#450 - “Sociopathic ELITES! - Billionaires Secret Plan for END OF WORLD | Douglas Rushkoff

And it's pretty f*cking alarming that they're having this conversation very matter of faculty with you. Even if you are describing yourself as the entertainment in 2017. This is before COVID, before the rise of AI, before the sh*t. That is wild. And these are people who would rather have f*cking with robots or teenagers than women, right? Wait a second. Please explain that. These are people who want to build sex robots. These are people you were talking to. These are, this is, they said this. This is who they are. These are the Epstein kinds of people. These are, they're talking about the culture that we're talking about, right? The culture that we're looking at, the billionaire tech bro culture. What are their values? What do they want? How many wives do they want? Who do they want the wives to be? How much power do they want those people to have? Can you put the camera on, Doug, real fast? Yeah. Let me just write this down on my band. Was that one of them? Oh, one of the, is that on the camera? It's not on the camera. You're on camera right now. No. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You couldn't see it on that, but let's make sure that's at it. If you want to know. If I, it's off record. That's one of them. God damn it bro. God damn it. That's so f*ck. But that's, this, that's so f*ck. Yeah. Doug, I see you joined the club of Rome. What's going on there? Isn't that cool? They asked me. Yeah. Club of Rome. We go clubbing. No, club of Rome was this thing. They started in like 1971. They wrote this thing called the limits to growth. And it was this way early, like before people really knew about pollution and climate and all that saying, if capitalism keeps growing like this, there might not be enough planet to support what's happening. You know, and they basically predicted all this stuff that was going to come down the pike, you know, by 2010, whatever. And then 2010 comes and it's like way worse than they said. Way worse than they said. Yeah, way, way worse. Now, wasn't there, aren't they based on like Malthusian economics in the sense that they think the population will grow too fast for us to have sustenance, enough sustenance growing at the same rate? Yes and no. I mean, it's, I mean, Malthus went worse than that. I mean, he went to total, total collapse. But yeah, the belief is that, that, you know, in theoretical systems like capitalism or mathematics, you can keep growing something forever, but that the belief is that the planet has a fixed amount of matter on it, you know, that it can only support so much that it's like one giant flower pot. And you can only grow so much stuff on it before you crash it. Sure. How do you get invited into the club? That was weird. You know, I think I was, I, I, either, there's one, I have one of two hypotheses because now that I'm in, I've seen some of the emails that they send out like about finding new members. And in those emails, they're saying things like find people that you wouldn't normally think to be here, you know, a typical people who have, you know, different media followings. And so I might have been part of that campaign. I feel more likely I'm part of that one than part of the one and find trusted, you know, scholars of environment. No, I don't, I did, I mean, that's partly that book that that book's arrival of the richest about the billionaires because this, this was a book that really laid out the, the, what is this kind of awful mindset that leads people to want to just grow exponentially forever. Yeah. And why wouldn't that work? You know, why is the only thing in nature that grows exponentially forever is cancer and it kills its host? So sort of, I was writing about that and I think they're like, oh, this is, this is a good new way of expressing what they've been trying to express. You know, hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. And, and, and from a different perspective, not of, oh, we have to deny ourselves things, but rather let's get into the greenie fun of life rather than worrying about growing more. No, no, no, no, what is the invite like though? They could just like a man in a black hat come knock on their door and be like, Douglas, cop diverse. You've been surrounded. No. No. Well, they're like, it's, it's, it's mostly, I mean, it's a club of Rome, they're not, they're not like they have money and buildings and it's not like Builderburg. It's more like, you know, a woman who is a former assistant to a UN person, emails and says, you know, they do, would you be interested? Is it in code like drunk, most drunk, here, Akko's code like the nights, I wish the nights and fields and poppies and whatever and seeds and got it all. I wish. No, it's like, there's not, it's not like a secretive society. Everybody's in it. They're names on the website and they're all like, so I can go in. Don't let me just like walk in. Well, there's no in. There's no in. There's no place. I feel like that's what someone on the inside would say. I wish there's a plate. No. I mean, so far for me, it's been email. It's been email. No, and they had zooms. You know, but it would be like there's someone in India, there's people in Africa, they're around and they're mostly people who used to be in politics like the X minister of this, sort of the X one of that, or people who've written books on the climate and the economy. But they're, it's not like, I've been to things that way more interesting than the way more interesting. Yeah. I got invited to that heredicon thing. That would have been way more. Oh, the Peter Teal. Yeah. And South America. Yeah, but it was like, no, it wasn't. It was in New Orleans. Oh, it's in New Orleans. Not quite so. Yeah. New Orleans. Yeah, close. Yeah, close. It's closer to there to South America than New York. But, uh, can we pull up the schedule for that again, deep, the heredicon schedule? I just talked about it. I just, I, email because I didn't go then because it was like, right smack in the early worst COVID time. Right. I was like, I just, I, I, I don't want to be exposing people to stuff. But I would have gone, I just was sort of an exciting idea. But that's like more secret. That's, it seems very secret. I, I just, you know, Doug, when you look at stuff like this and you like me and deep and everyone listening pretty much right now and you, you're not a part of these worlds and you don't really understand it. You read things and all the different types of subject matters they're going through throughout the day and then the types of people who are attending and you're like, this seems a little, uh, yeah, a little odd. Exactly. That one, like the goal is immortality, right? I mean, that's like, that was like a Delic Tea Party, Trist Burlesque, cyborg. Yeah. Yeah. Where could a human be an ape? Exactly. Where, where the club of Rome would be more like, um, encouraging better water policy in the southern states of, uh, of India, right? You know, it's, and it's, it's really sweet, you know, that the, like the ultimate version of the kind of, you know, Eurozone, do good or let's collaborate international cooperation and, and now all they're really trying to do is, uh, from what I can tell is really more, um, almost like promotion publicity of green, good stuff. of a rums tried to do that. - Yeah. It's not like, yeah, it's not like build a bird, kind of. - Have you ever been to build a bird? - No, but I've heard about it. - All right, that's good. - Yeah, that's good. - Let's check mine. - No, Marshall McCluein, the great media theorist original. He went to build a bird. - Great, goddamn it. - He was there. - They get all the goats, why? - I know. In the '60s. But yeah, I know they haven't. - What have you heard about it? - I met a guy, I was at a conference, and I was sitting next to a guy who was apparently a former president of Switzerland, which I thought was like really big deal, but it turns out they have like a different president every year. They just like pick them from some giant group. - Really? - They don't elect the president. It's like picked from like one of their parliamentary people. So he kept saying it's not a big deal, and I said, yeah, but you know shit. And he goes, yeah, what would you like to know? And I said, tell me if you've ever been the builder bird group, what is that? Whatever. And he goes, it's all has been. - Oh, it's all has been. - Yeah, it's all like people who used to run things and used to be, I said, yeah, but there's ex-presidents in there. And he goes, yeah, ex-presidents. - When was this conversation with him? - Oh my God. 2005, 2006, around the-- - Interesting. - Yeah, the guest list this year had some pretty active people in there. - That's what I think if they got the, do they have the tech people coming now? - Yeah. - Yeah, they had the teal, they had carp. - There you go. - Like for Reeds, the caria, from media, they had the current head of MI6, like, seems like they're up to their game. - Yeah. - They're back. - Yeah. Something's going on there. But you know, when you, when you join something like a club of Rome or something like that, I think where people at home look at these organizations and go like, alright, what the talk, it's more because they're thinking of themselves, alright, why is it all these people from all these different countries? It's got a lot of good diversity in these groups, for sure, minus the, I guess, like class diversity. But, you know, all these different Some people who weren't elected in any of these countries get together to discuss like what policies should be around the world and stop. You could see why people run wild with that. If they did that, yeah. But you'd have to think where is there a group of a few hundred people who a lot of them have touched government or academics actually actively thinking about how are we going to stop this train from going off a cliff. In other words, if, I mean, maybe you don't, some people don't believe that humans have any impact on the environment or the climate. But some of us believe that there's like microplastics in the ocean. Some of us believe the water table is threatened. And those of us who do would love for us to have alternatives to that. And if we don't see, if we see, okay, I would normally want to say, okay, my government could maybe do some of that. And then when I say, oh, well, they really hate solar and they really hate wind. They're discontinuing all that. They're really pushing oil. Then I think, oh, maybe it would be good to have a bunch of us promoting these ideas publicly. Or getting some research funded that could actually show, oh, look, the ocean. The ocean is getting really hot. Yeah, I think this is, and this is what makes all these conversations hard because this exists on either side of the spectrum with any of them, whether we're talking fossil fuels, whether we're talking some domestic political issue or whatever, you'll get research done, but it's always funded by a group that wants a certain outcome. So you guys want an outcome. And then like I had Randall Carlson in that seat a few weeks ago, who has the opposite view on climate change. I've had people from other things of that here who would probably want to fund something that has the opposite outcome. And it just ends up being a bunch of studies with a bunch of numbers run by a bunch of people and a bunch of places that we don't see. And then everyone looks at it and goes, well, they say that and I say that and it's hard to make sense of it. Right. It's the middle of the summer. You're not sleeping well. And chances are your mattress is a big part of the reason. Heat is one of the biggest disruptors of deep sleep. And most mattresses make it worse, not better. Ghost bed builds cooling into every mattress from the ground up. Not as an upgrade tier, not as something you pay extra for. Just part of how every mattress and their lineup is made. They're a family-owned company with more than 20 years of manufacturing experience and their focus has always been on quality materials and construction. So you get comfortable sleep that's designed to last. Every ghost bed mattress also includes their ProCore support layer, which reinforces the center of the mattress where your body puts the most weight. Not sure which model is right for you. 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Well, that's why you got to look at who's behind what? Right. So usually, I mean, this is an argument. I don't have to make. Usually when you look at the people who are funding the science that the environment is not at all threatened are usually big companies that are pouring stuff into rivers or taking Native American lands and building chip factories. Usually the people that are funding the studies to figure out if how the ocean is doing are people involved more in civics organizations, kind of more humanitarian, whatever people. Right. I mean, what, you know, someone like me, I guess at best someone, a conspiracy theorist, would just see me as a useful idiot, that I'm someone who, you know, bought into the fantasy that, you know, immune diseases are going up or that our food supply has gotten kind of screwed up. You know, there's, there's, there's, there are easy things you can do though. Like it's not any college, any college chemistry class could look at the amount of vitamins in the plate of broccoli today and compare that to what we knew was in broccoli 50 years ago. Oh, you're right about that. It's not there. Oh, it's not. The, the minerals aren't there. It's not. Why aren't, then you can go, why aren't the minerals there? And you can, you could disagree. You could say the top soil seems to be screwed up. You can go to South Dakota and talk to the, where I'm in, talk to the farmers there. And they can say, well, you know, our soil is getting kind of eroded. She went out there and talked to me. Yeah. Well, I was at a university there doing a talk, a talk to a college there. And I was talking about climate and all. A bunch of kids came up who were the children of farmers there telling me you don't know the half of it. Yeah. And saying how they're trying to do no till agriculture to try to preserve the soil and try to use this. Can you explain that to people? Like when you, when you, so it turns out the soil is not just dirt. Right. That soil is this living matrix and there's mycelia like these little strands and living things. Soils is living, you know, it's more like a sponge than it is dirt. And if you, when you turn it over in order to make it easy to get more seeds and plants and stuff in it, if you use big, gross agricultural machines, you break the soil matrix. You kind of kill the soil and it gets all dry. It turns more like sand. Then you got to pour more chemicals on it so something grows. So you go to Monsanto or Genentech or someone you pour all this crap. You get this kind of steroid growth things, but not, they don't have the nutrients in it. And then the topsoaked gets worse and worse and worse. And it gets closer to like the Sahara or something. Yeah. And Monsanto obviously has our best interest in mine for sure. Right. They don't. Right. Now, and it's fine and they're allowed to have their opinion, but Monsanto makes hundreds of millions of dollars, right? And they spend like the Koch brothers and a lot of other giant corporations spend real money on what you're saying to say the environment is fine. There are no microplastics and even if there are microplastics in placentas of people everywhere in the world in Bangladesh, we'll learn to adapt, we'll go to an engine, we'll do things, don't worry, we'll have selective reduction of your wounds, we'll do all those things. And they've got hundreds of millions of dollars. So like the production of our wounds. You know, whatever, you make it's like seven babies so that you can see which ones have the problems and then get rid of, you know, it's your basic eugenics. But they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars doing that. I joined Club of Rome and they asked me, can I please donate $500 a year to be a member to pay so the 200 people in it or whatever it is, pay $500 each to fund the whole thing? The whole club. Yeah, because that's duh, right? So Monsha's call up Pete. I feel like he's got that on the asterisk. Because he does what Pete doesn't like this thing. He's the opposite. Pete believes that we are Satanists because what he says, and this is the interesting believes clubs or club of Rome are Satanists. Well anybody has the pot calling the kettle fucking black. Yeah, well, he says he thinks, well, Greta's Thunberg could be the anti-Christ, right? I mean, it's poor little thing. But the idea is he believes that the object of the game here is for a few humans to be Christ like and transcend to the next level. And what happens to all of us? It kind of doesn't matter. But as long as a few of us transcend, they've leveled up. That's why his book is called from zero to one that you want to exist one order of magnitude above the where the larval stage, right? Where the larva and they're the ones that sprout the wings. And if we larva are busy saying, Hey, Peter, you can't, shouldn't have a trillion dollars. You should only have a few billion. We want some resources here. We're going to spread some shit around and we're going to give some money to people in Africa so they don't die of Ebola and that Ebola doesn't come here and kill us too and all that. He would say, no, what you're doing by taking his trillions away by reducing his ability to accumulate trillions, we're like dragging him back down into the, he was just about to get to send money. That's how he's measuring it. And he's just going to get the money in tech. That's how you do it. You know, Doug, I'm a very, very moderate guy and I think it's very conducive to being able to do this job. So in doing it, I talk to fellow moderate people and then I also talk to people who want a given issue or a lot of different issues, maybe on one spectrum or the other. And I'm always trying to see like, well, could you see it this way or devil's advocate, see it that way or whatever. And to me, I mean, I just, I guess it would be way too simple of a solution, but a perfect world for me would be guys like you going into meetings, you know, that we can all get the minutes on out here or see with guys that, I don't know, fucking Exxon mobile or something like that. And being able to say like, okay, I think this, I think this, let's go. - I've tried that one. Well, there was a time before I was as out of the closet as whatever the hell I am. I psychedelic hippie thinker. - You had to come out of the closet for that. - Well, I mean, before it became, I was a little bit, actually I kind of started out like that. I started out in the rave scene. There's my first books were on rave, so it was known. But I wrote some books on sort of the business of technics, saying how the, in the original.com era, how these companies were gonna fuck themselves over by going for growth and losing community and losing the real spirit of work. - You were ahead of the curve on that big time. - Yeah, 95, 96. I was like, oh no, this is the wrong way. You go back, go back. So they would invite me in. I mean, this is the reason I have money. I mean, I don't know, Joe Rogan money, but I have money to pay for my podcast. You know, that's the sad thing. I can afford it. - I think a lot of us don't have Joe Rogan money. - But you at least have a profit of it. I have money to pay for my podcast. It's a kind of funny thing. That's success. But you know, but it's in a weird way. If you're doing it, the podcast for the, for the, you know, to help the world whatever, then it's fine. As long as I can fund it somehow, teaching whatever. But they would invite me to do talks and things. I've talked like, you know, Pepsi and big companies and Uber, Facebook, Google. And I feel like they invite me, partly as entertainment. - Or to check a box. - In a way, you know, we can, unless I used to think it was like, I used to come myself in intellectual dominatrix. - In intellectual dominatrix. - Like, thank you, sir, may I have another. Like, I'll tell them about how are you fucking up the children, you know, the minds of the children with your social media and why are you using an algorithm on a 10-year-old to make them, you know, - Bear questions. - Bad stuff. You're being bad, you're being bad. And then I realized that in some ways, having me there, it kind of helped them feel that was there, that was their penance. - Yeah. That's a good way to put it. That was their penance, right enough. I pulled up his wide shut. This isn't what the initiation of club of rum looked like, right? - Sadly, no. - It was a Zoom. And they, they weren't wearing a mass and shit. - No, but there was three or four of the new ones there and they welcomed us and they're little, you know, the little icon, they go, no. Oh, there's a psych icon. If you ever use Zoom, it's-- - I don't use Zoom ever. - But you know what it is. - Probably not, no. - It's you talk to other people on the computer with it. - Oh, I know, it's Zoom, it's you. