Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 526: Douglas Rushkoff

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

Douglas Rushkoff, author and one of MIT's top 10 most influential intellectuals in the world, re-joins the DTFH! You can learn more about Douglas on his website, Rushkoff.com, and be sure to check out his new book: Survival of the Richest - Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Available RIGHT NOW everywhere you buy your books! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Herb Stomp - Use code DUNC15 at checkout to receive 15% OFF your first order! Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order!

Ghost Towns. Dirty Angel. Out. Now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns. Dirty Angel. Out. Now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Welcome to my bomb shelter. I'm so glad you're here. There's a wine bar and a hot tub. A heated pool with a double boiler.

What's your wife's name? I think I'll call her Angela. She's beautiful like the angels that brought you here. Don't look at it like I'm taking you later. Think of it as a brand new start. Your wife's vagina is my canvas. But tonight we're making art. Welcome to my bomb shelter.

You can trust me on billionaire. If I made it in the last world. Then I'll make it in this world. Welcome to my bomb shelter. While I'm fingering your wife. You'll be growing kale in the hydroponic chambers. Feed my teen children. That's welcome to my bomb shelter by Waylings Jennings Jr. Seniors.

And it is an incredible song. I can't not cry when I hear it. It's so beautiful. You hear the love in his voice. And I played it because Douglas Rushkoff is here with us today. And we talk about billionaires and their bomb shelters, among other things. We're going to jump right into it. But first this.

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Austin, Texas. Then after that, I'm heading off to San Francisco to do cobs. You can find all those dates at DuncanTrussell.com. Also, are you sick of commercials on this podcast? Well, all you gotta do is go to patreon.com. You can get commercial free episodes or hang out with us. Now's your chance because this Friday, for our weekly family gathering,

we're getting together to plan our next book. We'd love for you to write a chapter in it. All you gotta do is go to patreon.com. Douglas Rushkoff is here with us today. This is his second time on the podcast, and every single time I get to have a conversation with him, it changes my life. He's got a fantastic book that is out right now.

It's called Survival of the Richest, Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. If you are like me and you've had that wonderful fantasy that just maybe there's a smarter, richer person out there who's coming up with some thing, a technology, an idea, something that's gonna save the planet and turn everything green and beautiful and cool and wonderful and non-bomby,

then I'm afraid you might be wrong. Rushkoff's book is about how some of these people are not necessarily in the laboratory trying to come up with some world-keeling technology, but they are actively building their very luxurious bomb shelters right now. We talked about a lot of things that didn't just freak me out. They chilled me to the bone.

Jeffrey Epstein, we talked about him. What he was up to, yes, we talked about that, but this isn't just a chilling, spooky episode. What's wonderful about Rushkoff is he has a way of making the apocalypse seem a little less rotten. I hope you'll tune in. But first, go buy his book. It's out right now on Amazon.

All the links you need to find Douglas or his book will be at DuncanTrustle.com. And now, everybody, please welcome back to the DTFH, Douglas Rushkoff. Douglas, welcome back to the DTFH. How are you doing? Pretty good. A little overwhelmed. It's just like a lot of stuff's happening.

This new book, it's weird. With my other books, I always do so much publicity and trying and emailing and begging. This is a book that I've been working on for a long time. It's a book that I've been working on for a long time. I always do so much publicity and trying and emailing and begging. This one, I was kind of too busy, but because it's weird,

like Billionaires and Apocalypse and all, they're coming to me. It's like, Morning Joe came to me. New York Times came to me. And it's like, oh, that's way better to sit quietly and let them come to you. I think you're at that point now. Can you tell me how long you've been working on this book?

Kind of my whole life in a weird way without realizing it. I mean, I wasn't going to do a book. I wrote this article in 2018 after I had this weird experience where I was supposed to do this talk for bankers about the digital future. And it turned out to be these five billionaires who wanted advice on their bunker strategies. And I wrote this piece on media and in the Guardian

about what does it mean that the most powerful tech people in the world are trying to execute on the ultimate exit strategy. They have so little faith that we're going to make it that they want to leave us all behind and get on their rocket ships or upload their consciousness and all. And I kept thinking about it, you know, and then COVID happened. And I started to see how, well, you know, that kind of billionaire mindset about, you know,

escape from the masses and shield ourselves from disease and get, I'm kind of doing that too. You know, get my Amazon delivery and stay safe and all. And then I wanted to see, well, have we been moving in this direction all along or for how long and where does this come from? And then I started to look back and realized, oh, wow, you know, I've been confronting this since the very beginning,

since I was a, you know, the cool weird cyber kid getting invited to stuff because I was the only one. I've been confronting these kind of actually the real people, the scientists and technologists who consorted with Epstein and who really have been kind of executing on this weird master plan to get away from the rest of us, you know, since the beginning. I'm curious if there was a point where you weren't a critic

of the utopian notion that it does come out of, you know, what do you call them, the singularity? Singularity people? Singularity people. Were you, was there a time where you were more in the boat of like its technology is inevitably going to produce something that's going to fix all the problems? Yeah, in the late 80s and early 90s, you know,

when it was my most psychedelic friends from college who were moving out to California to go work at Apple and Intel, I was thinking something changed, man. These are not the pocket protector geeks going out there. These are the weirdos. And why is that? And I started to spend time with them and there was this overlap between like, I'm friends with Timothy Leary,

are you serious? Terrence McKenna on the one hand. And those folks are all talking about virtual reality and the internet. And McKenna is talking about, you know, we will have the ability to, you know, rise from the chrysalis of matter as pure consciousness and virtual reality. You will literally see what I mean.

And yeah, I believed and I didn't. I believed that the internet and these technologies were not going to be the way we orchestrated the global neurology into a single brain. But I thought it was like the training wheels or the practice that if we could do it online and then deal with issues of like privacy and collective action and all, then we can sort of remove the blinders from our eyes

and realize, oh my gosh, I know what everybody's thinking all the time anyway. You know, like there's some kind of telepathic, you know, one thing going on here. So I believed it, but not exactly in the way the tech people did. But I was. But I was.

And there was a moment. Yes, I loved it. I would give me more tech, more email, more, yeah. I was there. I'll be honest with you. But before the last time we podcasted, I was there. And then you sort of threw a pebble into the windshield of that and ever since then like cracks have been growing.

I did, you know, I would listen to McKenna and it wasn't just that he had some. He wasn't just prophesying about technology. He also in some of his lectures like insinuated perhaps aliens would come and save us. But always there was always this hopeful quality. There was apocalyptic, but hopeful apocalypse, the end of history, but in the positive.

We leap forward past whatever this, you know, the series of rotten mistakes we've done as a species into the glorious non-future called the Singularity. And then yeah, Kurzweil, of course, a different version, not psychedelic, technological. You can go on and on and on with all of these utopian fantasies. But you know, but you keep going back with any of them though, you keep going back to Ram Dass and you say, oh, wait a minute,

be here friggin now. You know, all of these narratives, however beautiful they are, Christianity, communism, capitalism, utopianism, they're all like, we're going to go arm in arm up the hill. Here we go to get to that promised moment to get to that thing. Come on, everybody gets more tech, more love, more money, more justice, whatever it is to get there to the thing. And all of the, most of the counter-culturalists who I most admired,

they were using a different palette, right? They were using my palette for, you know, psychedelia and free love and connection and all that, but they were buying the same narrative that they grew up on, you know, that same Catholic, Christian, Aristotelian, male, orgasm curve, crisis, climax, sleep, right? You know, like as long as you get to the climax, then you get to rest. Right? But that's not the way it really goes. The thing that we're here together all the time.

