139. Douglas Rushkoff
On surviving the tech billionaires & embodying the over-culture
Douglas Rushkoff is the Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics who MIT named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals.” He also hosts the podcast I listen to most, called Team Human. And he’s the best-selling author of 20 books, including the new one, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. The publisher’s blurb reads: ‘We always knew but now we *know*. The tech elite mean to leave us all behind. In Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, and the Metaverse.’
“If we are the over-culture and want to declare we’re the over-culture, which I don’t mind doing, to say the majority of us believe in a sustainable, happy, loving society of mutual aid. If that’s true, then we’ve got to learn the ‘yes and’, we’ve got to learn that Maori welcome for those who really only partially get it, because at least partially they do.”
A big early influence on me, Frances Moore Lappé, said: “Beyond eye-opening, this book is eye-popping. A master story-teller, Rushkoff brings to life perhaps the greatest challenge of our time, The Mindset that drives so much destructive behaviour, and blinds us to solutions beyond new technology and consumption. A must read.”
This is a profound and fun journey, firstly into the Mindset, then back out again. Where the billionaire preppers and transhumanists are ultimately dead ending, the current of life is flowing elsewhere.
0.00 Introduction
3.30 The Mindset!
19.30 Origins of The Mindset
33.00 Getting caught up in The Mindset while trying to ‘fix it’ (while exploring family stories and the wonders of epigenetics)
42.30 Douglas’ encounter with the Maori and our respective exchanges with Tyson Yunkaporta
53.30 ‘Human’ economies and platforms
61.00 If we’re the over-culture now …
66.00 A transformative tale in Douglas’ life before choosing to start a family
73.00 Music …
This conversation was recorded online with Douglas at home in New York City on 27 September 2022 (Australian time).
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Please note this transcript isn’t perfect, but hopefully serves to provide greater access to these conversations for those who need or like to read.
SPEAKERS
Anthony James (host), Douglas Rushkoff
Anthony 00:00
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Douglas 00:45
If we are the over culture and want to declare we're the over culture, which I don't mind doing, to say the majority of us believe in a sustainable, happy loving society of mutual aid. If that's true, then we've got to learn the 'yes and', we've got to learn that Maori welcome for those who really only partially get it, because at least partially they do.
Anthony 01:16
G'day my name is Anthony James. This is The RegenNarration and that was Douglas Rushkoff. He's the professor of Media theory and digital economics who MIT named one of the world's 10 Most Influential intellectuals. He also hosts the podcast I listen to most called Team Human. And he's the best selling author of 20 books, including the new one Survival of the Richest: Escape fantasies of the tech billionaires. The publisher's blurb reads, we always knew but now we know! The tech elite mean to leave us all behind. In survival of the richest Rushkoff traces the origins of the mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, Island bunkers, and the metaverse. A big early influence on me, Frances Moore Lappe, said, 'beyond eye opening, this book is eye popping. A master storyteller, Rushkoff brings to life perhaps the greatest challenge of our time, the mindset that drives so much destructive behavior, and blinds us to solutions beyond new technology and consumption. A must read.' When I used to run public dialogue events for 10 years or so, I'd commonly frame a conundrum to go at. Like if 50 years of environmental law hasn't stopped us destroying the environment, what makes us think more laws will? Or if technology and exponential growth have got us into this mess, what makes us think more tech and growth is the way out of it? Like those questions, this book is no dead end. It's an opening. Where the billionaire preppers are ultimately dead ending, the current of life flows in a different direction. So settle in, as Douglas joins us late evening in New York for a profound and fun journey. Firstly into the mindset, then back out again. Hopefully feeling more equipped to choose our own way together in a living world. Here's Douglas.
Douglas 03:34
Hello.
Anthony 03:34
How are you going?
Douglas 03:35
How am I going? I'm going okay. I'm tired.
Anthony 03:39
Are ya?
Douglas 03:39
Yeah I'm doing media like, all day, every day. It's so funny. I'll do these giant media things like Guardian of London and the Sunday thing did this giant spread about the book, you know, and they excerpted like 4000 words, and had all these pictures and stuff. And I get all these emails and stuff from people saying, Oh, that was fascinating. Have you ever considered writing more about that? You know, and I'm like, man, they're like, they're so bad at letting the world know that this is actually I mean, I guess it's against their interests. To make it really obvious that this is from a book. I can think the publication's part of them, even if it's not conscious, they want it to look like this is their material. Like someone wrote an article? Not. We just took this out of the person's book. Yeah
Anthony 04:34
That's not helpful
Douglas 04:36
Well not helpful for sales. It's helpful for getting the ideas out there, some of them, but what it does is it puts a lot of focus. I'm just writing about this a lot of focus on the figure and not enough on the ground. So there's like the hook of yeah, these guys are preparing for doomsday. Oh, my God, Rushkoff spoke to these billionaires. They're really building bunkers and worried about maintaining control their guards. And it's like, yeah, now do we want to talk about how do people get there? How does technology and science and capitalism lead us? And we all have our inner billionaire running away from these things. And no, oh, no, I want to know how many square feet is the biggest burger you've ever seen? Or how do they plan to fight against these germs? Or if Jeff Bezos goes to Mars, how will he put you know, get water and oxygen and so I'm supposed to now be, I'm supposed to be like, most in most of the even radio and podcast interviews I've done, have been treating me like, I'm a bunker expert. It's like, just like the billionaires did. It's like, Dude, I knew nothing about I know nothing about this. I'm the guy who's gonna when they're coming, I'm gonna take cyanide, right? Or whatever, something painless. I'm not going to do the zombie apocalypse. I'm jumping off the thing before I get bit, you know
Anthony 06:02
Talk about missing the point. So it's great that we took off there, Douglas, because having noted that you'd already been saying words to this effect in Team Human the podcast, that I thought, well, we're clearly not going to fall into the same trap. In fact, we're going to lay it down straight away what we're talking about Chapter One of the book in a sense, and let it be chapter one of this podcast.
Douglas 06:24
Yeah,
Anthony 06:24
that it's actually it's not about the bunkers at all, that they're sort of the signifiers to literally what you have now. I mean, we often will talk in terms like worldview or mindset, but you've sort of archetyped The mindset
Douglas 06:38
yeah
Anthony 06:39
in the title of the chapter at the urging of your your publisher, I believe, but let's lay it down straight away what you've observed.
Douglas 06:45
Well, there's people who believe that with enough money and technology, they can escape the disasters they're creating with their money and technology. The mindset is, you know, Cory Doctorow, another one of us. He just wrote this article about Epson printers, and how he studied this model of Epson printer that bricks itself after a certain number of pages, it just stops working. And he spoke to the company and did all this research. And they say that there's a little sponge somewhere in the printer that slowly fills with like the extra dust. And that after a certain number of pages, that sponge might be all filled this teeny little sponge. So we brick the whole printer. So you have to throw it away and get another one, rather than letting you buy a two cent sponge and replace that little piece there. And what I think about is the dude at the company, right? They're certainly old enough to have seen an inconvenient truth when they were in college and Al Gore talking about climate change. They know, Greta, they know it's right, right. They're educated. They know. They know the shits hitting the fan. But they're making a calculation that yes, we're going to throw more printers on toxic waste dumps. And yes, we're going to send more enslaved children into mines to get the rare earth metals to make a new printer. But I'm gonna make enough extra margin by getting people to buy more printers earlier and sooner, that I'll have enough money to shield myself or to stay one more step ahead of the devastation of the climate of all that stuff. And what I'm trying to say is that, that that doesn't work. I mean, not just because there's there's karma in the next life, but karma in this one, everything is, is circular, you can't make a car that drives fast enough to escape from its own exhaust
Anthony 08:49
But it looked like we could for a while, right?
