The REAL Story Of Rushkoff's Dinner Party That Turned Out To Be Epstein's

on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Something like that, when they're doing their speeches and their lectures and their working groups and all, they're informed by that stuff. Right. So they can say, here's why we don't want an AI company deciding how the land is used in our town. Yeah. And that's a big thing because they're being given authority over the water. And it's like, and I get it, I wonder 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, is there a problem? They're not rich. You don't have to see it. Especially, it's over there. It's over there. I've got to look at it. I just look at my stock. Yeah. But it's interesting. We used to only do this stuff to people on reservations. You know? Yeah. Casinos, though, you know, people are just getting fucked in no water. Right. No water. No casino. And Doug, we can go to that now because it's obviously a souped ashore, not casinos, but the data center thing and stuff like that that you're talking about because it's a souped ashore topic right now because you see so many of them popping up out of nowhere. And like, two things, I understand any time any new technology has ever come out, human race has always had a subset of people that are very, very afraid of it and do merit. And then, you know, we turn out okay, because I mean, 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 may be able to think for itself and I think us, which is certainly new territory. So it is a new normal in that way or in normal, if you want to say the second thing is I understand that you want, like, even looking at it from an American centric standpoint, you want to be at the front of the race and at the forefront of the world and be able to win and have the best tech. I get that. And in theory, I'm cool with like, if someone's going to 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 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 bet, America, we were the first at having social media, look how good that did for us, you know, China was second in social media, but they went, look, we're going to do this another way. I mean, in Chinese TikTok, as you know, is like, oh, the program educated, it's like the one good benefit of communism. And like, we can turn this off at nine o'clock and you watch math videos. Well, what's it? Right. And what's it optimized for? It's optimized. And to say that that it's totalitarian, to not have kids watching God knows what at night, Kardashians at night, it's not totalitarianism, that's the raising children. So there's the first mover advantage, I kind of question. The interesting thing is, you're right that when we say, oh, we've got writing now, and the ancient Greeks, when they got writing, Aristotle was going, I don't know, people don't know, there's 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 happened with AI. You've got, you're right. You're tumors on your utopians, your utopian 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 robot 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 the, I don't care about, well, it sounds radical. And maybe I don't care about what's going to happen because the ends don't justify the means. 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, get the cobalt to make the thing, then the soul of the thing is corrupted from the outset. So the soul of the thing. Yeah. 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 write my professor thing, I'm a professor at CUNY. All right. There was this guy, Albert Camus. Albert Camus? Right. Right. He was a saint. Yeah. But he wrote him. Yeah. He saved the theater guy. The theater guy knows. Theater people rule. That's a virtual. Yeah. We do. Theater people are smart. And you, you can't do theater without learning the history of everything. It's like so funny. Well, at least directors and writers, you have to read everything. But this guy, Camus, so he was friends with the French existentialist, like friends with Sartre and all the Marxists and all that. And they were all happy about communism. Oh, it's great. Yay. And then the communist started to make gulags and prison camps and all that. And guys like Sartre and the intellectual left. And 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 going to be studying. Got to 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. That's right. That 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 supposed good on the other side is worth doing the thing in the moment. So even if you tell me, like as an effective altruist, they're the new ones who have this belief, 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 could be a cool thing. Yeah. But the idea that we've got to sacrifice the environment, or if you don't believe in the environment, children, if you don't believe in the children, water, if you don't believe in water, a town's authority over its own land, you know, there's something, you know, there's a way to deploy this, you know, deploy it. Yeah. Well, it's military. Military love that. There's a way to deploy. Yeah. That's the center. We can decamp and deploy in ways that don't necessarily hurt people. Alright, so you taught this effective altruism thing, though, is a really interesting argument for sure. And yeah, I think a lot of the guys who have argued that are cringe and a lot of times happen also be sociopaths. We can talk about, say, an old man and a little bit, but like, you seen the show the last of us you ever watched? Yeah. I didn't like that. They made the mushrooms the bad guys, but others now, you know, spoiler alert out there. So skip the next 30 seconds if you haven't seen it. But there's one point in the show where Pedro Pascal has to make a decision where the girl Ellie and the show may have a cure. But for this disease, it'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 be passed on to other humans to make them immune and maybe end it. And Pedro Pascal says, fuck that. And then he kills all 40 people in the hospital and rescues Ellie 