Billionaires Secret Plan for END OF WORLD | Douglas Rushkoff

Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing. And it's pretty f***ing alarming that they're having this conversation very matter-of-factly with you, even if you are describing yourself as the entertainment. In 2017, this is before COVID, before the rise of AI, before the s***. That is wild. And these are people who would rather have s*** with robots or teenagers than women, right? Wait, wait a second. Please explain that. These are people who want to build sex robots. These are people- The people you were talking to. This is, 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 are they? 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, Steve? 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. Yeah, yeah. You couldn't see it on that, but let's make sure that's edited. 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 fucked up. But that's, this is- That's so fucked up. Yeah. Doug, I see you joined the Club of Rome. What's going on there? Isn't that cool? They asked me. Isn't it cool? Yeah. Club of Rome. We club, we go clubbing. You know, Club of Rome was this thing. They started in like 1970, 71. 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 2000, 2010, whatever. And then 2000, 2010 comes and it's like way worse. Way worse than they said. 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, in theoretical systems like capitalism or mathematics, you can keep growing something forever. But that, that the belief is that the planet has a fixed amount of matter on it, you know? Right. Then it can only support so much that it's like one giant flower pot. Right. And you can only grow so much stuff on it before you, you crash it. Sure. How do you get invited into the club? That was weird. You know, I think I, I was, I, I, I, either there's one, I have one or 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, atypical people who have, you know, different media followings. And so I might've been part of that campaign. I feel more likely I'm part of that one than part of the one, which is to find trusted, you know, scholars of environment. But no, I don't, I did. I mean, that's partly that book, that book "Survival of the Richest" about the billionaires. 'Cause this, this was a book that really laid out the, what is this kind of awful mindset that leads people to wanna 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? Yep. And it kills its host? So it was 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 greeny fun of life rather than worrying about growing more, you know, towers. No, no, no. What's your invite like though? Do they just like a man in a black hat come knock on your door and be like, "Douglas, you've been, you've been selected." Well, they're like, it's, it's mostly, I mean, the Club of Rome, they're not, it's not like they have money in buildings and it's not like Bilderberg. It's more like, you know, a woman who was a former assistant to a UN person emails and says, you know, would you be interested? Is it in code? Like John, what was John Kiyarako's code? Like the Knights, the Knights and Fields and Poppies and whatever and seeds and got it all. And it's like, all right, so I gotta go to the dumpster. I wish, no, it's like, there's not, it's not like a secretive society. Everybody who's in it, their name's on the website and they're all like. So I can go in? They'll let me just like walk in? Well, there's no in. There's no in? There's no place even. I feel like that's what someone on the inside would say. I wish there was a place, no. I mean, so far for me, it's been email. It's been email. Just 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 ex-minister of this or the ex-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 are way more interesting than that. Way more interesting. Yeah, or been invited, I got invited to that Hereticon thing. That would have been way more. Oh, the Peter Thiel thing? Yeah. Down in South America. Yeah, but it was like, no, it wasn't. It was in, it was in New Orleans. Oh, the New Orleans? Not quite South America, yeah. The New Orleans. Very close. Yeah, close, closer to there, to South America than New York. But-- Can we pull up the schedule for that again, D, the Hereticon schedule? I was just talking to Pomp about that. I just, I emailed, 'cause I didn't go then, 'cause it was like right smack in the early worst COVID time. Right. And I was like, I just, wife and kid, I didn't want to be exposing people to stuff. Mm. But I would've gone, this was sort of an exciting idea. But that's like more secret. That's-- Seems very secret. I just, you know, Doug, when you look at stuff like this, and you're like me and Deef, and everyone listening pretty much right now, and 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-- Yeah. A lot. Exactly, that one, like the goal is immortality, right? I mean, fuck. That's like, that was like-- Psychedelic tea party, Trist Burlesque, cyborg. Yeah, yeah. Could a human be an ape? Exactly. Interesting. Where the Club of Rome would be more like, encouraging better water policy in the southern states of India. Right. You know, and it's really sweet, you know, like the ultimate version of the kind of Eurozone, do-gooder, let's collaborate, international cooperation, and now all they're really trying to do is, from what I can tell, is really more almost like promotion publicity of green, good stuff. Club of Rome's trying to do that. Yeah, yeah. It's not like, yeah, it's not like Bilderberg, kind of. There's no-- Have you ever been to Bilderberg? No, but I've heard about it. All right, that's good. Yeah. That's good. That's a check mark. No, Marshall McLuhan, the great media theorist, the original, he went to Bilderberg. Great, goddammit. He was there. They get all the goats, why? I don't know, in the '60s. But yeah, no, 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 had like a different president every year, they just like pick 'em from some giant group. Yeah. 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 Bilderberg group, what is that, whatever?" And he goes, "Ah, it's all has-beens." Oh, it's all has-beens. Yeah, it's all like people who used to run things and used to be, I said, "Yeah, but there's ex-presidents." It's in there. And he goes, "Yeah, ex-presidents." When was this conversation with him? Oh my God, 2005, '06, around there. 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. Yeah, they had Teal, they had Karp. There you go. They had like Fareed Zakaria from Media. They had the current head of MI6. Like, seems like they're up in their game a little bit, right? They're back. Yeah. Yeah. Something's going on there. But when you join something like a Club of Rome or something like that, I think where people at home look at these organizations and and go like all right what the fuck it's more because they're thinking to themselves all right why is it all these people from all these different countries got a lot of good diversity in these groups for sure minus the i guess like class diversity but you know all these different people who weren't elected in any of these countries get together to discuss like what policies should be around the world and stuff you could see why people run wild if they did that yeah if but you'd have to think where is there a group of a few hundred people who've 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 if i mean maybe you don't some people don't believe that humans have any impact on the impact on the environment and i think that's a really important thing to think about 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 you know and those of us who do would love for us to have alternatives right to that yeah and if we don't see if we see okay you know i would normally want to say okay my government could maybe do some of that and then when i see 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 well maybe it would be good to have a bunch of us promoting these ideas publicly or doing getting some research funded that could actually show oh look the ocean's 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 demand 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 both ends 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 in 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 a bunch of different things and i say that and it's a bunch of different things and i say that and it's 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 in their lineup is made they're a family-owned company with more than 20 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you're going to get an extra 10 off the top of that by using code julian at checkout so head on over to ghostbed.com slash julian link in my description below and use promo code julian at checkout that's ghostbed.com slash julian promo code julian some exclusions apply seaside for details your sausage mcmuffin with egg didn't change your receipt did the sausage mcmuffin with egg extra value meal included in the promo code julian and you can get it at ghostbed.com slash julian includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just five dollars only at mcdonald's for a limited time price and participation may vary promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing well that's why you got to look at at who's behind what yeah right so usually i mean this is an argument i don't i don't have to make usually when you look at the people who are funding um 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 uh 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 you're right you're right you're right what you know someone like me i guess i i guess at at 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 are easy things you can do though like it's not any college chemistry class could look at the amount of vitamins in a 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 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've been and talk to the farmers there and they can say well you know our soil is getting kind of eroded you went out there and talked yeah well i was at a university there doing a talk 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 and use that to people like when you when you so it turns out the soil is not what you're talking about it's what you're talking about it's soil is not just dirt right that soil is this living matrix and there's mycelia like these little strands and living things soil is this 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 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 um they don't have the nutrients in it and then the topsoil gets worse and worse and worse and it gets closer to um like the sahara or something yeah and monsanto obviously has our best interest in mind for sure right they don't right now and 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 coke 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 engine we'll do things don't worry we'll have selective reduction of your wombs we'll do all those things and they've got hundreds of millions of dollars reduction of our womb 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 oh my god 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 five hundred dollars a year to be a member to pay so the 200 people in it or whatever it is pay five hundred dollars each to fund the whole thing the whole club yeah because that's duh right so why don't you just call up pete i feel like he's got that on the ashtray because he does but pete doesn't like this thing pete's pete's the opposite pete believes that we are satanists because what he says and this is the interesting he believes clubs or club of rome or saintness well anybody that's the pot calling the kettle fucking black yeah well he says he thinks well greta thunberg could be the antichrist he says right i mean it's a poor little thing but 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 right 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 the we're the larval stage right we're the 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 and and we're going to give some money to people in africa so they don't die of ebola and the ebola doesn't come here and kill us too and all that he would say no but what you're doing by 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 ascend money that's how he's measuring it 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 yeah so in doing it i talked to fellow moderate people and then i also talk to people who on 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 it 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 Mobil or writing like that no and being able to say like okay I think this I think this let's go there I've tried that right on well there was a time before I was as out of the closet as a whatever the hell I am he's a psychedelic hippie so I know thinker 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 as my first books were on rave so it was known but but I wrote I wrote some books on sort of the business of technology saying how the the the in the original dot-com era how these companies were gonna fuck themselves over by going for growth and losing community and losing the kind of the real spirit of you were ahead of the curve yeah 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 not I don't have Joe Rogan money but I have money to pay for my podcast you know I know that's the sad thing how much I can afford a lot of us don't have Joe Rogan but I know but you these have a profit of I have money do I have money to pay for my podcast it's the 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 but they would invite me to do talks and things I've talked like you know Pepsi and big companies and 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 almost I used to think it was like I used to call myself an intellectual dominatrix intellectual dominate like Thank You sir may 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 ten-year-old to make them you know 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 pulling up eyes wide shut this isn't what the initiation the Club of Rome look like right sadly no it was a zoom and they they weren't mass and you know but there was three or four of the new ones there and they welcomed us and they're little you know the little icon because you know there's a dyke icon if you ever use zoom it's I don't use zoom ever do 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 yeah yeah yeah and then they can hit little buttons to like make applause or hearts or whatever you get a little applause from each other this in 68 if they were still alive would be like what the fuck has happened to us we've fallen so far yeah no they they I mean it was sweet I mean the sad thing is in in 68 71 whatever when they came out with that thing it was so widely ridiculed just like you know Rachel Carson