved and paganism and mashing up roots to heal yourself of things, maker culture, all these things are what we've lost over the last thousand years. That's what the renaissance and the industrial age was about, stamping that out and putting everybody on the assembly line at Ford. So it's fun that as we move forward, we get these great old recurrences, which to me is reassuring. It means that we are bringing something with us into this next place.

I think it's also that the current system is so flawed that people are willing to try anything and that they're actually actively thinking about what can we do differently can we make a local currency like right yeah no and which is interesting it's like the two places i've gotten emails from in the last many years of people doing social currencies are either from a place like ithaca new york where they're doing it because they're just you, strange and trying to try something weird and good. Or like Lansing, Michigan, where there's no GM plan, there's no bank that's going to give money to a factory to open up to hire people. And they're desperate. They're like, well, I've got skills, I know how

to fix a refrigerator, and they have needs. So can't we just make an economy that way? You know, those are the places where people are actually asking where they're ready. I just don't like that readiness seems to involve being just so – not just fed up but uncomfortable that you've got to do something. Yeah. We're clearly going through a change. We're clearly going through a change as a culture that we weren't prepared for and we're sort of making our way as we go along and there's there's a lot of mistakes along the way and the evidence that points to it one of the best pieces is your story about people getting upset at you because you got mugged and called in the story you know and said the location that's

one of the best examples of people losing the script. Along the way in this crazy thing that we're doing where we develop currency and then there's things called property values and there's mortgages and equity and all this crazy shit. Along the way, we're going to have to figure out how to stay human. And when you see like instant failure, like, oh my god, I got mugged. You fucking asshole. Why did you save you say the place yeah it's interesting i mean it's in every single one of my books i've written like 12 now you know they're they're all finally about how do we bring humanity into this thing that seems to have lost it right so i did it for you know for for business i did it for for the economy with life inc is the book you're talking about i did it for the economy with Life Inc. is the book you're talking about.

I did it for Judaism with something called Nothing Sacred, saying Judaism should be this ongoing conversation. Keep it alive. Keep it human. Don't let it lock down. And now this one, it's weird because it's like, I'm kind of admitting that it's what, I guess I've realized it myself, but I'm kind of saying, oh my gosh, I'm a humanist. I'm a humanist and a technology enthusiast. And how do you be both? Because so many of the other folks who are sort of pro-technology, sort of my posse, they're all sort of talking about not human beings being enabled by technology but technology surpassing us. You know, some singularity or some moment in the future where computers get smarter than us and then we're not really needed anymore. It might not be that simple.

I've been thinking about it a lot lately. And one of the things I think is why do we have this idea of competition and why would the computer enjoy that idea with us? Our idea is based entirely on our biological makeup, our need to reproduce, our need to prove ourselves to our biological makeup our need to reproduce our need to prove ourselves to our mate our need to protect against strangers all these instincts that a computer's not going to have at all so the idea of competition with humans for resources or even the idea that survival is imperative and that you know you you have an ego and you can't die they're not going to have any of that so why would they be in competition with us why wouldn't it just be like a new it wouldn't be because of them it'd be because of the way somebody programmed reprogrammed them you know

it becomes sentient though that that's really they wouldn't do the bad thing because uh why not keep us around but it doesn't matter i don't even it's not it's not a matter of them being able to do that because i don't even think they will i don't think they can it's more a matter of them being able to do that because I don't even think they will. I don't think they can. It's more a matter of people in the here and now saying that human beings are really only important insofar as we can be the shepherds and organizers of information. Information is the thing that's evolving towards greater states of complexity. And once human beings are no longer the best at making complex information but computers are the best at it, then there's just no need for humans anymore. Would the computers kill us or not? I don't know. Would they give us a good time? Who knows? But just the whole idea that we should be developing technology with this in mind, I don't know. It negates what I think is an essential, for us anyway, centrality of humanity in the equation. Well, I think people don't recognize how much we need each other. We don't recognize how important positive interaction is with other people to your health and the way you feel about life.

There's clearly a relationship that people have to each other that we're in denial about. We lock ourselves up in our apartments or in our homes and we shut our car doors and we roll down the window. And that's one of the reasons why people are willing to give people the finger when they're in the car. You would never do that in real life. You feel like you're in some sort of a contained world.

And even though you're not even anonymous, you're still like, fuck you. How many people do you give the finger in real life like nobody but once a year i'll give somebody the finger somebody does something crazy and they beep at me fuck you fuck you it's beautiful it's beautiful thing to do but you know that eventually i think we have to accept the fact that we we're only happy when the people around us are happy when we're in harmony with the people around us we're not happy when we're in conflict we're not happy when when we're not happy when we fuck people over like i know people that have done bad things in business and bad things ethically and bad you know and they're not happy people but then in the current

culture they can compensate for that with medicine. Yes. Oh, there you go. Anti-depressants. That gets them through the night. What you have to hope, I mean, I always do, which is a vain hope. I hope that the people who do bad stuff but then make up for it with drugs still feel worse than I do, not taking those drugs and trying to do good stuff. You don't want to believe that – you know these kind of guys. I used to see – I won't even say his name,

one of those millionaires down at Knicks games. I'd always think, I sure hope he's not happy. That's funny. Which isn't very fair. All he's doing is playing some really crazy game that was around before he was ever born. He just got into it and got really good at it. The game itself is bananas.

Just the stock market itself. Just the idea that the wealth of a person can vary day by day because of confidence. You know, consumer confidence in a product can shift and change with recall. And then you're watching these numbers go up and down. Like, what the fuck are you even talking about most of the explanations you see you know i watch these business sites and the market will go down and they say oh mark it down because of such and such in london and then it's like by the time that piece comes out that market's actually back up and they're already constructing

their you know let's tie market going back up to another random feature you know it's like the the the explanations after the fact have so little to do, you know, with whatever some algorithm decided it was going to suddenly ultra fast trade something and throw the stock up. You know, it's like at this point, it truly is. That's the best place to see humans combating machines is on the market where it's like there's human traders competing with these programmed algorithms and the algorithms are certainly winning the war. And if you look at their screens while they're doing it, it is almost like code. Like the average person who doesn't understand it doesn't know what the fuck the stock market is saying.

The symbols and the SAO and this and that and the ones and the zeros. You look at all that, you have no idea what that is. I mean how is that really different than a computer code that you're reading? That's essentially like a way that people are tapping into this bizarre system. I mean it was at one time the sort of the price of something had to do with something. Right. It's like there's a factory. Oh, the factory went slower today in the rain.

The market will go down on that. It was like real. And I think it's gotten certainly further and further from whatever is going on in that company or their earnings or the things. It's absolutely abstracted to the point now where people don't even invest in companies. You invest in something like when Facebook went public, people bought it at like nine in the morning and like nine, 10, they're all pissed off that it hasn't gone up. It's like, wait a minute, I was supposed to- Triple my wealth. Triple my wealth. It's like, wait a minute. I was supposed to – Triple my wealth.

Triple my wealth. It's like, no, you don't make money on the trade. You're supposed to make money on when you've done it. But now we've got derivatives and derivatives of derivatives and derivatives of derivatives of derivatives on there, which is just a way of kind of shrinking the time span. Explain that for people who don't know what that means. So if you buy a stock, I mean, you buy a stock and you hope it goes up and then you sell it in the future. If you'd rather make up that time right now, I can sell it in the future right now. I can basically sell that future sale because I think that sale is going to be a good one now.

I can say what if I did that trade? I'm going to have it now. But when am I trading then? I'm trading on an abstraction from what something's going to be worth at some moment in the future. So it's like I'm trading on the stock over time. And then someone else will say, well, I'm going to trade on the abstraction of that. I'm going to trade on whether or not people think the stock in the future is going to be worth more next minute than this minute. It's like, well, what's that?

So basically what you're doing is you're buying the stock over time, over time, over time, over time. You're creating these things, these derivatives of whatever the original investment was, which is kind of just a derivative of the thing. There's the pork belly. There's the derivative of the pork belly. Derivatives of the derivatives. Derivatives of the derivatives of the derivatives of the thing. There's the pork belly. There's the derivative of the pork belly, derivatives of the derivatives, derivatives of the derivatives of the derivatives of the derivatives. All ever tighter ways of saying what is pork belly going to be worth on February 3rd. Trevor Burrus Why is that legal?

Peter Robinson Well, it's legal because what it – because the economy requires it, right? We have a kind of money, right, that has a clock in it. It's lent into existence and has to be paid back more than got lent out. So our economy needs to expand by hook or by crook somehow. It has to grow in order for it to survive. That's just the way central currency works. They need to find more surface area for the money, more ways for people to buy stuff. So instead of just having – there's not enough of a company to buy. So now we can bet on how that company is going to do in some future.