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, in the end, that feels like a cop out. No, no, they're actually not because, again, just reality, you can set something up, like a prisoner's dilemma situation to say, 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, 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. One of if not the most common DMs I get on Instagram. are many of you asking me what my favorite books are. Well, today's your lucky day, because if you use the link in my description below to join my newsletter, I'm gonna give you my top 10 book recommendations right now. Also, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make money producing content from the show, you can do so via the Discord link in my description below. And finally, you can join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the Patreon link in my description below. As always, please take one second to hit that subscribe button. If you haven't already, I really appreciate that. Also, the like button's a big help, and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below. - Rather than logic. - And. - And which do you think is the right answer or both? - The heart. I've been doing what the heart's saying. In that moment, we know Pedro Pascale has what Boobur would call an i-thou relationship with that girl. He sees her as a human being, right? And these other people in that hospital have dehumanized her, right? And he sees them as dehumanized agents of. And you could say, oh my God, you're gonna kill 40 people to save one. And it's like, it's my person. I mean, now I'm personally, I'm more of a pacifist. I would probably. - He would have talked him down to death. - That's sad. - I would have been a little bit more. I mean, I don't know, I would try to talk them down, but you know, I've got, forgive you, forgive you for what you're doing. And you have to understand that what you're. It's not actually gonna work because of what you're doing. This is not in the long term. This is not the solution to the real problem. - No, I'm not saying that you'd be as good with a gun as Pedro Pascale was in there. Certainly had some great aim hitting everyone in Mono down. - I took a gun lesson once and the guy told me at the end. - He said you were good. - He said you're a regular John Wick. That's fucking great. - Yeah. - Okay, so let's say you are, go with a gun. - Half an hour. - But in. (laughing) Yeah, his name was Anthony Williams. (laughing) - But if you, let's say you were. - For the 22. - You were good with it. You are. You have your 22. You can all commit reloads and everything. - And I'm right up next to him, right? - You're trying to piece him to death across that hospital in the first security guard who might be a rushing guy or something, so just go fuck yourself. - Yeah, 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 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 know. That's a good answer. - I don't know. I mean, I feel like I. I mean, someone was gonna attack my daughter or something. I feel like I've got the instinct to shoot somebody in the head or do whatever, you know? I mean, in the end, I'm an animal. I got teeth, I got nails. - That's right. - I got throwing stars and nunchucks. - That's right, and you got nunchucks too. - Yeah, I mean, I got the rubber ones 'cause I can't hit myself in the back of the head without the wood ones. I could have he trusted. They're hard. You're truly right, right? You're trying to really Bruce Lee with those things? - Oh my God. Yeah, now I stick with the gun. I got him in high school. I still have him somewhere. - Okay. - All right, let's not take those. I believe you with the 22, I feel like you. - You gotta be apparently the guy said, you gotta really up close with the 22, yeah. It doesn't have stopping powers, what they say. - No stopping power on that. We don't have to go on 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 same altments and stuff, I get really concerned when you hear, what's his name? Mo Godot. 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. I saw this clip on Twitter from that podcast where he was saying that Sam Altman's quoted in the documentaries, I guess, saying with like a straight face going, yeah, A.I. is probably going to end humanity, but we're gonna have a lot of fun making cool shit on the way. - Yeah, he did say that. He's like, it's only like 80% chance according to him. I think that it ends us. - Look like, 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 when you do that. - Yeah, well, the way he would put it is, well, humanity was gonna end anyway sooner or later. - Okay, what gives him that idea? - Sooner or later, when is that? - Well, you know, 'cause this sun burns out or whatever. - Yeah, and maybe like a million years or so. - And maybe we got off the planet by then. - And maybe we get off the planet by then. - And I think that elected him. - And if I was gonna get in a bet on anyone getting off the planet kind of thing, I would think it's like the co-gue. You know, they're the ones who do Ayolasca in Columbia or the Buddhist or something. You know, that we'll get there through like Monroe Institute Astral Projection out of body. That I just think, yeah, I think the way I would think an interdimensional travel feels to me more probable than making spaceships that let us go through the universe not get irradiated and destroy every-- - Okay, 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 generations. - Okay, yeah, I think we could, I think there's things that can happen in 10,000 years. There's ways off, but I think the ways off are not gonna involve like solid rocket fuel and metal canister. - 10,000 years at one, it'll be something way beyond that. But you don't think it would be the ability for us to literally physically go off. I feel like we'd have that at 10,000 years. - Yeah, but I think it'll be more like quantum folding space. - Quantum folding. - You know what I mean? It'll be something weird as-- - I can tell you were friends with Terence McKenna. - Like