Douglas 08:51
We could
Anthony 08:52
The illusion
Douglas 08:53
industrialism seemed to do that, you know, from Hobbes and the beginnings of colonialism forward. You know, those native americans they're not people they're just shrubs right? And not like we should run over shrubs either but they're just shrubs they won't feel it just Clear them clear them away to you know, build your buildings and spread your civilization because we're conscious - and that mindset is what rules Silicon Valley to this day with you know, Stuart Brand telling the tech bros you know, we're as gods and may as well get good at it. Right so if we're Gods then we are one level above nature and women and humans and all those things. we've gotten meta on them and that's really what the mindset is for me more than anything. We are as Gods we are one level above what's - Peter Thiel saying, you know in business go from zero to one - very digital, right? Go from zero to one, everybody else is at zero. They're all competing down there on the ground, like, you know, horrible little people and we are up, we transcend. And we're up at one. So you aggregate all of that. It's like go from web one to web two, don't be one of the businesses be the website that aggregates all the businesses. And if there's another one that aggregates the businesses then become the aggregator of the aggregators or the aggregator of the aggregator of the aggregators, it's the way financial people talk. It's like, don't buy a company, you buy the stock, no, don't buy the stock, buy the derivative, don't buy the derivative by the derivative of the derivative, no, by the credit default swap. So you can bet against the derivative while you're betting on the derivative. Or Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook stops working - Facebook, which is already going meta on culture by to be a social network - its digital social network - that stops working. Everyone hates that and their subscriptions peak. Now he's going literally meta, that's his next company is meta, one level above, he doesn't even know what it means except running around in a virtual world with no legs, right or no crotch, and no legs. It's this. It's It's craziness. But what it does, is it leads to this kind of sociopathic thinking, I am one level above them. They're just being ruled by their selfish genes. And Richard Dawkins, and real scientists from Cambridge told me it's true. So I can be Jeffrey Epstein, fund these scientists and have a nice Island - back to the bunkers. Nice island with dormitories for 50 Young 14 year old girls who I'm going to impregnate with my super seed, and grow my master race in a, in a kind of cyber utopian eugenic nightmare, of my own making, right? The symbol system, the digital symbol system replaces the reality it's like, not just do they mistake the map for the territory, but they want to migrate to the map and live on the map instead of the territory. Because the territory especially where you are in Australia, territory has bugs and stuff on it, you know, bugs and worms and dirt and women and brown people and indigenous people and legend and history's in the past, and Mommy and obligation and community and all that awful stuff that we built this technology to get away from in the first place. God dammit.
Anthony 12:20
Yes, so I want to go towards where we've sort of understanding this to have derived from but first, let's follow the thread a little more, because it is illuminating. Just how far you have discovered. I was telling someone last night that I was gonna be speaking to you this morning. And the premise of it, what you just outlined, and they said wow, so he had to go and actually research those people. I said, na na, they've been inviting him in, they want him to tell them
Douglas 12:48
Yeah
Anthony 12:48
make it work. So the extent of what you've found, though, that it's not just the conquest. It's the when you say that they're now seeking to leave us behind. You're literally meaning that this is sort of the the ultimate destination or the ultimate exit strategy. You call it in those terms, but the ultimate destination of really this cohort of people is to leave us - talk to that a little bit Douglas, what what have you found the ways that they're conspiring to this end - that I think probably a lot of people, you know, when they use Facebook on a day to day basis wouldn't contemplate - wouldn't know.
Douglas 13:29
Yeah. Well, I mean, in some ways, it's a fantasy that everybody's had, you know, that that sort of Burgess Meredith in that Twilight Zone episode where the world blows up and atomic bomb or whatever it is, and he wants to then just read the rest of his life. But of course, ironically, or tragically, his glasses break, so he's going to be alive there in a blur until he dies. But that's the fantasy. I mean, it. It's hard to talk about without talking about the origins. But but but even without going back. the fantasy is, well as Musk or Thiel would talk about it. It's what they call self sovereignty. You know, they've objectified everything, and everyone else. Everything is an object, women, people, money, the planet and everything, and self sovereignty, the term always confused me, because it's like, so your king of you, right? Self sovereignty means that you are both the subject and object, you are the king and the subject. So you're king of yourself that once you've objectified everything else, you objectify you, right, and that's weird. You go meta on yourself. And that's, that's a weird, that's a weird place to go. And in some ways, I think they're going there because, you know, oddly enough, a lot of these guys their big fear is AI. That's the one thing they're afraid of because they think that AI could go meta on them, you know, so maybe if they go meta on themselves, then they're still just watching over themselves. They'll keep themselves safe, though. Because rather than learn this stuff - because I mean, I met this guy, I was at this thing called FOO camp - friends of O'Reilly. It's a he's a digital publisher who has this kind of fun, elite soiree that I got invited to. And one of the guys one of the there had that Chatham House Rules charter house, I forgot what they call it. So I would say, a guy who is a guy, you would know, who's from one of the social networks, you would know, came up to me and he said, Doug, you know, you write a lot about AI and the problems and the dangers of AI. Aren't you worried that when the AIs are in charge, they're gonna read all the stuff you wrote and know you're one of their enemies and get rid of you or, or make you suffer somehow? And I said that I hadn't really thought about it. I mean, I would hope to maybe stop that from happening with what I'm writing. And then he said, Well, you know, I'm really careful, I make sure that none of my posts, I systematically exclude any mention of AI from any posts that's going to be online or anything they might see. And I said, Well, if you're doing it so systematically, don't you think a future AI with machine learning is smart enough to look at your posts and see that you've systematically withheld your opinion of it from public scrutiny, and they will be able to infer what that means about your deep seated fear of who they are? And he likes stops cold. Oh, man, oh, oh, man.
Anthony 16:47
There's the Steve Jobs moment of don't let your kids use your own devices.
Douglas 16:50
Yeah, exactly. And it's partly because these guys, you know, they're all kind of, they say they're micro dosing, but they're macro dosing, they're on, they're on unsafe levels of psychedelics all the time. And I certainly wouldn't want to be in front of one of their Tesla's unless it's on autopilot. So I think they flip into - a lot of them, the ones who go to Burning Man and have gotten addicted to their, you know, four doses of microdose every day. I think they're just paranoid. I think that they're easily drawn into that, that horror, which is part of why they're prepping so much, but you're right. It's not just prepping to avoid disaster. It's prepping to - like prep school. It's prepping to play out the fantasy of total Dominion being totally alone. I mean, I used to think about it when I was in middle school. What if everyone died, I was the only person in the world and I could walk into any store and take anything I wanted and go into Bleecker Bob's record shop, and every one of those records would be mine, you know?
Anthony 16:50
Totally. Me too.
Douglas 16:52
I think that's how they think. It's like Jeff Bezos. I mean, it's funny - I think about you mentioned him like going up in his in his spaceships, you know, up in Blue Origin in the desert. And I remember watching that on MSNBC, which is kind of our lefty cable news channel here in the States. And I saw the woman as newscaster I usually respect because she's always so critical of the man and corporatism and whatever. She's like, gushing, like she's at a friggin Justin Bieber show or her knees are like shaking. You know, he comes out of there. And I'm thinking, what did this guy really do? What did Jeff Bezos What did he do? He did something himself that we humans were able to do 60 years ago as a group. So if anything, it shows that the individual is 60 years behind the group, you know, what we were celebrating there is that one man has enough money to do what we used to do, which is why he comes out of there saying, Oh, thank you to all the people who made this possible by buying Amazon products over the years - as if it's we, you know, as if it's us going there. It's not - it's like, thanks for giving me all this money, so I could get away from all you little shitheads and build a Mars colony for me and my brother and William Shatner, you know, and good riddance, you you little, you know, to serve man. Another Twilight Zone episode.