Now we can bet on that or we can bet on that. But what we're really doing is trying to kind of compress all of this time right onto like the head of a pin so we can bet on that. So I don't have to sit and wait 3,000 years for Facebook to be worth something. I can trade on its future worth now. But the whole joke of that is people who are trading that way, they're these computers that are trading faster than them. So I put in one of my super fast, crazy derivative trade. Goldman Sachs sees that order coming in on the computer.

They're so close to the exchange. They can execute an order before my order even goes through based on having seen that I was going to do what I'm going to do. So they can literally trade in my future. I am in their past. Now, that's digital time shifting. That sounds like they're cheating. That's like someone running a Quake server and they're local and then you have like 150 ping. Exactly.

That's bullshit. I think so. It's all bullshit. The irony of it is it's gotten so big, right? Derivative trading is bigger than regular trading now. Oh, my god. So that the New York Stock Exchange actually just got bought. The exchange itself got bought by its derivative exchange.

Oh, my god. So it's almost just like the proof's in the pudding. It's like the derivative owns the market at this point but that's when you get how did anybody allow that how how could the government even ever deny how incompetent they are when they allowed that like that alone to like someone should just like have a broadcast on national television a you know one of those town hall sort of events where you sit down with the main people that run the country and go,

how the fuck are you allowing this? How are you not fixing this? Why would you ever try to do anything else before you fix this? When they made the decision, they genuinely thought it would be good for business. At least in the short term. I will never understand where it all goes.

The business people promised them they'd figure it out before it got really bad. Oh my god. We'll figure it out before it got really bad. How much bigger is the derivative economy? I don't know exactly. I mean it seemed – I was looking trying to find out what the sort of trading was. It seemed from what I could tell like 94 percent of trades are now derivative because they're in, because they're such bigger volumes.

Oh my God. That's insane. No one's going to like, you're not going to buy, you know, 10,000 shares of Honeywell today. Cause that's, you know, you know, whatever $60,000 or something, but you could buy like 10,000 futures on Honeywell cause they're, they're really cheap. God god that is so crazy 94 percent of the stuff of trades are we can look at and i'm scared how many more is i think it's ultra fast too as a whole other they're sort of two different two different realms but yeah it's huge they must all be crazy Everyone involved in that must know that they're bringing on the Matrix.

They must know that they're the first steps before the digital machine takes over. They must know. They must know that there's no humanity in that stock market shit. That's chaos. Well, the thing is – and again, I don't want digital technology to get blamed for this, right? Because the real operating system they're promoting is not the digital operating system. It's the economic operating system underneath it. It's this 13th century central currency interest-bearing debt-based economy. And none of the guys who I thought would get us out, you know, Ev Williams with Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook,

the kids from Google, right? Each of them had a real shot, even Bill Gates, at breaking the central economy and flipping things the other way. How do you think they could do that? Not going public, not doing it with venture capital, saying if Google can hack web search, if Facebook can hack social, if Twitter can hack everybody, why can't they – if they're so busy disintermediating all these different things, why doesn't any one of them yet want to disintermediate central banking and say, no, Mr. Chase, we don't actually need you. We're going to do our whole thing through Kickstarter, say. Like one of your – didn't one of your things – Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting point of view.

I think they probably would never want to take that stand because they would be killed. I would imagine there's a lot of money in them not being successful with that quest to ensure that they remain in control. Is there a point at which you're doing PayPal? OK, we're going to let people do individual transactions. That was their original model and they were going to make money on the float. And then the banks came to them and said, oh, you're not allowed to do that. You're not a bank, PayPal kids. You've got to be registered as a bank or you're going to have to be connected to one of us.

And that's when PayPal kind of becomes part of eBay rather than whatever these crazy guys might have done. And I suppose there's this point where innocently these companies that get bigger and bigger and bigger are hoping to do the right things. And then it's like we're going to – we're not going to let you do this if you don't play by our rules. But I also feel like there's companies that if you're willing to go smaller, if you're willing to let it grow a little bit slower, that you can scale up. You can become … A big ethical corporation. Yeah. Yeah.

I always wondered why a big corporation couldn't be ethical. Why can't you have a big corporation with a good ideology behind it? But I think it's really because of shareholders, right? Yes. And shareholders are impatient. Shareholders are there. They're not really shareholders, right? Yes. And shareholders are impatient. Shareholders are there. They're not really there, right? They're distant.

Their shareholders are people who just want to see a number go up by the next quarter. And if you have to make a number go up by the next quarter, then you're going to have to be thinking about something other than doing good in the world. Yeah. If it is ones and zeros at all costs. Yeah. Yeah. If that's the game you're playing. But if you've got shareholders, then you're going to throw you in jail if you don't do that.

I mean that's your fiduciary responsibility. And it's a fascinating thing that a corporation can do something that an individual would be a total piece of shit to do. If it was one person that was involved and this one guy, what he did was he gave the loans to the third world company, the countries that they couldn't pay back. He went over there, monopolized their natural resources himself, dug the oil line himself, polluted the river himself, raped and killed the villagers himself. He'd be like, Jesus Christ, lock that fucking guy in jail. He's making people work for $5 a week. That guy, there he is. There he is. There he is holding down.

But because it's a corporation, you're like, well, they're making money for their – Exactly, and how many people who on the one hand will read Good Magazine or something or listen to us and NPR and be all sad about that stuff still has a 401K plan with stocks in the very companies that are doing those things. So who are they? They're the ones who actually own the company. They're the shareholder who wants the thing to go up so they can send their kid to college. It's interesting how circular it gets.

For how unvirtuous that circle is though, I think unwinding it is just as easy. So it's like, okay, instead of doing these sort of long-distance, long-term disconnected investments in mining companies, I'm going to invest my money where I see it. And people I actually know in the place where I am who are trying to do something and bring it, if not local, at least into your present, at least into your visible reality. into your visible reality. Yeah, and it really is the pursuit of the end goal of simply only ones and zeros done through a corporate way is really anti-human. I mean that's the real anti-human aspect of it is that it will engage human suffering as long as it's willing to extract ones and zeros from that.

Like it calculates how much human suffering are we willing to cause, how much devastation to the environment are we willing to cause. Which is why then the question becomes, I mean in the nightmare scenario then, is you invest that into technology so that your robots, no, they're not in competition with us, but they are playing the corporate program. No, they're not in competition with us, but they are playing the corporate program. They have no desire other than to extract value and meaning from us. And those computers, running algorithms, recognize trends in the marketplace before a human could ever see it coming and then counter. And meanwhile, as we're making ourselves dumber about technology, I'm wearing this Codec code academy t-shirt right i want people to learn to code as we become more stupid about our computers our computers are getting smarter about us right they're doing big

data repositories of every every keystroke right every you know are there they know you know they know stuff about us they knew some teenage girl was pregnant before family did and you know they know when kids are going to be gay before they know themselves you know it's like they're they're they're scott really smart and how about the weirdness that comes when you go to a google uh when you google something or you look for things certain things online and then say you go to a youtube and there's ads for things that you've recently looked at that is scary tantalizing ads oh i see you're into jeeps why we have a jeep for sale and it's a new jeep and here's a video you can click on and they're ab testing that you know and they're saying which is which is he reacted last yeah girl in jeep or not girl in jeep girl okay

give him that next time tits this guy needs to see tits like they'll show you everything that you're into you're like you son of bitch. How do you know about all this? It's weird. And it's just the beginning. We're accepting it. Slowly accepting the needle into our vein that pumps in nano cells that eventually replace human tissue. If there's going to be a commercial, there's going to be an artificial guy who's going to be saying, why would you want to be natural? You're going to rot.

It's not fun. Life gets even better. You'll buy your be 1,000. You'll buy your little nanobots too from like the most reputable company, the one that you really like and a great user agreement. But then after it's in you, it's like they get bought by Google and all of a sudden your user agreement shifted. It's like agree to – do you want to have – do you want to remember your children's names? OK. Then sign this new user agreement. Right. You know, do you want to have, you know, do you want to remember your children's names? You know? Okay, then sign this new user agreement.

Right. Otherwise you get no data. You have enough for two people, two phone numbers. Your emergency, your 911. Yeah, just like your phone. Like your phone, if it's not registered, it only lets you call 911. That'll be the same thing. Well, you should have paid your bill, Mr. Rushkoff.