Silent Spring it - people didn't they didn't understand that the kind of the whole planet is one big system that mmm 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 know that you you were saying early on in our conversation you know that you can't do something in one place and have it not right impact other things right now you were saying early on in our conversation you know that you can't do something in one place and have it not right impact other things right now you were saying early on in our conversation you know that you can't do something in one place and have it not right impact other things right now you were saying early on in our conversation 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 saying early on in our conversation you were mentioning how there were a lot of different types of predictions that people you were mentioning how there were a lot of different types of predictions that people associated with Club of Rome made and say the different types of predictions that people associated with Club of Rome made and say the early 70s that then ended up being correct but also worse associated with Club of Rome made and say the early 70s that then ended up being correct but also worse than they said right say 2000 2010 what are what are early 70s that then ended up being correct but also worse than they said right say 2000 2010 what are what are some of those things Oh the annual said 2000 2010 what are what are some of those things Oh the annual temperature increase the temperature increase the temperature increase the condition of the ocean is salinization the condition of the ocean is salinization the condition of the ocean is salinization the pH of the ocean ocean temperature the pH of the ocean ocean temperature the pH of the ocean ocean temperature the size of North and South Poles the rising size of North and South Poles the rising size of North and South Poles the rising water the spread of certain diseases and water the spread of certain diseases and water the spread of certain diseases and it's interesting because you can look at it's interesting because you can look at it's interesting because you can look at those metrics then you can talk to like those metrics then you can talk to like those metrics then you can talk to like one of the the you're like a real pro one of the the you're like a real pro one of the the you're like a real pro tech utopian kind of guy and they'll say tech utopian kind of guy and they'll say tech utopian kind of guy and they'll say well yeah but to actually look at the well yeah but to actually look at the well yeah but to actually look at the annual rate of death from such and such annual rate of death from such and such annual rate of death from such and such diseases that's down yeah you know diseases that's down yeah you know diseases that's down yeah you know there's certain metrics that you can say there's certain metrics that you can say there's certain metrics that you can say I mean I can walk around New York and I mean I can walk around New York and I can walk around New York and there's way less chance of me getting killed there's way less chance of me getting killed there's way less chance of me getting killed than when I was a kid in spite of than when I was a kid in spite of than when I was a kid in spite of the Trump says it's the worst and there's the Trump says it's the worst and there's the Trump says it's the worst and there's blood in the streets if it's not blood in the streets if it's not blood in the streets if it's not like it was in the 70s no US cities are like it was in the 70s no US cities are like it was in the 70s no US cities are safe and they're getting safer all the safe and they're getting safer all the safe and they're getting safer all the time I mean there's medical stuff we can time I mean there's medical stuff we can time I mean there's medical stuff we can do our I mean our cancer rates are high do our I mean our cancer rates are high do our I mean our cancer rates are high but our our chemotherapies are better but our our chemotherapies are better but our our chemotherapies are better there's a lot of things they're better I there's a lot of things they're better I there's a lot of things they're better I think we got better chemo got better at think we got better chemo got better at think we got better chemo got better at that yeah I think there's like there's that yeah I think there's like there's that yeah I think there's like there's chemo's they don't even make people you chemo's they don't even make people you chemo's they don't even make people you know as off there used to you could be know as off there used to you could be know as off there used to you could be you gotta wonder 80 years it's even you gotta wonder 80 years it's even you gotta wonder 80 years it's even longer 9 August 1942 at Yale University longer 9 August 1942 at Yale University longer 9 August 1942 at Yale University when the physicians first did it so I when the physicians first did it so I when the physicians first did it so I guess it probably went mainstream in the guess it probably went mainstream in the guess it probably went mainstream in the next 10 20 years after that but either next 10 20 years after that but either next 10 20 years after that but either way it's like you gotta think they got way it's like you gotta think they got way it's like you gotta think they got some better shit than that that they're some better shit than that that they're some better shit than that that they're just not releasing I I really wonder just not releasing I I really wonder just not releasing I I really wonder the same kind of treatment even if it's the same kind of treatment even if it's the same kind of treatment even if it's more improved yeah well the the more improved yeah well the the more improved yeah well the the I may not to get whatever new agey or I may not to get whatever new agey or I may not to get whatever new agey or even uh Robert Kennedy on you but uh even uh Robert Kennedy on you but uh even uh Robert Kennedy on you but uh there's other ways you know there's there's other ways you know there's there's other ways you know there's other ways there's that's part of why other ways there's that's part of why other ways there's that's part of why we're so concerned about uh rainforest we're so concerned about uh rainforest we're so concerned about uh rainforest going away is that there's a lot of and things in the rainforest 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 habit. I only know 5,000 plants here. We're still learning more. We're talking to more plants to find out what they do and what they can treat. And the way that they treat them, it's just a different holistic kind of, I don't know what to call it. Any word you use gets energetic, whatever. No, I know what you mean. We've talked about it with different people on the show. There's a phrase they have down there in the Amazon where they're like, 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 you talk to the people who have lived there 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, bandage it with something. It moves real quick. You're like, something's going on there. Right. And there's stuff. I mean, and this is where scientists, bless their hearts, they're sometimes slow on the uptake, like the gut biome. It wasn't acknowledged until really recently. And there's more of them than there are of us. It's like now we're just coming to understand the jet lag is more your gut biome than you because there's all these bacteria that are so photosensitive or circadian that you go and it's the bacteria like, wait a minute. That's what's doing it? A lot of it, yeah. Can we pull up 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. So that could be the gut microbiome. But it controls 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, an imbalance of bacteria, often increasing microbes associated with obesity and inflammation. That second inflammation makes so much sense. Oh, my God. Inflammation's everything. Yeah. 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 a response to a bacteria that we didn't know how to deal with. Or you get all this dysbiosis and you're like, you're sitting there with the wrong bacteria and you're. That's right. I mean, wrong is a strong word, but wrong bacteria for the human metabolism in your belly all the time. Eventually, you know, some gland or whatever is going to try to kick in, fight that thing. Yeah. And I think I heard Dr. Amin 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, run a great business, trying to give you great food, 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. Yeah. Like we just got back from Italy again and like, you know, you can't eat into gluttony there and not gain weight, but it's amazing when you go there for a week or whatever and you have a good time, you 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 hangovers from food than I do from alcohol. It'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 then 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 they're like, "Oh, because the shit they're getting is packaged on trucks from the worst pink meat, whatever factories." I found out at college, I never looked into this, but a couple of people had told me the first year when I was at school where we all ate out of 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 the. I shit all the time in general, I'm pretty healthy, but in an unhealthy way, I was shitting all the time freshman year. And I'm like, "Oh, I just must be the partying." God, they used to do that to soldiers. I know that in the army. I didn't know they would do that in college. That's bad. They did that to soldiers to make them shit. Yeah, saltpeter. To keep their food though. You're already rationing them. They don't have to shit out in the. I mean. Yeah, but they're already rationing food. They're not getting enough usually. Yeah, but they're not getting fiber. Yeah. Oh, that's true. Yeah. I don't know. They stopped. Those MREs aren't great. Yeah. But obviously you've been talking about some of the people, but some of your backstory is kind of cool because you alluded to it already. You came up in the cyberpunk movement and everything. You liked raves and things like that. How'd you end up writing about the future of dystopian tech? How did that become like, "Ooh, this is my focus. Here's how I'm going to predict stuff." And as we said earlier, you've predicted some things with actors. Well, I guess partly by being more utopian about it. I mean, I was a theater kid originally. I was directing theater. No kidding. And I got really sick of theater partly because I got tired of working with actors. I was just like, "If you want to get a fucking psychotherapist, just go do that. Let's work on a play here, not your childhood trauma or whatever." You know what I mean? It's actually. It's actually. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually. Yeah. It's actually. Yeah. It's actually. And I understand they're using their sense memory or whatever. It's like, you do that at home. Yeah. You do that at home. Come to work. Learn the lines in the play. Can we just try that for once? You're preaching to his choir over here. Yeah. But there was that. And also that the audiences were so frigging elite. It was so expensive. I was doing plays in California. And even at the time, it was like $60, $70 to see a play called Three Penny Opera, right? About. So I'm this little lefty Marxist kid doing plays for a rich kind of blue hairs. And I was like, "Oh, this is not gonna work." And just as that was happening, the internet was. It 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 there, isn't it? Well, no, it's actually a shame. Shame? I mean, I think of it as shame. Why do you think Princeton is shame? Because it's like elitist, you know? Oh, okay. I respect that. And it's like, oh, and it's so hoity there. And when I went, it was like Southern Rock, Confederate flag kind of. Oh, "South will rise again" kind of stuff. Yeah. Gotcha. And 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. So if you're interested, you can go to Mood.com/FunctionalGummies. 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And, um, like three or four of them were calling me and saying that they were moving to California to become like, to be computer programmers. And I'm like, computer, like 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 Dead heads and psychedelic people and Brian Eno listeners and all these weird, the weirdest, most psychedelic people I know going there to do that. So I went out to San Francisco and 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 cactuses and tripping balls at night. Yeah. Rendering like, fractals on sun micro and, and, and then projecting the fractals at raves and dead shows and all. And I was like, oh, something's happening here. Right. So I, I was really, I got in really interested in the crossover between psychedelic culture and cyber culture and realizing that these psychedelic heads of San Francisco were taking a originally a war technology, you know, computers and turning it into a consciousness expansion. Weird. Ass thing. They're all consciousness expansion. Yeah. Like, you know, brain machines and fractals and, 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 was modeled on what was called the, um, the acid tests, which were these psychedelic parties they had and Ken Kesey 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, talk to the aliens or elevate, it was real sweet, optimistic, silly, but, um, very pro-human, very hard pro-human. Yeah. Very heart based, you know, we're going to 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. human grounded dancing it's us um you know 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 or it was like and and they were 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 and one big and you're on ec really yeah that's gotta be you're thinking different about about about love and society had you ever done that before ecstasy before you went out and did raves in california yeah yeah when i was 10 well it wasn't i mean he's like 12 sorry well no but we did as i mean we were doing acid at college acid was the 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 what about acid like what about it drew it drew it to you i feel like it asks nothing of you it asked nothing of you of the psychedelics i mean there was some even acid is just like this is you here you are yeah this is it you know almost more like a mirror you're gonna get whatever wherever you're wherever you're you're this is it it's like mushrooms are like connect to the earth the earth planet needs you we're weeping we're we're have compassion you know ecstasy is love you have to you know open your heart they're these sort of agendas to them