their 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 100,000 years to solve. And they were trying to figure, how did it do this? And the only way they can understand it is that the computer got the answer from an adjacent reality, right? Got the answer from an adjacent reality where the problem had been solved. - Can we Google this to get an adjacent reality? - Right, so it's like, those are the, that's, if you wanna, you wanna travel first class, you know, it feels like it's gonna be, it's gonna be shit like that that's, that we don't quite understand yet. You know, closer to stuff that we're playing with, remote viewing and ESP, and where aliens, and what's going on, and why are those things moving around? You know, sort of like 3D to 4D. Once you, if you lived in flat space, you wouldn't understand what's going on on the other side of the page, on the other side of the plane. How did you get there? How'd you pop up there? It's like, oh, well, you don't get it. We actually are in 3D. - I think you're thinking like Philip K. Dick. - Yeah, more of that kind of stuff. And some of the stuff we've done is as magical as that, and usually the people who figure those kinds of things out, get like the Teslas, you know, and who was that guy that was like balancing rocks and stuff using, this guy did these giant experiments. - Donald Claude Van Dam. - No, no, this guy balanced rocks and things, and he understood how the pyramids were made, and it was all about, you know, reversing the, you know, magnetism and gravity. And they could never, and when his things fell, they couldn't get them back up. They didn't know how to do it, even with cranes and all that shit. There's just, I feel like the, the, - I'll see, I'm deep-looking for that right now. Deep did pull up what you were talking about those second ago. - Yeah. - That was just so people came up. - Google's quantum AI team, right? - Yeah, Google's quantum computer experiments have sparked intense discussions about parallel realities in the multiverse, while the computers are simply running highly complex math algorithms. The unprecedented speeds have led some physicists to theorize that the computational workloads are being distributed across alternate realities or dimensions. So the willow chip and the multiverse, I'd love to follow the ship. And the multiverse hypothesis, the breakthrough. Google's quantum AI team introduced Willow, a 105-cubit processor capable of completing a random circuit sampling benchmarking task in just five minutes. Traditional supercomputers would theoretically take 10-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 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 finite solutions. 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, remind me to check, just make sure he's cool with me saying his name, Dave. But I remember, I wanna say it was early January 2018. I'm going for a walk with him in Central Park, like Midday. It was snowy out. I'm wearing, you know, I was a very-- I worked on Wall Street at the time where I was making about 65K a year, and I had to wear 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 maybe sometimes would get a call from someone that says, be at this bench at, you know, 1205 tomorrow, and when he's there, they pick him up, they put a bag over his head, drive him six hours away, he saw some fucking computer computational things somewhere, they hand him a bag of money, they put the bag back on his head, drive him back to the bench, and that's that really fucking sharp guy. And so, we were talking about the whole, blockchain revolution at the time because people were just tossing blockchain as a key word on everything. This is right when the crypto market was like starting the crash. After the first big boom there in 2017. And he was like, this 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 six, eight, forty eight, whatever it was, but he was blown my mind explaining how we could be in a reality where a country has already had quantum and has already effectively hacked all this stuff. And therefore hacked reality. And we're not even living in the space that we think we're living in anymore because something is actually controlling the world. And it might not even be a country. It could be like some unelected fucking government. And I just remember sitting there going, wow, we've lost them. Like he's crazy. And then it's all some of the stuff play out. And I'm like, maybe it's not crazy. Right. I mean, it's a matter of figuring out what it is. So there's this guy, Nick Land, who's like a real darling of the far right guys like Peter T.O. and Musk and all that. I love Nick Land. He's a theorist and he says that capitalism itself is a stranger tractor 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 racist hierarchical things because it's like they want to be the ultimate capitalists. You think it's racist? What they're proposing? Yeah. Well, it's kind of survival of the fittest eugenic thing. Yeah. In the end, it's it's. You think that's their intention or you think it's more like part of it. You think it's just a downstream part of it. Yeah. A part of being what doesn't mean doesn't that assume then that if we assume that that's a part of and trust me, I'm no fan of Peter T.O. and guys who think in any of the Genics. But if we're assuming that what they're doing is racist, we're therefore assuming that therefore there are races that are less superior to other races. Like I don't buy into that at all. But in their model. But what's to have they 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, you're actually afraid are going to come in storm when you got a helicopter in the courtyard of the house to escape when you lose control of this place. I think you do get indoctrinated in certain things. You know, it's tricky. Right. Can I, can I pee? We let it stop. You can just keep breathing it. No, we're good. We're good. Take your time. All right, we're back. So you're trying to get more muscles you're saying. I see the veins popping right there. I'm trying. I'm