You don't play the game in order to win. You play the game to keep the game going. Right. Yeah, right. To me, what's quite chilling about this line of thinking and your book is that, you know, we watch, I don't know if you've ever watched Preppers. I certainly have. I love watching. It's fun to watch, but, you know, if you're watching it,

you could easily just slip into a pretty intense judgment of some of these people. You can think to yourself, oh, come on, give me a break. You want the world to end. It's not going to end. This is just like your sort of way of role playing or something. But in your book, you talk about this thing that these billionaires call the event. Right? And somehow, and this is my own capitalist brainwashing, I guess,

when I hear shit, it's not just people digging holes in their backyards so that they could put some something they can climb into filled with ramen. These are these are like the people who theoretically know who have access to data sets that many of us might not or have done the analysis and are getting ready for some future horror. That to me is really unnerving. Do you believe what they're saying? Do you also fall into that line of thinking that around the corner at some point in our lifespan, something is going to happen that is going to topple civilization as we know it?

Well, dude, I mean, it's kind of already begun. You know, we're over the event horizon, right? Over the lip of the strange attractor into this thing with the, you know, the pandemics and poxes and things and things that are burning and Fukushima and wars and the collapse of coherence. We're actually we're actually in it. And in some ways that's frightening and other ways it's kind of a relief because it's like, OK, it's happening.

It's slow moving and there's opportunities at every moment to choose the alternative. It's like, oh, rather than trying to outrun this, which is what the billionaires are trying to do. I'm going to outrun it and build a bunker. I'm going to outrun it and get a rocket ship. I'm going to outrun it and create a server to upload my consciousness. It's like, no, no, no. And especially they want to outrun it and only them and like six of their friends make it. Which is a little McKenna, too.

You know, McKenna used to basically say that if you didn't have the right consciousness, you're not going to make it through the strange attractor at the end of time. You know, it's a little exclusive. I'm of the belief we all make it or none of us make it because there's one thing going on here. So we end up. Yes, these guys in some ways. And that's for me the beauty of the book. And you gave me a lot of this, the ability to laugh.

The fact that you're a comedian is so empowering. When we can laugh at the thing, it gets so much smaller. So what I tried to do in the book is I go to these billionaires and yeah, at the first I'm scared. The most richest, most powerful, smartest, most researched people in the world think the world is ending. The very best thing they can do is prepare for the inevitable collapse. You know, that's it. But then I thought, wait a minute, these guys are the richest and most powerful people in the world. Yet they feel utterly powerless and they always friggin have.

They've never been doing the thing that we were just talking about. They were never trying to unleash the collective human imagination. They were trying to bet on whichever future they thought was most probable. They're investors. They're gamblers. They're not creators. And the ones that were creators, maybe they were 19 years old and they had an idea in college. They get plucked by Peter Thiel or Mark Andreessen while they're in college.

And they're taught how to pivot towards the most profitable outcome. And they transfer parental authority onto some friggin venture capitalist and think that, you know, that startup capitalism is the only path forward for their technology and it's not. Thank you Squarespace for supporting this episode of the DTFH Squarespace. It's the all in one platform for building your brand, growing your business online. For me, it's the go to for my podcast. My podcast lives on a Squarespace website so beautiful. It will make your optical nerve transform into a glorious sapphire that you can pluck out of your head and then sell using Squarespace's awesome shopping cart functionality.

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Again, it's squarespace.com for slash Duncan for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Thanks Squarespace. Do you have surely you have considered that you lit in the topic of your book you that you have a synergy with like a pretty thriving conspiracy theory right now wrapped around the World Economic Forum. What's his name? Klaus Schwab. The conspiracy being.

And before I say this, another thing I took away from our last conversation that I have quoted you on many times is this idea of, well, let's not take these conspiracies. Literally, let's look at them as metaphors. Let's go deeper into them because they kind of are true at some level. But are they really true? Probably not. And yet, when you when you talk about billionaires burrowing into their elite bunkers to outlast those who can't afford elite bunkers, you're not saying that they're the ones who are responsible or complicit necessarily in whatever this event may be. I think that's where you diverge from the conspiracy, which is they want to do population control or whatever. I mean, maybe all of us, you could say, are responsible in our consumption.

And if those people are running companies that cause massive amounts of consumption, you could say they're sort of inadvertently responsible, but not intentionally responsible. That's an important point. They are and they're not. They are and they're not. But as an aside, I mean, like I just read it, a Corey Doctorow wrote yesterday this piece about Epson printers and how Epson intentionally bricks their printers after a certain number of printouts, arguing that, oh, it's because some sponge in there is going to get filled and we don't want it to leak on your desk or something. Oh, wow. But they really just want you to have to buy a new printer. You know, it's just pure evil.

Now, they're smart enough to know that when you buy a new printer, the old one's going to have to go on a friggin toxic pile of waste in China or Brazil and little, you know, enslaved children are going to be picking at it for renewable and they know it. But what are they thinking? They're thinking, yes, but I have to earn enough money to outrun the devastation I'm creating by earning money in this way. They somehow think, you know what I mean? That's what I'm calling the insulation equation that's kind of part of this billionaire mindset. So, yeah, I'm hurting the world, but I'm going to release enough capital from hurting the world that I'm going to stay a step ahead. But what these guys are realizing now is they can't stay a step ahead anymore.

That's the way they've always done it. Stay one step ahead of the devastation. Move further west. Move further north. Move further this. So now what they want to do is they want to go meta on the whole thing, right? You know, Zuckerberg, literally, when Facebook stops working, I'm going meta on Facebook. Right.

Or they're going to be as gods. Or Theo, go from zero to one. One order of magnitude above the others. Or Jeffrey Epstein, become this god with enslaved women to carry on my genes. Matt, pause you there for a moment because this is something all of us, I think, who haven't really gone deep into the Epstein thing. What was he? What was his deal, man? I keep hearing these strange meetings he was having, not just with people to hump teenagers,

but also there was some other bizarre quality to him. He had some weird plant. What was that? Does anyone know? What was that? Well, it's weird. When I interacted with the Epstein crowd, it was actually through my literary agent in New York, this guy, John Brockman, who had a lot of great scientists in his thrall, you know, Richard Dawkins and those guys.

And my interactions with them was mainly me arguing kind of, you know, Ram Dass-like Buddhist spiritual understandings of the world. There's something more going on here than pure materialism. Scientism cannot explain everything, you know, and play in that one. And they're just laughing at me like I'm a hopeless new age, you know, psychedelic kid. But, you know, I remember I was at this one party and then when I suggested that the universe might kind of be trying to lean in a moral direction that we're groping towards a higher, you know, a very Buddhist kind of, we're not striving, but we're moving towards, you know, kind of a nobler path. Yes. They laughed at me.

He said, oh, you know, you're a moralist, right? And then, you know, to my, what should not have been my surprise, you know, 20 years later, I see these same guys and dockets on the Lolita Express, which is, you know, Epstein's airplane going back and forth from wherever they go and realizing, right, if you are not a moralist, if you genuinely believe that we are just in the thrall of our selfish genes doing whatever we have to to spread our genes to other people, then you will have, that's an attractive world view to a guy like Jeffrey Epstein who wants to get everything he wants. I want a 14-year-old girl to fuck me like there's no tomorrow and I don't want to feel bad about it. Yeah. Well, if I'm just, this is just genes.