Anthony 16:52
Yes, yes. That's right, that episode holds as a great metaphor. Okay, so let's, let's trace some origins.
Douglas 19:24
Yeah.
Anthony 19:29
Because yeah, could have even done that first in that sense. But you mentioned dominion, right as one way to frame it. And I was listening to Ellen Davis, and she's professor in your neck of the woods - a theologian who's worked with Wendell Berry, and studied the Bible in ways that, you know, sort of recognize that the book of Genesis, for example, is all about the fruitfulness of the Earth as a self perpetuating system of fertility and all of that, that that's actually that's Eden or that's even heaven. You know, that sort of archetype that we've sort of lost with this mechanized worldview. But I really tuned in when she said that actually the Hebrew translation of mastery, you know, that it's often taken to say, humans have mastery or dominion over all things. And that that's been license for a lot of this stuff and sort of shaping the mindset for a lot of these people. There's, I mean, there's a scientific line to which you might come back to as well, but there's this religious line as well. And she said, actually, the Hebrew translation of mastery, if you like, is quite complex. And, and she has come to be framing it more like being implored to exercise skilled mastery amongst the creatures, amongst all things, not mastery over all things. I wondered if you - because you've done a lot of study in this area, too. And I wondered if you'd come across that interpretation or, or, or indeed have had your own from those sort of origin texts?
Douglas 20:59
Well, yeah, I mean, Adam and Eve weren't supposed to eat the animals, you know, in Eden. They walked with the animals, but they didn't eat them. And it wasn't until after the flood, right, and the flood happened because people were just really bad, right? They would just go nuts. And God was like, Oh, this, I'm just gonna wipe the slate clean. Control Alt Delete, right? On reality.
Anthony 21:27
The Mindset!
Douglas 21:29
God's allowed to have the mindset, right? He's God! Right?
Anthony 21:33
The Original Mindset!
Douglas 21:34
The original mindset. But God is in a different - God has a different role to play in humanity than humans. But yeah, but that's the thing. So God, God does that. And then after they come out of the boat, or the ark, or whatever it is, God says, basically, okay, you can eat animals. And that's when he makes the kosher laws, you can eat them, but don't like, don't, don't add insult to it. Don't cook a kid in its mother's milk, at least, you know, which is basically saying you can eat animals, but be civil about it. Don't eat something while it's alive. You know, kill it. Don't take off a leg and eat it and let the thing just hobble around, you know, be humane about it. You know, so it was almost like God's compromise. It's like, all right, you guys are just fucking animals. Anyway, you got those incisors? I guess. All right, your tearing teeth, you got some canines there, there's probably some, some meat eater in you that I couldn't get out. Go for it. So there's that. And and, you know, I think a lot about Babel, you know, which is a really good story for our time that you know, Tower of Babel is basically a blockchain, right? We're gonna we're gonna take as many atoms as possible, and convert them into these bits into this thing, it's like, look, you know, Bitcoin is we're going to burn the planet to prove our faith in this digital coin. You know, what, what is that? That's, that's kind of a religion, but it's for a kind of a universal, universal translator. single value system thing, a money for everyone. This is this is the unit of exchange - so we're doing it again, you know, not that Babel was real, necessarily, but those kinds of towers they used to build them, you know, but this the civilization that worships power, you know, the death cults of Egypt that that the Judeo Christian line was meant to counteract. There they are back. But yeah, I would say the Bible is largely about that. And even when there's a king, it's like, it's Samuel in the Bible that people are saying, Samuel, he's like the rabbi, he's like the priest of the people, they don't have a king. And they're like, Dude, we want a king. Everyone else has a king. Israelites. We don't have no king. This sucks, you know? And so Samuel goes to God, he goes, I'm really sorry, I kind of failed you here. You know, I'm trying to be the leader that you said they want a king, they want a king. And God says to Samuel, it's, it's okay. It's alright. Just tell them to pick the tallest guy put a crown on him, which is what they do because the idea is like, and put a crown on him as if that makes him the king is wearing this crown. And they're trying to say that you could be king but it's like King in quotation marks. You're not king over anything. It's just you happen to be the tallest guy there. So they get to call you king. And it was this guy, he sucked at it to so it was terrible, terrible King. Till you got a nice gay guy. Like, like, like David to come in. And, you know, or bi, I guess, or Poly? I don't know what he was. He was everything. But but you know, he did a little bit better, but it was the opposite of what you think of as the patriarchal King Dominion guy.
Anthony 24:49
Yeah. It's so interesting. There's so much in that.
Douglas 24:53
Yeah, well, Bibles rich. I mean it's layered. It's good. It's at least as good as like Finnegans Wake or any of these - Gravity's rainbow. I mean, there's some great works of literature out there that work on a zillion levels at once. But because the Bible is written by so many people over so many fights, it's so condensed, there's a lot of threads in there to really find really great wisdom, it's not just that patriarchal skeleton, which most people think is the main point.
Anthony 25:24
That's the thing. And there was a particular time when you were drawn back to that, as I understand, right, Douglas?
Douglas 25:30
Oh, yeah
Anthony 25:31
To come back to those roots. What? I guess what prompted that, in your journey and led to these insights?
Douglas 25:37
For me, it was, I mean, I'd read a bunch of Torah. And I read it more because I wanted to know, whether I could completely discard the beliefs and, and discard my heritage in order to move on, you know, my family, my great grandfather was hanged in Khishnev for being Jewish, the other side were thrown into gas chambers and stuff and grandmother was attacked - was awful shit. And you can't just then say, Okay, I'm not going to do any Judaism because I'm free. I'm in America, I don't care. I figured at least I should know, what was this line of thought, and I had that urge at the same time that I felt like I was, I was rather alone at the time, in the cyberculture, as being a person who was enthusiastic about the promise of digital technology to socialize people and bring us to truth, but very suspicious of digital technologies' ability to do what it ended up doing, you know, to empower the worst among us, and reduce people to programmable - to programs, which is what they do when they when they embed websites with behavioral economics technologies and social media feeds. And they use everything that we know, both from the Pavlovian side and the Freudian side, you know, to create a Skinner box of unprecedented magnitude. So I was thinking, who's gone through this before, and I realized, you know, the Torah, and Bible were written, in the moment of the Axial Age, when human beings were transitioning from an oral culture to a written culture, it was the last big shift, media shift, you know, and they really, in part, they wrote the 10 commandments as a way of like, Okay, we're gonna go to this other really, this first level of abstraction now, from an oral culture where you communicate with people to this thing, they're going to have a symbol system, and it's going to be there. So let's make a bunch of rules. If we're gonna have a symbol system, and we're gonna use these letters, let's make sure the letters look like fire so that they're kind of transparent, they don't look locked down, they don't, they're not like blocks - let's make sure we're not coveting. Let's understand how possessions work. Because now we're gonna write things down, and people are gonna be owning stuff, we're gonna have contracts, we're gonna have a past, we're gonna have a future because we can write down our history and we can write contracts into the future, how's that going to change our relationship to time and to story and to narrative and to why we're here and all that? So they told these stories and developed all these kinds of laws, if you will, was a way to try to bring the the ethical template of a Bedouin nomadic people who didn't understand property, or staying still or sedentary living, or a whole bunch of stuff. And, and they're going to transition now to this post Axial Age, agricultural, land-owning patriarchal culture. How do you keep the female alive in the patriarchal culture? How do you do this? How do you do that? So Torah and Judaism, although Torah really more, more so than Judaism, which is I look at as a much later phenomenon than this wonderful set of of stories and language. What did they figure out? And how could I apply that to what we're doing now - to the transition we're in now? And then and I was reading Torah and realize, oh, this book is important, not because it's a chronicle of history. It's not true because it happened. It's true because it's happening. It's happening right now. You know, I wrote this comic book called Testament which is trying to argue, look, Torah is happening now. And it was before crypto really ever happened. It was it was you know, it was years before Bitcoin but I was writing about this kind of decentralized digital currency that was going to become this global thing. I call it the Globo you know, this, this global thing, but it had it had magical power because people put faith into it, you know, which is sort of what we're doing now by burning. But when you burn for faith, that's black magic. That's like what Hitler was doing. I gotta burn, you know, a couple of million Jewish bodies to get power. If you're burning up planets to prove the value of the currency. That's bad, demonic Bad, bad, bad, no, don't - don't turn atoms into bits. You know, there's atoms they're alive.