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they can hit little buttons to like make applause or hearts or whatever. (laughing) And you get a little applause on each other. - Well, the whole internet, this in '68, if they were still alive, would be like, what the fuck has happened to us? - They've fallen so far. - Yeah, no. They, I mean, it was sweet. I mean, the sad thing is in '68, '71, whenever when they came out with that thing, it was so widely ridiculed. Just like, you know, Rachel Carson's "Silence Brain," it's people didn't, they didn't understand that the kind of the whole planet is one big system that you can't just do something in one place and have it not. - Right. - Impact other things. - Right. Now, you were saying early on in our conversation, you were mentioning how there were a lot of different types of predictions that people associated with club or room made and say the early '70s that then ended up being correct but also worse than they said in say 2000, 2010. What are some of those things? - Oh, the annual temperature increase, the condition of the ocean is the salinization, the pH of the ocean temperature, the size of North and South Poles, the rising water, the spread of certain diseases. And it's interesting 'cause you can look at those metrics and then you can talk to like one of the, like a real pro tech utopian kind of guy and they'll say, "Well, yeah, but to actually look at the annual rate of death from such and such diseases that's down, you know, there's certain metrics that you can say, I mean, I can walk around New York and there's way less chance than he getting killed than when I was a kid. In spite of the Trump says it's the worst than there's blood in the streets. - It didn't even sound like it was in the '70s. - No, US cities are safe and they're getting safe for all the time. I mean, there's medical stuff we can do. Our cancer rates are high but our chemotherapies are better. There's a lot of things. - They're better. - I think we got better chemo. - We got better at that. - Yeah, I think there's like, there's chemo's, they don't even make people, you know, as often, you can be on chemo, which is be awful. - How many years have we had chemo? What, I never even looked at something. Was it 50, 60 years maybe something like that? - We can check a D-FIFT from off, I apologize, but like, you know, it's such a nasty thing. And obviously it's a nasty disease, but you gotta wonder, 80 years, it's even longer. August 1942 at Yale University when the physicians first did it. So I guess it probably won more mainstream in the next 10, 20 years after that. But either way, it's like, you gotta think they got some better shit than that. That they're just not releasing. I really wonder that because it's like, look at all the, look at all the scientific achievements we've done since 1942. You tell me like one of the number one killers of human beings, we're still using the same kind of treatment, even if it's more improved. - Yeah, well, the, I may not to get whatever new agey or even Robert Kennedy on you, but there's other ways. You know, there's other ways. That's part of why we're so concerned about rain forest going away is that there's a lot of plants and things in the rain forest that we don't know how to use, that some people there do, and that the people there will tell you and we don't know the have. We only know 5,000, you know, plants here. We're still learning more. We're talking, you know, we're talking to more plants to find out what they do and what they can treat. And the way that they treat them, I mean, it's just a different holistic kind of, I don't know what to call it. Any word you use is, gets like energetic whatever. - No, I know what you mean. We've talked about it with different people on the show. Like there's a phrase they have down there in the Amazon where there's a sap for that instead of an app for that. You know what I mean? Because I would imagine you spent some time down there. I only went down there for two weeks one time, but like you talk to the people who have lived their all their life and are healthy as an ox and everything and they go through, oh, you can use this for that or that for this and they'll just take it off, manage it when you're real quick. You're like, something's going on there. - Right, and there's stuff. I mean, and this is where, you know, scientists bless their hearts. They're sometimes slow on the uptake like the gut biome. - You haven't acknowledged till really recently. And there's more of them than there are of us. - You know what I mean? It's like, we're now, we're just coming to understand the jet lag is more your gut biome than you because there's always bacteria. They're so photosensitive or circadian. - Really? - And they're really, you go and the bacteria are like, wait a minute, that's what's doing it. - A lot of it. - Yeah, that's a lot of that. I haven't seen that. Can we pull up that research? That's cool. - Yeah, I get bad jet lag. If I can't go to the hotel and take like a 90 minute nap after like, you know, maybe like a flight to Italy or something like that, like I'm fucked for a couple days. - Yeah. - You have to be the gut like, like-- - But it can cause a whole lot of stuff though. I mean, our emotions, I mean, they're looking at almost, you know, all this different stuff. - Jet lag doesn't just disrupt your sleep. It confuses your gut bacteria. Here it is. When you cross time zones, your microbiome loses its natural rhythm. This microbial jet lag triggers dysbiosis and imbalance of bacteria, often increasing microbes associated with obesity and inflammation. That second inflammation makes so much sense. Oh my God. - Inflamations, everything. And now we're finding, I mean, all these diseases that we're calling autoimmune diseases, you know, a lot of them we're tracing back to like, response to a bacteria that we didn't know how to deal with or you get all this dysbiosis and you're sitting there with the wrong bacteria and you're, I mean, wrong is a strong word, but wrong bacteria for the human metabolism in your belly, all the time eventually, you know, you're some gland or whatever's gonna try to kick in, fight that thing. - Yeah. And I think I heard Dr. Amman say this once and it always stuck with me. He's like, the really shitty thing is like, when you walk down the street and you walk past all these great restaurants that are usually run by great people around a great business, trying to give you great food. It's through no fault of their own. They're all trying to kill you because of all the shit in the food specifically here in America. Like we just got back from Italy again and like, you know, you can't eat in the gluttony, they're not gain weight but it's amazing when you go there for a week or whatever and you have a good time, you have fuck around, you eat whatever you want. Maybe you gain a little weight but you feel amazing every day. And you're like, how does that, if I ate this in America, I'd be, I get worse hangover from food than I do from alcohol. - That's wild, those kids, I'll tell you, there's farm kids in South Dakota, they came to me and they said when they realized that all this stuff was right was they eat the same foods at college and they eat at home. But when they're in college, they get fat and they feel sick. It's the same exact thing, same portions and like, oh, because shit they're getting is packaged on trucks from the worst pink meat, whatever factor is. - I found out at college, I never looked into this but a couple of people had told me, told me the first year when I was at school where we all ate out to like the cafeteria there, that the food there they would naturally pack with laxatives. And then it made sense to me because I was shitting all, I mean, I shit all the time in general. I'm pretty healthy, but like in an unhealthy way, I was shitting all the time freshman year. And I'm like, oh, I just want to be the partian. - God, they used to do that. - It's a soldier's. I know that in the army. I didn't know they would do that in college. - They did that to soldiers to make them shit. - Yeah, and salt Peter. - Keep their food though. - So they're not gonna wrap the shit out in the, I mean, but like they're already rationing food. They're not getting enough. - Yeah, but they're not getting fiber. - Oh, that's true. - Yeah. - I don't know. They stopped. - Those MREs aren't great. - Yeah. But you know, you obviously been talking about some of the people, you know, but some of your backstory is kind of cool because you alluded to it already. You came up in like the cyberpunk movement and everything. - Yeah. - You liked raves and things like that. How'd you end up like writing about like the future of like dystopian tech? Like how did that become like, ooh, this is my focus. Here's how I'm gonna predict stuff. And as we said earlier, like you've predicted to some things with that. - I guess we're partly by being more utopian about it. I mean, I was a theater kid originally. I was directing theater. - Okay. - And I got really sick of theater. Partly because I got tired of working with actors. I was just like, if you wanna get a psychotherapist, just go do that. (laughing) Let's work on a play here. Not your childhood trauma or whatever. (laughing) But I understand they're using their sense memory and whatever. It's like you do that at home. - Yeah, you do that at home. - They're in the lines in the play. Can we just try that for once? - You're preaching to his choir over here. But there was that, and also that the audiences were like, so friggin' elite. It was like, so expensive. I was doing a plays in California. Even at the time, I was like, $60, $70 to see a play called Three Penny Opera, right? - Right. - I'm about, you know, so on this little lefty Marxist kid doing plays for Rich, Rich kind of blue hairs. And I was like, this is not gonna work. And just as that was happening, the internet was before the internet, computers were starting. And my most psychedelic friends from college, I went to Princeton, right here in New Jersey. - It's a little flux, right? - I think. - Well, no, it's actually a shame. - A shame? - I think of it as shame. - What do you think Princeton is? - It's just like a leetist, you know? - Okay. - I respect that. And it's like, oh, and it's so hoidy there. And when I went, it was like, Southern rock, Confederate flag, kinda. - Oh, preps school rise again, kinda stuff. - Yeah. - In a rich thing. - Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And they found a way to combine THC with carefully selected functional ingredients to create gummies, baked goods, and flour for whatever buzz you'd like. Well, the company I'm talking about is mood.com and their incredible line of functional gummies. And today you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com by using promo code Julian at checkout. That link is in my description below. 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Best of all, not only is heavy mood product back by a 100 day satisfaction guarantee. But as I mentioned, our listeners are gonna get 20% off their first order by using code Julian at checkout. So head on over to mood.com, link in my description below. Find the functional gummy that matches exactly what you're looking for and let mood help you discover your perfect mood. And once again, don't forget to use promo code Julian at checkout to save 20% on your order. Try it today at mood.com. - But there were like 12 psychedelic people. I had prints in when I was there. And this is like Reagan Young Republican era. It was a dark time. We were, we were, we were, we were Mary tripsters. And like three or four of them were calling me and saying that they're moving to California to become like to be computer programmers. And I'm like, computer, I think the people I knew as computer programmers were like pocket protector wearing you know geek guys from high school. And I'm like, why are grateful deadheads and psychedelic people and Brian Eno listeners. And all these weirdest most psychedelic people. I know going there to do that. So I went out to San Francisco started spending time with them. And they were like working at Intel and Northrop Grumman and Apple and whatever during the day. And at night they're going to Oakland and scraping the peyote buds off cactus and tripping balls at night. - Yeah. Rendering like fractals on Sun Microwave and then projecting the fractals at raves and dead shows and on. I was like, oh fuck, something's happening here, right? So I was really, I got really interested in the crossover between psychedelic culture and cyber culture. Realizing that these psychedelic heads of San Francisco were taking originally a war technology, you know computers and turning it into a consciousness expansion weird-ass thing. - They're all into consciousness. - Yeah, like you know brain machines and fractals and 120 beat per minute music to imitate the fetal heart rate. I mean, a rave was originally meant as a spiritual union of like a thousand people in a field and have them dance. It was kind of like the original burning man thing. It would have modeled on what was called the acid tests, which were these psychedelic parties they had and Ken Keezy and grateful dead. They'd go in a barn and have weird music and trip. So with all these kids taking a drug like ecstasy, trying to commune together and talk to the aliens or elevate, it was real sweet, optimistic, silly, but very pro-human. - Very heart-pro-human. - Yeah, very heart-based. You know, we're gonna use the technology to realize a new collective human organism. And I was excited by what they were doing. And then I made a human organism. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - A human ground dancing, it's us. It's in sync together. There was something with a large group of people dancing together where you're not no longer, it used to be when you went to a dance. You went, maybe today too, you went to find a girl, right? And try to pick somebody up or it was like, and the clubs were very coke, kind of coke and alcohol oriented, you know, am I rich enough? Am I hot enough? Who am I going home with? It was very strategic. And the rave was, you're just dancing with everybody at once in one big, and you're on EC, really. - Yeah, that's got to be an extra. - You're thinking different about love and society. - Had you ever done that before? - Mm-hmm. - Next to see? Before you went out and did raves in California? - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, when I was 10. - Well, there wasn't no, I mean. - He's like 12, sorry. - No, but we did, I mean, we were doing acid at college. - Okay. - Acid was the easy thing to get at that, the easiest thing of the things. And I did ecstasy a little bit before that. I was more of an acid person. - What about acid? Like what about it? True it to you. - Yeah, I feel like it asks nothing of you. - It asks nothing of you. - Of the psychedelics? I mean, there was some even acid is just like, this is you, here you are. This is it, you know, but it was more like a mirror. You're gonna get whatever, wherever you're, wherever you are, your sentence is, this is it. Psych mushrooms are like connect to the earth, the planet need you, we're weeping, we're have compassion, ecstasy is love. You have to open your heart. They're these sort of agendas to them. And I always felt that acid was just like, (snores) - You're right in front of you. - Right, yeah. - Here you are. - Interesting. - Here you are. - Never did acid. - It's an interesting acid. It's an interesting one. - It's an interesting one. But anyway, so I'm meeting those people and I'm starting to write articles about what they're doing. - Are you still in college at this point or is this right after you leave? - After college, I went to college, I went to grad school, I went to Cal Arts, Cal State University of the Arts in theater and I went to American Film Institute in film. - Oh, wow. - Yeah, I didn't like film though in the end. I like theater 'cause it's live film kept feeling like each stage of the process in film, you're getting further and further away from the life of it. - Interesting. - Editing and compromising all that and with the play, it's like every night, it's new. - You do live it. - Yeah, every night it's new. And it feels like, you know, I used to say, it's like directing a play. It's kind of like brushing a woman's hair. Like you, 'cause you run the whole thing and they say, "Oh, it's not working right there." So how do we get through, you know, until you get the whole, and then by the end, you can see the whole two hour thing. - Yeah. - You've made it work. - It feels natural. - Defear is written multiple movie scripts and then also a play that's still continuing it's run soon at a new theater. - Yeah, Soko and Venzetti are dead. It's a satire of Soko and Venzetti. - Yeah, you'd like it as well. - I'm gonna watch, I'm gonna go. - Yeah. - But like, how do you feel about that description in the future? - I like that about the women's hair brushing it. Like you're getting the knots out so that it's nice and smooth. - Right. - You find out where everything connects to everything, else. You know, it's like, it's until you're there and then you go, we're gonna have to change this in order for that to work. You know, where's with a movie? You don't, you can fake it. You can make it all fit. But you've never really, you don't really do it. I mean, it's just a different takes. No, I think it's, I think it's a great way to point it out to and I think that it really depends who's making it. Like if you are, I mean, you'll see like Tarantino will do a lot of these long dialogue scenes, right? And you'll read about some of them after. And there's two different ways it happens. Either one is like they have to cut a lot together and they're filming it over seven days or something like that. And others maybe they film it over seven days, but he lets, he just does take after take after taking a lot of breath. Right. Or you're a Christopher Guest and those movies he does, those are the sort of improvised movies. Or what was that thing? It was that really sad, horrible thing on Netflix where they shut these giant scenes about this kid that kills somebody. Oh, adolescence. Yeah. So we're talking about, yeah. I mean, and the, the, the, the, the tour de force, I guess, of that is they did these like 15 minute scenes. It's crazy. They just play them out. And you're like, they really just to work to get the whole thing. It's not just a shot. It's the, it's to be there. But anyway, I got sick of theater because it, because of the elitism of it. And then the internet was happening. So I went and started writing these stories about virtual reality and there's new like hacker clubs and, you know, hacker clubs. You know, like people getting together and just hacking, making games, sharing things. It was all communal. Everything was free. You made software, but it was called shareware. You'd make software and put it on a disc and like go on your bus to your high school and share it with other people. The idea was how we all going to communicate. So the, the, the early internet was like a rave. Yeah. And that you made it free. It was DIY. And we're all just trying to build technologies to promote this sort of new human thing. And so as I was exploring that and doing journalism about companies that were giving, they were all giving drug test warnings to their employees because they needed psychedelic people to do. They all knew they had psychedelic heads and building their stuff because psychedelic people were used to imagining realities like were used to hallucinating things that didn't exist. There was no internet. There was no how to imagine what would hyperspace look like? What is hypertext? How do you navigate these realms? What would an interface look like to let people surf through information? So it was, it was that. So then I became friends with Timothy Leary who maybe you're, oh yeah, people don't know. He was a 1960s Harvard professor who gave graduate students acid in these parties and gotten all this trouble. And he became like the high priest of LSD. Nixon's public enemy number one in in 1970. Yeah, we've had a few people on time. There was another guy called Terrence McKenna. I was friends with. He was into more mushrooms and DMT, you know, and they and there was a big magazine called Mando 2000. Mando 2000. Yeah, that was a wide UK. Were they afraid of watching over there? No, no, it was before people worried about that one. But yeah, so there was a psychedelic culture that was mixed with the internet culture. So I was kind of part of that hope, but they saw me because I'm this like New York, I really educated journalist dude. They saw me as the cynic. The cynic. Yeah, so I'm writing these articles. Right. I'm writing these articles that my New York people and the magazines I'm writing them for think that I'm like this crazy west coast utopian and the people who are living it are like, why are you being so mean and negative about everything we're doing? And it's kind of funny because that, and then to me, Mando, I was doing the right job, right? I'm just saying what if? What if? And if nothing else, I mean, I used to get my book, my first book on the internet. I wrote it in 1991 and it got cancelled in 1992 because my publisher thought the internet would be over by 1993. Isn't that funny? Many people were like, this is the biggest joke ever. CB radio, they said. It's like CB in the letter. They said, yeah, it's gonna be like CB radio and we looked and that lasts about 18 months and it's something the right time scale for a book. I know hindsight's 2020. I understand it's that way with everything, but that is one I look at and I go, you mean to tell me that a bunch of really smart people were looking at something where