I am just, you know, behaving as a programming to my DNA programming, which wants to extend itself. So what Epstein's plan was, he had these compounds. He had one on an island with a little bit more occult stuff and one in New Mexico and he had these bedrooms set up. And what he wanted was there to be 20 or 30 young women at a time at these places getting impregnated by him and birthing their babies and having this, yeah. And he would make this kind of new race of little Epsteins, you know, it was his own little kind of eugenics project to express his genes. But from what he understood and what these scientists who are getting funded by him, what they supported was this, almost genetics as capitalism, right? Understanding genetics as, so it's almost like a form of interpersonal colonialism, right? With Jeffrey Epstein as the corporation trying to open up like new Walmart everywhere, you know, spawning his DNA.

That is fucked up. Yeah. I read something about that and this is documented. Like this is for sure. Yeah, this is real. This is not conspiracy theory. This is just real, right? He wanted breeding chambers.

Jeffrey Epstein wanted breeding chambers. Well, they were called bedrooms, right? For now, once the event happens, they're breeding chambers. Yeah, that's true. I mean, okay, so you mentioned the occult aspect of that. Again, like, you know, I've tried to apply Robert Anton Wilson's advice in regard to these things, maintain agnosticism. So when I've seen overwhelming evidence pointing towards some sort of religious or spiritual angle to whatever was going on there, I think to myself, probably not. I mean, not really, but it seems like there was the temple.

They had a temple there. There was some kind of, so intermingled in with this corporatization slash eugenics Epstein plan. There was also some religious coloring to it. There was some occultism to it, but who knows if they believed it because he might have been a staunch atheist. But the stuff works, right? It certainly works from the perspective of psyching somebody out. You know, if you're a young woman and don't know if you want to submit to this guy and now you're part of a, you know, a ritual to Aries, though, whatever. It feels, you know what I mean?

It's certainly a good psych out. I mean, the Masons certainly understood that when they would construct a Masonic temple or construct Washington DC and do all these sort of intimidating architectural tricks. I don't know that they necessarily believe that there was magical power in it, but more like kind of like neurolinguistic programming as magic. Like we can do all these hypnotic things that tend to work. I mean, these guys, the interesting thing was the same sort of Epstein folks around the edge and John Brockman and those scientists, the parties that I were not invited to, the things were always about behavioral finance. That's where they went with this. Behavioral finance is really the study of how to exploit people's kind of mental vulnerabilities when it comes to money.

Like people, you know, that's what behavioral economics is that like we look at future money differently than current money, or if we put money in buckets, we're more likely to spend it. So they were doing the workshops they were doing all had to do with how do you manipulate people, right? What's the latest and greatest science and neurology around getting other people to do what you want them to do? It's like how to win friends and influence people, you know, squared. Wow. But coming more from our perspective, like you've charted a perfect path to a nightmare world, which is a world run by people after some event who are purely materialistic, who laugh when they think you're a moralist

and who have decided that the number one goal outside of some form of like hedonism is gene expression into the natural world. This thing that you are describing is if it's true, it's chilling. Well, it is true. It should be more laughable than it is chilling. So when you go back to your conspiracy theory people, the difference between me and the conspiracy theory people is the conspiracy theory people take these guys at their word. The conspiracy theory people, they're the true believers of these guys that, oh, you know, we're going to build an AI that can manipulate the entirety of humanity and all that. If these guys were that good, the world would not be ending. Wow. If these guys knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be jerks.

If Zuckerberg knew what he was doing, he wouldn't be saying, oh, I'm going to give back 99% of my money and I'm not really happy. You know, they're not. They're laughable, right? That's why if you're in a room with five people with almost infinite money and the thing they're asking about is how do I escape from the event? Rather than how do I use the fact that just in this room we have more money than the nation of Argentina? What can we do to undo some of the horror, right? But instead, I got to earn more money so I can build a better bunker. So I'm going to sell more self-destructing printers to these losers who are going to be left behind in the regular world so I can get that last squeeze, that last bit of cash out of this thing. It's like some massive Ponzi scheme, except the way you win the Ponzi scheme is by wiping out everyone in the lower or letting your destruction wipe those people out so they can't be like...

It is interesting. Exactly. Right. It's like Alexander the Great except you destroy all the things that you take over. Holy shit. And you're right. You're right. That's kind of the difference. It's never before have the colonizers had the ability to really take down the whole thing. Not only the ability, but the desire to. And that's where these guys dovetail with Steve Bannon and the people called accelerationists. Yes. To Thiel and Musk and the accelerationists and Bannon, they've got this idea that, look, if it's going to happen, let's just rip the Band-Aid off.

Let's bring on the end so that we can start fresh, start clean. Right. And then they talk about Game B. We're going to do Game B. Let's let Game A. That's where people are now. Game A, that society is just over. That civilization is just wiped out. We're going to go to Game B. You know, I've got a new software stack for hydroponic gardens and a new education system and new roads and autonomous this and that.

Game B is going to be great. You know, and that's each of these technologists in their own way. That's a great reset. As if you could read, I get it. It's such a wet dream, right? I could just read all. Remember Control Alt Delete. Do they still have that?

Does that still work? I won't do it because I'll disconnect. Don't do it. I don't know. Remember Control Alt Delete. Yes. That is like just to get out. Just escape.

Get out. Oh my god. That's what they want to do. And then refrag the hard drive and just start this. Reboot this thing. That is so fucked up. That look. Yeah.

Okay. Now let me play. Let me play truly devil's advocate. Okay. I'm going to play devil's advocate. All right. And then I. So let's let's do a pretend argument.

Okay. Now I am no longer Duncan. Now I am. So now I am one of them. Okay. It's part of your part of Duncan. Oh, here we go. You're moralist.

Now look, look, here's the thing. All right. We have done you all the data is out there. Anyone has access to it. We don't have special access to data. Maybe we have a few like files over here. There's some pictures, whatever. But we have the same access to data that you that you all

have by y'all. I mean, all you all the pores, all the middles, all the non billionaires. And here's what's happening. There is no way to stop it right now. If everyone on the planet just somehow woke up, started growing hydroponic gardens, stopped driving and everyone just stopped.

It's still not going to stop the ice caps melting. It's not going to stop the disruption of the oceanic currents. If there are going to, there is going to be a die off. There's no way around it. So knowing that, knowing that, knowing that. And again, this is what we believe. Knowing it's unstoppable.

What is the most compassionate thing is the most compassionate thing to try to use all of our money to keep feeding these people, get people housing, prolong their lifespan, use the stuff that we see coming in the field of genetics, human life expansion so that we can extend the lifespan of people. Who are just going to keep consuming, just going to keep releasing carbon, just going to keep destroying the planet

and then let the planet wipe them out. Or do we, do we figure out alternate methods of behavioral control so that we can over a compassionate period of time? I don't like what, we don't like that you say control out delete. It's a slow reboot. It's a slow reboot. Compassionately sort of diminish the population.

We don't like to use the word coal. But if in any other biome, when a species is running amuck, you know, sometimes that's the most compassionate thing to do long term. And let's just say if we are going to use finances as a quantification of success in this particular social, economic biome that we're in, the theory of evolution seems to have favored us, you know, evolution itself.