I don't know why you didn't want to pay your bill. Now here you are with no recourse. Yeah. You're going to look at a shiny guy from the future. He's 1,000 years old and he looks great. He's going to be all artificial. Yeah, but again, it's not – with all that artificialness, it's not necessarily, although it maybe is, it's not necessarily the technology that's the problem in this equation. It's the company that owns the technology.

Right, but ultimately what's getting done? The technology is getting pushed. That seems to be the case in every single situation. Ultimately, at the top of the execution food chain, when you look at like what is being done at the end level, it's really the game changer. The technology constantly increases and with every you know overtake with every you know new gigantic invention and bundles of money that go along with it and all the people that got fucked over at the end of the day the technology keeps moving forward and it keeps getting stronger and stronger and stronger it does but it's not just stronger though it's it's it's fundamentally

different i mean that's the thing that mccluhan was trying to bring up marshall mccluhan the It does, but it's not just stronger though. It's fundamentally different. I mean that's the thing that McLuhan was trying to bring up. Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, he was looking at the different environments that different media, different kinds of technology create. So fire had a change – had a media environment, had a technological environment. With fire now, people could then go live further north in colder places and little apes who were smart enough to have fire could get away from big dumb apes who couldn't travel north to chase them. We got different races. All sorts of things happened because of something like fire or the invention of text.

The invention of text changed – well, for me, it changed the way we look at time because now I can write something now that I'm going to be accountable for later. So we can have contracts. With text, we got history. We got the Judeo-Christian line of thought. We got law and ethics. We got the calendar. Then that all went along and we developed. Then we get the printing press and we get the clock, right? Now the clock, all of a sudden we go, oh, wow, now we can actually break down the day into these little pieces. We put one up at the town square and that's when time became money. That's when it's like, OK, now you can work for an hour for me. Instead of making a thing that you're connected to and selling it to me, now you can work for the hour or two hours or three hours.

We've got a standard. media environment, you know, which is just as different as the industrial age media environment than the clock was from the printing press, from the, from written text, from, from, from even fire, you know, and in the digital media environment, there's this, it's not just more tech, it's, it's more, it's more of a sense of, of moving through time in a choice to choice to choice to choice way, you know, where we just have more choices than we know what to do. If we spend more time processing choice itself, then we do getting the things that we've chosen. You know, it's like the call waiting is almost like the typical kind of digital choice. It just enters, I'm talking to this loved one, I've got a call waiting. What do I do?

Just to be put in that – just to be put yourself in that interruptive state is very digital because you want to have the choice because that person wants to reach you. But how that interrupts what used to be a more continuous way of just moving through life. Yeah. It certainly gives us more options than we're naturally designed to handle. And the more people have on their Facebook page, the more likely they really – they have zero connection to those people. The idea – I mean like we're designed for Dunbar's number, right? 150 people. Yeah.

And you get 5,000 people on your Facebook page. What does that mean? Who are these people? Who are you talking about yeah well then you're marketing and you know what kind of interaction are you really having well it's not the same it's not a human to human interaction the other weird thing about facebook for me again is how it compresses time so it's like there are these people from like second and third grade i'm finally you know 45 whatever years away from that and then it's like you know two weeks ago hi i'm marcy from third grade. I'm finally 45, whatever, years away from that. And then it's like – it was two weeks ago. Hi, I'm Marcy from second grade.

It's like, oh my god. I finally – I left that behind me. It's not Marcy. I don't know who she is. It's who I was or who she relates to. It's just – it was in the past for a reason. And now it's here. But then on the front end, I've got the computer on the other side calculating everything about my keystrokes. So they know my future, right?

They know who's going to be pregnant, who's going to be gay, who's going to be this, who's going to be that. So it's like, OK. So it's like my past is all in here and now my future is all in here and everything is just sort of crushed in on me there. I don't feel autonomous anymore. I don't feel like I have agency. I don't feel in charge. I can't get away from anything and I can't actually be moving towards anything with a sense of free will. But can you though?

I mean you're sort of in control of how much you interact with it, how much you choose to use it. You did. That's why I dropped Facebook. You dropped it. Yeah. I was just like blah. Too much. Yeah.

But you still use Twitter. Yeah. Twitter stays there. Why is Facebook was just like, bleh. Too much. Yeah. But you still use Twitter. Yeah. Twitter stays there. Why is Facebook problematic? Facebook is a problem. Well, the real problem with Facebook is I'm not in charge of what I do on Facebook. Why is that? Because Mark Zuckerberg can use me or my likeness in an ad of something that I don't even know what it is.

He can't do that anymore, though, I thought. Oh, really? He undid that? Yeah. I think that was something that wasn't supposed to happen supposedly or they backtracked about that. They do. They go two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. It's sort of an ever-evolving user agreement.

I mean where the part that I had gotten concerned about was I'm on there as an author, right? I'm on there. Buy my book. Love me and like my ideas. I can't do that. I can't solicit the likes of other people, of readers, of people who I'm supposedly advising about this stuff, especially about sort of media ethics and integrity. I can't invite them to like my page when that very act of liking is making them vulnerable to marketing that's going to be passing through me beyond my control. Yes and no because they're also providing you with this excellent connection with all these people that's available through Facebook, which is not as limited as Twitter with 140 characters. No, and I'm willing to pay for the privilege to reach those people.

But I'm not willing to have them and their likenesses used to represent things. I don't think that they understand what liking makes someone vulnerable to. You know, I don't feel – so, I mean, in some sense, this is patronizing, I guess. What I'm saying is I think I know stuff about this technology that they don't. If they all knew really how this worked, if they all knew the implications of what they were doing, then I would say let's go for it. But ultimately, the worst consequences is what? Marketing? They're going to be marketed to?

They're going to be represented. So their image would then be put on something. Oh, so – but no, I'm pretty sure. I'm 100 percent sure they dropped that right didn't they drop that thing of using their photos and advertising yeah like you're not going to profit they're not allowed to just take your photos and just uh just go not your photos no they're not going to do it with your photos that was your information or you're talking about the the photo the photo thing they bought no no i'm talking about using but for you were saying

like using it for advertisements? I'm talking about sponsored stories and how they use people in a sponsored story. At least the day that I quit at that point, it was nothing – Oh, you could turn that off. But yeah, there's things like that that are on, but there's ways to turn them off. I'm not – I'm confused. There are. What is a sponsored story?

What do you mean? See, but you see people don't know. I feel like most people don't know. And just to be there, it just didn't seem like – and it also – because I so don't trust who they are and what they're about, I don't trust them as a company. The way I want to trust the kinds of companies I let get bigger and bigger and deeper and deeper into my lives and eventually put probes in my brain. Do you not trust them because Justin Timberlake played them in a movie? Is that part of it? No, he played the other one.

He played the other one? He played Sean – He played the good guy other one no he played the other one he played uh shauna um he played a good guy no he played what's the myspace story and how much of it is about coke and whores is that what happened with those guys they just take that money crazy but if you're going to if you're going to take facebook if you're going to say you i don't trust facebook you can't trust twitter you can't trust google you can't trust any of You can't trust Twitter. You can't trust Google. You can't trust any of the stuff you use nowadays. But I'm aware – right now I'm aware of the ways that Twitter is broadcast. I feel in control of how I'm tweeted and retweeted. Twitter is almost worse though because they're actually to the point where you try to go back in time in your timeline. You can't.

There gets a cutoff point where you can't download your own tweets unless you know the exact link of that input. Didn't they end up giving you your history? They said, I still can't do it on mine. And that's the same with like twit pics or all these photo ones. So now you're saying that, which is okay, you're saying that you want your,

if you're going to do tweets, you want, in addition for your free tweeting, you want them to maintain an archive of you and everyone else forever. Well, I personally don't have a problem with it. But what I'm saying is that that's kind of more ridiculous to me than Facebook, the fact that I can't even access stuff that I've – No, I mean you can if you save it or whatever. The thing I'm concerned about – I mean this is what what in the book i call it digifrenia you know i feel like the problem with with digital for most people is not this idea of information overload that there's

too much stuff coming at them but they're they can't maintain more than one online persona simultaneously that there's too many sort of individual instances of us and if you're going to have different instances of yourself, even your email inbox is an instance of a sort. If you're going to have all these different things out there filling up or interacting, you want to be damn well sure that you're in charge of each one of them. And I don't feel – I felt like Facebook was now doing things on my behalf. It was like one step of control.