people around the world would be able to just plug in a computer and connect to, you know, someone in Montana could hypothetically connect to someone in Paris for the first time ever and that wasn't going to be used or mass adopted. I don't what were the big arguments back then was that it didn't make money. They did a study in 1994. I don't think you can find it. They where they found out that the average internet connected home was watching nine hours less television a week and that's when they went, oh fuck, this sucks because the internet had no ads. The internet had no way to make money back then. They didn't think like let's put ads on that. They did, but you had a sign in agreement when you went on the internet saying you wouldn't use it for commercial purposes because it was all paid for by the government and universities. It was a research thing. Yeah. So you just went and venager some shit. Yeah. I mean, originally and then they turned it over to the public, but as an educational kind of a thing, not as and remember when the first ads went up, I mean, there was, there was a few moments when that's when I realized, oh, fuck, this is going. It's going to go the wrong way. Funny. This guy, Mark Andreessen, he's this big famous guy now, um, billionaire, whatever. He, um, took, there was this something called Mozilla, one of the first web browsers. And he did a version of Mozilla, which was a public free shareware app. He did a version called Netscape. And he, he did Netscape as a private company. And they did an IPO and made a zillion dollars. The day that Netscape had its IPO was the same day that Jerry Garcia, the guitarist of the Grateful Dead, died. And I always thought that it's like, oh, this is the moment that we're going to really leave the 60s part of the internet behind and move into this other thing. That's interesting. And it was right around them. We started to do ads and all that when I started to say, oh, we've got a choice here. We can either go the sort of wired magazine business direction with the net. Um, but it's going to be a problem because if we do, and this was where I was very present, I mean, this is where I deserve my, my, my, whatever. If I get it, um, I'm giving it to you. Thank you. That, that if we go down that road, instead of giving technology to people to let them realize a wild new collective creative possible human existence, we're going to be using technology on people to increase their predictability. Right. Once you're betting on a technology, you don't want the wildest possibilities to happen. Once you're betting on something, what do you want? The highest probability of your outcome. So we use technology on people to control their behavior. We become the product. We became the product. Holy shit. What a call. Yeah. And it was, again, I was like, don't do it. And I wrote about in the end of this book called coercion. Why we listen to what they say? I said, we're taking all the techniques of 20 century advertising. We're about to port it into this new landscape. Only the new landscape is not made of the real world. At least in the real world, you have the real world and advertisements in it. Now we're going to construct a world where the very landscape is fabricated to be an advertisement, to be mind control. And I don't know if human beings will be able to maintain their coherence if they're living in that. Now when you say maintain their coherence, what do you mean? Love each other. In the end. Yeah. That's kind of where I thought you're going to do everything. We see it now. Yeah. Because if everything is a one or zero, yes or no, before or an after and if or then we're essentially disconnected. There's no more continuity. It's like, you know, it's at 400, you know, 44,000 hertz, but it's still and you can train minds, you know, you can, you can yeah, slowly. It's not like, it's like boiling a frog. It's not like you suddenly blare someone and light them on fire with gasoline. I mean, they could do that too if someone's that unaware, but like that's not really how it's done. It's one piece and then two pieces and then three pieces and then four and then five and suddenly at whatever the issue is, you know, the opposite end of that will be something you don't see. And I've tested, like I'm one of these people I love to test my algorithms over time. So I'll go do like crazy shit on there and be like, okay, I've had a bunch of, I've had a bunch of tweets about people talking about Roe v Wade and a lot of the people talking about are the people who are like against this being overturned or something. Now I'm going to go to I'm going to start at this person's page who's really pro life scroll through all their tweets. See how it changes my algorithm. Like a few tweets on there. See what I see. And you can literally see like the robot shift and I'm like, oh my god, if I were reading this all day, I would agree with this 100% if I were reading this all day, to agree that is not we have never had anything even remotely close to that in humanity. And it does, you know, It feels like we haven't made, I don't want to be a cynic on it, but it feels like we haven't made any real progress on learning how to deal with that. Right. I mean, because we never really did, I mean, it's funny. In the old days, media literacy used to be being able to deconstruct the advertisement on TV. Right. That's what they taught us about. The advertiser's not your friend. They want you to buy something. They don't want you to be satisfied. I mean, and that was sort of an easy landscape. I used to say like, you know, who's the best customer for a Blue Jeans commercial? Right. Is it because the Blue Jeans commercial basically says all of them one way or another, buy these jeans and you will get laid. Right. Right. So, who's the ideal customer for that? Is it someone who's sitting on a couch with his girlfriend? No. Someone who's sitting on the couch alone with potato chips. You don't, you want the person not to be getting laid. Otherwise, they won't buy the jeans. So the advertisers don't want us getting laid. That means they're not our friends. It's sort of the simplest way to think it. Like from a group thinks scenario in a sense that it's not what you're saying, correct me from wrong here, is that it's not like there's one person at the top of a company saying we need to fuck all these people over. It's more like, oh, this type of ad worked. And then that team reports to that team and the company says this worked because these are the people buying it. And then that team reports to another team who handles that and says, therefore, we're going to do more of that because they're trying to get profitability and the end result is they're convincing people not to fuck. Right. Right. Or making them just making them pathetic. But and now there's algorithms doing it using techniques that we don't even know for reasons we don't even know. We don't even care. They're just like, oh, look, this worked on dog. What you're trying on yours. Oh, it's working on my guy. I'm trying on her. Oh, I adapt it like that. It seems to work better on her. Oh, try that too. And there are millions of them all sharing. This works. This works. And it's not it's for what? Is it going to do whatever we program them to do? Right. Get him to buy this thing by whatever means necessary. They don't care what it's doing to our to our psyche or anything else, which is why I mean now it's funny. This week in New York, it's called the summer of lead. You heard of this. You know what the leadites are? Yeah. Leadites are people. Yeah. People who don't want technology to be used to amish. Well, no, they can be modern. I mean, you can be a leadite using cell phones and chat. I mean, they have the same, the amish or amish sensibility that lets only adoptive technology once we understand that it's not hurting us. Right. Right. But the leadite distinction was technologies that distance us from each other. Technologies that make us hate each other and make it more difficult for us to work together are against us. Technologies that bring us together are good. Technologies that are used to hurt people and disempower people are bad. Technologies that empower people are good. So that was the thing. But it's leadite. It's this week in New York and it's really interesting to see. There's all these kids who it's a movement that started like about five years ago in high schools that these kids are turning in their smartphones for a flip phone. They're not using phones at all. They're like hanging out during, during breaks and like reading, walking in nature. And I saw this girl speak on a panel. It's just yesterday. And she's like, well, the weird thing, the weirdest thing about giving up my smartphone, because she's only got a flip phone now. She said she was walking in New York a year or so ago and she got lost. And she said her first feeling on getting lost was, oh no, I'm lost. But then all of a sudden the city changed. And the whole city became this labyrinth of possibility that she could go anywhere. And she realized that getting lost was the best feeling she ever had. I used to do that. Oh, when I was a kid, I'd get on my bike and go to a neighborhood I don't know. And you try to get lost. I've always, and it's an easy observation of spot now when you talk to people for a long time. But to me, the generation or the subset of generations born between 1990 and 1998 are the most interesting people to talk to in the current digital age, which I'm in smack in the middle of that. And so Steve, because we are the last people who in the context of growing up in some way, knew the world where there wasn't staring at the phone. You went outside and played. You didn't have GPS everywhere. And then I say like, because the iPhone came out in '07, it started to catch on like real adoption, like '08. So like think about that. 1998, you're 10 years old at that point. You've had 10 years where you're an infant and a kid and a child grown up running and playing. And then after that, you, it's hard to put into words. It's very hard to explain in words. And I'm definitely not going to do a good job. But when I'm talking to a kid born in 2000, 2001, there's a difference. There is a real difference on like not even necessarily like world view, but how they look at the world. If that makes sense, you know what I mean? And you know, we haven't even talked about like COVID and what that did for development and stuff. We can get into that later. But these are the kinds of things I don't know if we're going to understand the downstream effect of what I'm talking about on society and like what that generation does as it comes of age and continues to get a more powerful place in society. We're not going to know that for 30, 40 years with the effects of it. And given those effects, they might not be in a position to find out. Yeah. Wow. That's, that's the dark view. But I mean, something else. At the same time, I mean, I'm living in the East Village now. And I feel like it's partly because of it's partly nihilism. But they are out. Gen Z is out on the street every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then we locked up in high school, you know? Right. They're out. I mean, and not that it's necessarily good. They are drinking. They're smoking. They're fucking. I hope. Yeah. I hope they're all the stats say they're not fucking, but they look to me like they're fucking. They're, they're, and the guys, the guys, they're just like Gen Z guy type now, which is sort of like a 1970s porn look. I don't know if you've seen it. They got like a mustache and a mullet and a button shirt and a chains and stuff. And I'm like, whatever that is. Good. Good. They're doing, they're just like, yeah. They're just like effort. You know, I, it's like it's, I was always depressed when I would see like kids out in village on a, on a Saturday night. And the girl is like dressed to the tee and the guys just like, jeez and t shirt. And it's like, but now there's just like guys are trying, you know what I mean? There's like a thing. It just feels like, you know, it's like when you see those 70s movies and the guys have the, the, the shirts or the things. And it's like, we used to laugh at it because I was, I was in, in the high school in the 70s. But I kind of admire it now, you know, the, just that attention that that I want to look at. I want to feel sexy. It's good to see that that like again, in generation, it was like locked up during really formative years is interested in going out and experiencing the world. And I don't think sociologically we have ever seen a generation like Gen Z. They got a little bit of everything there. They got on, I'm talking on the spectrums of what you can go from like people that are for, for ease to people that like Nick Fuente's and everything in between is really, really strange in that generation. Right. But they're, they're interesting. They're interesting. And I am seeing like it's what I'm thinking when this, you know, summer of love that they're doing in Tompkins Square Park, I'm looking around. I mean, I had, um, can we pull this up, Dave? Summer of love. I'm sure. But they, um, some students of mine did a, I mean, this is the kind of thing they're doing. They did a curse on Palantir. Love that. Right. And they have a Z. They have a Z. A Z. They made a little Z. That they're handing out. They're doing like spells and shit. There's a spell, a collective spell to like her, uh, Palantir. It's really funny. Yeah. Look at this. That even looks like very, uh, late 60s Woodstocky, you know, the lead. I can feel a Jimmy Hendricks guitar in the background. It's the summer of love in New York City. It's just from Dr. Phil Fisher with one new special protest. Ludd from June 28 through July 5th, Tompkins Square Park, host lectures and demonstrations free lunch included spanning everything from a lead-out history lesson to the perils of Luddite Riz and dating apps. I take up the Luddite revival in my forthcoming book. I expected to become a consequential social movement this century as it was in the 1800s in a warning of the economic turmoil set to unfold over the next few years. You can already hear it in the booing by college graduates across the country loud and clear. Right. Right. When people are doing their, um, their graduation speeches, the, the tech bros or the college presidents, whenever they mention AI, everybody booze. Now that is just a, it's really, that's the same thing as Club of Rome. Just Club of Rome is like student government doing it. It's like the, the, the, the boring ex-governmenty. Oh, I think the way to solve this is to, we're going to publish a white paper. It shows the thing. And I'm like, but that's part of why they have me because they know there's like white papers. It's very sweet, but nobody's gonna read the white paper and if they do read your own, they're just gonna stick it in cloth. They're not reading it anyway. But this like summer of blood, but the the the the beauty of a $10,000 a year budgeted Club of Rome that's trying to figure out what's going on is that the smart kids who are at something like that when they're doing their speeches and their lectures and their working groups and all they're informed by that stuff right so they can say here's why we don't want an AI company Deciding how the land is used in our town. Yeah, and that's a big thing because they're They're being given authority over the water and it's like and I get it We I wonder why why someone would want that because if you're being paid by an AI company If that's where your stock is then you want that AI company to do well even if some Kids of a different race in some southern town are gonna suffer it's like it's a problem. They're not rich. See it Especially it's over there. It's over there. I'll gotta look at it. I just look at it But it's interesting. We used to only do this stuff to people on reservations You know, yeah, this we gave them casinos though, you know, we'll give people are just getting fucked and no water Right so water no casino and and Doug it's we can go to that now because it's obviously a soup the shore That not casinos but the the data center thing and stuff like that that you're talking about because it's a soup the shore Top of right now because you see so many of them popping up out of nowhere and like two things I understand anytime any new technology has ever come out human race It's always had a subset of people that are very very afraid of it and do merit and then you know, we turn out okay I mean that every single time it's gonna turn out fucking okay and also this time with AI This is the first time we're building technology that may be able to think for itself and I think us which is certainly new territory So it is a new normal in that way or in normal if you want to say The second thing is I understand that you want Like even looking at it from an American centric standpoint you want to be at the front of the race and at the forefront of the world and be able to win and have the best tech I get that and in theory I'm cool with like if someone's gonna do really well with it if we can do the best great but to me When you do that at the expense of thinking about all your people at a time where the wealth gap is at Unbelievable unprecedented levels every chart can back that on that and when you do it with companies that have proven time and time again to not care about Fellow humanity whether it be everything from Google to a Palantir or whatever who's gonna be the tenants at these places Yeah, I think everyone out there including myself who's like hey, let's slow down with this and let the people have a say in this matter It certainly has a good argument. What do you think? Yeah? I mean, it's funny It was Sam Altman went to government and said oh, oh, that's we're in a race with China You know and that was why we got to deregulate this stuff because we're in a race with China But the thing I would have said to him is you know since when has being first Necessarily been the bet America we were the first at having social media Look how good that did for us, you know China was second in social media But they went look we're gonna do this another way. I mean in Chinese TikTok as you know is like oh the program educated It's like the one good benefit of communism and like we can turn this off at nine o'clock and you watch math videos Well, what's it right and what's it? What's it optimized for it's optimized and and to say that that is totalitarian to not have kids Watching God knows what it night Kardashians at night is not totalitarianism. That's Raising children so you there's the first move revenge. I kind of question the interesting thing is You're right that when we say oh we've got writing now And the ancient Greeks when they got writing Aristotle was going. I don't know people know those their memories They were talking about they're worried about what will the impact be of the technology Mm-hmm and some people say we're gonna get books and be smart and other people said no We're gonna lose our memory and maybe both happen With AI you've got you're right. You've got your tumors on your utopians Utopian saying oh because of AI we're gonna be China we're gonna be a bit upload our brain to the cloud So that when the planet goes will have artificial beings. They're gonna have robot sex slaves. It's gonna all be beautiful And you have other people saying oh no when AI comes we're all gonna be programmed into oblivion. We're gonna do that for the I don't care about Sounds radical and maybe I don't care about what's gonna happen because the ends don't justify the means I care about what are we doing right now? If you're taking water away from a black child in Alabama in order to feed your data server. It's not right if you're sending a kid in the Congo into a mine at Gunpoint to get the great get the cobalt to make the thing Then the soul of the thing is corrupted from the outset. Yeah, so The soul of the thing. Yeah, if you can send a guy. I know it sounds religious or something But I believe if you I mean and this you know This is where the academics actually help right my professor thing a professor at CUNY. All right. There was this guy Albert Camus Albert Camus right he was a see see the yeah, but he wrote Yeah, he's seen the theater guy the theater guy knows people rule. That's a virtual. Yeah We do theater people are smart when you can't do theater without learning the history of everything. It's like so funny Well, at least directors and writers You have to read everything, but this guy Camus so he was friends with the French existentialists like friends with Sartre and all the Marxists and all that and They were all happy about communism. Oh, it's great. Yay And then the communist started to make blogs and prison camps and all that and guys like Sartre and the intellectual left They said look, you know, this is part of revolution that in order to get to the communist utopia Little pain on the way this is gonna be studying got a night stuff that happens right and it's part of the process because we got so off course and Camus said Dude this doesn't make sense. That's right. It makes sense. He's like if you're not doing this in the moment You're not doing it nothing no amount of No amount of supposed good on the other side Is worth doing the thing in the moment so even if you tell me like as an effective altruist They're the new ones who have this belief that the tech bros that oh you have to let