and i always felt that acid was just like right in front of you right yeah here you are interesting here you are acid it's never did acid it's interesting psychedelics but not it's an interesting one but anyway so 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 went to cal arts california's to the arts in theater and i went to american film institute and film oh wow yeah i didn't like film though in the end i like theater because 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 editing and i'm like i don't know i don't know compromise and all that and with a play it's like every night it's new live it yeah 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 like brushing a woman's hair like you because 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 so it feels natural thief here has written multiple movie scripts and then also a play that's still continuing it's run soon at a new theater yeah socco and vanzetti are dead it's a satire of socco and vanzetti yeah you'd like it i'm gonna watch i'm gonna go yeah but like well how do you feel about that description of i like that about the woman'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 is it until you're there and then you go we're gonna have to change this in order for that to work yeah you know whereas with a movie you don't you can fake it you can make it all fit but you've never really done it you don't really do it i mean that's just it's just a different no i think it's i think it's a great way to point it out too 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 it and he's like i don't know what's the point of doing it over seven days or something like that because he's like i don't know and a lot breathes right or you know christopher guest and those movies he does those are the um sort of improvised movies or um what was that thing it was that really sad horrible thing on like netflix where they shot these giant scenes about this kid that kills somebody oh adolescence yeah we're talking about yeah i mean in the the the the tour de force i guess of that is they did these like 15 minute scenes it's crazy just play them out and you're like they really to work to get the whole thing it's not just the shot it's the it's to be there but anyway i got sick of theater because because of the elitism of it and all and then um as 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 you'd make software and you'd make software and put it on a disc and like go on your bus or your high school and share it with other people the idea was how are we all going to communicate so the the the early internet was like a rave yeah and like 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 um drug test warnings to their employees because they needed psychedelic people do they all knew they had psychedelic heads building their stuff because psychedelic people were used to imagining realities like we're used to hallucinating things that didn't exist and there was no internet there was you had 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 um graduate students acid in these parties and got in all this trouble and he became like the high priest of lsd you know nixon's public enemy number one in in 1970 we yeah we've had a few people on time there was another guy called terence mckenna i was friends with he was into more you know mushrooms and dmt you know and they and there was a big magazine called mondo 2000. were they afraid of y2k over there no no it was before people worried about that one um but yeah so there was a 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 idly 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 meant to me it meant i was doing the right job right i'm i'm i'm i'm just saying what if 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 canceled in 1992 because my publisher thought the internet would be over by 1993 isn't that funny how many people were like this is the biggest like joke 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 it lasted about 18 months and it's not in the right time scale for a book i know hindsight's 2020 i i understand it's that way with everything but that is one of the things that i've been doing for a long time and 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 i don't what were the big arguments back then that it didn't make didn't make money they did a study in 1994 i don't think you can find it um 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 they didn't think like let's put ads on there they did but you had to sign an 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 invented or some shit yeah i mean originally and then they turned it over to the public but as an educational kind of thing not as i remember when the first ads went up i mean it 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 andreason 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 then we started to do ads and all that when i started to say oh we've got a choice here we can either go this 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 in 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 20th 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 are going to be able to do that 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 uh love each other in the end yeah that's kind of where i thought you were they're gonna 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 time to do anything we're going to do everything we're going to do 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 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 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 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 gonna go to i'm gonna 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 then right 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 percent if i were reading this all day i'd agree that is not we have never had anything even remotely close to that in humanity and it 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 me and my dad we were like we're gonna do this we're gonna do this we're gonna do this we're gonna do this we're gonna do this we're gonna do this we're gonna do this media literacy used to be being able to deconstruct the advertisement on tv right that's what they taught us about you know that 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 um you know the who's the best customer for a blue jeans commercial right is it 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 it's someone who's sitting on the couch alone with the 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 think scenario in the sense that it's not what you're saying correct me if i'm wrong here is that it's not like there's one person at the top of a company saying we need to all these people over it's more like oh this type of ad worked and then that team reports to that team in the company that 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 this because they're trying to get profitability and the end result is they're convincing people not to right right or making them just making them pathetic but yes 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 doug why don't you try it on yours oh it's working on my guy i'll try it on her oh if i adapt it like that it seems to work better on her oh try that too and there are millions of them all sharing oh this works this works and it's not it's for what they're 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 he's doing to our to our our psyche or anything else which is why i mean now it's funny this week in new york that's called the summer of lud you heard of this it's a lot you know what the luddites are yeah luddites are people they're not against technology bloodites are people who don't want technology to be used like the amish well no they can be modern i mean you can be a luddite using cell phones and chat i mean but they they have the same the amish or amish sensibility that let's only adopt a technology once we understand that it's not hurting us right right but the the the luddite distinction was um technologies that um distance us from each other technologies that make us hate each other and it make it more difficult for us to work together right 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 that the it's luddite um it's this week in new york and it's really interesting to see um there's all these kids who um it's a movement that started like around five years ago in high schools that these kids are um they turn in their smartphones for flip phones 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 that's just yesterday and she's like well the weird thing the weirdest thing about giving up my um smartphone she's only got a flip phone now she said she was walking in new york a year or so ago and um 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 all 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 and it's an easy observation a 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 in 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 oh yeah 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 cove and 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 right and given those effects they might not be in a position to find out yeah well that's that's the dark view but i mean something else at the same time i mean i mean i'm living in the east village now and i feel like it's partly because of uh it's partly nihilism um but they are out gen z is yeah out on the street every thursday friday saturday sunday night we're 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 i hope yeah i hope they're they all the stats say they're not but they look to me like they're good they're they're and the guys the guys there's this like gen z guy type now which 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 the buttoned-down shirt and the chains and stuff and i'm like whatever that is good good they're doing they're just like yeah there's like effort you know i i it's like it's i was always depressed when i would see like kids out in the village on a on a saturday night and the girl is like dressed to the t and the guy's just like jeans and t-shirt and it's like ah but now there's just like guys you're 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 those shirts or the things and it's like we used to laugh at it because i was i was in high school in the 70s but um i kind of admire it now you know the just that attention that that i want to look good i want to feel sexy uh you know it's good to see that that like again a generation that 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 you know what i mean they got on i'm talking on the spectrum of like you can go from like people that are furries to people that like nick fuentes 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 so i'm thinking when this uh you know summer of lud that they're doing in tompkins square park i mean i'm looking around i mean i had um can we pull this up deep summer of love talking about ludd um god knows how much they're going to be online with it right because it's the summer they're looking at someone's taking a video i'm sure yeah but they um some students of mine did a um i mean this is the kind of thing they're doing they did a uh curse on palantir love that right and they have a zine they have a zine a zine they made a little zine that they're handing out they're doing like spells and yeah which is a spell a collective spell to like curse uh uh palantir it's really funny yeah look at this that even looks like very uh late 60s wood stocky you know i can like feel a jimmy hendrix guitar in the background it's the summer of lud in new york city this is from dr phil fisher with one new special protest lud from june 28th through july 5th tompkins square park host lectures and demonstrations free lunch included spanning everything from a luddite 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 as consequential social movement this century as it was in the 1800s and 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 you know when people are doing their um their graduation speeches the the tech bros or the college presidents whenever they mention ai everybody boos now that is just uh 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 gonna publish a white paper that shows the thing and i'm like but that's part of why they have me because they know it's like white papers oh it's very sweet but nobody's gonna read your white paper and if they do read your life they're just gonna stick it in claude and i'd read it anyway that's right but this like summer of lud but the thing the the the beauty of a a ten thousand dollar 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 there are they're being given authority over the water your sausage mcmuffin with egg didn't change your receipt did the sausage mcmuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just five dollars only at mcdonald's for a limited time price and participation may vary promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing sam's club is the club for every holiday club guess who's joining the club this season walmart plus yep sam's club plus membership now comes with walmart plus at no extra cost two memberships one great price just 120 bucks a year can save you time and over 700 dollars want to get in on the membership duo of the century visit sam's club.com come join us sam's club annual plan only auto renews tnc apply estimate based on average combined walmart plus and sam's club plus savings among members of both for one plus year versus non-member or club member pricing slash fees excludes membership fees see walmart plus terms and sam's club terms for more info 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 going to suffer it's like it's their problem they're not rich see it especially it's over there it's over there i don't gotta look at it i just look at my stock but it's interesting we used to only do this stuff to people on reservations you know yeah at least we gave them casinos though you know these people are just getting fucked and no water right so no water no casino and and doug it's we've got to we can go to that now because it's obviously a soup du jour that not not casinos but the the data centers thing and stuff like that that you're talking about because it's a soup du jour topic 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 has always had a subset of people that are very very afraid of it and doomer it and then you know we turn out okay it doesn't mean that every single time it's going to turn out fucking okay and also this time with ai this is the first time we're building technology that maybe we're not going to be able to do it we're going to 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 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 palantir or whatever who's going to 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 