Well, you make a very good point in that having more than one version of yourself becomes very problematic, especially if you're involved in any real... I mean, I'm sure you probably interact with quite a few people every day. And to do that on Twitter is semi-manageable. Do it when you can, but to do that on Twitter

and then have to hop over to Facebook too, it's like you should have one portal. know one portal at least one that's one that it was always said you know because i don't really i didn't go to facebook much and i go there and they'd be like some relative you know who said oh i just heard of your mom's passing it was like six months have gone by before i found that message and you don't want to console them or whatever. It's just such a – for me, it was such an awful interface anyway that I was just losing stuff there. But yeah, it's – I don't think it just has to do with, oh, well, I get more correspondence from other people.

So I've got to limit it more than others. I think it really has to do with – well, if anything, it's at least I'm a canary in the cage for what's coming for everybody else. I mean people only used to get one or two emails and now it's just streaming in for everybody. Yeah, if you send me something on Facebook, I don't read it. It's just to let everybody know because they pile up. I don't have time to read them. So I'm with you in a certain way. I still use Facebook to put up links, but it's connected to my twitter and i'm pretty cognizant of that so when i put a tweet up on when i put a link up on facebook i make sure it's short enough to fit into a tweet yeah with with a link at least

with with twitter i mean you you understand what you're putting out you put out this little 140 things it went to your people and those words are out there right it's like with with a tool like facebook um you don't really have the same sense of of ownership over what's going and you don't have you don't actually have it right your picture is used douglas went into starbucks just now yeah i could turn it off so everyone should turn it off you know so right so again you know it's like i feel like it's it's a useful it's a useful tool but it's it's uh it's just part of the untrustworthiness of a good portion of the net yeah well i could see that with someone else being control of the uh the the interaction and someone else being control ultimately of like when you sign a user agreement and you have all this information that you just sort of put up online, you're entrusting it to them and in turn they're marketing it to you.

I mean that's – it's a really clean relationship as long as they don't fuck you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean there's a point at which I'm all – I'll let Netflix and whoever is in behind my TV remote – I mean now they know all that stuff, right? Right. I mean I'll let them craft commercials around me. It's like I'll accept in this little arrangement we have with business. I'll accept anything incoming.

But don't use me for your outgoing. In other words, once you're taking the person's identity and then saying, oh, Alice down the street liked this sitcom too. You should watch that. And then what I'm watching is getting broadcast to them or what they think I'd be watching. That's where it starts to be like, oh, now I'm being disembodied. Now I'm being taken somewhere else. Yeah. Facebook is one of the most popular websites online, and it's also one of the best ways to waste time. Like, you can waste a day easily just looking up people that you used to have sex with.

You know, just find them and go, what is this bitch up to? Oh my goodness, look how fat she got. You know, you could do that all day. You could do that all day, and that could be, you know, entertaining. And you're not getting shit done. Right.

It's like, I try to use Twitter. One of the things that I do with it is whenever someone sends me something fascinating in a link, I retweet it. And because of that, you become like a portal for cool shit. And people know that if they send me cool shit, I'll retweet it. And so you get all this cool shit just starts coming to you when you sort of have that idea. And then you send it. cool shit just starts coming to you when you sort of have that idea and then you send it. They send it to you and then it becomes this really exponentially expanding thing where you have this – like a radio channel or like an information dump. What percent of the tweets that you get do you think you pass on?

It's not that high a percentage because it's not always your thin filter well i'll have to look at it you know i mean if it's really interesting i'll look at it but sometimes they'll send you something like oh dude that's nonsense like what are you talking did you see where this came from like you read the link you're like no that is not bigfoot in that guy's refrigerator shut the fuck up man stop telling me this but but that makes you a reliable a reliable filter yeah you can't just retweet things. But I do occasionally, if someone sends something really preposterous, I will retweet it just to see how people react. Or if people get mad at me, I'll retweet it just to see how they react.

We live in strange times, man. The Twitter interface is a very bizarre one. The idea that you only give them 140 characters and people abuse the shit out of that. Sometimes people send me like 30 tweets in a row like explaining something to me like, dude, stop. Well, now you know it's all – do you know things like Snapchat? Have you played with that? No. What is that?

The one where you take a picture and it like – you can it, but it dissolves in like three seconds or five seconds. Oh, right. So it's like kids apparently – I mean this is the dark secret. Kids are leaving Facebook. The demographic, the younger, like younger than 16 is like falling totally off and they're doing things like Snapchat because they don't want to be putting everything they're doing on their permanent record. I mean they're finally kind of hip to this. So this picture, like they can show someone their pussy and it only lasts for three minutes. It's like five seconds.

You screenshot it though and then you save it and re-upload it. Well, he knows. But if you screenshot it, it at least tells them that they've – I mean so it's been defeated. But if you screensave it, at least the person who sent you the thing knows that you did that. They've given that control. But just this quest for truly present-based, non-archivable silliness. But it's because when we were silly, we got to do it. In the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, there was no camera in the back either.

It was really just what happens in the 7-Eleven stays at 7-Eleven. Now it's like it's every single silly thing they did. If they didn't post about it, their friend posted about it. So it's still up there and it's like may as well be patched into the side of the Parthenon. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Not only that but the ideas behind what you can and can't do are enforced by these archaic laws that were written when none of this digital technology was available. So because of that, you get a lot of weird shit happens. Like there's one girl who got charged with child pornography because she was sending photos of her naked body to boys in her class.

And so the cops arrested her and charged this young girl – she was 15 years old, with child pornography. Sending pictures. She's a child. Yeah. I mean, you talk about losing the scripts. That's really losing the script for life. I mean, that is the nuttiest shit ever. You found a child porn kingpin right there.

She happens to be a child. Yeah, exactly. Zero tolerance, son. It doesn't matter if she's a child. But, dad, it's her vagina. to be a child yeah it's like yeah exactly zero tolerance son it doesn't matter if she's a child but dad that's it's her vagina it doesn't matter son she's a criminal she's victimizing masturbation is rape exactly dark hunger she's feeding the dark hunger son we need to discourage this in a big way solitary confinement yeah but that's really just a temporal lag hopefully yeah i believe so i – That our laws then catch up or we – I mean – also, I mean in some sense a lack of privacy could help that along too. It's like if Google cameras finding like tens of thousands of people who are just smoking joints in the street of every American city, at some point they have to go, OK.

Let's just let people smoke pot. Let gays get married. I would say yes except the smoke pot thing, there's money in enforcing it. Is there more money in enforcing it than there would be in selling it? No, but it would be to different people, and you have to pry it from the hands of the people that are making money by keeping it illegal, whether it's the private prison industry, whether it's the prison guards unions, whether it's different pharmaceutical companies that would stand to lose profits.

There's going to be a bunch of people that are trying to stop anything, any change, and especially changes in legality because there's a big business in blocking people up for shit. I know. So they're going to have to maintain an illegal population, right? In order to stay alive, they're going to have to arrest more and more. If they're going to have corporate growth, a greater percentage of America has to be in prison every single year until it's an asymptotic curve and there's like one guy left. That becomes a really interesting scenario if marijuana does become legal and you can trade on the future of marijuana. What the fuck? Marijuana does have – there are some stocks that are marijuana stocks. Really? Yeah, that people trade.

How is that possible? Well, they're the companies that I guess that have already laid out a marijuana strategy or they're ready for it. Look at that. The percentage of the US prison population that are nonviolent drug offenders in the 1980 and then in 2012. 10% and then 2012 is 25%. Yeah. The war on drugs, folks. They're winning.

More people are in jail. I guess does that mean they're winning? I don't know. As long as we have a private prison system, it's good for the economy. The whole thing is fucking bananas. It's just the fact that in this day and age, you still can't make a logical argument as to why certain things are legal and illegal. Certain things that are legal, which are devastating to your health. And then when you find out that information has been withheld and that companies may have known about certain

risks, no one seems to go to jail. If anything happens, people get fined a little bit. But if that was an individual, a person that did that, oh my god, they would be a horrible human being, a personal person, one person who's responsible for all the deaths that came from aspirin alone. You would want them dead. John Greenewald Right. Well, that's why there's some ways to get more conscious of it though because

it's all of us, right? It's all of us who are part of that system or owning that corporation as shareholders or whatever. There are these things like – have you ever seen slaveryfootprint.org? No. It's a fun website. You got to do it. When you're feeling good about yourself though, what it does is you put in everything that you own if you have a car or not where you live and this and that and it calculates how many slaves are working for you right now god and like with like whatever getting that yeah getting the molybdenum for your iphone or whatever it is or you know losing their fingers in some uh is that a real

thing molybdenum molybdenum molybdenum yeah Molybdenum? Molybdenum? Yeah, it's a metal. Is it? It's a rare metal. Wow. I never hold that one. I've just recently heard of coltan. That's the stuff that they get in the Congo for cell phones. Oh, yeah. Something that's really good with connectivity.