this one baby die so these Tens of millions of babies live in the future because they're gonna have AI. No, no You will you will the only morality you can have is in the moment itself in the encounter with the other people in that moment and Part of faith and this is you know Christian or anything part of faith is believing that Doing the right thing in this moment will fractal trickle out to the everything so no I think AI is cool. I think AI is cool. It's a cool thing. It's a cool thing Yeah, but the idea that we've got to sacrifice The environment or if you don't believe in the environment children, you know if you don't believe in the children water Or if you don't believe in water your a town's authority over its own land, you know, there's something You know there's a way to deploy this You know, deploy it. Yeah, well it's military. You know military love that There's a way to deploy. Yeah, you that sense we can decamp and deploy In ways that don't necessarily hurt people all right, so you taught this effective altruism thing though. Yeah There's a really interesting argument for sure and yeah, I think a lot of the guys who have argued that are cringe and and Right a lot of times happen also be sociopaths. We can talk about saying all open a little bit, but like You seen the show the last of us You ever watched yeah, I didn't like that they made the mushrooms the bad guys, but yeah Other than that. It's right. I don't know Yeah, but you know spoiler alert out there So skip the next 30 seconds if you haven't seen it But there's one point in the show where Pedro Pascal has to make a decision Where the girl Ellie and the show may have a cure But for this disease that's ravaged humanity and rendered many most of the population dead and continues to do so and has been going on for a lot of years in the show And she may have the cure because she's actually immune, but in order to find that out they have to kill her to make You know some sort of you know Something that can that can be passed on to other humans to make them immune and maybe end it and Pedro Biscale says fuck that and then kills all 40 people in the hospital and rescues Ellie and takes her home Did he make the right decision doing that? Yeah? Yeah, especially because it's fiction Right, all right if it was true. Did he make the right decision? Well, it was true if it was true. There is no if it was true In the end that feels like a cop out. No, no, they're actually not because Again, does reality you you can set something up like a prisoner's dilemma situation Okay, you're in a prison and here's the game and this is that it's a setup So I guess if you say a setup. Okay, there's a trolley, you know And the trolley, you know, do you run over the one person in order to save the people in the trolley? You send the trolley off the cliff and whatever. Those are hard moments, right? And what you're going to do in those moments is probably follow what your heart is telling you to do rather than logic. And. And which do you think is the right answer or both? The heart. I've been doing what the heart's saying. In that moment, we know Pedro Pascale has what Boober would call an "I-Thou" relationship with that girl. He sees her as a human being, right? And these other people in that hospital have dehumanized her, right? And he sees them as dehumanized agents of. They're going to. And you could say, "Oh my God, you're going to kill 40 people to save one." And it's like, "It's my person." I mean, now I'm personally, I'm more of a pacifist. I would probably. He would have talked him down to death. I would have been a little bit more. I don't know, I would try to talk them down, but you know, I've got. Forgive you for what you're doing. And you have to understand that what you're. It's not actually going to work because so what you're doing, this is not in the long term, this is not the solution to the real problem. No, I'm not saying that you'd be as good with a gun as Pedro Pascale was in there. Certainly had some great aim hitting everyone in Mono down. I took a gun lesson once and the guy told me at the end. He said you were good. He said you're a regular John Wick. That's fucking great. Okay, so let's say you are. Half an hour. His name was Anthony Williams. But if you let's say you were. We're the 22. You were good with it. You have your 22, you can't ultimate reloads and everything. And I'm right up next to him, right? You're trying to piece him to death across that hospital in the first security guard who might be a rushing guy or something. Look at me. Go fuck yourself. Okay, yeah. In that moment though, this is one of those things where it's like if you truly are someone who's like, I see that girl as a human being, you don't think you'd be like, well, fuck it, this piece ain't working. I don't know. I don't see. That's a good answer. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I feel like I. I mean, someone was gonna attack my daughter or something. I feel like I've got the instinct to shoot somebody in the head or do whatever. You know, I mean, in the end, I'm an animal. I got teeth. I got nails. That's right. I got throwing stars and nunchucks. That's right. You got nunchucks too. Yeah. I mean, look at the rubber ones because I can't hit myself in the back of the head without the wood one. I could have you trusted. They're hard. You're truly right, right? You're trying to really Bruce Lee with those things. Oh my god. Yeah. Now I stick with the gun. I got him. I got him in high school. I still have him somewhere. Okay. All right. Let's not take those. Yeah. I feel I believe you with the 22. I feel like you. You got to be a pair of these guys. You got to really up close with the 22. Yeah. It doesn't have stopping powers. What they say? No stopping power on that. We're going to have to go in the comments way in there. But you know, when you're talking about these people who are talking about these things and like the same altments and stuff, I get really concerned when you hear what's his name? Mo Goddot. I think, deep who used to be a really high up guy at Google. I think he was on diary of a CEO's podcast. I want to say recently. Yeah. Okay. Where he mentioned, he's got this documentary coming out. And I saw this clip on Twitter from that podcast where he was saying that Sam Altman's quoted in the documentaries, I guess saying with like a straight face going, yeah, A.I. is probably going to end humanity. But we're going to have a lot of fun making cool shit on the way. Yeah. He did say that. He's like, it's only like 80% chance according to him. I think that it ends us. But like, what do you see? Why people out there look at this and go, who the fuck are you? Pal? Like, you're the guy holding your finger on the trigger of this thing. And that's how you look at it. Like, no one elected you. Right. Yeah. Well, the way he would put it is, well, humanity was going to end anyway sooner or later. Okay. What gives him that idea sooner or later? Well, you know, because this, this sun burns out or whatever. Yeah. And maybe like a million years or so. And maybe we got off the planet by then. And maybe we get off the planet by then. So I think that elected him. And if I was going to get in that bet on anyone getting off the planet kind of thing, I would think it's like the co-gie. You know, they're the ones you do Iolaska in Columbia or the Buddhist or something. You know, that we'll get there through like Monroe Institute Astral projection out of body. That I just think, yeah, I think the way I would think an interdimensional travel feels to me more probable than making spaceships that let us go through the universe and not get irradiated and destroy every. Okay. Let's play it this way. Let's not think in the lifespan of say like an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos who's trying to do this stuff. And let's say, you know, we're not the immortal generations. Okay. Yeah. I think we could, I think there's things that can happen in 10,000 years. There's ways off. But I think the ways off are not going to involve like solid rocket fuel and metal. 10,000 years at one. It'll be something way beyond that. But you don't think it would be the ability for us to literally physically go off. I feel like we'd have that at 10,000 years. I think it'll be more like quantum folding space. Quantum folding. Like it'll be something weird. I can tell you were friends with Harry's. Like there's Google. Google figured out. Google was like experimenting with the very beginnings of proto quantum type computers. And one of its proto quantum computers solved this math equation that was supposed to take like a hundred thousand years to solve. And they were trying that figure. How did it do this? And the only way they can understand it is that the computer got the answer from an adjacent reality, right? Got the answer from an old from an adjacent reality where the problem had been solved. Can we Google this to be an adjacent reality? Right. So it's like those are the that's if you're going to you want to travel first class, you know, it feels like it's going to be it's going to be shit like that that's that we don't quite understand yet. You know closer to stuff that we're playing with remote viewing and ESP and where aliens and what's going on and why are those things moving around? You know, sort of like 3D to 4D. Once you you if you lived in flat space, you wouldn't understand what's going on on the other side of the page on the other side of the plane. How did you get there? How'd you pop up there? It's like, oh, well, you don't get it. We're actually we're in 3D. You're thinking like Philip K Dick. Yeah, more of that kind of stuff. And some of the stuff we've done is as magical as that. And usually the people who figure those kinds of things out get like the Teslas, you know, and who was that guy that was like balancing rocks and stuff using this guy did these giant experiments on Claude Van Dam. No, no, this guy balanced rocks and things and he understood how the pyramids were made and it was all about, you know, reversing the, you know, magnetism and gravity and they could never and when his things fell, they couldn't get him back up. They didn't know how to do it even with cranes and all that shit. There's just that I feel like the the I'll see how deep's looking for that right now. Deep did pull up what you were talking about those second ago. Yeah. Google's quantum AI team, right? Yeah. Google's quantum computer experiments have sparked intense discussions about parallel realities in the multiverse. While the computers are simply running highly complex math algorithms, the unprecedented speeds have led some physicists to theorize that the computational workloads are being distributed across alternate realities or dimensions. Yeah. So the willow chip and the multiverse, I love to follow the ship and the multiverse hypothesis to breakthrough. Google's quantum AI team introduced willow a 105-cubit processor capable of completing a random circuit sampling benchmarking task in just five minutes. Traditional supercomputers would theoretically take 10-ceptillion years to complete the same task, the adjacent reality theory because the computations explore such a massive number of quantum states so quickly, Hermit Neveen, former head of Google's quantum AI team, and other theorists have suggested this performance aligns the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics. The idea proposes the quantum computations actually unfold across parallel realities, meaning the computer is tapping into multiple versions of reality-final solutions. So, Douglas, this actually. It's crazy. It's crazy, but this reminds me of something so an old friend of mine, this guy Marcelo Cabrera, remind me to check, just make sure he's cool with me saying his name, Deve. But I remember, I want to say it was early January 2018. I'm going for a walk with him in Central Park, like midday. It was snowy out. I worked on Wall Street at the time where I was making about 65K a year and I had to wear Joseph A. Banks, who would pretend it was something better. So, I'm wearing these shitty shoes or getting wet. I'm freezing. But Marcelo's the kind of guy that, you know, if I could describe him in a cartoon way, he's the kind of guy that maybe sometimes would get a call from someone that says, "Be at this bench at, you know, 1205 tomorrow and when he's there, they pick him up, they put a bag over his head, drive him six hours away, he saw some fucking computer computational things somewhere, they hand him a bag of money, they put the bag back on his head, drive him back to the bench and that's that really fucking sharp guy. And so, we were talking about the whole blockchain revolution at the time because people were just tossing blockchain as a keyword on everything. This is right when the crypto market was like starting the crash after the first big boom there in 2017 and He was like, this block chain stuff. You know, it's interesting, but if you get to the quantum, the quantum goes way beyond it. And he was explaining, I don't remember, 6, 8, 48, whatever it was, but he was blown my mind explaining how we could be in a reality where a country has already had quantum and has already effectively hacked all this stuff. And therefore, hacked reality, and we're not even living in the space that we think we're living in anymore because something is actually controlling the world. And it might not even be a country, it could be like some unelected fucking government. And I just remember sitting there going, wow, we've lost him, like he's crazy. And then it's all some of this stuff play out and I'm like, maybe he's not crazy. - Right, I mean, it's a matter of figuring out what it is. So there's this guy, Nick Land, who's like a real darling of the far right guys, like Peter T.O. and Muscatolle, I love Nick Land. He's this theorist and he says that capitalism itself is a strange attractor from the future drawing us toward it. That capitalism is like this living thing and that it's inevitable that we're gonna go into there and that's why they're promoting these kind of racist hierarchical things 'cause it's like they wanna be the ultimate capitalist. - You think it's racist, what they're proposing? - Yeah, well, it's kind of survival of the fittest eugenic thing. - Yeah, it in the end, it's. - You think that's their intention or you think it's more like. - No, it's just part of it. - You think it's just a downstream part of it. - Yeah, a part of being a stream. - Doesn't that assume then that if we assume that that's a part of, and trust me, I'm no fan of Peter T.O. and guys who think in any way, in Genics. But if we're assuming that what they're doing is racist, we're therefore assuming that therefore there are races that are less superior to other races. Like I don't mind into that at all. - In their model. But have they ever said that? - Yeah, in so many words. - Interesting. - In so many words. I mean, and it's partly, I mean, if you're raised under apartheid in South Africa, and when you're a kid, your parents lock the downstairs and put a cage on the steps before you go up to the bedrooms at night to keep out black people. You know, you're actually afraid are gonna come in storm when you got a helicopter in the courtyard of the house to escape when you lose control of this place. I think you do get indoctrinated in certain things. You know, it's tricky. - Right. - Can I pee? - Oh, yeah. - We'll be right back. - You can just keep rubbing it. - No, we're good. - All right. - We're good. Take your time. (dance music) - All right, we're back. - All right. - So you're trying to get more muscles you're saying. I see the veins popping right there. - I'm trying. - I'm trying. - I'm trying. No, my doctor said he wants me to get to 140. - Once you get to 140, what are you right now? - I'm up to 136. - I'm up to 136. - Okay. - 136. - It's easy to add on muscle when you get into the flow of things. You like lifting? - No, what I'm liking is, and I think I can develop a whole thing. I'm sure someone has. I'm liking like pull ups and dips and push ups. - Fuck you. with weights. There's something about the none, I don't like the punk. There's something about the clunk that's just like, "Uh, but if I can find ways." And I'm liking these, I got these giant rubber bands. I kind of like in that feel better than other and it and I got really this guy. He actually lives out here with Sean, me like if you do him really slow. It's like it's brutal, but it's like there's something. And I feel like, "Wayless, I'm over 60. I don't want to just rip a ligament or do whatever." And doing less weight or these stretchy things or even functional weights, like kettlebells and things. I was just going to ask, so you do some kettlebells there amazing. That's what I got instead of the little dumbbells. And it's like, "Oh, it's a whole different thing." Yeah, Dave got me back into kettlebells last year. I used to do a lot when I was younger and then got away from it, but like, "Oh my God." I mean, that's how it's meant to be because it is a combination of a lot of things depending on how you do your workout. Like if you're working in sets, then that can be a little closer to dumbbells and stuff like that. But it's like functional training, athleticism, high intensity training, and also like strength training and weight training. At the same time, it's it's unbelievable how much better and more athletic you feel. Like it's helped me on the heavy bag, a ton like movement. I mean, punching a bag. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, I love boxing, but like my movement on the bag since going back to kettlebells has improved dramatically, I'd say. It's good stuff. Yeah, definitely keep it now. No, I do that. I do yoga and I do a lot of yoga. You do a lot yoga. Yoga is amazing for me. Well, it's also for core. Yeah. Absolutely. Huge difference between abs and core. You gotta have a, yeah, you gotta have a strong core to be able to do anything really athletic for sure. Yeah, and it's another duh. You know, like when you find your core, you're like, oh, there it is. Oh, I get it. And then it's like, core, your core is everywhere. You know, when you're lifting something with your hand, it's like your core is there. But back to what we were saying before the break, so you were talking about some, so yeah, so these other guys you're saying, like the teals of the world, they're, they have something many of them. Yeah, there's not that many. And I think that's the problem. George Carlin, I always say they had this famous line. It's a big club in you ain't in it. Amazing observation. But like I always say it's a small club in you ain't in it. Like it's a very, very tight club. And so these guys who are looking at it, like they can transcend. I want to come back to that in a minute. But like, you know, you're saying it's at the expense of everyone else and they just don't care. So you were raising the point and this is interesting, because I was having a conversation with my friend Tim Martin about this the other day with it's very hard to think about. But like that ultra capitalism view, right? Where someone could be a trillion errands stuff like that. And then just, you know, let everything lie where it is, including like if people, that means people die off, because it's too much winter take off. Fuck it. That's how it's supposed to be. I disagree with that. I don't think it should be like that. While I look at all economic systems, and I objectively say like, yes, capitalism has been the best system proven over time over the other ones. It doesn't, I always say it doesn't mean it's perfect. That also doesn't mean you throw the whole thing out. So I was talking with Ty about like, yeah, I don't really see a good need for someone to be a trillionaire. But at the same time, to require someone to not be a trillionaire would require a governing body to come in and determine that when you get to a certain level of wealth, you're not allowed to have more, which means they could then use the slippery slope and set that objectively. Right. Like in the Reagan era. Right. How so in the Reagan era? The Reagan era. Anything you made over like a million dollars was tax like 80%. Oh yeah. Yeah. Eisenhower was like 90 or so. Yeah. And Reagan, we look back at as if he was, you know, some horrible conservative. And it's like, no, the tax policy then they prevented that. They do once you, they really said once you had over a million, a few million dollars, why did you need more? And they looked at it wasn't, it's not beneficial to the country, to the nation for one person to take that much of its currency and store it away. So taking a trillion dollars of value and taking it off the table, it doesn't make for a good poker game. Yeah. There's something about these guys and I, you know, I've never known any of those dudes personally, not sure I really want to, but like there's some crossing point that happens. Some day or maybe it happens slowly like a boiling frog where they separate themselves. Well, they do. And we've, and I wrote about those. They're studies. I mean, when you have a billion dollars, you have less empathy for other people. You wrote about that. Yeah. Yeah. There's studies. I quoted them in the, in the last book that once you have that kind of money, it's either because of what you had to do along the way or, you know, in some people theorize it's because you need a kind of sociopathic type personality to get