that went to government and said oh 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 best 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 going to do this another way i mean in chinese tiktok as you know is like oh the kids get educated yeah it's like the one good benefit of communism they're 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 for that and and to say that that is totalitarian to not have kids watching god knows what at night kardashians at night is not totalitarianism that's raising children so you there's the first mover advantage i kind of question the the interesting thing is you're right that when we say oh we got writing now um and the ancient greeks when they got writing aristotle was going oh no people are going to lose their memories right they were talking about their worry about what will the impact be of the technology and some people say we're going to get books and be smart and other people said no we're going to lose our memory and maybe both happen with ai you've got you're right you've got your doomers and your utopians utopians saying oh because of ai we're going to be china we're going to be able to upload our brain to the cloud so that when the planet goes we'll have artificial beings they're going to have robots sex slaves it's going to all be beautiful and you have other people saying oh no when ai comes we're all going to be programmed into oblivion we're going to do that for them i don't care about this sounds radical but and maybe i don't care about what's going to 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 i 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 i'm 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 in french yeah you see the theater guy the theater guy knows theater people rule that's a virtual yeah all right we do theater people are smart when you you can't do theater without learning the history of everything it's like so funny um well at least directors and writers um 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 um and then the communists started to make gulags 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 a little pain on the way just gonna be 30 million gotta die 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 this doesn't make 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 um 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 going to 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 you ai i think ai is cool i think ai is cool it's a cool thing it's a cool thing 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 um you're if you don't believe in water a town's authority over its own land you know there's something um you don't 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's we can decamp and deploy um in ways that don't necessarily hurt people all right so you taught this effective altruism thing though yeah there's a really interesting for sure, and yeah, I think a lot of the guys who have heard argued that are cringe and and right a lot of times happen also be sociopaths we can talk about stan altman in a little bit but like you've 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 very other than that 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 in 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 pascal says fuck that and then kills all 40 people in the hospital and rescues everyone and takes her home did he make the right decision doing that yeah yeah yeah especially because it's fiction right all right if it was true did he make the right decision well if it was true if it was true there is no if it was true um in the end that feels like a cop out no no there actually is 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 do you send the trolley off the cliff and whatever um 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'm doing what the heart's saying in that moment we know pedro pascal has a a an what buber would call an i thou relationship with that girl he's 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 gonna and you could say oh my god you're gonna kill 40 people to save and it's like it's my person i mean now i'm i'm personally i'm more of a pacifist i would probably uh he would have talked him down to death i would have been a little bit more i mean i don't know i would try to talk them down but you know god forgive you forgive you for what you're doing and you have to understand that what you're it's not actually going to work because of what you're doing this is not in the long term this is not yeah the solution to the real problem now i'm not saying that you'd be as good with a gun as pedro pascal was in there certainly had some great aim hitting everyone and mowing them 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 but let's say you are half an hour but in yeah his name was anthony but if you let's say you were 22 you were good with it all right you have your 22 you got ultimate reloads and everything right up next to them right you're trying to piece them to death across that hospital and the first security guard who might be a russian guy or something so kill me go fuck yourself yeah 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 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'm was gonna attack my daughter or something i feel like i've got the 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've got throwing stars and nunchucks that's right and you got nunchucks too yeah i mean i got the rubber ones because i kept hitting myself in the back of the head with the wood ones i could not be trusted they're hard you're truly right right try to really bruce lee with those things oh my god yeah no i i'd 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 i believe you with the 22 i feel like you got to be apparently the guy said you got really up close with the 22 yeah it doesn't have stopping power is what they say no stopping power on that we're gonna have to gun people 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 sam altman's and stuff i get mo god dot 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 ai is probably going to end humanity but we're gonna have a lot of fun making cool shit on the way yeah he did say it's like only like 80 percent of the time he's going to end humanity and he's going to end chance according to him i think that it ends us but like what do you 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 do that yeah well the way he would put it is well humanity was going to end anyway sooner or later that okay what gives him that idea sooner or later when is that well you know because this the sun burns out or whatever yeah and maybe like a million years maybe we got off the planet by then maybe we get off the planet by then so who died and elected him and if i was gonna get a bet on anyone getting off the planet kind of thing i would think it's like the the kogi you know the they're the ones you do ayahuasca in in columbia or the the buddhists 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 and destroy every sperm in our body let's play it this way then 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 generation okay yeah i think we could i think there's things that could happen in ten thousand years there's ways off but i think the ways off are not going to involve like solid rocket fuel and metal ten thousand years it won't 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 ten thousand years well yeah but i think it'll be more like quantum folding space quantum you know what i mean like it'll be something some weird ass i could tell you we're friends with terence mckenna like like the google 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 to figure out 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 from an alt from an adjacent reality where the problem had been solved can we google those things yeah adjacent reality right so it's like those are the that's if you're gonna you want to travel first class you know it feels like it's gonna be it's gonna be 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 are aliens and what's going on and why are those things moving around you know sort of like 3d to 4d once you you you if you lived in flat space you wouldn't understand what's going on on the other side of the the page on the other side of the plane how did you get there how did you pop up there it's like oh well you don't get it we're in three we actually are 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 um this guy did these giant experiments claude van damme 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 the magnetism and gravity and they could never and when his things fell they couldn't get them back up they didn't know how to do it even with cranes and all that there's just i i feel like the the i'll see uh deep's looking for that right now did pull up what you were talking about though a second ago douglas just so people can google 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'd love to find a ship and the multiverse hypothesis the breakthrough google's quantum ai team introduced willow a 105 qubit processor capable of completing a random circuit sampling benchmarking task in just minutes traditional supercomputers would theoretically take 10 septillion years to complete the same task the adjacent reality theory because the computations explore such a massive number of quantum states so quickly hermit naveen former head 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 find a solution so douglas this actually is that crazy it's crazy but this reminds me of something so an old friend of mine this guy marcelo cabrera i remind me to check just make sure he's cool with me saying his name thief 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 it was snowy out i'm wearing you know i was a very i've worked on wall street at the time where i was making about 65k a year and i had to wear a joseph a bank suit and pretend it was something better so i'm like wearing these shitty shoes that are 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's like i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know 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 solves some fucking computer computational thing 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 right after the first big boom there in 2017 and he was like this blockchain 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 blowing 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 wrong and we're not even living in the space that we think we're something is actually controlling the world and it might not even be a country it could be like some unelected fucking government right and i just remember sitting there going wow we've lost him like he's crazy and then i saw some of the 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 teal and musk and all they love nick land he's a serious and he says that capitalization is the most important thing in the world and he says that capitalization 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 going to go into there and that's why they're promoting these kind of um racist hierarchical things because it's like they're they want to be the ultimate capitalists you think it's racist what they're proposing yeah well it's it's the kind of survival of the fittest eugenic thing um yeah in the end it's it's you think that's their intention or you know it's just part of it you think it's just a downstream part of it yeah part of being but doesn't doesn't that assume then that if we assume that that's a part of and trust me i'm no fan of peter teal and guys who think in 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 buy into that at all but in ever said that yeah in so many words in so many words i mean and you and it's partly i mean if you're raised under apartheid in south africa you know and when you're a kid your parents you know 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 who you're actually afraid are going to come and 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 um indoctrinated in certain things you know it's tricky right can i can i pee oh yeah you can just keep running it no we're good all right we're good take your time all right we're back now so you're trying to get more muscles you're saying i i see the veins popping right there i'm trying pretty well i'm trying i'm trying no my doctor said he wants me to get to 140 once you get to 140 right now i'm up to 136 all right 136 okay 136 it's it's easy to add on muscle when you get into the flow of things you know what i mean you like lifting no i what i'm liking is um and i think i can develop a whole thing i'm like yeah and then push-ups with weights there's something about the non i don't like the clunk there's something about the clunk that's just like uh but if i can find ways to and i'm liking these um i got these giant rubber bands i kind of like in that feel better than others and it it and i've got really this guy he actually lives out here was showing me like if you you do them really slow oh yeah it's like it's brutal but it's like they're great and i feel like wayla so you know i'm over 60 i don't want to like rip a ligament or do whatever right you know and doing doing like less weight or these kind of these these stretchy things or even um functional weights like kettlebells and things i was just gonna ask so you do some kettlebells they're amazing that's what i got instead of the um little dumbbells and it's like oh it's a whole different thing yeah you've 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 it's i mean that's how it's meant to be it's 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 right 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 me punching a bag oh yeah yeah yes i i since going back to kettlebells has improved dramatically i'd say it's good stuff yeah definitely keep hitting that no i do that i do yoga and i do a lot of yoga you do a lot of yoga yoga is amazing for it's also for core you know absolutely huge difference between abs and core you gotta have a right 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 oh there it is oh i get it yeah and then it's like core and then it's like core 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 you know but back to what we were saying but before the break so we're talking about some so yeah so these other guys you're saying like the teals of the world there they have there's not that many of them but yeah yeah there's not that many and i and i think that's the problem george carlin i always say that he had this famous line it's a big club and you ain't in it amazing observation but like i always say it's a small club and you ain't in it like it's a very 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 my friend ty martin about this the other day with it's very hard to think about but like that ultra capitalism view right where someone can be a trillionaire and stuff like that and then just you know let everything lie where it is including like if people that means people die all because it's too much winter take all 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 say i don't want to be a trillionaire i don't want to be a trillionaire 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 anywhere like in the like in the reagan era right how so in the reagan era the reagan era anything you made over like a million dollars was taxed like 80 percent oh yeah yeah and eisenhower was like 90 or yeah and reagan we look back at as if he was uh uh you know some horrible conservative and it's like no the tax policy then they prevented that they you once you they they really said once you had over a million few million dollars why did you need more and they looked at it wasn't it's not beneficial right to to the 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 you know 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 someday or maybe it happens slowly like a boiling frog where they separate themselves well they lose yeah and we've and i wrote about those there's studies i mean when you have a billion dollars you have less empathy for other people you wrote about that yeah yeah there's 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 and some people theorize it's because you need to have a billion 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 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? 