For the batteries or the connectivity? Yeah. Something to do with electronic connectivity and the use of our cell phones. I've found that to be so bizarre and one of the more bizarre things in life that the most complex stuff that we use like cell phones, like computers, that the very base of it, the origins are – there's a mine. There's a hole in the ground. Peter Robinson Yeah. Well, there's a mine but there's also human suffering which is

why I don't like the idea that my computer, which could really do everything I need it to do, is rendered obsolete by changes in operating systems that really are unnecessary except to sell another computer. The difference does not – But aren't they necessary because they're trying to continue to improve the product and they're continuing to add more functionality? I stopped believing that or at least at the rate at which they do. I sometimes feel like there's a, it used to be sort of Windows and Intel, that Windows would make a complex operating system so that you'd have to get the next Intel chip,

and then Intel would create a tweak on that that makes you need the next Windows operating system. They sort of would leapfrog each other. And it feels like that with, yeah, your iPhone does better things now than three iPhones ago. But what about all these iPhones in the garbage and all these people who lost all this stuff? The amount of time compressed into one of these devices is really intense. That at least one of our goals when we're developing new technologies

and new technology pathways should be, well, what's the one that's going to actually require the sales of the least – of the fewest amount of computers? I don't know. Many people at Apple are going, how could we sell – how could we need to sell less computers so that we're – people don't have to throw out these old ones? Have you seen those photos of Cuba, of the old cars? Yeah. Because Cuba doesn't get new cars they have cars from like the 50s and the 60s and they keep preparing them are gorgeous yeah they're beautiful but they do drive like shit that's the problem if you drive like a modern day bmw and then you go

back to one of those stupid chevys from the 1950s those things are dog shit oh really they break terrible they they handle like a horse on roller skates they're ridiculous cars they're so stupid so you know how to be thrown into rebel without a cause today and you hopped in that car it would not be that it wouldn't be the experience we're thinking they're dog shit they're terrible you could with a prius you could easily get away from some guy in a 55 chevy there's no way he could keep up. Those things are terrible. They can't take corners. The brakes are this stupid drum brakes.

I mean, they might as well have a rock that you throw out that's attached to a rope to slow your car down. Still, you take a 57 T-Bird over a Segway. Yes. Yes. Just because it could rain. Okay. Yes, just because it could rain.

Okay. But I like the idea that they've managed to recycle these cars and keep them working and keep them running, and it's really cool to see. Aesthetically, it's beautiful. It's gorgeous. I mean you see a modern street in this day and age, and you see these beautiful – and you can tell they're proud people because these are shiny cars. I mean, they're painted nice and they're done well and they're restored well or at least maintained well. I mean, I don't know how many miles some of these cars have on them, but they do look, it does look amazing.

I know, and there is that, you know, I feel like there's a hunger for stuff, not just 50s, but also sort of 60s madman period, that the nostalgia for that is sort of that's right before this digital age started. That's like the height of the TV age and, you know, putting satellites in space. There was that innocence, you know. You know, it's funny because people look at these kind of shows and say, oh, you know, aren't they – you know, it's about their, you know, decadence. And I'm like't they – it's about their decadence. And I was like, no, it's about their innocence. They believe and they got – it's that – and you go around LA. It's like everybody has got Haywood Wakefield in their house and trying to get those old

GE refrigerators with the sort of rounded covers. There's that longing for – it's like the industrial age just feels so real. It's just solid when people made stuff. It wasn't just kind of printed. Right. Yeah. There's that – also like when you see those cars, there's like such a human element in that old stuff. Like even like 60s muscle cars.

Those are sort of like human-created works of art as opposed to – you look at like a new Mazda or something like that, a real modern car, and it looks like something that just came out of a machine. They screwed it together and it came out of a machine. You look at a 69 Chevy. That doesn't – no, a Chevy Camaro, a 69 Camaro. That's something somebody fucking screwed together. There's some men working behind that. There's some people put tires on the wheel and bolted it down in place. There's some guys who work some wrenches.

There's no doubt about it. You look at that thing. That's a mechanical creation. It's not a computer creation. We're slowly moving towards the Prius. And I'm fine with computer creation aesthetic if it means that we don't have to work. Right. if it means that we don't have to work right you know but it's like though they didn't it's like so they get rid of all those guys screw it in the the screws and it's like so they just then

let them stay in their houses no those guys are fucked they end up fucked you know those guys have to pick up a new line of work they have to evolve yeah but no that's the whole thing too it's like so now we have the big problem in america is unemployment and obama about getting jobs, jobs, jobs for people. Who wants a job? I don't want a job. You don't want a job. People don't want jobs. People want the stuff that you get when you have a job. They want the money that you get for having a job but they don't want the jobs. So meanwhile though, we've got more than enough stuff. We're burning food every week to keep market prices high. We're tearing down – Bank of America is tearing down houses in California because they're in foreclosure.

You can't just let someone live in it. It's going to bring prices down. So they tear them down? They tear them down. Why do they tear them down? Because they would have to sell at distressed prices. That would then lower prices of other properties that they're trying to keep up. It would cost them more.

I mean if you own ten houses in a town and one isn't going to sell you'd rather tear it down than right and if the bank comes along and creates some sort of a program to give houses to needy people then it's going to lower the real estate values of the of the mortgages that they've invested in that are already teetering so they can't do that so charity itself becomes unprofitable well it's never been quite profitable that So charity itself becomes unprofitable. Well, it's never been quite profitable. That's like less than unprofitable. What if we figured out that, okay, we only need – rather than having everybody work 40-hour weeks, which is based on a clock of the industrial age, how much can we have people work in a weekend? What if people don't really have to work that much for us to have everything we want?

What if 10 percent of people could work two days a week and we get everything? So you go in. You do your work. I'm going to do my work in April 2007. Then I'm going to go again in March. What if it got – that you really didn't need everybody working all the time for everybody to have stuff? We couldn't deal with that, not because we don't have technologies to do that. We can't deal with it because we don't have an economy. We don't know how to divvy out the spoils.

The reason that you have a job is so that you can be entitled to a share of what's actually in abundance. But because there's not enough jobs for people, we got to rip up stuff and ruin stuff that's in abundance because we can't give it out. There's also the social issue of not having jobs. When people don't feel like they've made their own way or pulled their own weight. They feel not worthwhile. That's a welfare issue, right? Yeah, but you've got to replace employment with work. Employment is a new invention. Employment, again, industrial age.

We used to work for each other and ourselves. We only got jobs when we got the clock, when we could work on the clock. Then we're employed. But we don't have to be employed in order to work, in order to have if you don't have to have your job you don't stop so you just have to find a new niche into the system you have to find a new thing a new way to contribute to your to the world yeah i completely agree with that but too many people find sort of a pre-existing way to interact and they don't create their own way to interact. And in doing so, you oftentimes miss on one of the best things, which is accomplishing things, whether it's accomplishing starting your own restaurant and keeping it open and, or, you know,

having a car shop that only fixes a certain type of automobile that you really love to work on. You know, when you can figure out a way to do something that you actually have a passion for, then it's like the old cliche. It stops becoming work. It becomes you don't really have a job. You have a thing that you love. Right, and you're in flow at that point. But how many people have that?

That's a real problem. You can't have it in this kind of economy. You can't have it when you have this kind of education problem. You can't have it in this kind of economy. You can't have it when you have this kind of education system. You can't have it. What about just real naturally dull people that need to be pushed in a certain direction? Well, yeah, but so not everyone has to be the one that figures out how to do a new method of biodynamic Rudolf Steiner farming on their organic community-supported agriculture plant. Someone can just go there and plant carrots. It's also the issue of how human beings are raised in the first place,

which is so huge and not really addressed. The reason why some of these people fall into these mindless jobs is because never along the line have they been stimulated, never along the line by their family, by the school systems, by their environment, by their school systems by their environment by their atmosphere by their you know their fellow knuckleheads in their community they're all just surrounded by people who are either like-minded or less or you know or support it and they're you kind of fucked and then when something comes along that eliminates that job for that guy that

robot job when he was 45 years old or 50 years old and he has to start again and sort of reignite some sort of passion and curiosity or die off like a dinosaur. And it's hard too because he was liking the thing he did. He's a toll collector and you get better and better at it and then you start – then test to see how many people you can make eye contact with when you're getting the tolls and how many lives can you change with that eye. I mean gosh, you can be – you could live the Bodhisattva life

as a toll collector. They take that away from him, and it's not just that he can't be retrained, he doesn't have motivation, you know what I mean? It's not his fault that they broke his heart. They should have a show where a guy's a toll collector and just see how he interacts with people and then give him projects.