trying. I'm trying. No, my doctor said he wants me to get to 140. Once you get to one foot, what are you right now? I'm up to 136. Okay, 136. It's easy to add on muscle when you get into the flow of things. You know what I mean? You like lifting? No, what I'm liking is and I think I can develop a whole thing. I'm sure someone has. I'm liking like pull-ups and dips and push-ups and then push-ups with weights through something about the non, I don't like the punk. There's something about the clunk that's just like, but if I can find ways to do and I'm liking these, I got these giant rubber bands. I kind of like in that feel better than others and it, and I got really this guy. He actually lives out here with Sean. Me like, if you do them really slow, it's like it's brutal, but it's like they're great. And I feel like way less, you know, I'm over 60. I don't want to like rip a ligament or do whatever, you know? And doing like less weight or these stretchy things or even 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 little dumbbells. And it's like, oh, it's a whole different thing. Yeah, Dave got me back into kettlebells last year. I used to do a lot when I was younger and then got away from it, but like, oh my god, it's, I mean, that's how it's meant to be because it is calm. 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 love boxing. But like, my movement on the bags since going back to kettlebells has improved dramatically. That's a good stuff. Yeah, definitely keep it now. No, I do that. And I do yoga. And I do a lot of yoga. You do a lot of yoga. Yoga is amazing for me. Well, it's also for core. Yeah. Absolutely. Huge difference between abs and core. You got to have a you yeah, you got to have a strong core to be able to do anything really athletic for sure. Yeah, and it's another duh. You know, like, when you find your core, you're like, oh, there it is. Oh, I get it. And then it's like, core, your core is everywhere. You know, when you're lifting something with your hand, it's like your core is there. But back to what we were saying before the breaks, we were talking about some so yeah, so these are the guys you're saying, like the teals of the world, they're they have something many of them. Yeah, there's not that many. And I think that's the problem. George Carlin, I always say that he had this famous line. It's a big club in you ain't in it. Amazing observation. But like, I always say it's a small club in you ain't in it. Like, it's a very, very tight club. And so these guys who were looking at it, like they can transcend, I want to come back to that in a minute. But like, you know, you're saying it's at the expense of everyone else and they just don't care. So you were raising the point and this is interesting because I was having a conversation with my friend Tim Martin about this the other day with it's very hard to think about. But like, that ultra capitalism view, right? Where someone 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 off, because it's too much winter take off, fuck it. That's how it's supposed to be. I disagree with that. I don't think it should be like that. While I look at all economic systems and I objectively say, like, yes, capitalism has been the best system proven over time over the other ones. It doesn't, I always say it doesn't mean it's perfect. That also doesn't mean you throw the whole thing out. So I was talking with Ty about like, yeah, I don't really see a good need for someone to be a trillionaire. But at the same time, to require someone to not be a trillionaire would require a governing body to come in and determine that when you get to a certain level of wealth, you're not allowed to have more, which means they could then use the slippery slope and set that objective. You mean, right, anywhere in the Reagan era. Well, how so in the Reagan era? The Reagan era, anything you made, over like a million dollars, was tax like 80%. Oh, yeah, yeah. Eisenhower was like 90 or something. Yeah. And Reagan, we look back at as if he was, you know, some horrible conservative, and it's like, no, the tax policy then, they prevented that. They, once you, they really said, once you had over a million, a few million dollars, why did you need more? And they looked at it, wasn't, it's not beneficial to, 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. And there's something about these guys. And I, you know, I've never known any of those dudes personally, not sure I really want to. But like, there's some crossing point that happens, some day, or maybe it happens slowly, like a boiling frog, where they separate themselves. Well, they lose, yeah. And we've, and I wrote about those. They're studies. I mean, when you have a billion dollars, you have less empathy for other people. You wrote about that. Yeah. Yeah. There's, 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 a kind of sociopathic type personality to get there to begin with. Now, the thing about capitalism that I would, I would say is, who says we only, we should only have one economic system for all places at all times. It's like, I could say marriage is good. Marriage is cool. But is it the best thing for 11 year olds who are, is it 14 year olds, 70 year olds? It's like, does, does everyone have to get married? Is that the only system of romance that we have? No, there's others. So like capitalism is really good if you're trying to grow an economy. It's not really great if you're an economy that's kind of fully grown and is worried about how are we going to manage remaining resources? You know, that's when you might want to commons. And we've had different kinds of economy. Late medieval Europe had it commons. You can use it commons to organize fisheries or a pasture that a lot of different cows are going to use. There's all these different other kinds of things, other kinds of money systems that you can use. Sometimes you want expensive money that's loaned out by a central bank at interest. So all the money we use, we got to pay back to the banker more than we borrowed. So our economy has to grow just to keep the bank in business. Sure. That's fine for Goldman Sachs economy, but are there any others and could they coexist? Can we have an economy of our little town? How it works? works, like we're going to share one lawnmower on our blocks. Exactly. Great. So there are a bunch of different things. So it's like capitalism's great among other things. Yeah. I, so there's a deeper conversation there, and I'm not trying to get off it. I'm trying to relate it to something else too. So I'm not copying out from that. But I remember, he said it way more eloquently than I can remember it. So like Sebastian Younger, when he wrote the book Tribe, really explored like how humanity began in a way in the sense that we existed in these mathematically smaller groups to wear systems. We're done with our groups or whatever. 