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? That's when you might want a commons. And we've had different kinds of economy. Late medieval Europe had a commons. You can use a 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. 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 block. Yes, exactly. Great point. So there are a bunch of different things. So it's like capitalism's great among other things. Yeah. So there's a deeper conversation there and I'm not trying to get off and I'm trying to relate it to something else too. So I'm not copping out from that. But I remember he said it way more eloquently than I can remember it. But like Sebastian Junger, 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 where systems- Dunbar groups or whatever, yeah. Yeah, I think 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 330, 340 million people here. Then think of a smaller country. It's got a million people or something like that. That's not how tribes worked back in the day. There were a hundred people, 200 people. Everyone knew each other. They knew what it was. So the idea that some government and some capital and some city of said country, whether it's a million people or 300, 140 million people, that's not how humans were evolved 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. Right, exactly. That's where this idea of something called, anarcho-syndicalism. Anarcho-syndicalism, that's a foreign word. Right, it's like anarchism, but syndicated. So the idea is you have these small communities like kibbutzes 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 the, 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, in this, in this apartment, I know 10, you know, 10 of them, right? So 10, but cause that's, that's your people who's closest to your body. When you're sleeping at night, there's the people who are protecting you, right? But they're, you're there 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 ones, but those are, you know, then we're all sleeping together and I don't even know who they are right through those walls. And it's like, that's your tribe. Whether you realize it 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 co-metabolizing with other people, they're your, uh, uh, first unit of, of, uh. But we have a warped 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 ravers were into. But like that's who you're talking with, you know what I mean? Yeah, but that was the whole rave thing. It's like, oh my God, we're creating a new neural network of human beings across the planet. We're going to be Gaia's brain. Gaia's brain, Jesus Christ. Remember the Gaia hypothesis? It was this again around Club of Rome, you know, 1970s, eighties, a guy, James. New Clubs of Rome. James Lovelock. Okay. Yeah. Well, they just invited me. I only learned about them, you know. Oh, you didn't know about them. I mean, I knew that they existed, but I just knew they were, you know, the initial report. I don't like that the Club of Rome isn't 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 greatest city on earth. Oh, 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. And I'm like. No. Are they? I don't think so. You're supposed to know this. You're. I don't think it is. Klaus Schwab is the guy who wants to. That's dark fucking shit. He's in Switzerland too. Yeah. No, no. It's like World Bank and that kind of stuff or World Economic Forum. Uh huh. No, that's dark. Okay. All right. That's a very different thing. All right. Club of Rome are like environmentalists. This guy is like, is like, is like AOC on cocaine. I'm having fun with you. 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 going to shine a light on the dark. Yeah, but I'll shine the light. I'm going to shine the light. All right. Good. Good. No, but they're not. They're not. They're not. They're not. They're not. It's like little policy wonk suite. 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 the planet and its people. 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 groupthink as a weapon to where they could be like, "Ooh, Doug Rushkoff, he's done research on this, this, and that. He's a great guy. He'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 Rushkoff. Right. And he believes in actually all the bullshit. He said, "We'll pull him in here. He'll fucking fight about it, write 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. You know? I mean, I'm a bad target for that, because I'm just like think and ask questions and explore. Yeah. I agree. So I'm not like, "Yeah." I take it as a positive sign. That side, if you want to call it that, is into my message of 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? Well, he wanted me to be on War Room to talk about my book Team Human, that I'm arguing that human. It was sort of against the technology. It was against democracy. Okay. But he's against that too. He's against. He doesn't like those guys. Yeah. Yeah. That's what he says. He's like for true MAGA against. He doesn't like. He didn't like Doge and those things, because again, it was the AI billionaires running things. He was the populist. He's a guy I'm very sketched out by. Oh, he's scary. I don't believe anything he says. And that's why I didn't want to go on it in the end, because I think not just that he's probably smarter than me on some level. Oh, he's a genius. Yeah. That I felt 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 my friend Henry Abbott, he did some amazing research on this years ago and got no credit for it at the time, but he was tracing out a lot of Bannon's life and the people he interacted with and the banks and the finance and this and that, and he's like, "This is a spy kind of novel." No, he's an interesting guy. I mean, he was. I mean, talk about the Club of Rome type. He was a CEO of the Biosphere Project. Now, Biosphere, which was this. Can we pull that up, Steve? Fake greenhouse earth. It was the most weird-ass environmental experiment. So, he's doing this. 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 it in 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 yeah you're right steve bannon served as the ceo of biosphere 2 in 1993 and 94 bought brought in by billionaire ed bass to cut costs to restructure the failing ecological project in oracle arizona his tumultuous 17-month tenure involved sweeping management changes aggressive lawsuits and significant alterations to the scientific mission bannon was hired as an investment banker and consultant to manage the facility's floundering finances he quickly ousted the original management of the project's founder john allen fearing bannon's management would jeopardize the crisis safety two former biospherians broke into the facility in april 1994 to expose the situation let me tell you this we wanted to throw coincidence yeah 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 because the whole idea was the biosphere was a closed environment that could we have plants and people live together and make oxygen like it's almost like an experimental mars dome or something they just couldn't do it yeah we were just dying in the sam's club is the club for every holiday club guess who's joining the club this season walmart plus yep sam's club plus membership now comes with walmart plus at no extra cost two memberships one great price just 120 bucks a year can save you time and over 700 want to get in on the membership duo of the century visit sam's club.com come join us sam's club annual plan only auto renews tnc apply estimate based on average combined walmart plus and sam's club plus savings among members of both for one plus year versus non-member or club member pricing slash fees excludes membership fees see walmart plus terms and sam's club terms for more info now at kroger your points add up to more ways to save every trip use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump you can even save at the pump up to 35 on your next fill up same points more choices and with low prices on fresh quality food plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop your dollar goes further redeem your points online or in the app kroger fresh for everyone restrictions apply see cider store for details and so they went and broke me but but i was at timothy leary's house that the night that they came that and then they let they were at his house in la and they were at his house and they drove to the biosphere and did that like the next day or were you doing 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 they you know yeah we're in rome back to rome no uh uh we were not okay all right so you remember this very clearly yeah they came over yeah but it was that's so funny april 94 that's interesting yeah yeah and that and 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 i swear to god it's been pulled off the internet but back when bannon 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 photograph 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 breitbart and so bannon has this big party with all these you know dc acolytes and everything the author is walking around with him and bannon's giving the tour of his 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 he goes what do you believe like like what what do you who is amazing question like what what is your political philosophy and he goes i'm a leninist and the author's like wait wait like like lenin like the bolshevik you're a conservative influence like what the fuck that doesn't make any sense he goes no no not the actual solutions of the policy is like a bolshevik but i'm a leninist 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 right now you get it so that's why he would want uh 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're not left or right if you just tear it down who is more likely to do more tearing it down you know biden kamala or trump of course trump there's more just it's more incendiary i disagree with that and i'll tell you why yeah 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 in some fucking memo that they put out right and i think both but they're not tear there but they're they're biden and harris are institutionalists though they're trying to prop up the system right and they're propping up systems that destroy things right of course but the the 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 um but you don't think institutions have torn down society oh they're hard like world bank and all those things yeah it's world bank was columbia colonialism by another tool it's like okay instead of going to those places with armies and enslaving 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 agri there and do all that right it was the same uh it's the same stuff um the only difference i would argue is that at least in government constitutions there are one 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 teal want um they want that yeah yeah they want a monarchy yeah yeah yeah i mean i'm the president of peter teal hate club but like he wants a monarchy i don't know that one yeah yeah look can we pull that up yeah he likes monarchy yeah yeah that's what they but keep going that was what what what nick land and and um 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 with uh how do i want to say this like quote-unquote libertarian conservative politics that peter teal claims to love if that is the case 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 you know 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 teal declared monarchy as the best form of government i read that book twice his ideas 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 see you're you're a good study there yeah but i forgot that entrepreneurial freedom he also praises monopolies right wow so you're right yeah the monopolies thing that's like i remember when i just looked at peter teal 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 this guy's a genius not to say i agreed with all of it but i'm like whoa the way you can see why he was so successful which i don't think you should ever underestimate your enemy he's a brilliant guy but like you know then you see what like some of it obviously came out in that book and i'm forgetting it but then you see like the actions taken and what what he might want and you're like this isn't this is a world that leaves so many people behind and you know maybe he really is malthusian and he's like you know what fuck it a lot of people are gonna die because they need to right he is malthusian he does believe in the limits to growth actually the right-wing extremist the the like the coke brothers and teal 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. 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 it's a problem. It's a problem. Well, partly it's economic expansion. They want more customers. Although now they're realizing, Sam Altman's realizing, future of customers are not human. Their future customers are going to be AIs. How does an AI pay you? In crypto. In other words, think about it this way. You're a billionaire sitting in your house. You don't interact with people except your servants and your family, right? So you're up there on the hill. You want there to be consumers. You want there to be people working because you want workers and you want consumers. 