Meaning that we are living evolution and because of that it kind of makes sense to, I don't know how to put it. I guess we could say control out delete. Georgia God stones, maybe they blew up the stones. Okay, I don't believe that. For anyone listening, don't cut that out out of context. And make it seem like I'm actually saying that. I've got kids and I love, I know what it's like to be a parent.

Fuck all that. But I'm just saying from that perspective, how would you argue with that? Like not just from a moralist sense. I would have two arguments. One, maybe most importantly for you is not going to work. They're going to come for you and kill you. Your guards are going to turn on you.

There's nothing you can do. You've been a mean person. Had you been paying for your head of securities daughters bat mitzvahs to this day, you might stand a chance. Right. But you haven't been. And if you suddenly turn nice, they're going to know why you're doing.

It's too late. Larry! Larry, pay for their bat mitzvahs! Pay for the last six years of bat mitzvahs! Do whatever! Sorry, I had to talk to my finance guys over here. All right, good. Yeah, some of them don't have bat mitzvahs, but you'll find

the equivalent, the confirmations, whatever it is. Sweet 16s. Because it'll be harder for them to shoot you between the eyes if you paid for their daughters bat mitzvahs, right? Holy shit. It's hard. I've tried. I've never been able to shoot anybody who's paid for

my kids bat mitzvahs. Physical impossibility. It's a safeguard. Well, that's how we get other people to do that for us. I mean, I stopped. All right. I forgot. So at first, it's not going to work.

You can't seal yourself off. The germs are going to get in. The radiation. The smoke from the fires. The immigrants are going to climb over the wall. The climate refugees. The from inside and outside. Your own daughter or son is going to stab you in your sleep.

It's just not going to work. Right. So there's that. And second, the way to, if the crisis is inevitable, which I would agree it is a crisis on some magnitude, it's already underway and inevitable. Then the best way through is to become the most resilient society possible to be, help people be the most local.

So no, you know, there are little hydroponic gardens and things may not, may not prevent the disaster, but it'll certainly make the disaster more comfortable. It'll, you know, it will be a lot better if, if we're not relating only on zoom and through door dash. But rather working together on community supported agriculture farms and teaching each other and sharing stuff.

You know, so we could, we could be more resilient. We can, I think we could push the crisis further and further off. In other words, it can happen in 50 years rather than 30 years or 10 years. Right. And we can, and the further off we push it, the kind of the more prepared we can be, the more interconnected we can

be. Right. The more local and grounded. So that would sort of be my, even my advice to the billionaires would be it's not too late to rejoin your community, to become part of it. Right. You're going to stand a better chance, networked and

connected with these people than trying to enslave them. You know, I think your first critique is the best critique. It's like, are you kidding? Like who, what do you think? I like, what, what do you think is going to happen when you are outgunned by people who were in a world where money no longer has value? What, what, what is, what's your plan there?

Like, are you, what are you going to do? Like you, I know what are they going to, and the one guy was showing me, I don't know. I go talk about it. I haven't shared this yet. Um, cause I've been being so coy. One guy shared me the archeology, the archeology, the

pinch being so coy. One guy shared me the architectural renderings for one of his underground bunker facilities. And in it, there was this indoor fake sunlight, sunlit heated swimming pool. And I was looking at it and I was going, man, you know, I've got a neighbor who's got a heated swimming pool and breaks down a lot.

He's always calling in for parts and stuff. How do you plan to get replacement parts for that heated swimming pool? Right. And he makes a little note on his pad. And I'm sure it's like you're like, get, figure out replacement parts for a pool. It's like, dude, you're fucking insane.

Right. You, you're putting it heated. You haven't, you're the one who's planning for the apocalypse and you're building a pool and you're not even considering how you're going to get like replacement filters and what about when the pump breaks and it's like, it doesn't, this is not going to work.

This is not going to work. You can hold out, you know, the Mormons, God bless them. They don't have a year's supply of food in their basement. That's resilience. They're not thinking apocalypse. Some of them, maybe they are, but, but a year of

food or six months of food is very different. That's just like, we're going to be a resilient community that can withstand really big bad things like a flood or a tornado or a plague or something that happens. We're going to be resilient. But to think that you're going to somehow outlast the apocalypse, you're going to do it alone, you

know, and each of their plans, whether it's a bunker or an island or a super yacht or getting off the planet, I mean, my billionaires weren't rich enough to get off the planet. One of them said, maybe I could get a seat on Richard Branson's, but he said, we're low level, we're low level billionaires. Oh right.

Yeah. That sucks. That sucks. Terraform, but, but you talk to any scientist and I promise you it's, it's way, way easier to terraform even an apocalyptically devastated earth than it is to terraform Venus. I mean, this, that, that, that is the, that to me is

the most ironic aspect of it. It's like, okay, what we'll do, even though we have a functioning planet is just try to start another planet so that we don't have to deal with all, because I think like, first of all, I'm Matt, this, I imagine that it's not all sinister for them. I mean, I do know that like Musk has said that, you know, this shit isn't going to last.

Like it's a matter of time. I mean, all of this good damage we're doing to the planet, all that aside, just the planet is poked with meteor impacts. This thing gets reset all the time just by chaos itself. Yeah. So the, the, to, to, if the goal is for our species

to not just be one of the potentially infinite number of species that rolled the dice, didn't work out, you know, we're just seeing like a quasar with the, what's it called, the new, the James Webb telescope. Who knows? There were probably some wonderful people living in the vicinity of that thing at some point.

It didn't work out. The idea is let's go galactic, let's spread out through the galaxy, regardless of the inconvenience of trying to terraform Mars or Venus or wherever it's still as far as like what a, it's what a species should do. It's what we do. It's not just like, fuck these poor people.

Let's leave. It's time to split. It's time to do a French exit to another planet. It's like, this is, this is our, our birthright as exploring creatures. So I don't think it, it's all sinister, but that, you know, but, but wrapped up in it is the, you know, I've quite often thought, okay, let's just

imagine it happens. We get to Mars. We, or we get to the, those craters in the moon that are apparently like 70 or 60 degrees. We get our hydroponic chambers going. We get the safe space. It's working. We got 50 years of heated swimming pool supplies.

We can fix our heated swimming pools for 50 years. What happens when the Epstein of the group is like, all right, so you're going to go into breeding pod A. You're going in breeding pod B. You're like, wait, what? I, wait, no, you didn't say anything about the breeding pods. And it's like, well, whoops, you're already here.

You can't leave. Like fascism and all of it's like, all the horrors of fascism become so much easier with a diminished population. You know what I mean? We're talking Jonestown on the moon, Jonestown on Mars, where it's, you know, and what culturally does happen to a group of people when they're off world.

America is what some crazy pilgrims came on some ships. Fuck. Look what they did. We're free. Holy shit. That's scary. That's so scary. Yeah.