Douglas 30:12
Don't you know - it's like a sacrifice to the gods. So anyway, I got interested, I wrote this big comic Testament which looked at a sort of a modern day cyberpunky story, and overlaid that with these biblical stories with the same characters in both to show how it is happening now in all times. And I also tried to show the difference between you know, Chronos, and Kairos, that I talked about, in my book present shock that there are these two Greek notions of time one is time by the clock Kronos. And the other is more human time, this readiness time, which is Kairos. And I was trying to argue that the digital age is trying to put us into Chronos. We're all clock speed this time is money, digital clock, but that digital clocks don't see the space between the ticks, they don't actually see where humans are alive. And AI's don't either they see the ticks, but not the living space or the negative space - or they see the figure but not the ground, the catastrophe, but not the landscape. And the other big thing is this is not meant to be psychedelic, heady talk. What this is meant to be is psychedelic grounding talk, because a lot of my contemporaries are now doing this weird thing. And they're getting really popular, coming up with these metaphors for things and then metaphors for those metaphors and metaphors for those metaphors. They're going all what they call meta modernism, you know, and they have this whole almost quasi fascist, though they would never know it, post Burning Man drive to make sense of things in the weirdest, most disconnected way. You cut yourself off at the neck and try to make sense of the world, that's not gonna work. You make more sense of the world taking your pants off, you know, and feeling what does it feel like on your parts, you know? Which Zuckerberg can't do in the metaverse, poor thing. He can't - there's no gonads in meta.
Anthony 32:17
My eight year old boy's just getting on to this sort of talk in the school ground. And that was the word that was the latest.
Douglas 32:24
Nads? Oh my god. When I was his age, no older. When I was in sixth grade first year of middle school. There's this guy. He was really clever Bob silhouettes. I'm gonna say his name on the air. I haven't seen him 50 years - we had a team you know with two different teams in gym they break you up and you play soccer or whatever. And he named our side the nads so that we could shout go NADs go NADs. It was great. It's the first time I've remembered that in 50 years.
Anthony 32:34
Come to us for the big big scoops.
Douglas 33:02
Exactly.
Anthony 33:03
I'm gonna share that with our young fella. Alright, to come back to some of what you were just talking about Douglas.
Douglas 33:10
The less important stuff.
Anthony 33:09
That's right. What we think is anyway. The maintenance of the abstraction, even when we think we're addressing what we're trying to get away from, but we sort of perpetuate it, coz we're in this realm of abstraction, which I think is one of the reasons your work in general, and this book is so important. Sure the bunkers, or the the planetary colonization, or the transhumanist, you know, upload yourself to the cloud are the manifest, are the acute representations. But you're about this broader thing that sometimes are inner billionaire, yeah, falls into the trap of. So I want to come back to what you just said. That just you know, rips the heart when you say it, you just sort of pass it over. When I hear you talk about that family history of yours. It does remind me of that episode you did with Ellen, another Ellen, Pearlman. Because you talked about your shared family histories in that way. And her story, where she went back to what's Poland now, and the site of all those traumas - where, you know, her family emigrated to the States as well. And you know, she didn't know the people there. But she described how they were sort of coming up to her as she was going about trying to piece things together. People were coming up to her, almost like we hear from Aboriginal people here in Australia, wherever you are, they'll spot you. And they'll come up and they'll say, where you from? And then they'll start placing you in all the kinship structures and stuff. It was a bit like that as I was hearing it, and then she said that the stories they were telling her were the nightmares she'd been having. But she wasn't there,
Douglas 33:17
right. Yeah, but of course, it's in her ah - we all know the epigenetic, whatever. It's all in her.
Anthony 34:56
I don't think we do now. This is why it's still such an important part of the story, I think - it's not just, I mean, it's about you, and it's about her, but it's about all of us in this epigenetics that we're coming to understand - it's that the story lives and breathes in us beyond, yeah, the bits.
Douglas 35:15
Yeah. I mean, it's really tricky in America, because everybody projects their story on to others. You know, and it's like - the, the, it's hard, because, I mean, you get into all the structural issues and everything else. And there's people, you know, the child of the child of the child who, you know, was that owner of enslaved people. And, you know, looking at the person who's the child of the child of the child of the enslaved person - or there could be just some friggin Irish immigrant who's come in and he looks white. And that looks like the person who was the this - or an African person from Senegal comes and they look like that one. And it's like, and it's all - so much of it is projection. It becomes, and this is the thing, I mean, certainly a tech bro can't do it. But it becomes our job to to metabolize the trauma, collectively, you know, and that's hard. You can't - I'm of the belief that you don't you don't metabolize trauma alone, no matter how good the tech is. I remember. It's funny. I went in this thing, I was making a documentary called Digital nation, about, you know, technology in America for our public television. And we went to all these different things. And I went, the Army has these VR booths for veterans who are traumatized. And you go in this booth with a therapist, and you put on the goggles and the thing and this, and they have smells, and their seat can rumble and all this, and they can put together the scene like you're in a Bradley, or what were you in? You were in a Bradley armored vehicle? Where were you? Oh, it was 4pm in the afternoon, we were going over this kind of terrain, and they recreate the whole thing. And then - where were you sitting and then you put where you were sitting. And then when did the enemy well, they started on about 11 o'clock was the enemy and then they shot us with this. And then that blew up the truck. They recreate the experience. So you can explain it to this therapist who is in there watching VR with you. And I did it with the guy because I had to experience it. About 10 years earlier my best friend had died in a car crash with me - he fell asleep at the wheel. Yeah, we were driving trying to get to the Grand Canyon of all places. He fell asleep at the wheel - 4 in the morning. We hit a tree and he died. He was impaled right next to me. Really traumatic thing. And so I recreated that with the guy in the booth. And I keep he had the sense and he made the Juniper scent of the area of the desert with junipers and, and Joshua trees and whatever was there. And I can actually smell it. They had the full memory of it. And I realized, and it was it was tremendously healing. But it wasn't healing because they recreated it. It was healing because the guide Chip, the doctor, could see what - he knows what I went through. He was there with me somewhat, I was able through the VR to convey my experience to someone else. And then together he could metabolize it with me. I wasn't alone in that experience anymore. And I feel like that's the big, big thing. We're all traumatized. You know, we all are - I mean, Timothy Leary, he was the one who told me when he read Stuart brand's book, the Media Lab, about Nicholas Negroponte and the early MIT Media Lab, he said, Oh my God, these guys, you know, their their mothers obviously couldn't attend to their every need, couldn't anticipate their every need. So now they want to build a technological bubble, you know, a womb, He said, a technological womb, where every need could be anticipated by an algorithm that will then bring them the thing they want before they even know they want it themselves. And I get it. So they want to they want to make up for their trauma by detaching completely from everybody else. And living completely alone in a frictionless reality, like seasteading, where you can you know, float to the nation that you like and if the nation makes a rule you don't like you detach and float to another nation that you do. The total libertarian frictionless dream of community with no obligation, right? You just attach and detach, you know, you know, honey, yeah, there's a there's a subway token on the nightstand baby. You know, maybe I'll see you again maybe not right - off with you. I got work to do. I'm plugging in. And that's the opposite - I understand why that feels safe to them. But it's the opposite of what's going to actually help us metabolize the fear and trauma. It's got to be together. It's all polyvagal theory, one big nervous system here. And we're all part of it