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 AIs? I think it's just so foreign for me to even think about something that's not human exchanging currency. 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. Oh, fuck. 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 the people anymore. Dave, 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. How many square miles? Yeah, they're 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 to 450 publicly tracked facilities. While the U.S. has a massive quantitative lead, China is rapidly scaling its infrastructure and state-led computing hubs to close the gap. And part of that may be exactly what you're saying, which is, you know, where we're building one that's 10 square miles, they're building one that's 110 square miles. Okay. So this is, I want to bring it back. I want to bring it back around to this, too, because we got off this, and I think it's important. This is where I, 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. The very first episode I ever recorded for this podcast was basically, a lot of it was discussing 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 U.S. 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 Palantir running these fucking places, and then we're living in a surveillance 1984 state. That would be a total L. So 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. It's funny, I don't even go here, but. Go there. Citizens' assemblies making decisions about things. I think people picked at random, not running for office. People picked at random. Interesting. In groups, and giving them agency over their own regions, what's allowed to happen there. You know, it's interesting. China. In. China's AI policy, I would think, is, I think, is superior to ours. Why? Because they realize that hand-in-hand with AI development, they've got to do renewable energy. Because of all the, you know. But they emit more smog than, like. China does? Yeah. Yeah, but that's why they've been working on it, though. But they're also. They're working pretty fucking slow. They're the global leader in solar, wind, and geothermal, and all these other kinds of. Of energies, and we've put an intentional stop to it. You know, the other thing. Funny, you were talking before about crypto, and about how so much of crypto is bullshit. And I started to look at crypto as a way to. 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. Has value. Right? Crypto, Bitcoin is. We spend energy. 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 are like, oh, this Bitcoin stuff doesn't seem real. And then we did NFTs. And we got this last burst. Oh, let's burn more! Burn more! More chips! RIP 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 building! 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. And now, water. Yeah. Now, all these guys we've been talking about today. Well, 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 Deef and I where you were talking. This was back in 2020, pre. It was, I believe, right before the pandemic. You did this interview where you were very matter-of-factly explaining about how you had been advising these billionaires on how to deal with the end of the world. Yeah. And, you know, building bunkers and hilariously explaining, like, how to be nice to your security guards so that they won't fucking kill you when, you know, money doesn't. Yeah. 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, gonna hit up Danny, like, oh, can you connect me with Doug Rushkoff? But then you texted me, like, let's do it. So, I'm 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? Yeah, like I said, I used to get to do talks for, like, corporations sometimes or rich people, whatever, and this was a. Turned 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, and I'm sitting in the green room, and instead of bringing me out. Usually, they'll come. You know, you do a talk. I've never done a talk. Oh, the guy comes with a microphone. Usually, they clip it on, and then you go out. And instead, 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. He said, 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? No, it's a green room. It's in a resort. It's like a. So, it's bright. It's normal. They're serving refreshments. It's bright. It's daytime. It's the one in the afternoon. They're not wearing masks and shit? No, no, no, no. It was before COVID or anything. It was a nice resort. It was nice. 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. Environmentally friendly. It's very cool. But they come in. And they're asking me, like, Bitcoin or Ethereum. Okay. Like, where to put it. They don't place their bets. You know, alternate or augmented reality or virtual reality. Oh, I remember when that was huge. Yeah. That argument. And then finally, it was like Alaska or New Zealand. And you're like, what? It's 2018. Since 2018, this happened. Like, what? It's like, you know, what's the better place? Assuming climate change happened, 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, well, that was for that. And it was like, where do we put our bunker for the event? The event. That's what they called it, the event. What did they think it was? Climate catastrophe. the pandemic economic unrest um nuclear war um mass migration you know whatever it is um that that makes life as we know it unlivable and forces them to go to a special place and and ride it out or live there forever and uh so i i then got in then i did get into my intellectual dominatrix mode and then i was like oh so you're gonna have a bunker that's gonna somehow you know so you and and one of them showed me these plans he had of this underground thing that all these shipping containers all together and he had a heated pool in there that's the first thing 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 and all summer there's always a little van in front of his house with like the guy with the spare parts and the fixing this it's like a heated pool is a hard thing to maintain 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 moleskin book and he's like parts 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 up billionaires they're not sending their best god damn it so then i'm like okay then they're like your water table your water's contaminated from the nuclear fallout how long is you gonna last you're gonna have filters oh reverse osmosis is gonna do the fucking bentonite benzene and the radiation and whatever and then so they're like oh no we've got this we've got scientists on that and this and reverse this and the top water and the landfill and the blah blah we work that out i'm like okay so who's gonna protect your bunker from the rest of us you know from all of us the ones that are still alive yeah it's got oh cement gate things blah blah and then the guy's like oh you know i've got uh i've got navy seals on the speed dial they've got helicopters they're gonna come they're gonna pick us up and go bring us out of that and i'm like oh you got navy seals how are you how are you gonna pay your navy seals after your bitcoin is worthless why are they gonna stay don't matter right exactly and they're like oh uh uh then they're like okay so so well we could control we could have um what if i'm the guy says what if i'm the only person she says how smart they are tech bros billionaires who are richer than us what if i'm the only person who knows the combination to the place where we keep the food so they go navy seals they don't have any experience getting information out of people you're gonna spend the whole apocalypse getting waterboarded i've had a lot of navy seals sitting in that chair let me tell you wouldn't take no no or they said you know we're gonna have um chips chips that'll 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 we are so fucked you know i'm funny because i told that story and someone said dude they should get army rangers not how long was this meeting um 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 lair by the wealthy guys i was the entertainment the entertainment there was that you said they had mold skin books and shit yeah i know well some of them knew i was going to be there one of them definitely knew because he had his plans but i was the entertainment i was the entertainment i was the entertainment i was the entertainment 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 you know and there were other speakers at this thing it was like a weekend long so we just like learn to make an omelet with this famous chef improve 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'm a fucking a fucking anarchist media theorist about how to build a bunker you know i'm just like love each other man you know i love that where you're explaining how disconnected these guys were and you said in the clip where they're asking like how they can build goodwill with their future security guards and you're like i don't know pay for the kids birthday party or their bar mitzvah or some shit and they're like oh wow oh so i gotta be i gotta be nice to them pay for your head of security's daughter's bat mitzvah yeah because 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 what do you mean 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 positive whether it be some climate disaster whether it be a nuclear holocaust whether it's a pandemic ai taking over ai taking over like these are people that have access to people whether you like them or not they have access to people who have a lot of information and a lot of simulations and a lot of things that could point to what the actual future is and it's pretty alarming that we're having this conversation very matter-of-factly with you even if you are describing yourself as the entertainment in 2017 this is before covid before the rise of ai before the that is wild and these are people who would rather have with robots or teenagers than women right wait wait a second please explain that these are people who want to build sex robots these are people the people you were talking to this is 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 steve 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 yeah yeah you couldn't see it on that but let's make sure that's edited was that one of them if you want to know if i it's off record that's one of them god damn bro god damn that's so fucked up but that's this that's so fucked up yeah you know and i i had i did have a brush with the epstein crowd interestingly enough through the science people yeah what so you did you ever meet him i don't think so you don't think i don't think so you didn't meet palm beach pete i don't know who that oh that guy no no no no but i um i was invited to a party in new york thrown by a literary agent who was the literary agent brockman yeah of the scientist stars you know hawkins and all those kind of guys and dennett and pinker and all every single you know and and really really smart super smart smarter than us people when is um late 90s late 90s so it was before epstein was known before he had gotten arrested the first time before any of that but um it was basically called like the millionaire's dinner the billionaire's 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 um the guy who was throwing the party said um this is a really special party i'm going to 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 who runs a website at the time of literary website not a looker it was beyond that she's the smartest woman i know yeah i know but like and i bring her 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 feel he grabs me he pulls 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 i'm like what do you mean and he goes look and there are these all these like middle age guys with like 20 if they're lucky 20 year old gorgeous little model people and i'm like that's the quotient duh you know because i was so worried about not being you're gonna go to a thing with dawkins and you're a young writer you're thinking i'm not smart enough to be with these people i want to i'm going to 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 this fight with how many people are here at that thing yeah 40 50 and where where is it in new york in some 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 um remember that you would think i would but i really wouldn't because he wasn't famous yet was it on east 71st street could have been god it could have been i just don't know it was so far it was so far back when all right i don't know i don't know it was a very rich person's big big place though um but anyway so i get in this argument with dawkins about um 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 are like genes and we're just um sort of automatic how did he say he reached that conclusion because it's that's what there's only evidence of that there's no evidence of anything else and i was arguing my my felt experience is that human beings have souls and that the universe is leaning towards you know morality we're trying to make the world better and we're reaching you know that there's a there's an effort there's some kind of a a love or something animating us and he dismissed me finally he said oh you're you're a moralist i don't even know what that meant but it's like it's a dismissed thing 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 plane and i'm like okay i'm the moralist you know guilty i'll take i'll take that and it's like for all the for all the 20 30 years that i was said that i never got rich or invited to the right things or being one of those people i realized oh there's a 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 were you invited by brockman yeah yeah when's the last time you talked to brockman i saw him at a thing you know it was weird because then after that he represented me for a while and um then i saw the article come out that those parties were funded by um uh uh epstein and there was a guy evgeny marzov smart guy kind of anti and more anti-tech anti-capitalist um you know he would call me pro-tech because he's like anti-tech okay i'm critical about but he's like more critical um and he wrote this piece in the atlantic exposing all that and i was like oh fuck when was the um whenever epstein was exposed and all that back in 2019 yeah when everyone was exposing those things i was like what the fuck and um he's he wrote this piece and he said um and and he was more more philosophically educated than me and better at sort of figuring out a moral conundrum um because he's this great agent i'm at this agency he's not even my agent i'm at the agency and he said you know the the the agency needs to make some public acknowledgement and um of of what happened some commitment about or give back the money that the that the foundation got from this guy um make some repair and i can stay and the agency never acknowledged it at all never did anything so he left and uh and then i left the agency then because it was just like you