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

This holiday, all plans, even unlimited, are just $15 a month. A holiday deal this good obviously deserves an enormously expensive holiday song, like All I Want. Right. Okay, we can't afford that. You know what? Forget the music budget. We're going to stick with whatever's in the public domain. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes. May slow when network is busy. See terms. 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. We. I don't know 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. You don't have to see it. Especially. It's over there. It's over there. I don't got to 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? Yeah. These people are just getting fucked. No water. Right. No water. No casino. And Doug, we can go to that now because it's obviously a soup du jour. Not casinos, but 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 may be able to think for itself and not 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. I'm cool 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, 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. And we ended up 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. 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. Right. And what's it? What's it optimized for? It's optimized for that. And to say that that is totalitarian to not have kids watching God knows what at night. At night is not totalitarianism. That's 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 got writing now and the ancient Greeks, when they got writing, Aristotle was going, oh, no, people are going to lose their memories. 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, your 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. We're the. I don't care. 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? Okay. 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 cobalt to make the thing. Yep. The soul of the thing is corrupted from the outset. Yeah. So. The soul of the thing. Yeah. If you can send a guy, I know it sounds religious or something, but I believe if you, I mean, and this, you know, this is where the academics actually help, right? My professor thing. I'm a professor at CUNY. All right. There was this guy, Albert Camus. Albert Camus? Right. He was a, see, see. A Syrian philosopher. Yeah. But he wrote in French. Yeah. Do you see? The theater guy. The theater guy knows. Virtual. 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. Well, at least directors and writers. You have to read everything. But this guy Camus, so he was friends with the French existentialists, like friends with Sartre and all the Marxists and all that. And they were all happy about communism. Oh, it's great. Yay. And then the communists started to make gulags and prison camps and all that. Yeah. 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 stuff- 30 million gotta die. Stuff that happens, right? Yeah. 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. This doesn't make sense. He's like, if you're not doing this in the moment- 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 gonna have AI. Who gets to decide that. No, no. Yeah. You will. And that's what we're gonna have is in the moment itself, in the encounter with the other people in that moment. And part of faith, and this is 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, AI, I think AI is cool. I think AI is cool. It's a cool thing. It could be cool. It's a cool thing. Yeah. But if you sacrifice the environment, or if you don't believe in the environment, children, if you don't believe in the children, water, or if you don't believe in water, a town's authority over its own land, there's something, you don't. There's a way to deploy this. Ooh, deploy it. Yeah. Well, it's military. Military love that. There's a way to deploy. Yeah. That sends the shivers up to the spine. We can decamp and deploy in ways that deploy. Yeah, that sends the shivers up to the spine. Yeah. We can decamp and deploy in ways that don't necessarily hurt people. All right. So you talk. 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 to also be sociopaths. We can talk about Stan Altman in a little bit, but like, you seen the show The Last of Us? You ever watched that? Yeah. I didn't like that they made the mushrooms the bad guys, but other than that, it's very cool. Other than that. But spoiler alert out there. You can watch 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 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 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. There's not. That feels like a cop out. No, no. There actually is not. Okay. Again, does reality. You can set something up, like a prisoner's dilemma situation, say, "Okay, you're in a 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 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 going to 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'm doing what the heart's saying in that moment we know pedro pascal has a an what buber would call an i thou relationship with that girl yeah 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 one 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 that's i would have been a little bit more i mean uh 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 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 him right you're trying to piece him to death across that hospital and the first security guard who might be a russian guy or something says kill me go 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 mean someone was 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 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 ready ready to 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 really concerned when you hear what's his name mo god dot i think def 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 documentary 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 it's only like 80 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 right do that yeah well the way he would put it as 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 and 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 the night and we'll get there through the night and we'll get 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 10 000 years there's ways off but i think the ways off are not going to involve like solid rocket fuel and metal canisters in 10 000 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 10 000 years like 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 weird i could tell you we're friends with terrence 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 100 000 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 yeah adjacent reality right so it's like those are the that's if you're going to you want to travel first class you know it feels like it's 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 we're 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'd 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 magnetism and gravity and they could never and when his things fell they couldn't get him back up they didn't know how to do it even with cranes and all that shit there's just i feel like the the i'll see deep's looking for that right now deep did pull up what you were talking about though a second ago douglas just so people can go 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 the chip and the multiverse hypothesis the breakthrough google's quantum ai team introduced willow a 105 qubit processor capable of completing a quantum 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 finding 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 i remind me to check just make sure he's cool with me saying his name d 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. Banks who didn't pretend it was something better so I'm like wearing these shitty shoes that are getting wet i'm freezing but marcello'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 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 crypto market was like starting to crash 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 this holiday all plans even unlimited are just 15 a month a holiday deal this good obviously deserves an enormously expensive you right okay we can afford that you don't forget the music budget we're gonna stick with whatever's in the public domain give it a try at mintmobile.com switch upfront payment of 45 for three months 90 for six months or 180 for 12 month plan required 15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra new customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy see terms hi there i am fully charged and here to tell you toy story 5 is now on disney plus what do you mean it's been too long cowboy woody buzz and jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech what holy butterscotch you said it jesse so save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home and the best part it's perfect for the whole family power up your movie night and watch disney and pixar's toy story 5 now streaming