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, and 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 where there were 100 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 340 million people, that's not how humans were evolved to technically 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. Right. 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 an arcosyndicalism. An arcosyndicalism. Right. Arcosyndicalism, but syndicated so the idea is you have these small communities like cabutses 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 communities, what we do and whatever. And that one over there, they make beds and that one over there, they do farming. And we all trade with each other. So you have a community of people, I mean, something I started saying to people when they're talking about alienation and all these big problems. And I'll say, you know, what if you start with think, what are the, do you know the first name of the 20 people who are closest to you when you're sleeping at night, the people who are physically, like when you're sleeping in this, this, this apartment, I know 10. You know, 10 of them, right? So 10, but because that's, that's your people, who's closest to your body when you're sleeping at night. They're the people who are protecting you, right? But they're here 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 one, 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, you know, whether you realize it or not. You're in proximity. And maybe you're not your only tribe, but that's kind of where it starts organismically. If you believe that there's like electromagnetic fields and our hearts and, you know, that you're breathing and come metabolizing with other people, they're your first unit of, of, but we have a one thought of this note, though now Douglas, because like right when we were on that break right there, I was texting someone in Hawaii, yeah, right? She's nowhere near here. But that's what we, but like into you're talking with, 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 Gaya's brain and Gaya's brain, Jesus Christ, I'm a Gaya hypothesis. It was this again around Club of Rome, you know, 1970s, 80s, a guy James, James Levellock. Yeah. Well, they just invited me. I only learned about them. Oh, you didn't know about them. I mean, I knew that they existed, but I just knew. They're mission, the initial report. I don't like that the Club of Rome is an in Rome. I'm very sketched out by that point. Yeah, I want to be. What does Rome have to do with them anyway? Well, they started in Rome. They did. Which is the great 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. I don't like it. No, are they? I don't think. You're supposed to notice here. I don't think it is. Klaus Schwab is the guy who wants to, he's in Switzerland, shit. Yeah, no, no, Klaus Schwab is a world bank and that kind of stuff or a world economic forum. No, that's dark. Okay. All right. That's a very different thing. Club of Rome are like environmentalist. This guy is like, is like, AOC on cocaine. I'm having fun with him. 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 you to know. You're going to shine the light on the dark. Yeah, but I'll shine the light. I'll shine the light. All right. Good. No, but they're not. No, they're like little policy wonk suite, 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. It's people, now here's the dark argument here. And I could see this being a scenario where people are in it and don't even know it, by the way. Unless it's two sides playing against the middle while acting like they're playing against each other because there's forces at work that use group think as a weapon to where they could be like, oh, Doug Rushkov. He's done research on this, this and that. He's a great guy. I'll never fucking know this because he just wants to do his research. He won't bite him to do this. So, who come over here and say this? And then this other group over here is like guy X thinks the opposite of Doug Rushkov. 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. I mean, I'm a bad target for that because I'm, I'm just like thinking and asking questions and explore. So, I'm not like, yeah, I take it as a positive sign that, that side, if you want to call it that, is into my message of like heart and humans and all. But interestingly enough, Steve Bannon was asking me to be on War Room a bunch of times. Right? He don't like me too much. I don't think he doesn't. But what was he asking you about War Room? He wanted me to be on War Room to talk about my book Team Human that I'm arguing that, you know, human. It was sort of against the technology, but she's against that too. You know, he's against, he doesn't like those guys. Yeah. He's like for true Maga against, he doesn't like, he didn't like Doge and those things because again, it was the AI billionaires running things. He was, you know, the populist. He's a guy I'm very sketched out by. I don't believe anything. And what's why I didn't want to go on it in the end because I think not just that, not just that he's probably smarter than me on some level. Oh, he's a genius. Yeah. 