do something yeah that's 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 john you could run through i don't know if it's still you know two three years ago even you could run through like the organization of everyone who's who's at least related to edge foundation run by rock was fucking everybody like there's literally no one and 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 doing things with being in the edge foundation meant there was like 500 of us i think they would send oh really they would send in 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 2 000 years and you would give 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 you get access to stuff too because you're in the fraternity i didn't but there was the people who were really in it they would get to go to um it was interesting they would have um uh like seminars like they did a thing on and ultimately it turned out they were into kind of dark stuff um 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 interest and it was like oh that's what you're interested in but um so there were inner things or if you were you know dawkins or daniel denner steven pinker you got invited they would like take a cruise around antarctica or go to galapagos you know what i mean they did cool things if you were but i wasn't you didn't get to go to antarctica no i wasn't pyramids under the ground no i'm just i was more periphery but they were they were i mean i met alan alda he was oh yeah he was in there because he got really interested in science he did narration for some cool science things um uh but all you from from that one experience at the party you went to that you didn't know was sponsored by epstein you remember having a intellectual argument with dawkins and that's what you did yeah 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 um that these guys are calling me a moralist and laughing at me for believing in something in anything right as if believing having faith in anything i'm not saying there's god don't worry i'm not saying i won't say there's god i'm just saying that there's you know it's okay it's okay uh uh uh you know i'm not gonna 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 there's like oh no you're you know a lot of scientists that do believe in god though yeah i know a lot i know but these ones there was a hyper vigilance against any of that and that's because if you believe in the in in the sacredness of the other human and you can't do that shit to them right oh my god great point you can't rape a 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 a higher power because of the way you just described those people and i don't i don't think you're wrong at all i i and i i'm i think i think it's pretty pretty telling too that you as 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 and it's spidey sense it's all spidey 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 for spidey sense but but that feeling in your gut it's so real you can trust so you can really trust you know you meet a person and it's like you know man it's 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 it makes life so much easier in the end right if you're just like oh man right i don't have to worry about anything i'm just gonna spidey it out yeah now go 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 was and wasn't yeah you know interesting that's the crazy thing man i mean i spoke at mit you spoke at mit right in what context i went to media lab to talk about a book and then it turns out you know what i mean yeah but yeah a lot of people but that's the thing a lot of people have been in club of rome a lot of people have been at harvard you know yeah like yeah it's it there's some line there at some point where it's like okay 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 right 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 it would be there would always be the question like yeah i wasn't important enough for anyone to want to think through me i wasn't a bestseller 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 got gonna run in sometime in your life you're gonna run into sketchy people especially if you start publishing or i mean look at you you're gonna run into sketchy people of course it's gonna happen and the only thing you've got the only thing you've got is your spidey because they're 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 you know what i mean there was there was a bunch of us we were like slackers so we were optimizing for something else so the 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 yeah you know no to go back to it though that less than one hour meeting as you described it with right say five billionaires out there i'm still mine and i think it was four billionaires and one almost billionaire when i tried to look them i'm sorry to hear that for that guy but you say so matter-of-factly i guess that they first of all did you know 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 like no they weren't like zuckerberg level but you know because i asked them even that i said i thought you guys were making rocket ships to get off the planet they go we're not there yet we're low level billionaires like five six billion but like your sausage mcmuffin with egg didn't change your receipt did the sausage mcmuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just five dollars only at mcdonald's for a limited time price and participation may vary promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing you said it in a way that would suggest they were extremely open about it that they were into sex with underage girls and robots no they weren't open about it no you picked up on that i i picked up that they're of that culture now what made you pick up on the fact that you're not an underage girl you're not an underage girl you're not an underage girl you're not an underage girl you're not an underage girl you're not an underage girl 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 and i guess it's a i'm drawing them with a with a with a inaccurate non-journalists brush that's okay right so i've brushed up against these kind of folks two or three times in my life right once at that party that's it only two that's kind of low for a guy if you're like the types of things you talk about i would imagine they're all over you i know or giving money to my team human show like what a rude sponsor it's like i got like 200 200 or 300 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's just they they're they really they just really don't care yeah you know and i guess it's more like it's it's not that they are it's more like they could be like i talk about i talk to people who've um who've met like jame dolan or something and they just go oh he gave me the creeps you know that's everybody you know i saw um i saw harvey weinstein once at a party and i was like when oh in late 80s late 80s early 90s yeah he was he was the merchant ivory they were big producers even then and he just like the only other he looked like uh like a massad agent or someone you know he's big you know what i mean like he could just no i don't know what you mean he was scary he was scary look like him as you you pegged him as a massad agent well like it's interesting not like like a massad guy that or special forces massad you know like an israeli guy who could just crush my neck you know it just he was just scary he had a scary imposing presence so you picked up on that in the late 80s early 90s there's guys that just there's certain guys they gotta look in their eye they do and you're just like oh stay away good for you yeah it's funny because and but everyone has it what do you mean i think everyone has everyone would look at those same people and go oh i think we all have the that i think but here's the thing i think enough people didn't or subconsciously look the other way with he's got something else i want power got some power yeah yeah god it's so oh it's dark but it's also fascinating to just like consider yeah i gotta pee again okay we'll be right back 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'll call it capitalist anonymous or ego anonymous or we as a species we as a civilization are addicted to something right some sort of uh uh disconnection from nature accumulation of money saving stuff security um we're addicted to to this abstracted way of of dealing with the world and when you look at something like 12 steps it's just the steps that are involved because it's like a quaker meeting right you just get together and fellowship and share where they're at the first thing you do is you accept a higher power 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 you know it's like the things they sort of it feels like we could almost take western civilization through 12 steps and we'd get we'd get to a better 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 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 right so i just like it as a a lot of things about that model um i really like that's why it's funny like at the beginning of um fight club remember how they meet they're all going to different self-help meetings because they're looking for that loss and a common connection yeah of course that's interesting no because it also goes back to what you were first writing about when when you were getting into the tech scene and like thinking about what the world was going to be you were thinking about a world where humanity could integrate correctly with text with tech for the good of humanity rather than tech taking over humanity and making rendering it obsolete right which has been a theme of other parts of our conversation as well today but like you know now that we are 30 35 years down that roll from when you were first right down that road from when you were first writing about it like how do we make sure that in a world of where there's people like sam altman's and peter teal's saying yeah you know we 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 uh 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 uh reddit and it's interesting and it kind of does and and then you think well what are the difference between reddit and social media reddit has moderators in each subreddit so they're sort of the moderators are there to try to help keep it uh cohesive and and social that's sort of one thing to think about i mean think as much about are you going to bring a an app into your ecosystem i know you worry about your phone if you're going to put an app there is going to fuck up my phone is the app going to fuck up you what are you bringing into your day what are you and really to think about that and the other thing i started to advocate is for um this was like a 99 i said uh we should do a tech shabbat tech sabbath tech sabbath one day a week where you don't use screens i i don't 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 that'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 you see other people what are you going to 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 um 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 borrow a drill. Borrow a drill? Borrow a drill, yeah. It was based on this story that 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 first thing I'm thinking I'm going to do, like any American, I'm going to go to Home Depot, get a minimum viable product, rechargeable drill, charge it up, drill a hole, 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 going to charge and I'll throw it away. So I 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 is going to 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? Or I can walk down the street and knock on my neighbor Bob's door. Bob's always wrapping doors and things in his driveway and he's got, okay, 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 going to say, not only can you borrow my drill, but actually I'm going to come over and drill the hole for you because you don't know how to do an anchor. You don't know how to do a stud. You're a fucking nerd. He's going to drill. Drill the hole, put it in the anchor, the butterfly thing, whatever it is that I need and get it in there and put up and put up the picture, you know, with a drill that plugs in the wall, like God intended and go home. Then that weekend, I'm going to have the barbecue party for my daughter, the graduation party and smoke's going to go over to Bob's house. He's having fucking sirloin steaks over there at his house, graduation party for his daughter. I hung the fucking picture and he didn't even invite me. Right. So I'll invite Bob. All right. Now I invite Bob. And now, you know, Helene over on the other side of the block. What? Since when is Doug friends with Bob? He invites Bob. So now I got to invite Helene. And if I invite Helene and Bob, I'm going to have to invite everyone on the block to the graduation party. So my whole block is going to 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 going to say, oh, why did this happen? Oh, because I borrowed a drill from Bob. So I wouldn't have to. I'd buy one myself because I don't really need a drill. I'm only going to use it once every two years. Then someone's going to say, well, you know, I only use my lawnmower once a week. How much do you use yours? What if we had two lawnmowers for the whole block? And all of a sudden we're going to 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 forbid we weren't suspicious of it. Like even below the final point there of like the guy thinking from an economic standpoint before you even get there, the social dynamics of that. We used to live in a world, you know, 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 you. They're 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 that 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 think that's what's happening. 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 girl's like, what is his group text going to say about me to where you can't just like feel each other out? Like it's it is it is totally it's like anti evolutionary. Yeah. I mean, there was always peers involved, I guess. You know, you meet someone and you're how is your how does your gang feel about? Sure. But it wasn't viral. No, it wasn't. Exactly. And it was it was. In some ways, there were positive aspects even to different generations. He's no good for you. There was a little of that. I know it's. It's hard. And the thing is, it's not just tech. This is old. 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, have you ever heard of Levittown? It's this giant, the first giant suburb development in Long Island. Levittown. No, I don't know. It's one of the first one. And it was built by these guys, the Levitt brothers. And you can see there these letters. That the Levitt 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. It forces you to keep your job and always you're a little bit in debt. GI Bill. Yeah, the GI Bill. 