Anthony 40:15
Yes. And this touches on a lot of what's come through in The RegenNarration podcast is, I guess where that is being done in all manner of areas, including regenerative farmers, for example, where they're working at, you know, healthy soils for the nutrient dense food that invokes expression, and invokes your human response that's always occurred to those foods over millennia to help with, I guess, the healing trajectory in those spaces. So when Ellen said in your conversation, that it's about embodied consciousness, we're talking embodied consciousness. And I love how incidentally, she said that AI is emerging puppetry, that was the metaphor she put on that. Yeah. And that that embodied consciousness, you know, at the same time, I was listening to my wife working in her health space and sort of Eastern philosophical basis of approaching health. And she's increasingly dealing with trauma and moving into that space as well. And she was reading texts and having experiences that were affirming that the road to trauma recovery, is through in embodiment, that the same thing is recognized across these realms as what actually works. And so yeah, the tragedy that I guess not only these people, suffering, let's say, with the mindset might be thinking that they're addressing it by heading in another direction, but that we might be getting swept up in that current, and not being able to recognize it,
Douglas 41:46
it's hard not to, we're living on their platforms, these fear based platforms where anything that creates friction, you just swipe left, right, make it go away. And once you're in that habit, and entrained, to be in that habit, it's hard to then you look at the world, you're like the guy in being there with the remote control, how do I swipe left on these people that I don't want to see? Well, it's easy, you just stay home, get an Amazon doorbell. And don't open it for anyone that you you know, just get everything delivered, stay on Netflix, and criterion, and whatever, you know - well criterion's good actually, it's like old cool movies. But you know, you get your HBO Max and, you know, suck in your Soma. Yeah, you know, and it's funny, you mentioned the original people. And I remember when I went to New Zealand, and for a storytelling conference, actually Tipapua Museum, and they had all these Maori there, and I was convinced that the Maori were just going to be like, pissed off, you know. I'm like the tail end of the white supremacist, horrible, whatever. And, you know, they're going to come and be yelling at me and whatever. And it was, like, I felt like they looked at every person there is an opportunity to open - I mean, I, what did I do to deserve love? You know, you know what I mean? And I was just so wiped - it was, it was so ... you know, so humbling, on such a profound level. And it's funny, I got to do a presentation. And there was a ton of Maori in the audience there, you know, it's like more than half Maori had come up for this thing. And I'm just like, so embarrassed to be telling a story to the storytelling people, right. And so anyway, so I'm talking about interactive storytelling and what it is and how the narrative works for me, and how I was really into Brecht and different things. And I was trying to say, and I said, Look, you know, like the fourth wall, in the proscenium arch of Western drama is this artifice. And that, right now, we're learning how to break the fourth wall. And I said, so look, you know, so when I reach through the proscenium arch, just watch what it's going to feel like - and I put my hand through the proscenium arch. And just as I did, all the fire alarms went off in the building, and they said, you had to leave, we have to leave. And it was like, only halfway through my talk - we all leave the building, and then these Maori they're all hugging me, and saying you did that you did that. And I'm like, No, it was a great coincidence. And they're like, No, you did it. You are a master storyteller. Do you understand? You know, and I was like, Well, it happened because you were teaching me what I was doing because you were in there, you manifested it. But it was like, that was for me, that was the gift of the Maori to me saying no, no kid. You do have it. You do have, you know - and who does that? Who does that? They spent how much magical energy? How many kilowatt bitcoins of token was spent by the Maori to teach me that right? They would say none, they would say none, we generated
Anthony 41:52
That's right. That's the thing. There's so many threads sort of bursting into my mind in this moment, because I think of, I think of my own experience of that here in Australia. And you know, you've experienced a bit of it's with Tyson Yunkaporta, right? The same thing, right? And what they'll tell me, which makes instant sense is that their whole being in the world is is kinship. So even though we represent or are the lineage or, or, you know, the supposed winners, but we're talking about our own traumas in all this, so so much for that, that actually, they would countenance no other approach than to, to look at us as kin.
Douglas 45:39
Right.
Anthony 45:39
Which then seems extraordinary to us, because we're coming out of the mindset.
Douglas 45:43
Right
Anthony 45:44
But for them, it's, it's the given and, and I think about Tyson a lot in this context, and having appreciated your conversations with him too, and mine on my podcast, where - I mean, firstly on yours, I mean, I remember writing to you after, I think it was the second one you had and you said that you nearly didn't post it because it had such vulnerability sort of nestled in it, but I was so glad you did. And, and in mine, Tyson was beautiful enough to express that vulnerability because there was a moment where I asked him - he had in his books Sandtalk, something he thinks about every day. And I'm like, he thinks about that every day. Well, I have to ask him. So I asked him, and he sort of started to cry. And he said, No one has asked me that - for all the media he was doing, no one's asked me that. And he thanked me for asking about it. And what it was, was a bit of footage he'd seen of some Andaman Islanders, first contact it was apparently, he's never been able to rediscover it. But he remembers this footage. And it was a couple, a man and woman that approached the camera. And they were both ripped, you know, physical specimens, and corresponding fierceness and sharpness in their eyes. And as he describes it, you know, they came to the camera as if to say, what? And he said, it sort of made such an imprint on him because he felt, on the one hand, all that had been lost, or fragmented, as he said, but on the other hand, an essence of humanness. And I think then, you know, when I read about what you were describing, and you mentioned before the sea steaders, like these, Peter Thiel and the like, who would Yeah, colonize those spaces and have their exit strategies that way. The irony in that, because I remember around the time of the big tsunami in '04, I think it was, that the Andaman islanders were one of those famed stories, because they sensed it coming well before our machines did. And they either went to high ground or went to deep sea and came out unscathed. They knew. I think, Wow, what a way - another way of understanding that the irony of looking for, I guess, limitlessness and ultimate knowledge, and all that, through transcending the human condition, but it's in the human condition. That's where you'll find it. And you won't find it out there. But you'll find it in here. It's lmost like another Aboriginal man who just passed away, Archie Roach, a famous singer songwriter over here, profound soul. He said, the elders are waiting, waiting by the firepit for us to come home - and it feels like that's the invocation here.