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 like my friend Henry Abbott, you know, he did some amazing research on this years ago and not got no credit for it at the time. But like, he was tracing out a lot of Bannon's life and like 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, you know, the club of Rome type. He was a CEO of the biosphere project, the biosphere, which was this they made the fake greenhouse earth. It was the most weird-ass environmental experiment. So he's doing that. He was like, he like owns like Seinfeld or something. Well, he, so what he did is he came and he did a financing round on Seinfeld. So now since then, like back when he did, like fucking 1991 or something, whatever it was, we could check it. He's paid a royalty on every episode. Right. It's fucking insane. Right. I mean, so he's done, he's an interesting, interesting cat. Yeah. But you're right. Steve Bannon served as a CEO of biosphere, too, in 1993 and '94, but brought in by billionaire Ed Bass to cut costs or restructure the failing ecological project in Oracle, Arizona, his tumultuous 17-month tenure involves sweeping management changes, aggressive lawsuits and significant alterations to the scientific commission. Bannon was hired as an investment banker and consultant to manage the facilities, floundering finances. He quickly ousted the original management of the project's founder, John Allen, fearing Bannon's management would jeopardize the crew's safety, two former biosphereians broken to the facility in April 1994 to expose the situation in terms of-- Let me tell you this. We want to throw coincidence. In April 1994, I was at Timothy Leary's house when the two people, the two people who broke into it came to Timothy Leary's house and talked to Timothy about this act and they, they [BLANK_AUDIO] did it also because they thought the people in the biosphere were going to run out of oxygen. And they went and they broke the actual glass of the biosphere to let oxygen in and undermine the experiment. 'Cause the whole idea was that biosphere was a closed environment that could we have plants and people live together and make oxygen. Like, it's almost like an experimental Mars dome or something, they just couldn't do it. People were just dying in there. And so they went and broke them. But I was at Timothy Leary's house that the night that they came that then they let, they worried his house in L.A. and then drove to the biosphere and did that like the next day. Were you in psychedelics or something at the time or just chilling? And they just walked in? Well, it wasn't on psychedelics. It's not like you go to Timothy Arias. It's not like everybody's just-- Why didn't they, you know, when it broke? Well, in Rome. Yeah, when it broke. Yeah, when it broke, you got back to Rome. Back to Rome. No, we were not. Okay. All right, so you remember this very clearly. Yeah, yeah, it came over. Yeah, but it was that so funny, April '94. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, and again, you look at a career like his and that's another guy where I go both sides against the middle. I remember there was an article there for the life of me. I cannot fucking find a swear to God. It's been pulled off the internet. But back when Benin was named the chairman of the campaign for Trump in summer 2016, when they fired Paul Manafort. So this is like maybe early August 2016. There was an article on him. And I can't remember if it came out right then or if they reprinted it from like a year before. And I want to say like the photographic memory saying it was in something like Bloomberg Business Week, but I'm not sure. And basically, the author of the article was given full access to Steve Benin, to just shadow him for like a couple days or whatever in Washington, D.C. 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 Benin has this big party with all these D.C. accolades and everything, the authors walking around with him. And Benin's given the tour of this place. And they go to some, I don't know, like the fireplace or something and they're looking at some pictures. I don't remember what they're looking at. But the guy turns to Ben and he goes, what do you believe? Like what, what do you, who is an amazing question? Like what, what is your political philosophy? And he goes, I'm a Leninist. And the author's like, wait, Lenin, like the Bolshevik, you're a conservative inflow. Like what the fuck, that doesn't make sense. It goes, no, 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. I want to burn it all down. And that's all he said. And the author was just like, well, that seems to me. I remember clocking that going, that's interesting. Now you get it. So that's why he would want a January 6th. That's why he'd be in the war room for that. Because it's just tear it down. And what would be, if you're not left or right, if you just tear it down, who's 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. And I'll tell you why. I think it's both. I make no distinction. Biden Harris is a passive destruction. Donald Trump has more aggressive destruction. Meaning like he'll tell you that he wants to do this and rip it down. Whereas Biden Harris will tell you there's no such thing as a gender and some fucking memo that they put out. Right. And I think both, but they're not tear, but they're, they're Biden and Harris are institutionalists, though. They're trying to prop up the system. Right. And they're dropping up systems. That destroy things, of course. But if you're going to tear it down, you're not going to go to the people who are building Biden and Harris are more like, but you don't think institutions have torn down society. Oh, there are. World Bank and all those things. Yeah. It's world bank was 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 aggregate there and do all that, right? It was the same, it's the same stuff. The only difference I would argue is that at least in government constitutions, there are ways of recalling things. There are ways for people to intervene, to vote in ones who are not going to do those things, whereas if you really do have a monarchy like musk