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, 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 kind of thing. Paved with 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, Deef. But he plays a wounded disabled veteran of World War II. 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 farm system that's set up. 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 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 – you know, you didn't have technology separating each other as much. You had good social interaction. Yeah, but you only had room for the nuclear family in there. There wasn't room for grandma in there. It took away the tribe. It did because the tribe is going to share stuff. If you have all these different families, you're going to have more consumers. Everyone is 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. That's going to require more. Well, here's the other thing there. This was a creation – was an unnatural creation in a way 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 50s. And, you know, Pinker in Enlightenment Now – I know Pinker gets a lot of bad press, right? Just so these days. But he's a really 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 that humanity is in the best part of history right now overall on a rolling 10-year basis or whatever it was. Yeah. at all times. That said, there was one alarming chart and he pointed it out as alarming 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 break them up with trust busts 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 at scale in 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 if inflation gets to 40 50 and they can't fucking feed their families or they don't have a job and ai is taken over and now you have real class revolution warfare like french revolution style right and i think that people like tear it 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 it 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 bloody revolution bloody revolution and it's then then the question is will elon musk have his droid armies in time oh jesus christ it's droid armies well that's what when someone asks 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 oh that's i can't even i'm glad he didn't say it against us yeah yeah but still like the idea i can't even think like that i mean i have that money i think it goes somewhere else i mean there have been there have been peaceful revolutions too where like in uh czechoslovakia and that was peaceful yeah well they had they had candles and held hands and stuff until the guy left they did yeah not yugoslavia that was oh okay that was a sorry i have my i have my slavias mixed up yeah it's because i feel like there are a few the czech it was called the um he could look it up it was had some great name czechoslovakian candle revolution they did these vigils every day they just stood outside basically everyone went into the streets and they just stood good for them so it was peaceful you know all right so the candle demonstration or candle manifestation on march 25th 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 right they got they got slams square to demand religion civil rights and were 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 a few people in the crowd and they were all like oh my god we're going to go to czechoslovakia lit candles and a conscience the reaction state security violently dispersed a non-violent 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's my point like they didn't they didn't they gathered quietly they kept they still did all right let's go down they got there they got the velvet revolution 1989 the velvet revolution widespread democratization in czechoslovakia is formerly 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 out outrage created movement millions of czechs and slovaks joined daily strikes and peaceful protests heavily utilizing candles and chants the result was the communist party of czechoslovakia surrendered its monopoly on power in just over wow okay wow that's when they got by right by december dissident and playwright was elected as the new president so it's possible that's that's good that's cool it's like we well i mean we live in a country that had a violent revolution that worked and like when you see like afterwards like it worked and they made something pretty amazing in the constitution but when you look at most violent revolutions that happen around the world it doesn't work it doesn't you just you you when you're a violent revolution are you often just recreate the oppression yeah you become your attacker what do you make of i mean we've been talking 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 we're we're all transhuman already you know what do you mean you got we use glasses you got stitches on your arm i mean how does that make me transhuman i'm still 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 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 it with a new one you're replaced them with you know bionics you're still human you know and there's your heart and then your liver then you know where where does it where would the line be the 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 like i feel like it's one thing to like repair myself with whatever is around right and it's like behind to see to see the human as in need of upgrading you know upgrading you know i there's again it goes back to faith but i think there's some built-in challenges to our existence is there and that 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 but 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 bros or whatever 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 the a lot of the the genomics bros talk about junk dna oh that's junk dna leave that behind it's like none of my dna is 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 want this 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 we have all these feelings about other people and it's making us really hard to kill them and eat them you know so what if you know let's get rid of those feelings that's it let's that's engineer that out let's engineer that out engineer our empathy well in a certain situation i could see why you wouldn't want that anymore yeah you know 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 gonna 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 right as a gene what makes you different from a human being what makes you different from a human being what makes you different from a human being what makes you different from a human being what makes you different from a t-rex dinosaur at that point you just 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 teals or the whatever who are going to ascend yeah and all that you know i don't what do they view as a breakaway situation civilization 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 you don't have to die they don't want to die you know that's 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 i would say they think of it more as a whatever a what it's not other people if other people have to die then they do but whatever yeah yeah all things being equal no they don't have to die they can live as long as i get to get up to the next place but the more of them that are around the more people around that could unplug the thing that i'm living on did any of these guys believe in god i don't think so yeah so why does peter till go around and lecture people about the antichrist right he might he might but he's got a interesting take on god what's his take on god oh it's sort of like certainly god's not um it's not the god of jesus that blesses the meek you know and it's the god of the ubermensch yeah it's the as if somehow christ lost likeness is an achievement you know rather than a previous example or uh i would think that becoming christ-like would involve more of a surrender to this you know more of a surrender like that surrender though right they don't they don't they win yeah what is this d if we got a quote from emile sioran 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 he's god the god of ambition i'm pure spec obviously but yeah ambition more you know more it's it's it is it's almost into addiction for addiction'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 you 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 yes kind of controlling and be over it squish the bug burn the worm you know that you create a similar uh a similar kind of clutch but without the the vulnerability how do you stay like so happy and optimistic when you have had 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 um 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 i'm sorry i forgot which uh uh exactly who it was and they um as they were 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 transcend you are living in infinity at that point you are living in the compassion and um i don't i'm not saying we're doomed i'm not saying there's there's a great possibility that we're doomed i'm not saying we're doomed i'm not saying we're doomed i'm not saying humanity can survive another century or two we that's it i mean that's not exactly like fucking positive another century i might be alive to see it end well it end what is it right but no the 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 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 put it i think that's a good way to put it i think that's a good way to put it 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 but it makes it easier to adopt the uh let's call it strategy that i'm talking about and what's that the small things your neighbors who are the 20 bodies you're sleeping closest who are who are the people living next to you why don't you take joy in helping uh in sitting with an old woman who doesn't have company in teaching a kid how to read and uh uh it's that's where you find the joy not in amassing a billion dollar empire yeah that's not where it is it's not where it's at and that's the thing though doug i don't think that like that quote is great thief ambition is a drug that turns its addicts into potential madmen i love that it says potential madmen because there's it's two ways western man you can either have ambition to create something and bring something better to the world where 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 let's go i need it fuck you i'll take it from you those are the two 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 are ambitious and they'll go the right way with that the problem is when you get really ambitious and more, they get such a big piece of the pie that they can put their finger on the scale more people are ambitious and they'll go the right way with that the problem is when you get really ambitious than the rest of us. Yeah. 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 gulag. 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? Yeah. And you can really figure out if 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 oh you should do that um i did a drug recently called bufo which is like a frog venom dmt 5meo dmt bufo yeah and i think i think that's like did 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 to diffuse into the back into the quantum hole um 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 it's hard to explain i i think we do the closest i could say it is we dissolve back into the whole like we and does that and the dust aspect of it that was steve saying back here does that imply that there's some sort of then we rise from the ashes and reincarnation. I think that stuff recycles, but it might not be your stuff that recycles as a single unit again. Meaning just a piece of it? You might dissolve into the – like if you're a droplet. Okay. You go and you go into the cloud of droplets. And then another droplet rains. So some of your droplet's in that droplet that rains, but it might not be you, your droplet. Wow. That's heavy. Yeah. You go back into the mix. Butterfly effect kind of thing. Yeah, you mix into the stuff, but you dissolve again into the stuff. You should do that book, Asking the Religious Leaders. Oh, yeah. That would be great. Do you think that we are alone in the universe, or 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 um i think the whole i i 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 an of 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 you know in this in this simulation of the simulation of the simulation we could be the white blood cells yeah and just the sum whole of every action that happens on this earth creates whatever that yeah cellular action i'm interested i mean there could be other than carbon-based life forms what would 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 is this is special almost more special temporally than spatially we've had a really good 20,000 40,000 years of temperate perfect little earth climate thing it doesn't doesn't last forever it's it's it must we innovate a way to do maybe yeah i feel like we could 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 dog this has been awesome man dude we had a good to meet you why it's great to meet you as well and we had a wild very far-ranging far-reaching conversation i'm about to think some more about but a lot of years are like this though i appreciate that we do a lot of different topics in here which i like but 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 that are 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 human and team human yeah and any books down below so everyone go check that out cool and let's do this again sometime all right all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me 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 huge help thank you sam's club is the club for every holiday club guess who's joining the club this season walmart plus yep sam's club plus membership now comes with walmart plus at no extra cost two memberships one great price just 120 bucks a year can save you time and over 700 want to get in on the membership duo of the century visit sam's club.com come join us sam's club annual plan only auto renews tnc apply estimate based on average combined walmart plus and sam's club plus savings among members of both for one plus year versus non-member or club member pricing slash fees excludes membership fees see walmart plus terms and sam's club terms for more info now at kroger your points add up to more ways to save every trip use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump you can even save up to 35 on your next fill up same points more choices and with low prices on fresh quality food plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop your dollar goes further redeem your points online or in the app kroger fresh for everyone restrictions apply see site or store for details