But the funny thing is they do, a lot of them have good intent. Like, so, you know, you take some evil tech bro mastermind guy and he goes to Burning Man and does ayahuasca with some high priced shaman. And then he like sees the light. Oh my God. I've been hurting the planet and I've got to change my

ways. I'm going to come back. Now I, now I have the plan for how to save the whole world. So they, they have the same sort of narcissistic personality disorder driven drive to, you know, to solve the world's problems with their new stack, with their new wonderful techno solution, rather than

coming back as I always have with humility of like, oh my God, I have no idea what's going on here. I'm just a leaf and a gale of this giant system. They come back. They, maybe they have that, but they, they, they come back doing the same thing. And in the end they justify, well, you know, with my company, Facebook, what I'm actually doing is kind of

good for fostering the new human, you know, and they end up doing the same thing they were doing, they were doing before, but, but Musk, you know, God bless him. Those cars, he did, I don't know if end to end, you know, if, from production to destruction, if a Tesla car really is that much better, you know, for the environment, given all you have to do for it. But let's say that it is, and he's done good and

reduced energy and all that, you know, when he bought like a billion dollars of Bitcoin for Tesla, he undid like 20 years worth of Teslas, just energy wise, just in that action. From the Bitcoin. Yeah. Well, but, you know, if you're looking for a currency in your moon crater to like pay somebody to do the

pool repair, it's not going to be the U.S. dollar. It's probably going to be cryptocurrency. I mean, wrapped up in this idea of asteroid mining, creating some colonies wherever is, they're going to need a currency and I think blockchain currency to them probably seems like one of the most, what are you going to, I mean, what are you going to do?

Moon rocks? What are you going to trade up there? Like what are you going to trade? You're going to do crypto probably. I mean, that's, I don't have, I don't even know. Maybe if you got to have capitalism up there, you know, if you still, and that's the thing, it's the possibility of imagination.

All of these tools are just like digital copies of what we have already fucking up the world. It's like, no, if you're going to have digital and create, let's create something different. Let's do a commons based economy rather than an extraction based economy. You know, what if, you know, what if we don't need to invest in currency?

I mean, you look at Bitcoin, it's like, here we are. Let's burn a significant amount of the planet as a way of proving our devotion to a coin. Yeah. No, it's, you know what it is? What do they call those potlatches? You know what a potlatch, it's a digital potlatch. It's like, you know, except for the potlatch is what

you gained from it was status. With the Bitcoin, what you're getting is some quantification of energy burned via the time it takes to get a new Bitcoin into existence. Yeah. But it's a potlatch. I mean, it's a very sophisticated, you're not like throwing your whatever, your furniture in the fire,

your cows or whatever, but still to some degree, I get that critique of Bitcoin. Here's another thing that you have really like just conversations with you are life changing in the best way possible and that they illuminate something. And the other thing that you've illuminated all the critique of billionaires aside, I think we have fully potlatched the billionaires in the first 30 minutes of this.

Okay. So I think that aside from like environmental impact and the damage that that has caused, there's another more subtle damage that you have illuminated for a lot of people, which is the rescue fantasy that via just the existence of these people propagating a notion that at some point in one of their laboratories or at some point, you know, in wherever they're doing whatever

work they're doing, their chocolate factories, there is going to be an answer, the fix upstream. We're going to fix it. We're going to fix disease. We're going to, we're going to fix everything. What that does inadvertently and maybe for some people a very subtle way is it takes the onus off of the individual.

Just what you're saying. If you have with it, you know, I'm God, I'm listening to this great audiobook endurance about Shackleton and oh, it's so good. These people are screwed. They're trapped. They're there on these like shit islands surrounded by ice.

And at one point, just one of the journal entries is, you know, we have to, it's not helping us anymore to think that we're getting out of here. And that, that, that moment's really important. Isn't it? That's an important moment because if you, if you think you have some safety net, whether it's a backup plan in your own, like someone's going to come and help you or

whether it's like, you know, billionaires are going to save the planet, then it, you can kind of get away with some pretty like intense shit in your own life. You know, you can like, you don't have to feel quite so bad about this or that or this thing because it's coming. Help is coming. And so I think that's the shadow of this thought, this utopian, I don't know, new world religion or whatever you

want to call it. That it's given people the impression that somebody else is doing the work for them and they just need to wait. Yeah. You wanted to go on a nice picnic with your lover, but now you find yourself looking at them wondering, are they actually a demon pretending to be human? And the reason you're thinking that is because you thought

you would take a small dose of an edible THC gummy, but it wasn't a small dose. You got the shishito pepper effect, as they call it, and you did a mega dose and now you're in hell. You've got to act like everything's cool because you don't want to mess this up. This doesn't have to happen. You don't have to go through that thing that I have gone

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order. Links can be found at DuncanTrussell.com, but again, that's microdose.com code Duncan. Thank you, microdose. I need some more, please. I love you guys. Thank you. It's given people the impression that somebody else is doing the

work for them and they just need to wait because it's coming. That's to me. A gift you might be giving some people, even though it's a painful gift, is forget that. It might not be coming. The help isn't coming. There's no fix. It's not going to get fixed in the way you think it is.

That means that now you have to start making your own plans. Is that a fair analysis of what you did? Yeah, it is. I don't know that I go with the same conclusion, but definitely part of the disillusionment is the wealthiest, most powerful, smartest tech dudes are running. They're not solving. They're running.

They believe the goose is cooked. Does that mean that it's up to us as individuals? I don't know. That's sort of like the inconvenient truth sort of thing of like, okay, now it's on you. I think it's on us as a collective. That's what I was trying to tell the billionaire guys was look, that's not, what you're doing is not the way to survive.

And not the way to have a happy life. There is a way to survive. Stop running. Stop running. Don't go meta on everybody. Don't rise up. Join us. Join us.

And we all get to make it. But yeah, I think you're right that if you stop looking for whatever that, the gold ring, the thing, what are you going to hit to get the, to get, again, you know, they've been running businesses. They've been taught from the time they were 19 that the object of the game is to get to your exit strategy, your exit, your deliverance, your, you leave them holding the bag and you take the money and run.

Right. You know, there's no exit strategy. That's the thing. There is none. No way out. No, there's no, you know, and if you, if you get so addicted to it, I mean, that's why these guys love Marvel movies and stuff. They're end game.

They, they, they, they are living at this giant scale that requires an end game. Otherwise, how do you justify all the shit that you've done unless there's an end game? You need at least, you know, even in our own lives, COVID helped us justify, you know, I felt, I had Amazon Prime. I felt bad about it, but I had it now. COVID.

Oh, thank God I've got Amazon Prime. Right. Thank God I got fresh direct. Cause I don't, it's like, there's a reason. So the worst things get the happier these guys are because the more they can justify having a yacht with a service yacht to, you know, follow around your yacht or your private island or your home.

Oh, I'm so glad we have the home on the Hamptons because, you know, Murray was able to do his work. The children could get private tutoring. I was able to do my, my skeet ball or whatever. You know, I was listening. Give me pickleball. They're all into pickleball now. Pickleball.

Yeah. Pickleball. Oh my God. It's, it's, uh, it's like, um, what is it? Like, you know, uh, something that's been tossed around in relation to COVID, like a term that became popular was, uh, mass psych, mass hysteria, mass psychosis, mass psychosis. And, you know, in some, to some degree, I agree.

I think you could expect from the pressure of a global pandemic for there to be some form of, um, uh, collective mental illness that appeared just from being stuck in your house for so long. Um, but I think what you're talking about is an unacknowledged form of mass psychosis, which is the finish line, the dream of the finish line. Once you cross that finish line, whatever it may be, and you are, that is when the, the fires of your suffering will be

quenched by the sweet heated waters of your indoor pool. Like once you hit that pool for the first time, all the stress, all the trauma, all the rotten things you might have had to do to get that heated pool. It's just going to wash it away. A capitalist baptism and you are going to feel good again. Right. Not going to have to worry about getting canceled.