there to begin with. Now, the thing about capitalism that I would, I would say is, who says we only, we should only have one economic system for all places at all times? It's like, I could say marriage is good, marriage is cool, but is it the best thing for 11 year olds who are, is it 14 year olds, 70 year olds? It's like, does everyone have to get married? Is that the only system of romance that we have? No, there's others. So like capitalism is really good if you're trying to grow an economy. It's not really great if you're an economy that's kind of fully grown and is worried about how are we going to manage remaining resources? You know, that's when you might want to commons. And we've had different kinds of economy. Late medieval Europe had it commons. You can use it commons to organize fisheries or a pasture that a lot of different cows are going to use. There's all these different other kinds of things, other kinds of money systems that you can use. Sometimes you want expensive money that's loaned out by a central bank at interest. So all the money we use, we got to pay back to the banker more than we borrowed. So our economy has to grow just to keep the bank in business. Sure. That's fine for the Goldman Sachs economy. But are there any others and could they coexist? Could we have an economy of our little town? How it works? Like we're going to share one lawnmower on our blocks? Exactly. So there are a bunch of different things. So it's like, capitalism's great among other things. Yeah. I So there's a deeper conversation there and I'm not trying to get off it. I'm trying to relate it to something else too. So I'm not copying out from that. But I remember he said it way more eloquently than I can remember it. But like Sebastian Younger when he wrote the book Tribe really explored like how humanity began in a way in the sense that we existed in these mathematically smaller groups to wear systems or whatever. Yeah. So where basically and I'm not even sure he intended to do this but he showed that elements of libertarianism and socialism can work below a certain number. And so now you look at it like think of America we got 3334 million people here and they give a smaller country it's got a million people or something like that. That's not how tribes work back in the day. They were 100 people 200 people everyone knew each other they knew what it was so the idea that some government in some capital in some city of said country whether it's a million people or 340 million people. That's not how humans were involved technically to be which I'm not saying we shouldn't be now but what I am saying is we have to understand collectively that that's not our natural state. So however we're going to coexist together and create opportunities for people needs to be like actually I don't know if the term is like studied or whatever but you can't just assume we'll figure it out. Exactly that's where this idea of something called an arcosendicalism. An arcosendicalism right it's like anarchism but syndicated so the idea is you have these small communities like cabuts and towns that do stuff together and most human beings really only focus on the few hundred people that are in their thing but all these little things are networked with each other and there are some people that help them communicate but it's like we're really good oh we make you know we make shoes in our community that's what we do and whatever and that one over there they make beds and that one over there they do farming and we all trade with each other. So you have a community of people I mean something I started saying to people when they're talking about alienation and all these big problems and I'll say you know what if you start with think what are the do you know the first name of the 20 people who are closest to you when you're sleeping at night. The people who are physically like when you're sleeping in this apartment. I know ten. You know ten of them right so ten but because that's that's your people who's closest to your body when you're sleeping at night. That's interesting. They're the people who are protecting you right but they're here. And it's like wow and I thought about that and it's like in my building I know like five or six of the one but those are you know then we're all sleeping together at night. I don't even know who they are right through those walls and it's like that's your tribe you know. You know whether you realize that or not they're in proximity and maybe not your only tribe but that's kind of where it starts organismically. If you believe that there's like electromagnetic fields and our hearts and you know that you're breathing and come metabolizing with other people there you're first unit of but we have a one thought of this note though now Douglas because like right when we were on that break right there I was texting someone in Hawaii. Yeah right like she's nowhere near here but that's what we rate. But like you know you're talking with yeah but that was the whole rave thing like oh my god we're creating a new neural network of human beings across the planet. We're going to be Gaya's brain and Gaya's brain Jesus Christ. I'm a Gaya hypothesis it was this again around Club of Rome in the 1970s 80s a guy James Clums are Rome James Levellock yeah well they just invited me I only learned about them you know I don't know about them. I knew that they existed but I just knew their initial the initial report. I don't like that the Club of Rome is an in Rome I'm very sketched out by that point. Yeah I wonder what does Rome have to do with them anyway. Well they started in Rome they did which is the great city on earth because they did like a meeting or something in Rome I guess they did a meeting in Rome and now they're in fucking Switzerland with Klaus Schwab. No are they I don't think you're supposed to notice here. I don't think it is. Klaus Schwab is the guy who wants to he's a Switzerland shit. Yeah no no Klaus Schwab is world bank and that kind of stuff or world economic forum. No that's dark. Okay all right. That's a very different thing. Club of Rome are like environmentalist. This guy is like is like is like AOC on cocaine. I'm having fun with that guy it's a different thing. Yeah but like I think I mean if I found out Club of Rome was evil I'd want to know. You're gonna shine the light on the dark. Yeah but I'll shine the light. I'll shine the light. All right good. No but they're not no they're like little policy wonk sweet. Yeah. Like educators really thinking how do we promote but it's interesting and I get it that people who are concerned about the well being of the planet and its people are the enemies of those who want us to disregard. But unless. But unless. Now here's the dark argument here and I could see this being a scenario where people are in it and don't even know it by the way. Unless it's two sides playing against the middle while acting like they're playing against each other because there's forces at work that use group think as a weapon to where they could be like oh Doug Rush cough. He's done research on this this and that he's a great guy. I'll never fucking know this because he just wants to do his research. We'll invite him to do this so he'll come over here and say this and then this other group over here is like guy X thinks the opposite of Doug Rush cough. He believes in actually all the bullshit. He said we'll pull him in here. He'll fucking fight about her right a bunch of papers and everything and then everyone will fight about it in the streets while we all do the real shit out here and take over the world. I wonder about that sometimes. Yeah. I mean I'm I'm a bad target for that because I'm I'm just like thinking ask questions and explore. Yeah. I'm I take it as a positive sign that that side if you want to call it that is into my message of like heart and humans and all but interestingly enough Steve Bannon was asking me to be on War Room a bunch of times right. He don't like me too much. I don't think he doesn't. What was he asking you about War Room? He wanted me to be on War Room to talk about my book team human that I'm arguing that you human it was sort of against the technology. Okay. But she's against that too. You know he's against he doesn't like those guys. Yeah. He's like for true Maga against he doesn't like he didn't like doge and and those things because again it was the AI billionaires running things he was you know the populist. He's a guy I'm very sketched out by. I don't believe anything. He says I what's why I didn't want to go on it in the end because I think not just that not just that he's probably smarter than me on some level. Oh he's a genius. Yeah. You know what I mean that I thought like I probably would end up getting just used. Yeah. No I think that's a good thought man because he has been everywhere all at once for the last four and a half decades and one place two place three place four okay five places six places seven places eight industries nine at some point that's not a coincidence and I can't sit here and say for sure this thing or that thing but like my friend Henry Abbott you know he he did some amazing research on this years ago and not got no credit for it at the time but like he was tracing out a lot of bannons life and like the people he interacted with and banks and the finance and this and that he's like this is a spy kind of no he's an interesting guy I mean he was I mean talk about you know because the club of Rome type he was a CEO of the biosphere project the biosphere which was this they made this fake greenhouse earth it was the most weird-ass environmental experiment so he's doing that he was like he like owns like Seinfeld or something well he so what he did is he came and he did a financing round on Seinfeld so now since then like back when he did like fucking 1991 or something whatever it was we could check it he's paid a royalty on every episode right it's fucking insane right I mean so he's done he's interesting interesting cat but you're right Steve Bannon served as a CEO biosphere two in 1993 and 94 bought in by billionaire Ed Bass to cut costs to restructure the failing ecological project in Oracle Arizona his tumultuous 17-month tenure involves sweeping management changes aggressive lawsuits and significant alterations to the scientific mission Bannon was hired as an investment banker and consultant to manage the facilities floundering finances he quickly ousted the original management of the project founder John Allen fearing Bannon's management would jeopardize the crew's safety to former biosphere and broken to the facility in April 1994 to expose the situation and let me tell you this we want to throw coincidence in April 1994 I was at Timothy Leary's house when the two people the two people who broke into it came to Timothy Leary's house and talked to Timothy about this act and they were they did it also because they thought the people in the biosphere were going to run out of oxygen and they went and they broke the actual glass of the biosphere to let oxygen in and undermine the experiment, 'cause the whole idea was that biosphere was a closed environment that could we have plants and people live together and make oxygen, like, 'cause almost like an experimental Mars dome or something, they just couldn't do it. People were just dying in there. And so they went and broke the, but I was at Timothy Leary's house that the night that they came, that then they let, they worried his house in LA and then drove to the biosphere and did that like the next day. - Were you in psychedelics or something at the time, or just chilling and they just walked in? - Well, it wasn't on psychedelics. It's not like you go to Timothy Leary's house, not like everybody's just, - Why didn't I, you know, - Well in Rome, yeah, well in Rome. - Yeah, well in Rome. - Back to Rome. - Back to Rome. - No, we were not. - Okay. - All right, so you remember this very clearly. - Yeah, yeah. - It came over. - Yeah, but it was that so funny, April 94. - That's interesting. - Yeah, and again, you look at a career like his and that's another guy where I go both sides against the middle. I remember there was an article that for the life of me, I cannot fucking find a swear to God, it's been pulled off the internet. But back when Ben and was named the chairman of the campaign for Trump in summer 2016, when they fired Paul Manafort. So this is like maybe early August 2016. There was an article on him and I can't remember if it came out right then or if they reprinted it from like a year before and I want to say like the photographic memory saying it was in something like Bloomberg Business Week, but I'm not sure. And basically the author of the article was given full access to Steve Bannon. - Right. - To just shadow him for like a couple days or whatever in Washington DC where he's got the townhouse where I guess now he does all these years later, the war room and stuff. At the time, he's the head of bright part. And so Bannon has this big party with all these DC accolades and everything. The authors walking around with him. And Bannon's given the tour of this place. And they go to some, I don't know, like the fireplace or something and they're looking at some pictures. I don't remember what they're looking at, but the guy turns to Bannon and he goes, what do you believe? Like what do you, who is amazing question? Like what is your political philosophy? And he goes, I'm a lennonist. And the author's like, wait, wait, wait. Like, like lennon, like the Bolshevik? You're a conservative inflow. Like what the fuck, that doesn't make sense. It goes, no, no, no, no. Not the actual solutions to the policy is like a Bolshevik, but I'm a lennonist in the sense that he burned it down. Right. I want to burn it all down. And that's all he said. And the author was just like, well, that's, that seems, and to me, I remember clocking that going. That's interesting. Now you get it. So that's why he would want a January 6th. That's why he'd be in the war room for that. Because it's just tear it down. And what would be if you not left her right? If you just tear it down, who's more likely to do more tearing it down? Biden, Kamala, or Trump? Of course, Trump. There's more, just, it's more incendiary. Not totally why. I think it's both. I make no distinction. Biden Harris is a passive destruction. Donald Trump has more aggressive destruction. Meaning like he'll tell you that he wants to do this and rip it down. Whereas Biden Harris will tell you there's no such thing as a gender and some fucking memo that they put out. Right. And I think both of them-- But they're-- they're-- Biden and Harris are institutionalists, though. They're trying to prop up the system. Right. And then dropping up systems. That destroy things, of course. But if you're going to tear it down, you're not going to go to the people who are building-- Biden and Harris are more like-- But you don't think institutions have torn down society and maybe they're going to fight for that. Oh, they're like World Bank and all those things. Yeah. It's World Bank was colonialism by another tool. It's like, OK, instead of going to those places with armies and slaving your people, you're going to borrow money from us. And you're never going to be able to pay it back. So you're going to open your markets to us. And we're going to put our big aggregate there and do all that. Right. It was the same-- it's the same stuff. The only difference I would argue is that at least in government constitutions, there are ways of recalling things. There are ways for people to intervene, to vote in ones who are not going to do those things. Whereas if you really do have a monarchy, like Musk or Tiel want-- They want that? Yeah, yeah. They want a monarchy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm the president of Peter Tiel Hay Club. But like, he wants a monarchy out of that one. Yeah, yeah. Look at-- Can we pull that out? Is he all likes monarchy? Yeah, yeah. Next thing. But that was what Nick Land and who's the other one that they like? I'm Curtis Yarvin. That's what they're all about. See how that makes no sense, though, with-- How do I want to say this? Like quote unquote libertarian conservative politics that Peter Tiel claims to love, if that is the case, that he wants to be monarchy. It does, if you think we are in a might-makes-right universe. Might-makes-right. Whoever's the strongest wins. We're all just fighting all the time. We have these laws, but the laws aren't real anyway, because the people who control the laws are just the strongest people with the biggest guns. So if that's what's happening anyway, then just have the most mightiest person be in charge and get over all this bullshit democracy voting, we're just going through the motions. Democracy is just there to convince people that they're living in something other than might-makes-right when they're not. And they would say the happiest-- Oh, shit. I don't remember that at all, but god damn, you're cooking. In his 2014 book Zero to One, Peter Tiel declared monarchy as the best form of government. I read that book twice. His idea is-- He argued that capitalism and democracy is diverged. A shift he traced to the expansion of voting rights. His ideal society, wealth-based, and male dominated. Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. And there you go, libertarian. He embodies, at times to a cartoonish degree, the contradictions of the libertarian movement. You're perfect. You see? You're good study there. You're champion of entrepreneurial freedom. He also praises monopolies, right? Wow. Yeah, the monopolies thing that's-- I remember when I just, like, the Peter Tiel, like as a businessman and didn't know all the shit he did and everything, and I read Zero to One, I'm like, wow, that's kind of genius. Not to say I agreed with all of it, but I'm like, whoa, the way you can see why. So successful. Which I don't think you should ever underestimate your enemy. He's a brilliant guy. But then you see what some of it obviously came out in that book, and I'm forgetting it. But then you see the actions taken of what he might want. And you're like, this isn't a world that leaves so many people behind. And maybe he really is Malthusian. And he's like, what? Fuck it. A lot of people are going to die because they need to. Right. He is Malthusian. He does believe in the limits to growth. Actually the right wing extremist, the like the Koch brothers and Tiel and Musk and those guys, they believe more in the limits to growth than Club of Rome does. The difference is the right wing guys, like those guys believe that because of the limits to growth, there's not enough for everybody. And why? So we've got to let those millions and billions die. Why does Musk argue that people need to have kids way more than? He is at the forefront of that movement. And like we do have a birth rate problem in America now for sure. It depends if you go to the problem. It's a problem partly. It's economic expansion. They want more customers. Although now they're realizing, same altman realizing future of customers are not human. Their future customers are going to be AI's. How does an AI pay you? In crypto. In other words, if, think about this way, you're a billionaire sitting in your house, and you don't interact with people except your servants and your family, right? So you're up there on the hill. Yeah. You want there to be consumers. You want there to be people working? Do you want workers? And you want consumers. And you want them buying and selling and the money going up to you, the profit going up to you. Why do you care if those consumers and producers are human or AI's? I think it's just so far in for me to even think about something that's not human exchanging occurrences. Exactly. But you think of an AI, right? An AI in order to do its job, it needs energy. It needs data, and it needs processing power. So where is it going to get those? It will earn money doing its AI tasks, and it will spend that money buying processing power and memory and data center storage and all that from these companies. So they are your consumer at that point. And then they don't need to be people anymore. Deep, can we Google how many current AI data centers does China have and how many current AI data centers? Well, China just built one that's as big as like 100 of ours. You heard about they built this giant giant giant giant giant. - How many square miles? - Yeah, they're your square foot, yeah. - So that's a good point. They built this really big one. - Okay, so the United States leads the global AI infrastructure race with roughly 4,000 to 5,400 total data centers compared to China, which has approximately 350-450 publicly tracked facilities. While the US has a massive quantitative lead, China is rapidly scaling its infrastructure in state-led computing hubs to close the gap. And part of that may be exactly what you're saying, which is, we're a building one that's 10 square miles, they're building one that's 110 square miles. Okay, so I wanna bring it back around to this too, 'cause we got off this and I think it's important. This is where I like to go. like see the idea that, you know, you worry about if China got to like AGI first, would they use it for worse than we would? I also don't necessarily trust the people we got in charge of that to use it for good either. So that's a problem. But I remember this is like a full circle kind of thing too. The very first episode I ever recorded for this