Douglas 48:16
I know. But in our culture, the elders are seen as somehow, you know, primitive or you know, it's - I wrote about it back in team human - even in Japan, you know, there were these markings. The they put these warning stones in Japan saying don't build below this place. It was the elders. And the moderns looked at it and said, Oh, screw that. They were primitive people. And they go and build their nuclear reactor there. And of course, it got flooded, and we're still dealing with the fallout. It's like no one has respect for it. But look at the way we treat elders in our society, we lock them up in institutions, nobody takes care of them. They're the wisest people we have. And we we intentionally cut ourselves off from them. It's just nuts - even an old person with full on Alzheimer's still you can get a shitload of wisdom from them. You know, it's it's remarkable.
Anthony 49:10
Oh, that's right. I was in that boat. So dad went down that road, before he died. And it's the same with young children, isn't it? I mean, we had a spectacular moment at our Super Bowl equivalent, our Australian rolls grand final on the weekend, where the captain of the winning team in the end took out the young son of one of their club people who, who isn't expected to live long, you know, he's three and he can't talk and he's got a short lifespan. And he took him through the banner and he was on fire with laughter. The love that - in the whole country, let alone between those people was just enormous. So there's the beauty in all sorts of domains. But I really love Douglas, almost to emphasize the point but yeah, it's also a great way isn't it to take the thread of our conversation to the fact that you literally then have taken more time in your life to sit with these people. To sit with old people on park benches, to just yarn with them. But this is this is a deep sort of philosophical point of arrival that you've come to that it is being on the ground with each other, that is the way away from - the way to go meta on the mindset if you like, in a real way.
Douglas 50:16
Yeah, for sure. I mean, and different writers embed differently, right. So you'll see, you know, oh, this writer goes to bars and hangs out with drunks. And this one goes to poor areas, you know, and hangs out there. And, you know, whatever, you read Athal Fougart, and this one, and that one, everyone hangs out with - and it's like, yeah, and I guess, I hang out with old people outside. Well, because it's also who's around in my town, I write in an office in my town, and everyone goes to work, except, you know, a few poor people. And there's just these old people like old lady's with little dogs and stuff sitting there. And, you know, but you, man, they are just so used to not being noticed or getting help or anything. There's this woman who comes out every day. Next to the pizza parlor, there's this like, vestibule, and she's got a walker, you know, like one of those aluminum things that you walk with, and a little chihuahua, and to see the dog and the leash and the walker. And these two doors that are both like hard to open spring doors. With her getting through the vestibule, it's like, Oh, my God, I just like, run out there and see - there she is, she's coming out, she's coming out. And it's like, I'll try to hold a door, just one little just, I could hold one of the doors for her. But the level of appreciation she has for someone to reach out like that. I mean, it's just, it's, it's, you get so much back, you get so much back. It's just like, you get so much back, I would pay for the privilege of getting to do that for this person - you get so much - and the stories people have of their lives, you know. People are so much smarter than we give them credit for. You know, and I'm as guilty as anyone as any tech bro thinking, Oh, I'm educated, I'm smart. I could program and see, you know?
Anthony 52:19
Oh totally. I feel like these are our own - these are our traumas that we've had to work out. I feel like that's that's it, right there, is realizing the delusion.
Douglas 52:32
Yeah. The delusion. But each of these things, they're all the armors - they're our armor plating, you know, our defense against the the inevitable tug of nature and intimacy and everything else, you know. That's back to Francis Bacon, again, you know - the founder of empirical science. He said, you know, science will let us take nature by the forelock, hold her down and, you know, submit her to our will. What is that? That's the opposite of Tyson. You know, and it's worked, you know, to some extent, it's worked. It's destroyed the planet
Anthony 53:06
Appearances
Douglas 53:06
Yeah, appearances. But it's worked as well as, as well as steroids help someone get more homeruns in a year than the person without the steroids, it works until it stops.
Anthony 53:16
Well, that's right. And then you're a disgrace for the rest of your life. Was it worth it?
Douglas 53:21
Yeah, maybe. I guess they probably got awfully laid in the year or two before they were discovered. Although I think on all those steroids, I don't know. I think it actually - you don't get laid - I think it doesn't work. I think you're back to nads. Bad for NADs
Anthony 53:39
I guess, you know, another conversation you had with Janelle Orsi, was so telling for me too, because it emphasizes the point in really beautiful ways in that you talked about, you know, all the structures and innovations that can help re-embody ourselves as humans in these wonderful ways. But they've got to be couched - almost like you know, the VR within your human experience - it's got to be couched in the context of - how did she word it? She said, her concluding point was to have the minimum level of control to enable intuitive care to take from there. And again, I've seen this play out in so many domains, again, literally even with the farmers I was talking about, where they will be led by the livestock to the land that needs the help to regenerate next. Whereas, you know, conventional western wisdom, mechanized wisdom would say, keep the bloody animals off - the land's already stuffed, make sure you hold it apart, and you leave it alone. And that's the nominal good approach
Douglas 54:39
Right. And they'll put a zillion sensors there. So you have exactly the data that you need to make your decision
Anthony 54:45
Exactly
Douglas 54:45
You know, and you're gonna use your data to make the wrong decision. Yeah
Anthony 54:49
exactly. So that there's, there's all sorts of stuff which we've alluded to in our conversation going on under that practice.
Douglas 54:57
Yeah.
Anthony 54:58
Which more people I am finding are taking to. And you certainly have described even in your book - and that beautiful closing chapter - where you even talked about stories where that does manifest in structures, like those bounded economic structures. I'd never heard of that term bounded economics. But these ways that we can help ourselves and choose differently in an economy and on platforms that would have us, you know, stay in the stream.
Douglas 55:24
The reason why you haven't heard of bounded economics is I made it up. But it's kind of like circular economics in a way, except a little different in that, the idea is you create an enclosure of some kind. It's like, you build a tide pool, so that things can grow in it, rather than just have current, you know, running out. So you look at big corporations, I mean, the object of the game for them is to land in communities like a vacuum cleaner, and suck out all the money - like in here, it's Walmart, or whatever - you suck out the money, you destroy your marketplace, and then eventually, then you move on to the next thing. So it's scorched earth, it's like industrial agriculture, you suck all the nutrients out of the ground, and it's gone. And then if someone comes back, they need Monsanto to, you know, create a genetically modified rock or whatever to grow a piece of broccoli on and there's no nutrients, and it's just bad. But bounded economics is more like finding ways to reuse the same money. So it's like, instead of earning $10 once, how can I earn $1 ten times? Because it's moved through the community that many times - but to do that, and it's not to say you, you're provincial, you build walls, but you create incentives to keep the money moving - you optimize for the circulation, and to have each dollar do double, triple, quadruple duty. So that the best case I had found of it, the easy case to explain it, was the steelworkers union - that they had their pension fund, and someone got the great idea of rather than investing their pension fund in the s&p 500, you know, in the stock market, what if we invest it in building projects that hire Steelworkers? Because they weren't getting a lot of jobs. They're like, you know, we need more employment. Okay, so we'll take $10 million of ours, and put it toward a building that will then hire us to build the building. And they're like, Is that legal? Can we do that? Because now we're actually paying for our own salaries and getting an investment? Of course, it's legal. Then after that worked, they said, well, now what if we build buildings that we actually need? So what if we use our investment to invest in the building of retirement homes for our own parents, so now they're getting something that they need. So they're investing in something where their own parents can stay, and they get paid to do it, and they make money on the investment. So it's like triple dipping in the same money. And what's funny - when I tell, you know, traditional venture capitalists about this they're like, well, where's the exit? And it's like, no, there is no exit. That's the whole point. There's no exit. There's no exit. And that's, no exit is not a nightmare. No exit is the good - you don't have to leave, you get to stay, you get to stay.