It's not going to, errant tweets, nothing. It's all good. It's all good. It's going to get quiet. And, and, and that because you know this and I know this and I think we don't just know it theoretically. I mean, I know you have had massive success in your life. You are a globally respected intellectual.

You're an incredible writer. So you have experienced crossing that finish line. You're, you're crossing it right now with your book. Would it be dishonest to, I mean, haven't you experienced a little bit of like joy or right ecstasy or a remission of whatever your own personal struggles might be in the, in the light of your success? Yes and no.

I mean, it was funny. I remember I interviewed David Lynch when I was like 22 years old for some little magazine, you know, and I kept asking, I said, because I was going to film school and wanting to, you know, be him. I'm like, what is it like on the other side? What is it like to have made it? Yeah.

I mean, he made it. And this was like just when he was like quitting the, the, the Dune movie or whatever. And he wasn't feeling so good. And he was like, dog, you got to understand. There's no other side. You never make it. There's no, there's isn't, there is no thing.

There's no inside and outside. You're always struggling. You're always this. It's just sometimes with more money or bigger budgets. And there is no, there is no place, you know. And if you think you've made it, then you're fooling yourself. But if you think you've not made it, you're fooling yourself too. We've all made it.

You're, you're, you just being born into this dimension means you made it, honey. You made it. Mr. Rogers tried to tell us, right? You're okay just the way you are. This is it. You did it. You are, you are a fucking king.

You know, and these guys though, these guys who have also made it, right? These billionaires, they're still seeking. They keep talking about, they want to be self sovereign. I want self sovereignty. What the fuck is self sovereignty? I'm going to be king of myself. I'm going to be distant from me.

You know, I'm going to be so important that I'm my own king. But it's like, no, you got to have a slave of some kind. You got to have a subject. So you're, you're, you, you, it's like, what, what is that? You know, what there, it's, it's a, it is a form of, of insanity. But yeah. The one thing I will say is that that's a little unfair of me is like, I've gotten to have book success.

I've gotten to have some money and a car and I've gotten to stand in front of a group of people and have my ego stroked and whatever. And now I'm telling everybody, just chill out, be happy with your neighbors and the love and the that. Um, but I will tell you the, the, as you know, the, the joy of having my nude baby on my chest when she was six months old. Oh my God. There's nothing, nothing, nothing that compares.

No. With that, the, the, the joy of, of the, the old woman in my town with this little dog who I help her get out of her, out of her, her vestibule sometimes in the morning, cause the dog and the leash and the thing she can't quite, it's, that's the, that's the richest joy of my life. Richer than standing in front of the people and seeing all their big wide eyes, loving what I'm got. If anything, when I'm in front of a group of a thousand people, part of

me is thinking, yeah, but you know, you each have, I appreciate that you're, you're, you're looking at it in me, but you each have it. You each have the same, the same thing. It's, it's, it makes the good thing about it is it makes me, it makes me humble, you know, and that's the thing that they're missing. Even the good ones, you know, I go to these things, I get invited to them like, you know, the, the conference for the new humanity or the next goodness of the globe.

And, you know, I see these people like investment bankers and, and elites, you know, finally doing yoga or something and realizing, oh my gosh, the, the climate really is imperiled or, oh, our economy really is built on a faulty and unfair structure. And then they think, well, we need to be the leaders of the next economy. We are the leader. And I'm like, you've been, you've been aware of this problem for 30

minutes. Your entire life experience has been spent as a financial advisor or a brand manager or a tech investor. And now, now 30 minutes into your new awakened self, you're ready to lead the revolution. And then I'm like, have you heard of extinction rebellion or sunshine? No, I haven't heard of extinction rebellion.

Well, you should join. Well, if they're so good, then why haven't I heard of them? Wow. Dude. Yeah. Right. That's, there you go. That's about, and, and these are the well-meaning ones, right?

Right. These are the well-meaning ones who've been so used to being the leader of everything they do that they can't just follow, you know, and in environment, in climate, in politics. I'm, I'm a follower. I'm a leader in understanding certain things about the way technologies create environments, the way digital technology has created this escapist mindset, partly because everything digital is

kind of one level removed, one symbolic level, everything's meta. So I'm looking at how the guys who are, are, are addicted to these technologies and making money off them, how they're trying to go meta on us, on our world, on reality and escape. And I'm fine for that. But in terms of, of, of climate, I'm going to extinction. But in terms of race, I'm talking to Alicia Garza. I'm the baby.

Right. I'm the baby. I'm the follower. Just trying to, to, to live as good a life as I can. Right. It's like you can't apply the whatever method or mindset that got you into a place of being peak consumer to try to like save the planet.

It's not going to work. And part of that mindset is to imagine that you automatically understand everything that you automatically know. That's part of the psychosis. I mean, it, it, and I do think it's fair to call it a, a, a, some form of delude, like delusion, which, and, and which is, you know, and the problem, I'm, you know, the problem when you are someone who is like, you know, you're, when you see people like

posting that they can afford groceries, you're not posting that you're getting, you're, you know, about your groceries. You can afford groceries. Inflation isn't fucking you. The pain at the pump isn't fucking you. These people are getting fucked by that. So, you know, to, to say out loud, something that's been said in a myriad of forms throughout recorded history, which is, look,

it doesn't work, but to say it from the place where it seemingly is working, it would be easy to think, yeah, it's easy for you to say, isn't it? It's easy for you to say you're already there. It's easy for you to say that. But man, I, my kids, they, I can't get formula for my fucking kids. Well, you know, so, but, so to me, that's where that's the

perplexing problem of talking about some of these things is because if you were talking about them experientially, if you're saying, look, at night, I wake up in the middle of the night with the identical anxiety I had before I was sleeping in this nice house, nothing, this house is not helping. This money does not seem to be really doing much for some deeper problem in me that, and, and, and, and, and I fell for it. And I've been like, you know, I work my ass off.

I get the grind thing. I listen to David Goggins. I, you know what I mean? I, I've tried, but it's, it's, it's not really fixing the problem. I mean, that's to me the essence of it. Like as above so below the tech billionaires, they have the fantasy, okay, we'll burrow in the bunker.

That's when we'll find, we'll, we'll do game B, all control out delete, then that's when this thing inside of us is going to feel a little better. I'm for a lot of people that the version of that is I'm going to get a raise or I'm going to get my own business and the business is going to take off or I'm going to become a famous DJ or my Instagram followers are going to exponentially, they're going to go up exponentially.

And then somehow through that fame, I'm going to, this shit feeling is going to go away. But dammit man, when we're talking about it, we're talking about it from a place where I think some people, I mean, I would love to have your mind. I would love to have your intelligence. I would love to have your ability to parse information and to articulate it in such a clear and somehow optimistic way.

I would love that man. But so I guess I'm just saying, shit, how do you transmit to the world what to me is like the essence of Buddhism, which is there is suffering and you're suffering because you're clinging and once you stop clinging, this suffering will stop. Not once you invest in a company and get a big return. Not once you have an orgy with 17 models, not once you have 17 teenagers in your breeding pod.

You know what I mean? So how do you like, how do what is the way to have this, this thing, this seed idea grow in culture? Because if there is some real way things are going to change, it's got to be from the elimination of this kind of capitalist psychosis thing that we all are. Yeah. I mean, I think that the easiest way is to help people feel

safe, even for a moment at a time. You know, I was looking at a video of Mark Zuckerberg's meta and they're these like virtual characters and they run around and they're like, they have nothing below the waist, right? They're like these torsos and heads floating around. There's no legs. There's no crotch either, but there's no legs.