podcast, which turned out to be episode six because I put out 10 episodes day one, was basically a lot of it was discussed in Kai Fu Lee's 2018 book. I believe it was called AI Superpowers. Did you ever read this? So Kai Fu Lee, Chinese American technologist guy in the venture capital world, I believe he was laying out what this race looks like where it stood and where it could be going between China and the US. And so I see where it's like you'd want to have an advantage. And I was raising this point earlier. That said, where like it could be such an example of the road to hell is paved with good intentions where the people that you use, the devil you make the deal with to get that advantage, then fucking eats the whole population. You know, you have power to your running these fucking places and then we're living in a surveillance 1984 state. That would be a total L. Right. So how do we, how do we try to advance, progress, do good for humanity, also like get America in a good position without sacrificing everything that makes that purposeful in the first place? I mean, the easiest way would be, I mean, even go here, but have citizens assembly is making decisions about things. I think people picked it random, not running, not running for office. People picked it random, interesting in groups and giving them a agency over their own regions of what's allowed to happen there. You know, it's interesting China in China's AI policy, I would think is, I think a superior to ours. Why? Because they realize that hand in hand with AI development, they got to do renewable energy because of all the, you know, but they, they emit more smog than China does. Yeah, but that's why they've had it, they've been working on it. But they're also the global leader. They're the global leader in solar, wind and geothermal and all these other kinds of energies. And we've put an intentional stop to it. You know, the other thing that's funny, you were talking for about crypto and about how so much a crypto is bullshit. And I started to look at crypto as a way to an excuse to sell chips and energy. An excuse to sell chips and energy. So Bitcoin, basically, the main thing that Bitcoin is, if you look at Bitcoin as a Martian anthropologist looking at Earth, you say, oh, so they're burning the planet to prove this money is, it has value, right? Crypto Bitcoin is, is we spend energy, we, we burn fuel in order to value this thing. And we buy chips in order to mine more of it. So the main economic activity of Bitcoin was Nvidia chips and energy. And then we like people like, this Bitcoin set doesn't seem real. Then we did NFTs and we got this last burst. Oh, let's burn more. All right, all right. Let's get to an era. Right. That was an era. It was. But we could burn, burn, burn. And then when NFTs died, what happened? AI. And what is AI? A new excuse. More Nvidia chips. More burning fuel. More build. So it's like, who's really making money on this? Yeah, the AI companies are getting invested in. But what are they spending it on? Chips and oil. Chips and oil. That's where it's all. And now water. Yeah. Now, all these guys we've been talking about today, not all of them. But, you know, the way that you recently came up on the radar again was because I had played that video on one of our weekend episodes with Deep and I where you were talking. This back in 2020, it was, I believe, right before the pandemic, you did this interview where you very matter of factfully explaining about how you had been advising these billionaires on how to deal with the end of the world and, you know, building bunkers and hilariously explaining like, how to be nice to your security guard so that they won't fucking kill you when, you know, money doesn't get. I mean, it was hysterical and also very sad to watch, but I appreciated you like totally outing this kind of thing right here. And then ironically, you had been on my friend, Danny Jones show. And so I was like, going to hit up Danny like, oh, can you connect me with with Doug Rushcoff, but then you texted me, let's do it. So like, great. But this whole concept of you long before the pandemic even happened and people were thinking in certain ways like that. Obviously, before the complete rise of AI and everything, you are somehow thrust into a situation where you're meeting with very wealthy people, very powerful people who are asking you existential questions seemingly about the future of humanity, not with the idea that like, hey, maybe this could happen, but more with the idea that, yeah, this is going to happen. So how do we deal with that? First of all, can you just take me there and tell me how you even got into this conversation or what happened? I mean, yeah, like I said, I used to get to do talks for like corporations sometimes or which people, whatever. This was a, turn out, it was a hedge fund that invited some of their biggest investors to this resort out in the middle of the desert and they had different speakers and stuff. And I thought they said, oh, we want you to come and do a talk on the future of the digital economy, you know, because I talk about that shit. And so I was ready to do this talk. I'm sitting in the green room and instead of bringing me out, usually they come, you do a talk. So they come out in the morning. I've never done talk. Oh, they come with a guy comes with a microphone and usually they clip it on and then you go out. And then they said they brought these five guys in, they sat around this table. Five guys. This is your talk. This is it. And I'm like, okay, I'm ready. So no, no, you don't have to talk. And they start asking me all these questions, like the really binary tech bro questions. What's the lighting like? Is it dark? Like, no, it's a green room. It's in a resort. It's like a, it's normal. It's a brain. They're serving a refreshment. It's bright. It's daytime. It's the one in the ass. Not wearing a mask and shit. No, no, no, no. It was before COVID or anything. It was a nice resort. No, it was. It was. I had a private hot tub in my unit. It was like a bungalow. I like bungalows. And they go around. They had little golf carts taking you around. I mean, it was nice. Like the electric golf carts. Yeah. It was a whole thing. Firemen are really friendly. Very cool. So, but they come in there asking me like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Okay. They were to place their bets. You know, alternate or augmented reality or virtual reality. Oh, I remember. That was shit. Yeah. And then finally, it was like Alaska or New Zealand. I mean, you're like, what? 2018. So, 2018, this happened. Like, what? It's like, we're here. What's the better place? Assuming climate change happened to, where's the better place to put our bunker? Alaska or New Zealand? So, were they only asking you in the context of climate change? No. And I was like, with that was for that. And there was like, where do we put our bunker for the event? The event. That's what they called it. The event. What do they think it was? The pandemic, economic unrest, nuclear war, mass migration, whatever it is, that makes life as we know it, unlivable on forces them to go to a special place and write it out or live it forever. And so, I then got, and then I did get into my intellectual dominatrix mode. And then I was like, oh, so you're going to have a bunker? It's going to somehow, you know, see, and one of them showed me these plants he had of this underground thing, all these shipping containers all together, and he had a heated pool in there. That's one of those first things I would think about. Yeah, in his thing. And I'm like, dude, you know, there's a guy, I know, in my neighborhood who's got a heated pool in all summer. There's always a little van in front of his house with the guy with the spare parts and the fixing this. It's like a heated pool is a hard thing to maintain. And I'm like, where are you going to get the spare parts for your heated pool after the apocalypse? And he's like, opens this mall skin book and he's like, porch for the heat. Like, he hadn't fucking thought of this. It's like, these are like walking dead level scenario. When they're sending a billion in, that's sending their best. God damn it. So then I'm like, okay, and they're like, you get water table, your water's contaminated from the nuclear fault. How long is it going to last? You're going to have filters. Oh, reverse osmosis is going to do the fucking benzene and the radiation and whatever. And then until they're like, oh no, we got this. We got scientists on that and this and reverse this and the top water and the landfill and the bus. We work that out. I'm like, okay, who's going to protect your bunker from the rest of us? You know, from all of us. The ones who are still alive. Yeah. It's got, oh, cement gate things, long, long. And then the guy's like, oh, you know, I've got, I've got Navy seals on the far. Speed dial. They've got helicopters are going to come. They're going to pick us up and go bring us out of that. And I'm like, oh, is you got Navy seals? How are you going to pay your Navy seals after your Bitcoin is worthless? Why are they in the state? Why are they exactly? And they're like, oh, okay. So, we could control. We could have a, what if I'm the only person? How smart they are. Tech bros, billionaires who are richer than us. How do I find the only person who knows the combination to the place where we keep the food? To go Navy seals, they don't have. - If any experience getting information out of people, you're gonna spend all apocalypse getting water-boarded. - I've had a lot of Navy SEALs sitting in that chair. Let me tell you if it wouldn't take-- - No, no. Or they said, "We're gonna have chips." Chips that don't like control everybody's access to different things, and if they got out of hand, I could always like use it as a shot. Yeah, it's like, "Oh, they're gonna yank that thing out "and fucking kill you in a second." Just even knowing that you're saying that you've already lost your Navy SEALs. - Oh my God, we are so fucked. - I'm sorry, 'cause I told that story and someone said, "Dude, they should get Army Rangers." Not many people say it. - How long was this meeting? - Less than an hour. - Less than an hour. - Less than an hour. Less than an hour. Well, because the whole thing you got to realize, I was not like being called into the layer by the wealthy guys. I was the entertainment. - The entertainment. - There was, you said-- - They had mold skin books and shit. - Yeah, I know. Well, some of them knew I was gonna be there. Well, one of them definitely knew, 'cause he had his plans. But it was more like, first, I don't know if they all really had plans. They could have also been trying to impress each other. Like, "Oh, I got this going, I got that." And there were other speakers at this thing. It was like a weekend long. So we just like learned to make an omelet with this famous chef and prove your golf swing with this golf pro, spend an hour with a futurist. You know, so-- - Build your bunker. - Yeah, exactly. - When everyone dies. And I'm like, "Why are you asking?" I mean, I'm fucking anarchist media theorist that I'd had to build a bunker. You know, I'm just like, "Love each other, man." You know, I love that where you're explaining how this connected these guys were. And you said in the clip, where they're asking how they can build good will with their future security guards. And you're like, "I don't know, pay for the kids. "Burt, they parted their bar mitz for some shit." - That's what I'm gonna say, exactly. - And they're like, "Oh, wow, whoa, so I gotta be nice to him." - Yeah, pay for your head of security's daughter's bottom. - Oh my God. - Yeah. 'Cause then they were like, I said, "Be nice to them, be nice to their family, "be nice to their friends." And then one of them, this was one of the last things he said. He's like, "Yeah, but where does it stop?" - Where does it stop? - The being nice. How do you-- where do you draw-- And I'm like, "Dude, that's the whole thing. "We're all in this together." But for me, the thing was, I realized that the people who-- the richest, most powerful people I've ever met felt utterly powerless to impact the future. That the best they could do was have someone like me predict the future and then just-- - But they're assuming that future's happening and they're assuming-- - Inevitable. - Inevitable, they call it, they have a name for it, the event. - Right. - And there's multiple, whether it be some climate disaster, whether it be a nuclear holocaust, whether it's the pandemic, - No tech, no matter how-- - AI taking over. - AI taking over. Like, these are people that have access to people, whether you like 'em or not. They have access to people who have a lot of information and a lot of simulations and a lot of things that can point to what the actual future is. And it's pretty f*cking alarming that they're having this conversation very matter of faculty with you, even if you are describing yourself as the entertainment. In 2017, this is before COVID, before the rise of AI, before the sh*t, that is wild. - And these are people who would rather have f*cking robots or teenagers than women, right? - Wait a second. - Please explain that. - These are people who want to build sex robots. These are people-- - The people you were talking to. - These are-- - They said this? - What are the sexes who they are? These are-- They're talking about the culture that we're talking about, right? What do they want? - Can you put the camera and don't real fast? - Yeah. - Yeah. - Let me just write this down on my band. - Was that one of them? - Oh, one of the-- Is that on the camera? - It's not on the camera. - You're on camera right now. - No. - No, that's not. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - If you want to know. - If I-- It's off record. - That's one of them. - God damn bro. God damn it. That's so f*cking-- - But that's-- - That's so f*cking-- - Yeah. - You know, I did have a brush with the Epstein crowd. Interestingly enough, through the science people. - Yeah, so did you ever meet him? - I don't think so. - You don't think so. - I don't think so. - You didn't meet Palm Beach Pete. - I don't know who that guy-- - Oh, that guy. - No. - No, no, no. No, but I was invited to a party in New York thrown by a literary agent who was the literary agent. - Brockman? - Yeah. - Of the scientist star. You know, Dawkins and all those kind of guys. - All of them. - And Dennett and Pinker and all. - Every single one. - And really, really smart, super smart, smarter than us people. - When is that? - Late 90s. - Late 90s. So it was before Epstein was known, before he had gotten arrested the first time, before any of that. But it was basically called like the Millionaires Dinner, or the Millionaires Dinner. And I got to go to it because I was one of the kids writing about the Internet was new. So I was like, cyber boy. And I got into this thing. And the guy who was throwing the party said, this is a really special party. I'm gonna give you a plus one, make it count. And I'm thinking, these are the smartest people in the world. I invite the smartest woman I know, this woman who runs a website at the time of the literary website. - No, look her. - It was beyond that. She was the smartest woman I know. - Yeah, I know, but like, they were bringing her to something else. - Right. And I bring her there. And I get to this, I get to the party. The guy grabs my wrist. I can still like, almost be like, grabs me and he's plus me aside and he goes, how dare you waste your plus one on a lesbian? And I'm like, huh? And I said, this is the smartest person. You said, make it count. And he goes, you, I invited you, you're like, 27, 28 years old. I invited you to raise the quotient in the room. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he goes, look. And they're these, all these like middle-aged guys with like, 20s, if they're lucky, 20-year-old, gorgeous little model people. And I'm like, that's the quotient. Da, you know, 'cause I was so worried about not being, you're gonna go to a thing with Dawkins and you're a young writer. - Right. - You're thinking, I'm not smart enough to be with these people. I'm gonna impress them with a fucking genius, you know? And oh my God. And so that, it turned out that that dinner and all those dinners were funded by Epstein. And I got in this fight with Dawkins. - Come on people here. - At that thing? - Yeah. - 40, 50. - And where is it? - In New York, in some, the. - What kind of place? - Townhouse, rich person thing. - There's some townhouses. - Yeah, but not his place. - No, I don't think. I don't think. - I don't remember that. - You would think I would, but I really wouldn't, because he wasn't famous yet. - Mm-hmm. - Was it on E71 Street? - Could've been. - Goddamn it. - It could've been, I just don't know. It was so far back when. - I didn't, I didn't. - I don't know, I don't know. It was a very rich person's big, big place though. But anyway, so I get in this argument with Dawkins about whether or not there's like a soul or any meaning or anything to this. And he's basically saying that human beings are just basically computers running memes. And we're all just, we're all, you know, like memes or like genes, and we're just sort of automatic. - How did you say reach-sec conclusion? - Because it's still that's what, there's only evidence of that. There's no evidence of anything else. And I was arguing my felt experience is that you mean being so have souls and that the universe is leaning towards, you know, morality, we're trying to make the world better and we're reaching out that there's an effort. There's some kind of a love or something animating us. And he dismissed me finally, he said, oh, you're a moralist. I don't even know what that meant. But it was like, as a dismissing, you're a moralist. And then it's like 20 years later, I see their pictures on the fucking Lolita Express, you know, heading out to the Ted on Jeffrey Epstein's plan and I'm like, okay, I'm the moralist, you know, guilty. I'll take that. And it's like for all the, for all the 20, 30 years that I was sad that I never got rich or invited to the right things or being one of those people, I realized, oh, there's a deal you make. - It's a price to pay. For going there. - And that was the only time you ever went to one of those things that you know of that was like funded by him where you invited by Brockman. - Yeah, yeah. When's the last time you talked to Brockman? - I saw him at a thing. Now, you know, it was weird 'cause then after that he represented me for a while and then I saw the article come out that those parties were funded by Epstein. There was a guy Evgeny Marzov, really smart guy, kind of anti, more anti-tech anti-capitalist. You know, he would call me ProTech 'cause he's like anti-tech. I'm critical about it, but he's like more critical. And he wrote this piece in the Atlantic exposing all that and I was like, oh, fuck. - When was the? - Whenever Epstein was exposed in all that. - Back in 2019, 20. - Yeah, when everyone was exposing those things and I was like, what the fuck? And I was like, He wrote this piece and he said, and he was more philosophically educated than me and better at sort of figuring out a moral conundrum because he's a great agent. I'm at this agent. He's not even my agent. I'm at the agency. And he said, you know, the agency needs to make some public acknowledgement of what happened, some commitment about, or give back the money that the foundation got from this guy, make some repair and I can stay. And the agency never acknowledged it at all, never did anything. So he left and then I left the agency there. Because it was just like, you do something. Yeah, that's one thread that kind of gets ignored these days and it's been a thread that's been open for a while because to be clear, you could run through. I don't know if it's still on there, but two, three years ago, even you could run through like the organization of everyone who's at least related to Edge Foundation run by Fox. It was fucking everybody. There's literally no one. And you have to be objective at that point and you're like, okay, obviously all these people, all of them aren't down on Epstein. No, with them being in the Edge Foundation meant there was like 500 of us. I think there's more. Oh really? What it meant was you would get an email once a year. Just like Club of Rome. No, but they would have an email with a question. And it was like, what's the greatest invention of the last 2000 years? And you would do an answer. And if they thought the answer was cool, they put it in a book of the Edge, that's what the Edge was. And then there was an access to stuff too. Because you're in the fraternity. I didn't. But there were the people who were really in it, they would get to go to, it was interesting. They would have seminars. Like they did a thing on, and ultimately turned out they were into kind of dark stuff, behavioral finance. They got into that behavioral psychology, behavioral finance, which is sort of how do you get people to make financial decisions that are best their own, against their own best interests? And it was like, oh, that's what you're interested in. But they were inner things. Or if you were, you know, dock insured Daniel Denner's Stephen Pinker, you got invited. They would like take a cruise around Antarctica or go to Galapagos. They did cool things if you were, but I wasn't. You didn't get to go to Antarctica. No, I was. I was here. No, I'm just, I was more pervert. But they were, they were, I mean, I met Alan Alda. He was one. Oh, yeah. Because he got really interested in science. He did narration. Interesting. Interesting. Cool. Science things. But all you from that one experience of the party you went to that you didn't know was sponsored by Epstein, you remember having an intellectual argument with dock ins and that was kind of it. Two strikes. Two strikes. One strike against them was that this is a party where I was supposed to bring a hot woman right is like, oh, this is some weird misogynistic thing going on here that I don't understand and creepy and whatever. And the second was that these guys are calling me a moralist and laughing at me for believing in something and anything that as if believing having faith in anything, I'm not saying there's God. Don't worry. I'm not saying, I'm not saying there's God. I'm just saying that there's, you know, I'm not going to be that radical. I'm just saying, you know, that there's, you know, like, because I'm among scientists, you know, talking about God. And it's like, oh, no, you're, you know, there's a lot of scientists that do believe in God though. Yeah, I know. I know. But these ones, there was a hyper vigilance against any of that. And that's because if you believe in the in the sacredness of the other human and you can't do that. Right. Oh my God. Great point. 