or teal want, they want a monarchy, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm the president of Peter Teal Hay Club, but like, he wants a monarchy out of that one. Yeah, yeah. Can we pull that out of the teal likes monarchy? Yeah, yeah. Next thing. That was what Nick Land and who's the other one that they like? I'm Curtis Yarvin. That's what they're all about. See how that makes no sense though with, how do I want to say this, like quote unquote, libertarian conservative politics that Peter Teal claims to love, if that is the case that he's a monarchy. If you think we are in a might makes right universe. Might makes right. Whoever's the strongest wins. We're all just fighting all the time. We have these laws, but the laws aren't real anyway because the people who control the laws are just the strongest people with the biggest guns. So if that's what's happening anyway, then just have the most mightiest person be in charge and get over all this bullshit democracy voting, we're just going through the motions. Democracy is just there to convince people that they're living in something other than might makes right when they're not. And they would say the happiest, oh shit. I don't remember that at all, but goddamn, you're cooking. In his 2014 book zero to one, Peter Teal declared monarchy is the best form of government. I read that book twice. His idea is, he argued the capitalism and democracy is diverged, a shift he traced to the expansion of voting rights, his ideal society, wealth-based and male dominated. Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. And there you go, libertarian. He embodies at times to a cartoonish degree the contradictions of the libertarian movement. You're perfect. You see, you're good study there. You're just champion of entrepreneurial freedom. He also praises monopolies, right? Wow. So you're right. 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 of 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, like the Koch 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. Then why? So we've got to let those millions and billions die. Why does Musk argue that people need to have kids way more than. Well, he is at the forefront of that movement. And like, we do have a birth rate problem in America now, for sure. It depends if you've got to 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 gonna be AI's. How does an AI pay you? In crypto. In other words, think about 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. Yeah. You want there to be consumers. You want there to be people working? Because you want workers and you want consumers. And you want them buying and selling and the money going up to you, the profit going up to you. Why do you care if those consumers and producers are human or AI's? I think it's just so far in for me to even think about something that's not human-exchanging. In 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 gonna get those? It will earn money doing its AI tasks and it will spend that money buying processing power and memory and data center storage and all that from these companies. So they are your consumer at that point. And then they don't need to be people anymore. 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 a hundred of ours. You heard about they built this giant giant giant giant giant giant. How many square miles? Yeah, they're your square foot. Yeah, so that's a good point. They built this really big one. Okay, so the United States leads the global AI infrastructure race with roughly 4,000 to 5,400 total data centers compared to China, which has approximately 350 to 450 publicly tracked facilities. While the US 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, we're a 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 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 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 US. And so, I see where it's like you'd want to have an advantage, and I was raising this point earlier, that said, where like it could be such an example of the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where the people that you use, the devil you make the deal with to get that advantage, then fucking eats the whole population, you know, you have a penalty of running these fucking places, and then we're living in a surveillance 1984 state. That would be a total L. So, how do we, how do we try to advance, progress, do good for humanity, also like, get America in a good position without sacrificing everything that makes that purposeful in the first place. I mean, the easiest way would be even go here, but how do the citizens assembly is making decisions about things? I think people picked at random, not running, 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 a superior to hours. Why? Because they realize that hand in hand with AI development, they got to do renewable energy because of all the, you know, but they emit more smog than China does. Yeah, but that's why they've had, they've been working on it, but they're also the global leader. They're the global leader in solar, wind, and geothermal, and all these other kinds of energies, and we've put an intentional stop to it. You know, the other thing they're funny, you were talking for about crypto, and about how so much a crypto is bullshit, and I started to look at crypto as a way to an excuse to sell chips and energy. An excuse to sell chips and energy. So Bitcoin, basically the main thing that Bitcoin is, if you look at Bitcoin as a Martian anthropologist looking at Earth, you say, oh, so they're burning the planet to prove this money is has value. Crypto Bitcoin is, 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 like, this Bitcoin set doesn't seem real. And then we did NFTs, and we got this last burst, oh, let's burn more, burn more, our chips. Right, that was an error. It was, but we could burn, burn, burn, and then when NFTs died, what happened? AI. And what is AI? A new excuse, more Nvidia chips, more burning fuel, more build 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 