And I remember my chiropractor, this guy, Mark Philippi, rest his soul. He used to say that, you know, the way you feel safe is put your feet on the ground. If your feet are not on the ground, you can't feel safe. That's the way your body knows you're safe. Right. You know, and you know, so he's like, if you watch a movie,

you know, if you want to get totally sucked into the movie, put your feet up on the chair in front of you and you're no longer grounded, right? Go into the thing. Yeah. But if you want to feel here and safe, put your feet on the ground. And it's something, you know, when I met Ram Dass that he

does, he makes eye contact. Ram Dass. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. But I mean, I was fucking eye contact. It's like, oh my God. But that eye contact is for me, it reminded me of my

experience as a child with Mr. Rogers on TV. I felt safe. I accepted. Just like, you are, you know, that was Ram Dass's biggest message. You are fine. Yeah. Right now.

You are sacred fucking raging. You are, you're it, you're manifesting. You're sad. You're manifesting. You're still, this is it. Yeah. This is it. You know, and to help people get that, you know, because

then when you feel, if you just stand here, it's like, wait a minute, my bank account didn't change. I don't have a hot girlfriend. My car's still broken. I don't know. But I just felt great. What does that mean? It means that my experience, I mean, I don't mean to sound like

S or something, but my experience of life is largely not completely, is largely independent of the things, the circumstances that I've considered to be important. Yes. The conditions on the ground matter. There are people starving. They're bleeding. They're, it's very different than the kind of things that we

worry about. Oh, my podcast didn't get me listeners this week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, or, you know, I mean, the formula is a biggie, but, but, you know, the kinds of worries that we have, certainly that we have are, are luxury worries.

There are, you know, white people worries, whatever you call them. Yeah. But luxury. And I understand, you know, that getting wealthy doesn't make you happy. These people are just as unhappy as billionaires as, you know, we might be as, as 100,000 airs and our friends are as, as, as

not. Or poor people. It's like, it doesn't, um, it's, it's not that. But yeah, I lived a life where I was like, I remember once I get in high school, I could write. Right. Then once I get accepted to college, then I'll be okay. Okay.

Once I graduate, then I can, well, once I get a job, well, once I get a job actually in theater, then it's like, wait a minute, when is that going to stop? Right. You know, and in America, it's like, oh, well, it stops, I guess, with retirement. So then you spend your whole career, where else, what other civilization did this?

You're going to spend your entire career trying to save up enough money so when you can't work anymore, you can support yourself because no one else is going to care about you. Right? Oh my God. What kind of world is that? God. Oh, that is so wild.

It's what a, yeah. But that each one of us then is a billionaire prepper in our own personal lives looking for what is my escape plan for when I can't work anymore. Right. But when the shit hits the fan and I have cancer or old age or senility or whatever it might be. And so if we're each doing that on a micro level, of course the

billionaires are going to do it on a macro level. And that's because we live in a society that is not nurturing, which is why the only solution for both sides of the equation is you start to nurture those around you. Right. And the whole thing disappears. Your compassion comes back. I mean, in the book, I wrote about how extremely wealthy people

lose their empathy. You know, they've done neurological tests on them, that billionaires, it's as if they are brain damaged. Their frontal lobe no longer lights up when they see another person in pain. Holy fuck. They lose their empathic response. I know it's scary, right?

So that's the thing. So the way to undo that, you've got to look at the other. You know, you've got to make eye contact. You've got to be there. You're nurturing your empathy for others is really the only possible solution to these problems. Billion becoming a billionaire causes brain damage. Yes, it causes brain damage.

The studies are cited in the in the book and it's not just like correlation. It's like cause, you know, and I was trying to figure out, you know, why, why that would be and they don't really have have good answers. And I think it's because in our society, winning necessarily means leaving others behind. That's it.

You know, their understanding of winning. You can't run a company where your employees are collapsing from heat exhaustion with that part of your brain that, you know, they've done other studies. I'm sure you're aware of where they've taken Buddhist monks and they've played like sounds like of like shrieking and like horror and things like that to see what are their brains do and they're hearing these things.

And it's the compassion part of their brain lights up. It lights up and because they've trained that. I mean, it's a thing. If really what you're saying is is weirdly validating the notion of meta, the idea that you're not necessarily born perfectly compassionate. It's almost like a muscle that you have to develop. You have to learn how to do it.

You know, people might think feel bad because they don't instantaneously feel compassion for the people around them. But from at least the Buddhist perspective, you have to build that muscle up. So if it's a muscle is the wrong word, obviously, but if it is a thing that can be developed neurologically, then obviously is a thing that could atrophy. Right.

And digital technology really doesn't help with that either. So these guys who've already lost the ability to experience empathy are developing the platforms on which human beings are now socializing and interacting. And digital technology, we've spoken about this before, but, you know, and I can see you through this interface, but I can't really see if your pupils are getting larger or smaller. I can't see the micro-motions of your head.

Right. I can't see if our breathing rates are sinking up. So the mirror neurons in my brain are not going to fire. No matter how much you agree with me, no matter how sympathetic you are, the oxytocin is not going to go through my bloodstream. I'm going to hear you say, yes, Douglas, I get that. I agree with you, but my body is going to say, I don't know if he agrees with you.

I'm not getting the, you know, painstakingly evolved social cues of agreement. And that's going to engender distrust. So the more you say you agree with me, the less my body is going to trust you. And then the less empathy I'm going to have for everybody else in my world. Good.

God. Exactly. So again, we're just little creatures. No matter how much we know. I mean, I try to keep reminding myself, yeah, Duncan, friend, friend. He's really a friend. Yes, friend.

But because I need to tell my body that, but when I'm talking about how do you feel good and safe? How do we undo this? Well, you got to have your feet on the ground and you got to have eye contact and with other humans and breathing space. You've got to get intimate. I mean, that's, that's the great conspiracy. I love the word conspiracy, the great cause conspire means

literally to breathe together conspire. You know, the great conspiracy of humans that leads to that rapport and social engagement and empathy that we need to make it through this seeming apocalypse. You know, it's just right there. It's right next door. It's, it's right. Everybody.

They're, they're all, they're so many. Each person you pass is another opportunity to juice it up to, you know, to, to experience that soft, squishy wonder that is being human. And the more you do that, then honestly, even if we're on the Titanic and it's going down, even if we are, then what? Get the, get out the band. Get out the band.

I'm going to, I'm going to play music. Get out the band. I'm going to love, I'm going to hold hands when we go down. I'm going to look in your eyes. I'm going to, I mean, let's, let's do it. Let's do it lovingly. You know? Oh my God.

You are like a hospice nurse for the apocalypse, Douglas. It is, it's so beautiful. You're, you're, you're also surgically devastating some of the last tendrils of, you're just amputating these tendrils of technological hope. I had, I mean, truly, like if you, you know, one of the, like with all of this shit, I still think, well, you know what? At least via this technology, I can connect with people all

around the planet and talk to them. But you, what you're pointing out is okay, but whatever those parts of your brain that have developed, whatever sensory apparatus has developed to pick up the pheromones, the microsignals, all those things you can't see, those are going to atrophy. They're going to atrophy everywhere. Everyone's going to lose that capacity over time.