Anthony 55:40
You get to stay! I'm seeing this everywhere, Douglas, where you know, in this nominally changing time, and you know, my podcast name obviously takes a, puts a little spin on regeneration. And deliberately so because you could see this coming, right, with regeneration, being the next sustainability. The money is now looking and the brands are now looking, how do we get a piece of this, right? But I'm seeing this play out - that the mindset can't understand it. And there's a real struggle right now. So you know, to people's credit, some of them at least are working at it. And you know, there's a lot of people on the side that would share this conversation who are trying to broker those conversations and, you know, deal with their own triggers to be able to come together - own their own traumas to be able to come together more on that front.
Douglas 58:56
Yeah, um, so yeah, I'm just so intolerant though. I'm, I don't know whether it's because I'm true to some ideal, or I'm still just an asshole. But I get invited to these things called, like, you know, the new human blah, blah, the save that, yes. And there'll be these wealthy people who are like 10 minutes into their recovery. And they're like, Oh, we're gonna be the leaders of the new climate movement. And we'll tell people what to do, and we'll make money doing it, of course, because we always profit off these things. And I know that they mean well, and they've just done psychedelics for the first time and they're come back from Burning Man or, or the Amazon, and their $10,000 ayahuasca retreat. And they think that God spoke to them and that they are - because they are already leaders - that they - and I have so little tolerance here. So they hire their expensive Zen master and they talk the talk then and I'm like, why don't you just join Extinction Rebellion or the Sunrise Movement or do that? Oh, well, if I haven't heard of that they couldn't be very good. You know, I'm going to do it myself. And and I should be more Maori about it right? Welcome. This is great. Yeah, wonderful.
Anthony 1:00:15
Team Human.
Douglas 1:00:16
Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful. And instead I'm like, Where the fuck have you been? And you're sitting here talking to you about saving the world? Why don't you take - you've got a billion dollars, why don't you take even just 800 million of it and just give it right now? You'll still have 200 million left. Maybe that's enough, maybe just 100 million will get you through the next 10 years. If that's what you got left, buddy.
Anthony 1:00:43
It's true.
Douglas 1:00:44
But they can't - they can't do that. They can't do that. I mean, the Patagonia guy could, you know
Anthony 1:00:50
Exactly.
Douglas 1:00:51
He was a good example. But he didn't go into it that way. He's just trying to make cool camping gear, and he's like, I keep making all this money. Yeah
Anthony 1:00:58
That's the thing. He never had the mindset. But you're right, though. I mean, in terms of then how we try and I don't know if disable the mindset - that's sort of got a god game mechanistic thing that we assume, isn't it? That we can disable the mindset. But how to - I mean, when we talk about that there are no fixes, you know, part of the delusion of the mindset is you can fix stuff - to, again, my old mentor used to say, we need dissolutions, where you dissolve the problems, you steer away, or you transcend the causes or something. And I feel like that's part of again, what I'm hearing from you a fair bit, actually, when you're trying to practice it, obviously, as we all are. It's probably an outdated metaphor now. But you've talked about for what it's worth, claiming victory. If people are coming to you now, and coming to us now. And geez maybe it's even an intuitive sense. Not all cunning.
Douglas 1:01:52
Yeah.
Anthony 1:01:52
mindset sense, but maybe there is something deep down in them, that's calling - to indeed welcome them. And the old metaphor you use was claim victory - just to say that, okay, you've reached them. They're coming now, don't be scornful.
Douglas 1:02:06
Yeah, it's hard. Because traditionally we've been the counterculture for the last 2000 years, you know, or maybe more, but certainly since since Pharaoh, you know, we've been the counterculture. So, now, if I was right, in 1999, when I did that talk for disinfo con, and I said, we won. The counterculture has won, it's tipped. As of today. It has tipped. That means then that Steve Bannon and Q Anon, and the Fascists are the new counterculture. Right?
Anthony 1:02:42
Yes exactly.
Douglas 1:02:42
And we are the over-culture. And that's why they're doing their own version of Operation mindfuck and pranksterism and angry memes and bottom up media and extremist talk. And is it a joke? Or is it real? And what they do, though, that we don't do, because we were so counter everything, is we are always the party of no, you know, we're always you know, you try to come and and no, yeah, you're a little bit but you need more Marx or but, you're not racially appropriate, or but you don't understand the class struggle, or but so you're not really on my team. You're on that other one, and I'll be - but your socialist instead of communist, but your anarcho syndicalist instead of leftist, but you know, but but but - and you look at the right, you look at Q Anon, they're like improv people. They are 'Yes and' - you know, everything. It's like, oh, you know, Bill Gates, put nanobots in those in those vaccines. Yes. And the UN is going to distribute them. Yes. And they're putting they're putting Audrina Chrome in them from children. Yes. And I saw those kids in a pizzeria in the basement. Yes. And the Catholic Church is programming the nanobots so ... they're just like yes and yes, and yes. And they end up with this one big unified, inconsistent pile of powerful insanity. You know, the yes and - and I think like we as - if we are the over culture and want to declare that we are the over culture, which I don't mind doing, to say the majority of us, you know, the majority of us believe in a sustainable, happy, loving Society of mutual aid. If that's true, then we've got to learn the 'yes and', we've got to learn that Maori welcome, for those who really only partially get it, because at least partially they do. You know, it's just so hard. It's so hard, especially when those people have been mean, and rich and horrible. You know, give up your mansion then - give it up, give it up. Stop riding around in that Rolls Royce, just come on. But no.
Anthony 1:05:02
Which is still true to say, but you know, that's how you - you felt like you were that person in that room with the maori people, but they broke it down to you. And showed you another level.
Douglas 1:05:12
Exactly. I gotta be at least that good. I know because Tyson Yunkaporta, he talks with all these crazy tech bros, right? He's on the Rebel Wisdom shows and talking to Daniel Schmactenberger and these guys - who are, I mean, as I experience them, they're a pretty friggin dangerous philosophy, these guys. They're all really you know, very, you know, alt right. darkweb adjacent, at best. But he walks right in there. And he's like, yeah, yeah, they - you know, the way Tyson is? Like, yeah, yeah, I'm trying to show them this. I'm trying to show them that. But he's like, you know, but also, but you know, I'm trying to show you this or trying to show you that.
Anthony 1:05:52
Which I love.
Douglas 1:05:53
It's like, we all got our hang ups. We all got our stuff.
Anthony 1:05:55
Well, you did that with this - with this book. You did that. And you had to, you had to recover a bit too, didn't ya? But you did it. You went where we - where I don't - and you spoke to them, and you're speaking to us. It's a beautiful thing.
Douglas 1:06:08
Yeah, it's certainly a thing.
Anthony 1:06:09
I have to ask you, before we go, a lot of my listeners, I don't know about you, but they write in and say, yeah, so your guests are really cool. And the work they're doing is cool. But how are they with their families in this context? Like how do they work their education? How do they work their device exposure? And how did they, you know, find their way in the world in a sense, through this media, or mediating - through these mediating institutions? How are you navigating that - that might be the best way at going at this point?