Like today, you're just going to casually mention your penis and let's see how many people freak out. Back to your reality roots. Yeah. That'd be funny. You have to do a toll collector. You got to do it pretty fast. Well, yeah.

That'd be a weird way to experiment how people interact when they don't have to. When it's really quick. How many people treat you like shit? How many people are like, how are you doing? What's going on? Everything cool? All right, man.

You take care. You're going to get a broad variety of the way people interact with you. I think that would be kind of fascinating. It wouldn't hold up as a series. Right. But maybe as a one-hour special. One-hour special. The toll guy.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just have a guy. And you have to do, like, break it up. It-hour special. The toll guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, just have a guy. And you have to do, like, you break it up. It's like we'll sit down in our little chairs and then have a discussion about the last couple of months that we've seen and what it really means. People love that fast track thing now, though. They don't want to pay a toll.

They want to put that little thing up there and just go through. Like, New York is one of the weirdest scenarios ever because somewhere along the line they just decided to make people pay to get to the city it used to be that they were paying to get the bridge built but they paid that fucking thing off a long time ago every bridge got paid off a long time ago but the revenue is so intoxicating they just kept with it we can't understand that in california because we don't really have a place we could get anywhere those bridges were built but now they got to all be rebuilt they rebuilt the i understand hudson bridge they were building it building and building it and by the time they finished they had to start rebuilding it again it took that many years two

reasons why that's nonsense the the big one one is the dumbest way to make traffic. You have a spot where everyone has to stop on the way into the city. That is so stupid. When you are going from Long Island to Manhattan, that is the most maddening shit to do at 8.30 in the morning. You want to fucking kill somebody because it's so stupid. You're making me stop at your little box you should make people pay you know either either you could justify the construction of the bridge the maintaining of the bridge but they should pay for it through their taxes and that's it there

shouldn't be a spot we have to stop because that's fucking dumb the only reason why you would want to do that is you want to check cars for bombs or nutty people or you're just trying to discourage yeah well i guess maybe it's environmentalist trying to discourage get people onto lirr and do rapid transit the way god intended and discourage people from coming into the city because the easier it is to get into the city the more this traffic sucks and it sucks already it's terrible we'll make it suck and then charge for making it not suck here's the special lane fix the suck you can. Fix the suck. You can't fix the suck that way. You're just making more suck. For $20,

we'll give you the green light. Do you live in Manhattan? No. Do you live in New York? I did. I live in New York. I live in Westchester County now. Oh,

I lived in New Rochelle for a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Hastings on Hudson. Oh, yeah, it's,

um, that's a, that's a beautiful area. That's nice. That whole, Westchester has got some nice spots. Yeah, it does. It's a little snooty, some of it.

So there's a couple of towns in Westchester that kind of retain some connection to reality. You know, it's not just... Westchester's weird. It is. Though you'll be in a neighborhood where you're seeing these mansions with these giant lawns. And then you'll go half a mile and you're in the projects. And you're seeing these mansions with these giant lawns, and then you'll go half a mile, and you're in the projects. And you're like, whoa. Well, it's not projects so much.

It's a little more Jersey-esque. I mean, when you drive through the oranges, it really, you get that sense. I mean, most of Westchester is pretty affluent at this point. But, you know, it's not as affluent as Manhattan. Manhattan's the most affluent in the area, right? Well, yeah. I mean, if you're inside Bloomberg's bubble, if you made it in there somehow, you know, when an apartment was a million, now you've got $10 million of real estate or something. But, you know, anywhere else, it's not quite that bad.

Those places are madness. Those multimillion-dollar apartments. The way of living in a big city like that is so alien it only exists in manhattan where you have so many people living in apartments and it creates it's a different community and in in a sense it's more connected than than los angeles says oh it is i mean most things about it are are kind of more consonant with our era and our digital economy and all that. It's a better carbon footprint to stack people up like that, that they have everybody having lawns and fertilizer and whatever else they get in the suburbs. So I mean it's good on most of those levels.

It's just New York itself is so crazy expensive through God knows what sort of real estate shenanigans are done. That's what sort of then for me colors the experience of urban joy there. No one is an artist or a writer of regular means could live there. Yeah, that's where it gets really crazy. We see a small apartment is like $3,000 a month and you're like, okay, that's just nuts. That means a guy who makes $50,000 a year has to give up three-quarters of his income to pay his fucking rent. That's nuts. Right.

So it's like – I mean I don't know if you need crime to make it better. But you go back to the era of Basquiat. He couldn't live in Manhattan now. None of the folks from then or the Ramones or – well, they were queens actually. But – or Warhol or any of his – Do you remember 42nd Street? The real 42nd Street? Yeah, but that's the thing though.

It's like – it was also – it was criminal. It was awful. Terrifying. Yeah, it was terrifying. And yeah, there's certain – some part that waxes nostalgic. But that's not a good old days that you really want to return to either. It's just like how can you have a New York that works and is still artistic and alive and vibrant and fertile and not have people getting stabbed in the subway? Yeah, and how can you have so many rich people living together? Because you have to be rich to live there i mean it's it's really difficult to pull off living in manhattan if you don't have at least

you know of upper middle class income so yeah it's a strange strange place unlike any place in this country you know there's no place in the country that's so overvalued you can get a decent apartment in san francisco for half of what you'd spend on an apartment in manhattan i think although san francisco now has gotten the worst something yeah one of those lists well at the worst um there's some places outside of san francisco that are just insane like we're um near uh stanford uh they have um i think it's called atherton it's the highest real estate in the country. And you look at these people that I know have this house up there. It's an acre and a half.

It's worth $15 million. I was fucking looking at this house like, what are you talking about? It doesn't make any sense. But it's like everybody in that neighborhood is all – they're all tech people. They all made insane amounts of money in the various tech bubbles and booms over the years and all that google money's up there and all that apple money's up there and there's just a lot of fucking people that have incredible amounts of cash up there so real estate they need houses this is where they live so real estate's through the fucking roof right like you will look if you look at like i i enjoy doing that sometimes. Like, hmm, could I live in Phoenix?

Let's see what the neighborhoods are like in Phoenix and I'll go look at real estate in Phoenix for a goof. You look in Atherton and what's $11 million? You're like, get the fuck out of here. That's $11 million? Well, they got to be bike distance from Facebook or wherever. It's an amazing bubble of money, a strange one, a really strange one. Because, again, you go a mile over and we've stopped at this Wendy's and it was like a really sketchy Wendy's. Like, this place is kind of fucking dirt baggish to be a mile away from a $15 million house.

Like, it's so strange. Well, there's no middle anymore. Yeah. That sort of got spun out in the in the spin cycle at the end of the yeah this industrial age here well you can't say there's none but i mean there shouldn't certainly a diminished very little yeah very little but you know like you're saying though if if the if that lower 98 or 99 whatever it is uh gets fed up enough it'll network with itself rather than trying to get something down from the top.

It's not even fed up. It seems like we only act when we're forced to act. We need a desperation. We need to have no options and then we move into this new stage of understanding what the fuck the real problem really is. And that's different. And again, that's the whole point of being in the present, of presentism, is that instead of going on some long march on some other 20th century movement, sort of this eyes on the prize and justify the means battle to the future thing, we go, screw all that. We just want it now.

We're going to just do it. That's what was so encouraging about the Occupy movement. They go, what are your demands? What do you want from us? We don't want anything from you. We're not going to state our demands. We're going to actually do this thing. And that's where –

But do what thing though? The real issue – Well, try to occupy the world in which we live. I liken the Occupy movement to white blood cells. Like they recognize there's an issue and they gather around it and it's like it calls attention to the issue. But they're gathering around a sick spot. I mean they know there's something wrong here. And so everybody is like, look, this is the spot.