And we are going to become something different and something less squishy as you put it. And the less squishy, the more we're going to feel okay, squishing others. And then, and then that is what creates this feedback loop, a perfect cultural storm for acceleration, as you say. And it's not just tech, you know, I mean, I'm not, I'm really genuinely not anti-tech.

These devices are amazing. They do wonderful thing. Look what we're doing here. I just got, you know, I got an advance that he bought this book for a movie already. I got an advance and I'm like, fuck it. I'm getting title, right? So I'm paying $19.99 a month for title.

It's like high def, blah, blah, blah audio that goes through this thing and through my, my app and a wire. And it's like through my old stereo speakers that I still have from 1979 when I was in high school. And it's like, oh my God, the remaster doors and stuff. What have they done there? It's amazing, right? These are miracles.

These are miracles to listen to the doors on title on these speakers in that. It's a miracle. And I don't, I don't deny any of that. But at the same time, the people making these technologies, they believe that the real world is coming apart. And they know that they are the cause and they mean to escape by any means necessary and think that our last best

hope, if anything, is to double down on the tech. And that's, and that's not it. We have to accept, yes, we have these technological miracles that allow us to do all sorts of things like listen to the doors 50 years after they recorded it in better fidelity than people had at that moment. But the real joy is going down the block where there are six kids in a garage band.

I mean, you must hear, these kids are so good, the stuff they're doing and you see them making the music and you're there, you're playing with them. Or it's like, yes, it's not to get so seduced into this simulacra in the simulation, which is so beautiful. It's a wonderful thing not to get so seduced by it, especially if we're resorting to it because we're actually afraid of other people, you know, and it's hard.

We got to go out there and do it. I get more notes. I'm going to start teaching again on Monday. I get more notes every year, first day of class from kids from their psychiatrist saying, please excuse Johnny from class participation. He's got social anxiety and, you know, and I'm thinking, man, what did this kid do K through 12?

What did they do? They put him on a frigging iPad, probably. And he got the miracle of calculus on an iPad, but he didn't get, he didn't learn how to be with people. Holy shit. Do you, we've done an hour and seven minutes. Do you have another 10 minutes? Sure, sure.

Okay. I have infinite time. Okay. Great. You, you've stirred up a lot of stuff for me. I want to mention something I read about and hear your thoughts on it because it is something that's been taken up a lot of processing power in my brain just because, and it

fits in with the conversation, I think. Have you heard about, apparently there was some demo of this new Amazon Alexa technology. They showed, I don't know if you heard about this, the mother is with a kid and the kid is like, I wish Nana Karimia story Nana's past and the mother's like, she can Alexa have Nana read where the wild things are or whatever some kid story deep fake of Nana's voice.

Yeah. Comes through the Alexa. Nana is now has gone from being this beautiful elderly woman who theoretically cooks you cookies to turning into some kind of like a technological speaker, a monolith that is now like sounds like her reading the story, but she's dead. And to this, to me, of all, you know, all the emerging

technologies fills me with a kind of just uneasiness, a sense of like, you know, a book of revelations or the notion of while the dead will rise again at the end of time. And, you know, we all think, oh, it's zombies. They're talking about zombies, but it's like, no, no, no, no, they're talking about something maybe worse than zombies, at least a zombie. It's the shambling husk of your Nana.

This is your Nana turned into a black pillar in the kitchen. That's like sounds like Nana, but it's you is not Nana. What are your thoughts on the potential of AI? Bringing back simulated versions of those who have left us. I think we forget that the telephone and the phonograph and I think even the telegraph were all originally invented as ways of communicating with the dead. What?

Yeah. That's what they were for. And they ended up being better for other things. How? How was the plan? I believe you always communicate that you talked to the dead that somehow they'd be in that they'd have radio waves. You know, the same like SETI, you know, we have SETI that

we're sending radio waves out into space thinking that aliens can come talk to us. So instead of aliens, it was they didn't know about aliens back then because they didn't have spaceships. So we thought about it more as the dead that we would communicate with them somehow. Wow. And so it's not surprising to me that, you know, now we

were trying to use AI as a way of recreating the dead. The concern for me is not how good those things will get, but how bad we might get at distinguishing between real people and what are essentially non-player characters in this video game that we're moving into. And I mean, to Tibetan Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhists bring children to deaths regularly as they're growing up. So they understand what death is and it becomes part of

their experience. You know, now we're in a society that's figuring out not just how to hide death from young people, but how to simulate non-death for them. And I think, I mean, I get it wanting to hear it read in Nana's voice, but I remember a guy named Jeremy Balanson at Stanford did experiments with kids in virtual reality, like six and seven-year-olds.

And half the kids, they took to the aquarium and let them swim with whales. And half the kids, they had swim with whales in virtual reality. Oh, boy. Well, that's an unlucky kid. Two months later, the kids who swam in virtual reality thought they really did it. And they had indistinguishable, expressed experience.

They didn't know it wasn't real. Because the brain doesn't know how to tag memories as real or simulated. There's just memory, right? It's really hard. That's why sometimes you don't know if you dreamed it or if it was real. It was like, wait a minute.

Did that happen? Because your brain doesn't know how to tag. There's no tag. There's no tag for, oh, simulated. We did not evolve with VR. So we don't know how to tag a memory that we've had in there that seemed real. So I don't know how good it is for a kid to have that.

I don't mind. Like when you throw in a voice of somebody in your GPS. Oh, you could have a movie star reading your GPS to you. And AIs can then do the deep fake of it. And I do think we're going to be increasingly encountering deep fakes. I'm talking to people who are at the companies that are really doing these simulations.

They just did one on America's Got Talent. And they have a Tom Cruise one and things that have really made people that have been turing test indistinguishable for people between that and real life. And it's fine on a screen, but it's not here. I mean, I guess what it is, is the more mediated our experience of one another becomes, the easier it will be for an AI to take the place of one of us.

And the more incarnate we are, the sillier anything like that would seem. Douglas, I could talk to you. I hope we end up in a bunker together. I bet all these billionaires are like, you know what? This is how you become a billionaire. Just put it out there like, listen, give me the advance now. Highest bidder.

I will hang out with you in your bunker. But I'll tell you this though. We are already in the bunker. This is it. This is the bunker. It's a beautiful bunker and it's called Earth. And it's got a limited time horizon because it's called death. We are going to die, but I'm so fucking glad I get to spend some

of my bunker time with Duncan Trussell in the family. Thank you, Douglas. You would be smelling friend pheromone. Trust me on that. Douglas, rush cough. I can't wait. You've your book survival. The richest escape fantasies.

The tech billionaires. That's coming out. What is that? September 6th. Exactly. That's coming out September 6th. Folks can get advanced copies. I'm sure if they want to like, oh, yeah, get the get the ball

pre roll. Yeah. Yeah. Do it. Get the advanced copies. I've heard that makes some weird difference in the publishing algorithm. Algorithms love it.

And we're live for the algorithm. Feed the algorithm. Get that heated bull in the bunker. Douglas, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. This conversation and thank you. I'm thrilled that you are existing in the bunker with me. And I hope you'll come back on the show.

Thank you. Thank you for what you do. Thank you for your music and your love and your funnies. Thank you, Douglas. Okay, cool. Thank you. That was Douglas Rushkoff, everybody. Remember, his book is on Amazon.

Buy it now. It's so good. He's such a great writer. Such a genius. Thanks to all our sponsors. And thank you for listening. I will see you later on in this week with another spectacular episode of the DTFH.

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