Douglas 1:06:43
I mean, it's interesting. The reason I'm glad you've asked that question is because - I mean, the main reason, this sounds really mentally ill, but the main reason I embarked on the whole project, of finding a life partner and creating a family was so that I could honestly answer that question. When I was 36 or 37, you know, I'm writing these books and writing about the way the world is and what we have to do, and how we have to, you know, roll up our sleeves and do this and do that and be optimistic and all. I mean, I felt like a lot of people who had families were like, Yeah, but I've got a kid and they're dealing with social media, or I've got a wife and she's sick, or I've got this and I've got bills to pay and all that. And I was like, you know, it's a little bit unfair of me to be a real time presentist sociologist, sharing my opinion, about, you know, how things are and how they might be better, without having skin in the game. Right? Because it was easy my life. I mean, it was a little lonely, I'll admit, but it was easy. When you're one dude, you know, writing books, whatever, I could have a studio, one bedroom apartment. You know, once that's done and rent stabilized, wherever you finally get that, you're done. I mean, I could last forever like that, you know, I've got my wits. I can write, I could teach, it's easy, one person is nothing. So I was like, you know - I remember the first time I really tested myself, I was a late 20s, early 30s. And I went alright. I'd just seen a Irish journalist had been necklaced in Soweto - atownship in South Africa. Necklaced is when they put a tyre on you and set you on fire. And I was thinking, wow, that's really heavy. Alright. I'm gonna go to South Africa and write a story for a magazine. Just figure out something. I'm gonna go down. I want to see what's there. I want to test my optimism for the world by going to what sounds like a scary, whatever, dangerous place. And I go to Soweto. I walk right there, right in there, get a rental car, go into Soweto. And I find the place where that happened. And people start coming out of their houses. And I'm like, Oh, shit, this is it. And they come out and they all come around, they all start hugging me and saying thank you for coming for not believing what you saw. You know, you're welcome here. And they took me into this place called a shebine. It's these weird little pubs they have. They're like, in the back of people's houses. It's like, it could be like your rec room. But it's got like three tables in there. And they give you beer and stuff and weird little cakes and, and they were just talking to me about, you know - and they were saying, Why did you come? And I explained. You know, I wanted to see what real you know, what real oppression and real poverty is like and all that. And I wanted to test my ideas. And they said, Oh, that's weird. You know, we feel really bad for the black people in America. And I was like, Why? Because you know, because they're just possessed - they're not in their home. It was like, wow, dude.
Anthony 1:07:28
Yeah. Better get home, better go back to get the real story.
Douglas 1:10:10
Yeah.
Anthony 1:10:11
And I relate to that, by the way, it's partly why I'm in Australia. So I found myself in international development, somewhat similar threads. But I guess in a way I was looking to - I was so pissed off really about the cycles of earning and spending here, that I just thought, I'm gonna go where I know I can be of help, and where I might not have to spend anything to do it. And likewise, I won't ask for anything. And I did find that in Central America, to cut a very long story short. But I'm back here, though, for similar sort of moments of revelation, I think. And connecting with the people that were always here and indeed for bloody long time as we've spoken about. So it's not just helping, but I realized the lessons, the beauty, the ongoing revelations about ...
Douglas 1:10:56
Yeah, and it's the opposite relationship that the tech bro mindset people I'm writing about have to this stuff. It's the direct opposite. I mean, they're building something in Saudi Arabia in the desert called Neome, which is these you know, these tech Bros and billions and billions of dollars. They're building a new eco city, stretched out thing with arts and economics. It's sort of like Dubai meets Lincoln Center meets something. And it's perfect in every way. And they've thought about everything, and it's going to be sustainable and last forever. And the one problem they ran into is on the land where they want to build it, there are these Bedouins who've been there for like 5000 years. How do we get the Bedouins off this land, the Bedouins who've been there for 5000 years, off this land, so we can demonstrate what a sustainable culture looks like?
Anthony 1:11:47
That's right. Wipe the slate clean. But all the more that these things don't work, they continually fail.
Douglas 1:11:55
Yes.
Anthony 1:11:55
We've got ghost cities left from where these things are tried.
Douglas 1:11:58
Yeah
Anthony 1:11:59
You know, I'm glad that this came up in a way, to sort of wave towards our end, because you brought up the terrific metaphor, which I think could be helpful in this instance, of the coyote in Roadrunner. And then I thought, jeez, you could have extended it even because I thought of the old Acme bombs and contraptions and stuff that he would come up with, and they were increasingly preposterous and dangerous. And this is what it is. It's acne solutions to sustainability or whatever.
Douglas 1:11:59
Exactly. Yeah, that section was longer. And I was like, Oh, it's getting self indulgent. So I cut it - and I cut a lot of the book, but I did have one line about more ever more preposterous. But you're right. It's like more dynamite more dynamite on a bigger cliff. And we're just following them down there. Alright, let's try this. And it's like, you know, it's never going back is never the solution. It's always more - always one more layer. One more meta, one more meta will get us through, but I'm here to say, enough meta.
Anthony 1:12:57
Let's go home.
Douglas 1:13:00
Yeah.
Anthony 1:13:01
Beautiful. What's the piece of music that you would send us out with if we could put one in a podcast?
Douglas 1:13:07
How about - I'm trying to think what would be the most fun. It's different than I would have done. I'm gonna say, Spaceman three, an evening of contemporary sitar music, Dream weapon. It's what I would call drone music. You know, it's music that you know, Brian Eno did ambient music, which is mostly sound but it had, it was like a kind of an elevator music. But it had abstract lunar landscape, filling in as if it were elevator music. This is music that, for me oscillates between figure and ground. You know, it becomes subject and then it goes into the back. And it's it's, it does that so you could - it's - what is it? You have to ask - what is it? But it kind of works for me as music. I can put it on and listen to it. Or I can put it on and you know, have it in the background with friends or work or something like that. But then I wasn't gonna suggest it but then some for some reason as we were talking, I thought you know, that, that's cool.
Anthony 1:14:16
Yeah, that does sound cool.
Douglas 1:14:18
They'll let you do it. They're not gonna stop you. I mean, everything's everything's ASCAP or BMI, and they see it if you put yourself on YouTube. They'll just take it down automatically. automagically - sorry.
Anthony 1:14:29
That's right. Exactly. Yeah. They're watching alright. Well, Douglas, I appreciate you spending the time with me.
Douglas 1:14:38
Sure.
Anthony 1:14:39
You're such great company, whether it's through your podcast and or whether it's in your books,
Douglas 1:14:44
Well, you're great company too, we should seestead together someday. You could be on my seasteading nation any time
Anthony 1:14:55
I tell you, if I do ever get near your neck of the woods, I'll join you on one of those park benches.
Douglas 1:15:03
Thanks. Alright, well I'll be old by then so Yeah, you better
Anthony 1:15:06
Bang. You're right in the cohort! Terrific Douglas thanks a lot for spending extended time with me
Douglas 1:15:12
Thank you. Sure. Alright don't be a stranger
Anthony 1:15:17
That was author, professor in media and digital economics, and host of the team human podcast, Douglas Rushkoff. For more on Douglas, our previous conversation on this podcast back in 2019, and the new book Survival of the Richest: Escape fantasies of the tech billionaires, see the links in our program details. And stay tuned for a special extra with Douglas that I'll put out next week. And that's with thanks as always, to the generous supporters who have helped make this episode possible. If you're enjoying what you hear, please consider joining this community of supporting listeners so I can keep the podcast going. Just head to the website via the show notes RegenNarration.com/support. Thanks again. And if you feel like it, share this episode with someone you know who you think might like it. The music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barden off the Regenerating Australia soundtrack. My name is Anthony James. Thanks for listening.
Find more:
Tune in to a special ‘offcuts’ extra to this episode, ‘on grounding, mentors and fatherhood’.
Douglas’ website, where you can also pick up the book Survival of the Richest (and others).
Hear my previous conversation with Douglas on episode 41: ‘Playing for Team Human’.
Music:
Regeneration, composed by Amelia Barden, from the soundtrack of the new film Regenerating Australia, available for community screenings now.