It's all going down right there. And then they try to educate. They do teach-ins and learn about stuff. A lot of people know more about these issues now than did before. And they see it as a super long-term project. I mean this year they did Occupy Debt and the Debt Jubilee. So what they're doing is buying pennies on the dollar, the debt of people like who've got health bills they can't pay and all that

because it's just owned by credit companies. So they buy the debt and just relieve it. So it's kind of cool. They take $10 and relieve like $1,000 of debt. It's well worth it. That's interesting. That's a great idea. And I think that's a great community idea that there's a lot of people out there that have a spare $5 or a spare $10. You wouldn't even think about, but if you get enough of those people,

you can enact some real change and really help people. What do you think is like, what is the best way besides podcasting and besides books and besides having actual conversations with people where you explore these ideas? What is the best way to get people to understand that true happiness really does come from a sense of community? One of the interviews that I saw with you, you were talking about your youth and you were talking about living in a place where you all shared a large backyard and it became sort of a community thing where everybody would get together and have like a barbecue yeah and well it's interesting yeah so in queens and we had it was like one barbecue pit at the end of the block that was just on all weekend that's when we were lower middle class my dad got a better job we leave queens we go to largemont scarsdale these you know these westchester towns yeah and it's like you don't barbecue with the joneses anymore you barbecue against the jones

it's like every single family's got its own like 300 dollar weber grill in the backyard and no one would think you know it's like you can invite someone over i suppose but it's not that barbecuing was this solo family activity and i was thinking well as far as the grill company is concerned, that's better. They'd rather everyone have a grill and nobody grill together because then they get to sell more grills. You know, but what – it's like I've looked in my – not the neighborhood I'm in now but neighborhood I almost went to. It's like everybody on the block had a snowblower. I'm thinking that's really weird. There's like 10 houses with 10 snowblowers. how many snowblowers do you need per driveway it's like can't every two houses

share one or every four houses share one yeah but what if you want to just get up in the morning you don't want to talk to mr johnson see if you can use the snowblower first because you got to be at work at 7 30 you don't want to talk to mr johnson is the thing he's a douchebag maybe he is maybe you should be able to have your own snowblower maybe there isn't a douchebag isn't his douchebag is because he's working overtime to save up for that goddamn snowblower easily right what yeah well there's not a lot of people that are happy out there is the rose quote that most men leave lives of silent desperation yeah or today loud desperation and marshall mccluau's quote that most men leave lives of silent desperation. Yeah, or today, loud desperation.

And Marshall McLuhan's quote that humans are the sex organs of the machine world and that has this desire to keep up with the Joneses. You got to pay for those Weber grills. Disconnects us. I walk in a room now and it feels different. When I see people sitting on their devices, you used to walk into a room with a bunch of guys. You walk in here and you guys have devices, but you can feel the family. You can feel you guys are on an animal level in touch with each other's vibe, right? On whatever that subtle level is.

And I go into rooms now and I don't feel the same group dynamic, group presence that I used to. Even teaching a class 20 years ago versus going into one today when everybody's, you know, tweeting what's going on in there. It's just a different, I'm not saying it's worse, although I think it's worse, um, a qualitatively different experience. They have more choice over what they do. They can divide their attention the way they want. They have more autonomy over all these things, but they're they're losing – and maybe it's out there on the net somewhere. Maybe by the time we're in the great, great second life, we reconnect. But they're missing a certain subtle animal contact that we don't yet fully understand.

Maybe it just needs to be mitigated. Maybe we need to just understand and explore like the ethics of when to and not to use cell phones when to and not to connect and encourage more connection and like let people know they're like look that is an impulse just like washing your hands too much or just like there's a there's a like a lack of satisfaction in the um satisfying or the uh the completion of that impulse the check your twitter you check your twitter check your twitter again what are you getting out of that impulse to check your Twitter. You check your Twitter. Check your Twitter again. What are you getting out of that? Why not pay attention to the person who's in front of you?

You're doing it to like a nutty person washes their hands a hundred times. Yeah. I mean that's the whole reason I write. My books are – the book before this one is called Program or Be Programmed and the idea was just to give people sort of the 10 biases of digital media like they're really good for doing things far away. They're not good for doing things with someone in the same room because they're there. You know, just really simple stuff like that or this time idea, which is that digital technology is asynchronous.

It doesn't live in time. So don't you try to keep up with it because it's not in your temporal universe. It's in its own. And you can make it conform to yours, but certainly don't run and chase it. It's that. It's kind of – at this point, it's education. It's just having the conversation, letting people – that's the whole thing. If they become more aware, then they stand a chance.

I certainly think a lot of these things have sort of snuck up on us and we could all do with a lesson or at least an idea of how to manage them more humanly. Right. Exactly. And the trick is for people not to see – and this has been my whole thing – not to see the messenger of this as the one who's saying, oh, this stuff is so bad. Oh, whoa, the children are turning more violent, that whole kind of PBS-ish hand-wringing thing that so many writers are out there.

It's like, are you for technology or against it? Are you for it or against it? And if you're not just going, yay, yay, yay, go business, they think you're against it. And it's like, no, no, I'm for technology. I'm just against the way we happen to be using it right now. I don't think there's any – I don't think it's a coincidence that people are, I think, fundamentally less happy now, I think, than they have been in a long time. If you look at the amount of people that are on medication for happiness, that's really what it is. And if you're on an antidepressant, essentially you're on a medication for happiness.

And whether or not that's because of a chemical imbalance that you suffer from or because of the fact that your job sucks and your life sucks and you're just filled with suck every day and you're responding to that. Well, for whatever it is, if you look at those numbers, one or two things is happening, probably both. One, we're getting fucked over by these pharmaceutical companies and they get unethical doctors to prescribe that shit with impunity. There's that for sure. But then there's also like people are not connected to this world. They don't feel whole. They don't feel whole.

They don't feel satisfied. And if you're in great pain, it's better to only be in moderate pain or mild pain if you can take a pill. I mean what's hard to do is to get people to go, oh, well, actually that pain is kind of a good sign because it means that we all need to kind of work here to change the way the world is and take some action. The pain is trying to get you to change. Right. The pain is trying to get you to avoid the pain and you should use your logic to say, well, what's causing this pain? Well, there's a disconnect.

I'm not emotionally satisfied. I'm not connecting with my fellow humans. I'm missing something. Right. Unless you're up against the wall and there's nothing you can do to change your circumstances in which case you're going to take the pill. That's the danger there. But I do think the more people can start to get in touch – for me, it's these rhythms,

the rhythms of life, the 28-day lunar cycle and the fact that each week of a lunar cycle, your neurotransmitters change. So you have an acetylcholine week followed by a serotonin week followed by a dopamine week followed by an orpinephrine week. It's like every month, there's one, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. If you know that, then you're like, oh, this serotonin week, followed by a dopamine week, followed by an orpinephrine week. It's like every month is one, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom. If you know that, then you're like, oh, this is the dopamine week. That's why I feel like this or I'm getting strangely analytical. How do you know when it's a dopamine week or acetylcholine week?

Well, now – actually there's a website, somaspace.org, that he's got it laid out. There was – originally it was an Olympic trainer, Irving Dardick, who figured this stuff out. He was doing – exercising people at different times of the day and different parts of the month. And they've been looking at biological clocks for many years. Ever since the Major League Baseball pretty much discovered jet lag, that people get more jet lag when they travel west to east than east to west. They realize, oh, these clocks are not folklore. There's actually something going on here.

So there's circadian rhythms for the day and the night, but there's also all these other rhythms controlled by different weather and astronomical features. And traveling like that really does fuck with those rhythms, right? Yeah, but as people get in touch with them, I think it could help us get out of some of these drug relationships that we're having, where we're taking drugs in order to compensate for those shifting neurotransmitters

because we're trying to be on all the time. I'm in sales, so I've got to be in sales when I'm in dopamine week or in serotonin week. And that's hard. Well, there's also the arrogance of the human mind to think that it can manipulate the human mind. The human mind going, look, I don't like how things are running here. I think I am going to take over the running of me. And I'm going to invent some shit that makes me run more to my liking. I'd rather just be okay with everything.

I want to be high all the time and okay with everything. Okay, can you get that? And then one day they're going to get what you feel like when you're on ecstasy. And it's going to be, keep it all day.

Just be on ecstasy all day. Enjoying the world. Wow, I've never seen this guy this color blue. You're going to be so happy. They don't let you have those though. They don't let you genuinely have those drugs.

Because if you're as high as you are on ecstasy or as high as you are on pot, then you start figuring things out. Then you start unwinding that relationship and becoming less dependent on them. Yeah.

I mean even just a shift in the levels of things and the approach to things gives you, oh, this is a new consciousness space that I'm occupying here for – whether it's a brief moment or a long, drawn-out, crazy trip. Right. But that's different than the sort of palliative care of pharmaceuticals. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

That does the exact opposite. It's true. The ones that are available that you could buy on a regular basis are the ones that bring you closer to the hive drone. Exactly. You look slow. Drone drugs. Yeah. It just will let you accept more and take more.