water. Yeah. Now, all these guys we've been talking about today, not all of them, but you know, the way that you recently came up on the radar again was because I had played that video on one of our weekend episodes with deep and I where you were talking this back in 2020 pre. It was, I believe, right before the pandemic, you did this interview where you very matter, effectively explaining about how you had been advising these billionaires on how to deal with the end of the world. And you know, building bunkers and hilariously explaining like, how to be nice to your security guard so that they won't fucking kill you when you know money doesn't. I mean, it was hysterical and also very sad to watch, but I appreciated you like totally outing this kind of thing right here. And then ironically, you had been on my friend, Danny Jones show, and so I was like going to hit up Danny like, oh, can you connect me with with dog rush off, but then you texted me, let's do it. So like, great, but this whole concept of you long before the pandemic even happened and people were thinking in certain ways like that. Obviously, before the complete rise of AI and everything, you are somehow thrust into a situation where you're meeting with very wealthy people, very powerful people who are asking you existential questions. Seemingly about the future of humanity, not with the idea that like, hey, maybe this could happen, but more with the idea that, yeah, this is going to happen. So how do we deal with that? First of all, can you just take me there and tell me how you even got into this conversation or what happened. I mean, yeah, like I said, I used to get to do talks for like corporation sometimes or rich people, whatever. And this was a turn out, it was a hedge fund that invited there 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 come, you know, you do talk. So they come out. I've never done talk. Oh, they come with a guy comes with a microphone. Usually they clip it on. Then you go out. And I said, they brought these five guys in. They sat around this table. Five guys. This is your talk. This is it. And I'm like, okay, I'm ready. So no, no, you don't have to talk. And they start asking me all these questions, like the really binary tech bro questions. What's the lighting like? Is it dark like? No, it's a green room. It's in a resort. It's like a. It's normal. They're serving a refreshment. Right. It's daytime. Because the one in the ass in the ass and shit. No, no, no, no, it was before before COVID or anything. It was a nice resort. I had a private hot tub in my unit. It was like a bungalow. I like bungalow. And they go around. They had little golf carts taking you around. I mean, it was nice. Like the electric golf cart. Yeah. It was a whole thing. Environment friendly. Very cool. So, but they come in there asking me like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Okay. Like where to place their bets. You know, alternate or augmented reality or virtual reality. Oh, I remember that. That was shit. Yeah, that are you meant. And then finally it was like Alaska or New Zealand. I'm like, what? 2018. So, 2018 this happened. Like what? It's like, we're here. What's the better place? Assuming climate change happened to. Where's the better place to put our bunker? Alaska or New Zealand? So, were they only asking you in the context of climate change? No. And I was like, with that was for that. And there was like, where do we put our bunker for the event? The event. That's what they called it. The event. What do they think it was? It was climate catastrophe, pandemic, economic unrest, nuclear war, mass migration, you know, whatever it is. That makes life as we know it, unlivable on forces them to go to a special place. And write it out or live it forever. And so, I then got. And then I did get into my intellectual dominatrix mode. And then I was like, oh, so you're going to have a bunker? That's going to somehow. And one of them showed me these plants he had of this underground thing that all these shipping containers all together, and he had a heated pool in there. That's one of those first things I would think about. Yeah, in his thing. And I'm like, dude, you know, there's a guy I know in my neighborhood who's got a heated pool in all summer. There's always a little van in front of his house with the guy with the spare parts and the fixing this. It's like a heated pool is a hard thing to maintain. 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 small skin book and he's like, "Parch for the heat." Like, he hadn't fucking thought of this. It's like, these are like walking dead-level scenarios. When they're sending a billion ends and they're sending their best. God damn it. So then, I'm like, okay, then they're. Like, you get water table. Your water's contaminated from the nuclear fault. How long is it going to last? You're going to have filters. Oh, reverse osmosis is going to do the fucking benzene and the radiation and whatever. And then, until they're like, oh no, we've got this. We've got scientists on that and this and reverse this and the top water and the landfill and the bus. We work that out. I'm like, okay, so who's going to protect your bunker from the rest of us? You know, from all of us. The ones who are still alive. Yeah. He's got, oh, cement gate things. And then the guy's like, oh, you know, I've got Navy Seals on the fuck on it. They've got. Kelly Coverage is going to come. They're going to pick us up and bring us out of that. And I'm like, oh, is you got Navy Seals? How are you going to pay your Navy Seals after your Bitcoin is worthless? Why are they in the state? Money don't matter. Exactly. And they're like, oh. Thank you guys for checking out this clip. if you haven't already. subscribe. Please subscribe and hit the like button on this video. It is a huge huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clip, full podcast episode, that link is in the description below or right here. And finally, you can follow me on Instagram and X by using the links in my description below.