12 year old girl, if you believe human beings have souls. And so what happened was people like Epstein ended up admiring very staunch atheist scientists because these scientists were giving, we're creating a permission structure. There's nothing going on here. There's nothing inside that person. It's just genes. It's just memes. They're not real. You just unintentionally, in my opinion, made the most fucked up, but legitimate other argument, just another one added to the list of believing in the higher power because of the way you just described those people. And I don't, I don't think you're wrong at all. And I think it's pretty telling too that you was a younger guy, you know, among the other people there, went to something like this. You say you didn't know the context of it and everything and all that, but even back then when you knew nothing about what they actually really do, walked away going, yeah, that just mm. And it's a spidey sense. It's all spited. We all have it all the time for you. And you know, there's so many things we can do that repress your spidey sense. I mean, I feel like being online all the time is probably bad spidey sense, but, but that feeling in your gut, it's so real. You can trust it. You can really trust you. No, you mean a person and it's like, you know, man, you know it. You know, and the fact that you know it means that everybody knows it on some level. So don't lie because people know you're lying, even if they don't know consciously you're lying inside they know you're lying and they know what's like. So it's like it makes life so much easier in the end. Right. If you just like, oh man, I don't have to worry about anything. I'm just going to spidey it out. No, and so you never went to something like that again as far as you know, like some party like that where he's involved and you don't remember seeing him or anything like that. No, that's why he could have been at that one, but it might have been something that he like funded and wasn't at interest. You know, interesting. And that's the crazy thing, man. And then I spoke at MIT. You spoke at MIT, right? What context? I went to a media lab to talk about a book and then it turns out, you know what I mean, but yeah, a lot of people, but that's the thing. A lot of people have been in club or realm. A lot of people have been in Harvard. You know, like, yeah, there's some line there at some point where it's like, you know, we're probably making a reach and then there's things where it's like, you're not. And it kind of is like, whoa, like what? Everyone around that poison. And that's the thing. That's unfortunately what made Epstein and Maxwell while they were operating so effective at their game is that they knew all they had to do was take a picture with you. And there would always be the question. That's all would be there would always be the question. Yeah, I wasn't important enough. You want to want to think to me. I wasn't. So either way, there's people who will listen right now and be like, oh, you went to a party with them or whatever and they'll be like, maybe, maybe. And that's a really tough thing because they knew so many people. Right. And I didn't know them, but that's the whole point. For me, the whole point is you're going to run in sometime in your life. You're going to run into sketchy people, especially if you start publishing or I mean, look at you, you're going to run into sketchy people. Of course, it's going to happen. The only thing you've got, the only thing you've got is your spidey because they'll have money, they'll have opportunity, they'll have women. I mean, whatever they have, they'll have. And it's like, I mean, for me, I mean, I was lucky. I was a Gen X counterculture determined to stay poor. There was a bunch of us. We were like slackers. So we were optimizing for something else. So the traditional temptations didn't quite apply to me. You know, it was like, I don't know what. It would have been something else. You know, to go back to it though, that less than one hour meeting as you describe it would say five billionaires out there. I'm still more than one. And I think it was four billionaires and one almost billionaires. When I tried to look them up, I'm sorry to hear that from you. But you say so matter of factly, I guess that they, first of all, did you know that any of these guys before they walked in the room? No, I knew of one of them. You knew of them, but you didn't know that. But they weren't like, no, they weren't like Zuckerberg level. But in a mess. Because I asked them even that. I said, I thought you guys are making rocket ships to get off the planet. They're going where, where they're not there yet. They're going where they're not there yet. Yeah, yeah. They're like five, six billion. But like, you said it in a way that would suggest they were extremely open about it that they were in the sex with underage girls and robots. No. They weren't open about it. No. You picked up on that. I picked up that there of that culture. Now, what made you pick up on the fact that they were of that culture? That they, I mean, morally, that they were perfectly okay with leaving humanity behind. You know, they just seemed, I mean, and I guess it's, I'm drawing them with an inaccurate non-journalist brush. That's okay. Right? I'm brushed up against these kind of folks two or three times in my life, right? Once at that party. That's it. Only two or three things. That's kind of low for a guy if you're like the types of things you talk about. I would imagine they were all over you. I know. Or giving money to my team human show. I don't know. That's what I'm like. What a room. It's like, I got like two or three. 200, 200 people paying two bucks a month. It's like, where's one, you know, one tech bro? They're not, they're not, no, they're not. - But two or three times you were, you were obviously. - I feel in presence of those kind of people, you know, and it's energetically and what it is, it's just they're, they really, they don't just really don't care. - Yeah. - And I guess it's more like, it's not, they are, it's more like they could be. Like I talk about, I talk to people who've met like James Dolan or something. And they just go, "Who are we getting to the creeps?" (laughing) - I feel like that's everybody. - You know, I saw, I saw Harvey Weinstein once at a party and I was like, - When? - Oh, in late '80s? - Late '80s? - Late early '90s? Yeah, he was, he was the merchant ivory, they were big producers in the internet. And he just like, the only other, he looked like a misod agent or someone. You know, he's big, you know what I mean? Like he could, - No, I don't know what you mean. - He was scary, he was scary. - He looked like a mis, you, you pegged him as misod agent. - Well, like the interesting. - Not like a misod guy that, or special forces, misod, you know, like an Israeli guy who could just crush my neck. You know, it just, (crying) - He was just scary, he had to scary, imposing presence. - So you picked up on that in late '80s or early '90s? - There's guys at just, there's certain guys, - They gotta look in their eye. - They do, and you're just like, oh, stay, stay away. - They lay. - Good for you. - Yeah, it's funny because, and- - But everyone has it. - What do you mean? - Everyone has, everyone would look at those same people and go, oh, I think we all have that, that interesting. - I think, but here's the thing, I think enough people didn't, or subconsciously looked the other way, with the guy like, - He's got something else I want. Power. - He's got some power on him. - Yeah. - Yeah. - God, no. - It's dark, but it's also fascinating to just like, consider. - Yeah, I gotta pee again. - Okay, we'll be right back. (banging) All right, we're back on air. We were just talking off air on this. You said you got into 12 steps, but you're not an alcoholic. - Right, 12 steps. Well, we're something else anonymous, right? - Okay. - We call it capitalist anonymous or ego-anonymous, or we as a species, we as a civilization are addicted to something, right? Some sort of disconnection from nature, accumulation of money, saving stuff, security. We're addicted to this abstracted way of dealing with the world. And when you look at something like 12 steps, it's just the steps that are involved, it's like a Quaker meeting, right, they just get together and fellowship and share where they're at. The first thing you do is you accept a higher power. It doesn't have to be God, but the kind of stuff we're talking about before, that there's something else going on here. You make amends with other people. It's like the things, it feels like we could almost take Western civilization through 12 steps and we get to a better place. And I just like the way it's organized, it's that anarcho-syndicalist thing we were talking about. There's all these individual groups, they're all their little meetings run themselves, but they're also part of this big network doing sort of the same thing. You can go anywhere in the world and find a 12 step meeting and go and do your thing there. So I just like it as a, a lot of things about that model I really like, that's why it's funny, like at the beginning of Fight Club. Remember how they meet? They're all going to different, so help meetings because they're looking for that loss and a common connection. Of course, that's interesting. No, because it also goes back to what you were first writing about when you were getting into the tech scene and thinking about what the world was going to be. You were thinking about a world where humanity could integrate correctly with tech for the good of humanity rather than tech taking over humanity and making rendering it obsolete, which has been a theme of other parts of our conversation as well today. But now that we are 30, 35 years down that role from when you were first, down that road from when you were first writing about it, how do we make sure that in a world of where there's people like Sam Altman's and Peter Tiel is saying, yeah, you know, a few of us may transcend, but humanity itself probably won't survive. It'll be something different. How do we make, like what are the ways that we make sure collectively is even like a world population that like that thought process doesn't win and a tool like AI can be a great use case to us and something that takes us to the next level and allows all of us to enjoy it rather than people to die off. It's a loaded question. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things that first I think it's good to be able to distinguish between technologies that bring us together and technologies that pull us apart. Okay, what would be two examples in your mind of that? I mean, social media doesn't really bring you together, right? Social media, when you know now how it's designed, it doesn't. But you could look at something like Reddit and it's interesting and it kind of does. And then you say, well, what are the difference between Reddit and social media? Reddit has moderators in each subreddit. So the moderators are there to try to help keep it cohesive and social. So that's sort of one thing. And think about, I mean, think as much about, are you gonna bring an app into your ecosystem? I know you worry about your phone. If you're gonna put an app there is gonna fuck up my phone. But is the app gonna fuck up you? What are you bringing into your day? What are you, you don't really to think about that. And the other thing I started to advocate is for, this was like a 99, I said, we should do a tech shabbat. Tech Sabbath. Tech Sabbath. Like one day a week where you don't use screens. I think that's not a bad idea at all. One day a week, it's like the Israelites gave it to themselves first thing in the desert. We got one day off, you don't have to produce or consume. Because the idea is, the idea that they did it, then was to say a human being is sacred just the way you are. It's enough, you don't need to do anything in order to justify your existence. So to take one day a week where you say, I can just be, I don't have to swipe anything, I don't have to send an email, I don't have to, and to get off the screen too and then just see other people, what are you gonna do? You know, you play games, fuck, walk around, pet your dog, I mean, there's all these other things besides the app one. So there's that sort of on the one hand, and the other for me is, I think the path to the kind of empowerment you're talking about is local. You know, it's like the simple stuff. I used to do this talk called Baro Adryl. - Baro Adryl. - Baro Adryl, yeah, it was based on this story happened to me when my daughter graduated high school and we had the picture of her, and I had to stick it on the wall, and I got these plaster walls. So I can't just put a nail in there so I need to get a drill. So I'm first thing I'm thinking I'm gonna do like any American, I'm gonna go to Home Depot, got a minimum viable product, rechargeable drill, charge it up, drill the holes, stick it in the garage, and maybe never take it out again, or if I do it'll be a year from now, it's not gonna charge and I'll throw it away. So I've sent one kid into the mines to get the rare earth metals to make the rechargeable lithium battery for this thing, and the carbon footprint, use the thing once and throw it out and some other kid, it's gonna pick at it on a pile of toxic waste in Brazil to get the renewable part to sell it to Apple so they can say they make green computers. Or I can walk down the street and knock on my neighbor Bob's door. Bob's always retin' doors and things in his driveway, and he's got, and Bob, can I borrow your drill? And why am I so reluctant to go to Bob and say, Bob, can I borrow your drill? And it's because I'm afraid if I go to knock on Bob's door, he's gonna say, not only can you borrow my drill, but actually I'm gonna come over and drill the hole for you 'cause you don't know how to do an anchor. You don't know how to do this study, you're a fucking nerd. You don't drill the hole, put in the anchor, or the butterfly thing, whatever it is I need, and get it in there and put it up and put it up the picture with a drill that plugs in the wall I got intended. And go home, then that weekend, I'm gonna have the barbecue party for my daughter, the graduation party. And Smoke's gonna go over to Bob's house. You can say, I don't know, he's having fucking sirloin steaks over there at his house. Graduation party for his daughter. I hung the fucking picture and you didn't even invite me, right, so I'll invite Bob. Right now I invite Bob, and now, you know, Halein over on the other side of the book. What, since when is Doug friends with Bob? He invites Bob, so now I got to invite Halein and find Halein and Bob, we're gonna have to invite everyone on the block to the graduation party. So my whole block is gonna be there at graduation party, and that's the bad thing? That's the bad thing, that's the good thing, but I flipped it. We flipped it, we flipped it, oh my god, we flipped it. And then when everyone's there at the barbecue party, we're gonna say, oh, why this happened? Oh, because I borrowed a drill from Bob, and so I wouldn't have to buy one myself, 'cause I don't really need a drum, I'm only using it once every two years. Then someone's gonna say, well, you know, I only use my lawnmower once, so we can't much you use yours. What if we had two lawnmowers for the whole block? And then we'll be starting, we're gonna start sharing things and be friends. And I gave that talk and told that story, and someone got up at the end, some business guy and said, Well, yeah, but when you're all doing all that, what about the lawnmower company? What about the lawnmower company? How are you going to grow this economy if you start sharing lawnmowers with each other? God forbid, we helped each other out. God, we weren't so suspicious of it. Like, even below the final point there of like the guy thing from an economic standpoint, before you even get there, the social dynamics of that, we used to live in a world, pre-internet, even, you know, forget pre-phones, where the block raised the kids, right? Everyone in some way could parent. There was a trust, there was a social contract and bond. People didn't have this extremely suspicious outset at you for everything. And what I feel like technology has done specifically social media is we had all these apps that were built to connect us, but they really divided us mentally because they made us be suspicious of every other fucking thing that someone else could be doing, thinking, or even acting on about you. And it also made you personally narcissistic without you realizing it. And I'm not even getting to the points of like posting yourself and stuff like that, but like you're constantly thinking people are paying attention to this. Everyone is focused on me right now for out of the crowd, wondering about every little thing I'm doing and judging me for it to the point that then it affects you in the real world. So that you could see people or come across people that you know, but don't even really know a lot, but you assume that they're making assumptions about you and vice versa. And it creates this almost like, I don't mean to make this too meta, but like electromagnetic force field between people. And I have watched this get worse and worse and worse over the last, especially 10 years. And I don't really know how we put that rabbit back in the hat. When even if you look at like kids coming up right now, like, you know, in high school who are getting into dating or something like that, they're growing up in a world where they have to make assumptions about, oh my god, what is that group text going to say about me and what is what is his group? The girls like, what is his group text going to say about me to where you can't just like feel each other out, you know what I mean? Like it's it is it is total. It's like anti evolutionary. Yeah. I mean, there was always peers involved. I guess, you know, you meet someone and your how is your how does your gang feel about? Sure, but it wasn't viral of viral ability. It wasn't exactly and it was it was in some ways, there were positive aspects even into different generations. He's no good for you. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, there was a little of that I know it's it's hard. The thing is it's not just tech. This is older. I mean, I did research back when I wrote this book called Life Inc. And I was looking at the sort of the corporatization of America and how people were turning into corporations and corporations were turning into people. Oh, wow. It was really fun and dark, but fun. And I found out, you know, like you ever heard of Leviton? It's this giant the first giant suburb developed in Long Island. Leviton. No, no, no, no. It's one of the first one and it was built by these guys, the Levit brothers. And you can see there these letters that the Levit brothers were writing to Franklin Delano Roosevelt about they're going to build this suburb and it's going to be a way to prevent a rebellion by the returning World War II veterans. We're going to have all these houses. They're all going to be zoned just a little far apart. Men are going to have to work on the lawn. They're not going to have any gathering places, no social gathering places. They're going to all have a mortgage. So it was calculated. You have a mortgage that forces you to keep your job and always you're a little bit in debt. Do you have a bill? Yeah, the GI, but you're going to have a yard that you're going to have to take care of. So you're going to be busy on the weekend. The woman is going to be in the kitchen in the back and the kids are going to play there. And it was designed to promote social alienation so that we wouldn't gather and, oh, wow. And, you know, and I get it, men are dangerous and we might have labor movements and, you know, whatever, but they thought this would be they thought it would be benevolent. Everyone gets a house. And a wife and their kids. Yeah. Yeah. Road to hell. Yeah. Pay for those wonderfully good intentions. You know, there was a movie Brando did in the early 50s called The Men. You ever see this? Where we can pull it up, thief. But he plays a wounded, disabled veteran or World War II. And, you know, the movie obviously covers a lot of that and dealing with that. But it shows a lot of amazing imagery of exactly what you're talking about. This almost like ant-form system that's set up. White picket fence house, white picket fence house. They all look the same. It's open. No trees. Just grass and each unit lives here and you just live your life. You save up for a 401k. That's the American dream and you die. You know, it's like they, they systematically, yeah, there you go. Created that plan. And listen, there were some good aspects to like there was more nuclear families back then. There was, but, you know, you didn't have technology separating each other as much. Yeah, but you only had room for the nuclear family in there. There wasn't room for grandma in there. So, the way to tribe. It did. Because the tribe's going to share stuff. If you have all these different families, you're going to have more consumers. Everyone's going to need their own everything. And at the time, again, at the time, it didn't seem like a bad thing because the economy could grow forever. The factories would grow forever until around 1969 or 70 when the club of Rome came out and said, you know, everyone having to buy one of everything forever may not work. There may be social limits to growth. There may be physical limits to growth and economic limits to growth that maybe everyone having an individually air conditioned home is going to backfire on us in some way. We're going to make the world hotter than we're going to require more air conditioning. Well, here's the other thing there. This was a creation was a unnatural creation in a way. Yeah. Of a post-World War II middle class, which began okay because there was a burgeoning middle class that built the boom years of this country, no pun intended there. Then you get the official going off the gold standard in '71, '72. That had already started really with FDR and you could go back to 1913 with the Fed. And, you know, Pinker in Enlightenment now, I know Pinker gets a lot of bad press, so these days. They're really smart. Smart guy. You ever read the book Enlightenment now in 2018? So, you know, it's a positive book in the sense that he's showing, listen, things don't always work on a straight chart up. But, over time, it's provable by every statistic from sustenance to all the basic things. The humanity is in the best part of history right now, overall, on a rolling ten-year basis or whatever it was at all times. That said, there was one alarming chart and he pointed it out as alarming in that book, which showed specifically since the beginning of the 1980s, the wealth gap and the destruction, as you can call it, of the middle class. And it also then correlates with a more technological society where it used to be winner-take-all would be, you know, yeah, like a John D. Rockefeller could control oil and that would certainly be a lot, but they'd break them up with trust bus and like, you know, someone who was wealthy wasn't a billionaire. They were worth 10 million or something like that. But as technology came out and global scale came out, someone could be worth 10 billion, 20 billion, 100 billion, a trillion eventually. And they become a country like a powerful Elon Musk is a powerful country as a man. We've never seen that right scale and society in the highest parts. And so when I look at that and I see this going away and I see that what is it 54% of Americans don't have $500 in their savings account. Eventually, if a trend like this continues to bring it back to like that end time type scenario, if a trend like this continues and people can't eat while other people are trillionaires, one event that could happen, and I'm not rooting for this, I'm throwing this out as an analytical possibility. So people get in the streets of inflation gets to 40% 50% and they can't fucking feed their families or they don't have a job and AI's taken over. And now you have real-class revolution warfare like French Revolution style. Right. And I think that people like, I don't know. I hope that doesn't happen. That could be the intent. But that could like the fact that people think that can't happen. Oh, we can't happen here. Brother, it could. Do you ever think about that as the possibility that that's what brings down the House of Cards? Oh yeah. Body Revolution. Body Revolution. And then the question is, will Elon Musk have his droid armies in time? This droid armies? Well, that's when someone asked him, why do you need a trillion dollars? And it's when he said, I've got to have enough money to control the droid armies. God, that's a, I can't even, I'm glad you didn't say it against that. Yeah, I'm pretty still like the idea. I can't even think like that. I mean, I think it goes somewhere else. I mean, there have been, there have been peaceful revolutions too. Where? In Czechoslovakia. That was peaceful. Yeah, well, they had candles and held hands and stuff until the guy left. I did? Yeah. Not Yugoslavia. That was. Oh, okay. I have my, I have my Slavias mixed up. Yeah. It's because I feel like there were a few check. It was called the me could look it up. It was, it had some great name. Czechoslovakia and candle revolution. They just stood outside. Basically everyone went into the streets and they just stood in the right candle. Good for them. So it was peaceful. You know, yeah, you do general strike. There's ways to do it. All right. So the candle demonstration or candle manifestation on March 25, 1988 was the first mass protest against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia since 1969. Around 5,000 peaceful believers gathered in Bratislava's. I'm not going to be able to say they got the slums square to the man religions civil rights. And we're brutal. This is a point though. They were brutally suppressed by police. So all right. The protest thousands of unarmed citizens gathered quietly with only like candles and a conscience. The reaction state security violently dispersed a nonviolent crowd using water cannons and batons detaining dozens and injuring many injuring many. And so like then it turns into like they had to do real revolution after that. That's my point. Like they didn't they didn't they gathered quietly. They kept doing it. All right. Let's go down there. They got the velvet revolution in 1989. Development revolution widespread democratization in Czechoslovakia is formally known as the velvet revolution, which took place a year and a half after the candle demonstration. Another, okay. Another peaceful student demonstration in Prague was severely beaten by riot police. Sparking massive nationwide outrage created movement. Millions of checks in Slovak's joined daily strikes and peaceful protests heavily utilizing candles and chance. The result was the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia surrendered its monopoly on power in just over Wow. Okay. Wow. That's when they got the battle by right by December dissident and play right Valkov Havill was elected as the new president. So it's possible. That's that's good. That's cool. It's like well, I mean, we live in a country that had a violent revolution that worked. And like when you see like it afterwards, like it worked and they made something pretty amazing in the institution. But when you look at most violent revolutions to happen around the world, it doesn't work. It doesn't just you you when you're a violent revolution, are you often just recreate the oppression? Yeah. Become your attacker. What do you make of, I mean, we've been told about some of these billionaires and stuff all day, but like you've been in these circles where people talk about, you know, the idea of like transhumanism and ascending to some other type of, I don't know, race of species or whatever. Number one, I guess let's just start with what do you make of all that? And do you think any of that is legitimate at all? Or it's just like a dark, you know, where we're all transhuman already, you know, we got we use glasses. You got stitches on your arm. I mean, how does that make me transhuman? I'm so human. You're still human, but I mean transhuman is just that you've got technology embedded in who you are. We've taken antibiotics. We've, you know, we've used technology to be here. Where's the line on that though that stops you from being human? It depends. I mean, it depends. Where is the line on it? You know, if you lost your arms and replaced them with, you know, biomex, you're still human, you know, your heart and your liver, then, you know, where does it? Where would the line be? The thing is, it's like, I feel like it's one thing, it's one thing to like repair yourself with whatever is around, right? And it's another to seek to kind of leave your humanity behind, to see, to see the human as in need of upgrading, you know, upgrading. You know, there's, again, it goes back to faith, but I think there's some built-in challenges to our existence. That are part of it, like breathing. Okay. Right? We breathe. And I think breathing is really fundamental, not just to our respiration, but to kind of who we are and how we are. Yes. So if the air starts getting really bad, and then the tech browser would ever come up with, oh, we've got this new thing, you won't have to breathe anymore. It's a new blood thing that'll somehow pre-oxygenate your blood. I think letting breathing go may, you may lose other things with it. You know, when we talk about genes and all, the, the, a lot of the genomics bros talk about junk DNA. Like, oh, that's junk DNA. Leave that behind. I don't know my DNA's junk. That's, it's, it's the past. It might be stuff you don't know what it's there for, but that's, it's there. It's resonating. It's, it's the library. It's, uh, if we were chameleons or monkeys or whatever, I'm keeping that history there. It's not that heavy. Right. Not that burden. So it's like the, the, the risk is where we start oversimplifying or start optimizing for very particular values of the moment rather than a little bit of accepting what this is. Like, you could say, ah, I, you know, we're living in a moment where you have all these feelings about other people and it's making us really hard to kill them and eat them. You know, it's like, what if, you know, just get rid of those feelings. That's, that's engineer that out. It's engineer that out engineer out empathy. Well, in a certain situation, I could see why you wouldn't want that anymore. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, it, there's a balance and where do you find the balance is in your spidey? Yeah, but, you know, I'm going to splint my arm or replace my finger. You know, but getting rid of that. Hold on. Getting rid of that takes us back evolutionarily, in my opinion. Like, if you got rid of empathy as a, as a gene, what makes you different from a T-Rex dinosaur at that point? You just see fucking eat things. Yeah. You don't care. You don't feel you inflict pain. You don't view it as inflicting pain. It's survival, right? And that could be the birth of the true superhero. Turn off that empathy. Well, you get a super soldier that way anyway. Yeah. Well, that gets scary. Some of these guys, though, whether it be the Peter Teolish or the whatever, who are going to ascend and all that, you know, what do they view as a breakaway situation if it's not multi-planetary? Like, what does it look like? I don't know, uploading to the machines. Like the matrix? Yeah, but in a good way, I guess. In a good way. Where they think, you don't have to die. They don't want to die. You know, that's what it really comes down to. But other people need to die for them to not die and for it to be worth it, because they need to have the resources to live and be able to subsist forever. Oh, they think of it more as a whatever. A what? It's not other people. If out there people have to die than they do, but whatever. Yeah. All things being equal, no, they don't have to die, but they can live. Well, as I get to get up to the next place, but the more them that are around them, or people around the could unplug the thing that I'm living out. Did any of these guys believe in God? I don't think so. Yeah. So why does Peter Till go around and lecture about the Antichrist? Right. He might. He might, but he's got an interesting or take on God. What's his take on God? Oh, it's hard of that. Certainly God's not, it's not that God have Jesus that blesses the meek, you know, on. It's the God of the ubermanch. It's the as if somehow Christ's likeness is an achievement. You know, rather than a previous example, or I would think that becoming Christ like would involve more of a surrender to this, you know, I don't surrender. That's a render though, right? They don't. They don't. They win. Yeah. What is this, Steve? We got a quote from a meal, seoran. Oh, yeah, I had this up earlier from when you guys were talking ambition is a drug that turns its addicts into potential madmen. Yeah, you were talking about like there's something we're all addicted to. I think it's that. That could be how it's God, the God of ambition. I'm pure spec, obviously, but yeah. Ambition, it's more, you know, more. It's almost an addiction of prediction's sake. It's kind of dopamine without the other reward chemicals. How do I keep feeding that? And it's fear of intimacy. If you really can't be, if you're really going to be intimate, you end up in a state of surrender, you know what I mean? You the boundary between you and the other person kind of disappears and you just, you're there. You know, and if you're there, if you don't like that feeling, then the only way you can get something like it is by dominating. Like, yeah, I'm controlling it over it. Squish the bug, burn the worm, you know, that you create a similar, a similar kind of clutch, but without the vulnerability. How do you stay like so happy and optimistic when you have access to some of the most powerful people who give you every reason to be otherwise. I'm not optimistic. You're not optimistic. I'm happy. You're happy. Can you explain that? Yeah. If you were on the deck of the Titanic and you're a musician and you know it's going down, would you choose to pick up your violin, play music for the people as they go down, and would you be in a state of bliss having realized your life's purpose? You are celebrating life. You are you're there or you're the soundtrack to the end. At least you're playing music on the deck of the Titanic as it goes down. You know, if you're the people and there were in Auschwitz, there were people who were taken from the barracks and being brought to the gas chamber. It's a famous, sorry, I forgot which exactly who it was. And they, as they are being taken, they were forgiving the guards saying, it's okay. It's going to be okay. We understand that that was their impulse. To be that person, you are a person. You are living in infinity at that point. You are a living in the compassion. And I don't, I'm not saying we're doomed. I'm not saying there's, there's a great possibility humanity can survive another century or two. We, that's it. I mean, that's not exactly like fucking positive, but another center of truth might be alive to see it end. Well, it end, what is it? Right. But no, humanity could, could some amount of humans could still make it. You know, and there's low bar here. Yeah, but that's the thing. Low bar, low bar, it's so much easier to be happy if you have a low bar, right? Oh, man. It's like, oh, man, I got another meal today. I got a meal. I got a meal. Now that's different though. Hold on, hold on a minute. That's different to be grateful for the little things and be happy by things that are otherwise expected on the daily and built into just what you know. I think that's a good way to live. But to have the bar so low for like the hope of the survival of like the human race and how we exist on this crazy fucking planet, whatever it is. But it makes it easier to adopt the, let's call it strategy that I'm talking about. And what's that? And what's that? It's the thing that's the thing though. I don't think that like that quote is great, D. Fanbyshin is a drug that turns its addicts into potential madman. I love that it says potential madman because there's, it's two ways Western man. You can either have ambition to create something and bring something better to the world. We're then you're compensated in a good way for it. And then you put that forth in a good moral way within the world. You don't do evil and you treat people well and I'll create jobs and environments. Or you say, give me, give me, give me more, more, more. Let's go. Let's go. I need it. Fuck you. I'll take it from you. I'm just a good, potentials of ambition and there are a lot of people out there and I believe this, who are ambitious and they'll go the right way with that. The problem is when you get really ambitious people who are sociopathic and will just amass more and more and more, they get such a big piece of the pie that they can put their finger on the scale more than the rest of us. Yep. Or for ambition, you know, you could look at the Bolsheviks who started out ambitious for universal justice and ended up putting people in the Google out. That's right. See it again and again and again. Again and again, which is why you keep pulling it back to the moment. Look at what am I doing right now? And you can really figure out what you're doing right now, how good or bad is it? That's right. What do you think happens when we die? I wonder, you know, I wanted to do a book at one point where I asked like all different like religious leaders what happens when we died to figure it out. I did a drug recently called Bufo, which is like a frog, Venom, DMT, five me, O DMT. Bufo? Yeah. And I think that's what happens when we die. I think we have the opportunity to really exhale. To exhale. So let go of this, you know, to diffuse into the back into the quantum hole. And I think we're more conscious than ever, but it's less, you're not there anymore. More conscious than ever. Right. You're part of something that's way more conscious than we are. What does that mean? But you lose the boundary of self, you know, you, it's hard to explain. I think we do the closest I could say it is we dissolve back into the hole like we, and does that and the dust aspect of it, those deep saying back here, does that imply that there's some sort of then we rise from the ashes of reincarnation? I think that stuff recycles, but it might not be your stuff that recycles as a single unit again. I mean, you just dissolve into the like if you're a droplet, you go and you go into the cloud of droplets, and then another droplet reigns. So some of your droplets in that droplet that reigns, but it might not be you, your droplet. Wow. Not to be. Yeah. You go back into the lift. Butterfly effect. Yeah, you mix into the stuff that you dissolve again into the stuff. You should do that, but asking the religious leaders. Oh, yeah, we find that. That would be great. Do you think that we are alone in the university? Do you think there's other intelligent life out there? I don't think we're alone. You know, I don't think we're alone. I think the whole universe is conscious. You know, I'm kind of more whatever an animist or something. I think the whole thing has an awareness. Meaning it's a body and another itself. Yeah. There's some, yeah. So we could be cellular membranes. Yeah. We're doing biological life. Is this one experiment? It's running. So in this simulation of the simulation of the simulation, we could be the white blood cells. Yeah. And just the sum hole of every action that happens on this earth creates whatever that cellular action. I'm interested. I mean, there could be other than carbon-based life forms. I'm hope that be, you know. You know, but there's probably, because there's so much stuff out there, there's probably some other place. But we got to realize this is special, almost more special, temporarily than spatially. We've had a really good 20,000, 40,000 years of temperate, perfect little earth climate thing. It doesn't, it doesn't last forever. It's, it must we innovate a way to do that. Maybe. Yeah. I feel like we can do that. We could. You know, and life was a great innovation to do that. Life is really good at homeostasis. The getting rid of so much life on the planet at once is really bad for trying to keep that balance that Earth has managed. But yeah, there could be, could be ways we'll see. Well, Doug, this has been awesome, man. Dude. We had a, it's great to meet you as well. Yeah. We had a wild, very far-ranging, far-reaching conversation about the things that more about the, but a lot of years are like this though. I appreciate that. We do a lot of different topics in here, which I like. You're a lot of fun to talk to. You've obviously known a lot of people good and bad in your life, which is interesting to hear about it so openly here. And you know, as a, as an optimist, I'd like to think we figured this thing out and maybe some of the people they're trying to figure it out for us don't get the chance to do that. Right. Yeah. All right. We will link your website, your socials and and team human. Yeah. And any books down below, so everyone go check that out. Cool. Now let's do this again sometime. All right. All right. All right. Peace. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge help. Thank you.