Even caffeine and alcohol are such – easier for them to tolerate. The one that's interesting that sort of is playing both sides of the field here is Adderall. You know what I mean? Because they use it to control little kids. Adderall, it's like Ritalin. It's one of these ADD drugs that keeps those kids from acting out or whatever in class. But also the counterculture is taking it for – to write or work or to get that kind of speed euphoria. More like to work, right?

I've never fucked with it, but the people that I know that have said it, it kind of hampers creativity. Right. I guess it's more for... It's more like a speedy thing. Yeah. Cramming for a test or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. Getting work done. Organizing shit. My friend Robert Schimmel, rest his he um he accidentally took it once and he had heart issues it was kind of a crazy story he he picked up the wrong pill it was someone else's prescription and and took an adderall then he called his doctor it's like what am i in trouble am i i'm scared you know i got this heart condition the guy's like you're gonna be fine you're gonna be fine you're just gonna you're gonna be you're gonna be uh doing a lot of things

over the next few hours. Just accept that. So he takes it and he starts fucking organizing his office and he sat down in front of his notes and he said, I got more work done than I've ever gotten before. Well, yeah. That's why they call it speed. Yeah. But it's a great – You pay a price.

Yeah. It's the ultimate industrial age drug I guess because it makes you more productive, more efficient. I've had quite a few friends who have had an issue with it, several. A good friend, very smart guy who just went – just got off of it and he went crazy with it for like several months. He was starting up a business and working at a tech company and it was a lot of hours and he just took a little Adderall to help him along the way and next thing you know, he needed Adderall every day. Yeah. Yeah.

They do say there's this sort of – I think speed, long-term speed use is the closest they can model schizophrenia with drugs. If you've been on Speed Freak for a really long time, you get way closer than with any psychedelic or something. Yeah. Well, it just seems like it just redlines your system. Lindsay Lohan's plea deal. One string attached.

I want my Adderall. Was that TMZ? Yeah. TMZ is so ridiculous. You know, she's supposed to be in that prison or that rehab for the next whatever, 60, 90 days. Is she? She's trying to get a plea deal so she can get Adderall. Wait a minute.

They're putting her in jail again? Yeah. What for this time? I think it was for hit and run back in 2010 or something like that i can't remember poor kid i've been following it boy there's another weird aspect of our new society that children become famous you know what i mean back in the shirley temple days when they invented that it was like two of them yeah yeah who would have ever thought that you would get a person like a Lindsay Lohan?

We raised them from the time they were a child and they never know anonymity. And just long to escape every day, longing to get fucked up and just drift away in a drunken stupor and not have to think about it. Yeah. And they can't leave it as a thing because they're also addicted to uh to it yeah and if you do leave it it's almost worse to been a has-been than to be a never was a never was you see a person walked on the street you never go oh look at that loser he was never famous you just go oh there's a guy i'll tell you there's it reminds me there was this moment that i still don't know exactly how i feel about it when they did the uh they did the brady bunch reunion it's like 10 years after the show

whatever 20 years and jan didn't show up they had a different girl for jan and i was like you go girl in other words she broke free she moved on yeah she probably eve plumb she probably got you know all this crap for not going and a lot of people probably thought oh because she's probably too screwed up or some problem whatever and i'm like no you know you went you went into the future you know and you were not going to let that just you know define you no matter what yeah or she wanted money and they didn't want to pay yeah who knows who knows who knows i know that's media is good for projecting. But there's something very sad about people that live completely in the past. Like if you were on a show in the 1970s and you're still going to those autograph signing things. It's hard.

I heard Barbara Eden on the radio. You know, Juma Jeannie? Yeah. And I was thinking, man, that's one of those things. Well, Barbara Eden also was in a time where you didn't make money. Like you didn't get that residual cash. People are still selling I Dream of Jeannie. She would still be getting a piece.

But no, she didn't get a slice. Back in those Gilligan's Island days, those guys didn't make any money. They got fucked over. Gilligan's Island days, those guys didn't make any money. They got fucked over. Gilligan's Island days was, you know, like back in the day, they never knew about like syndication. They didn't have any idea that things were going to be worth so much money and then in a digital form forever. Dude, I was supposed to be at my next thing by now.

Whoops. It's like 513. How long is this podcast allowed to be? We just go. You just go? We go. People download the whole thing? Yeah, we never go for more than three hours. Do you have to leave?

Is that what you're saying? I'm supposed to go. Where are you going next? What is it? What am I doing? I mean, I've already missed 13 minutes of it. Jason Calacanis. We can at least apologize to them.

Yeah, Jason Calacanis. He does this conference called Launch. What is it? And it's like Silicon Valley, Entrepreneury, What's Going to Happen Next in Technology. So is it like an interview or a podcast? And then another podcast.

No, a video podcast. Well, this is too. But that's like only you click on the thing. For a digital theorist, you're a little bit out of touch with numbers, my friend. Thank you. And – thank you. And then Richard Metzger. Do you know him?

Richard Metzger. He does a Dangerous Minds website. Richard Metzger. It's a really fun counterculture. No, I was thinking Kurt Metzger. You would like it. He's a very funny stand-up comic. He's local. He does a great – he used to do Disinfo.

He invented that. Oh, okay. That whole website. Oh, he did? Yeah. Okay. Well, Matt, Matt Staggs, the publicist. Yeah, yeah, he's on to something.

Yeah, that's who I know him from. All right, so you've got to get the fuck out of here. I do. Dude, this has been an awesome conversation, really fun. Yeah, it's great to meet you.

Great to meet you, too. Thank you very much for coming on, and people, please, go pick up his book. It's called Future Shock. Present Shock. Excuse me, Present Shock, When Everything Happens Now, right?

Exactly, yeah. Okay. Available now. Is it available on audible.com? They're the company that just emailed and said they want to do the – They want to do the audio? Yeah, they want to do the audio. They better.

God damn it. It's crazy that it's not. It needs to be done, right? Audible, go get it. Go get on it. But you can get it right now on amazon.com, on your website, DouglasRushkoff.com. Rushkoff.com, yeah. Thank you very much, man.

Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. Good to meet you. Thanks to the sponsors of the podcast. Thanks to Audible.com. If you go to Audible.com forward slash Joe, you can get one free audio book and 30 free days of Audible service. Thanks also to St stamps.com and if you uh click on the link on stamps.com and use the code jre you uh you get a special offer no risk trial plus 110 bonus offer

including a digital scale that you should not use for illegal purposes. Thanks also to Hover. Hover.com forward slash... What is it? Rogan or something? I have too many fucking things. I know. You should make it all the same. Yeah, I should. But I don't have control of that shit.

Hover.com forward slash Rogan. Go there. Get 10% off your domain name registrations and they give you a free shit like who is domain name privacy and they're awesome. And thanks also to Onnit.com. Go to O-N-N-I-T, and if you use the code name Rogan,

you save yourself 10% off any of our awesome supplements. All right, folks, that's it for the week. I got shit to do, yo. I'm busy. I got a lot of things happening. And next week is going to be a little sketch because I'm on the road for most of the week. So we might bang out one only next week. Try to get through it.

This is all temporary. And we love the fuck out of you dirty bitches. All right. So we'll see you soon. Oh, Indianapolis this weekend, Saturday night, April 6th. I'll be in Indianapolis with Tony Hinchcliffe. And if you've seen my live at the Tabernacle special that's available for $5 on JoeRogan.net right now, this set is 100% new. There's nothing from that on any of these shows.

So to answer all these people's questions, should I go see you if I just bought the special? It's all new shit. I've got an hour and 20 minutes now of all new shit. And I'm actually happier with it than my last special. It's a new shit. I got an hour and 20 minutes now of all new shit. And I'm actually happier with it than my last special. So it's a beautiful thing. Can I just say that Kevin Pereira this week, we're going to have some good podcasts. So if you're freaking out and needing a podcast, we're going to have Penn Jillette on Thursday.

Oh, excellent. Reggie Watts tonight. Excellent. Yeah, Penn Jillette. Awesome. That's great. You're going to do it. Is he in town?

Yeah, I think just he's in town one day or something like that. Wow. Yeah, he's awesome. He's a great talker, too. That guy will go on and on and on? Yeah, I think just he's in town one day or something like that. Wow. Yeah, he's awesome. He's a great talker, too. That guy will go on and on and on. Yeah, I think we have Cheech and Chong next week, too. Oh, and Cheech and Chong together? Yeah.

Oh, interesting. All right. Douglas Rushkoff, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you soon. All right. Bye. Bye. Thank you.