on disney plus rated pg the quantum goes way beyond it and he was explaining i don't remember six eight forty eight 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 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'm 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 theorist and he says that capitalism itself is a strange attractor from the future drawing us toward it that capitalism is like this living thing and that it's inevitable that we're 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 a 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 think it's more like 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 any mechanics 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 who 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 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 sure someone has i'm liking like pull-ups and dips and push-ups 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 ah 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 do them really slow oh yeah 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 right you know and doing doing like less weight or these kind of these 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 beef 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 it's a combination of a lot of things depending on how you do your workout like if you're working in sets then it can be a little closer to dumbbells and stuff like that but it's like functional training 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 punching a bag oh yeah yeah yes i i love boxing but like my movement on the bag since going back to kettlebells has improved dramatically i'd say it's good stuff yeah definitely keep 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 you're like oh there it is oh i get it yeah 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 yeah but back to what we were saying but before the break so we're talking about some so yeah alternate universe so these other guys you're saying like the teals of the world 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 very tight club and so these guys who are looking at it like they can transcend i want to come back to that in a minute but like you know you're saying it's at the expense of everyone else and they just don't care so you were raising the point and this is interesting because i was having a conversation 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 could 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 winner 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 last five or six decades it's been the best system ever and it doesn't i always say it doesn't mean it's perfect that also doesn't mean you throw the whole thing out so i was talking with ty about like yeah i don't really see a good need for someone to be a trillionaire but at the same time to require someone to not be a trillionaire would require a governing body to come in and determine that when you get to a certain level of wealth you're not allowed to have more which means they could then use the slippery slope and set that objectively right anywhere like in the like in the reagan era in the reagan era anything you made over like a million dollars was taxed like 80 percent oh yeah yeah yeah and eisenhower was like 90 or something 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 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 to the country to the nation 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 then 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 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 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 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 sure that's fine for the goldman sachs economy but are there any others and could they coexist can we have a an economy of our little town how it 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 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 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 where systems or whatever yeah yeah i 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 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 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 what that's where this idea of something called um anarcho-syndicalism anarcho-syndical 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 you have these small communities that do stuff together and you have these small communities 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 to 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 that like when you're sleeping in this in this in this apartment i know 10 you know 10 of them right so 10 because that's that's your people who's closest to your body when you're sleeping at night that's interesting they're the people who are protecting you right but they're 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 one but those are you know then we're all sleeping together and yeah 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 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 a community of people who are closest to you when you're sleeping at night they're the people like electromagnetic fields and our hearts and you know that you're breathing and co-metabolizing with other people they're your 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 in that's what you're talking with yeah but that was the whole rave things like oh my god we're creating yeah a new work of human beings across the planet we're going to be gaia's brain and gaia's brain jesus christ remember the gaia hypothesis it was this again around club of rome you know 1970s 80s a guy james 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 their initial 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 you're supposed to notice here i don't think it is klaus schwab is the guy who wants to that's he's in switzerland shit yeah no no klaus schwab is world bank and that kind of stuff or or world economic forum no that's dark okay all right that's a very different thing club of rome are like environmentalists this guy is like is like is like aoc on cocaine i'm having fun 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 i'd want to know you're gonna shine the light yeah but i'll shine the light i will shine the light all right good no but they're not no they're like little policy wonks sweet yeah like educators really thinking how do we promote but it's interesting and i get it that people who are concerned about the the well-being of the planet and its people are the enemies of those who want us to disregard the planet 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 groupthink as a weapon to where they could be like oh 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 he's he believes in actually all the bullshit he said we'll pull him in here they'll fucking fight about it write a bunch of papers and everything and then everyone will fight about it in the right that sometimes yeah you know i mean i'm i'm a bad target for that because i'm i'm i'm just like think and ask questions and explore so i'm not like yeah i'm i'm i take it as a positive sign that that side if you want to call it that um is into my message of like heart and humans and all but interestingly enough um 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 you know human it was sort of against the technocracy okay but she's against that too you know he's against he doesn't like those guys yeah he's like for true naga against he doesn't like he didn't like doge and and those things because again it was the the ai billionaires running things he was you know the populist he's a guy i'm very sketched out by i don't believe anything he said and that's why i didn't want to go on it in the end because i think um not just that not just that he's probably smarter than me on some level oh he's a genius yeah don't under you know what i mean that i felt like i probably would end up getting just used yeah no i i think that's a good thought man because he has been everywhere all at once for the last four and a half decades and one place two place three place four okay five places six places seven places eight industries nine at some point that's not a coincidence and i can't sit here and say for sure this thing or that thing but like my friend henry abbott you know he he did some amazing research on this years ago and not got no credit for it at the time but like he was tracing out a lot of bannon's life and like the people he could move in the banks and the finance and this and that he's like this is a spy kind of no he's 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 this fake greenhouse earth it was the most weird ass environmental experiment so he's doing that he was like he like owns like seinfeld or something well he so what he did is he came and he did a financing round on seinfeld so now since then like back when he did it in like fucking 1991 or something whatever it was we can check it he's paid a royalty on every episode right it's fucking insane right i mean so he's done he's interesting interesting cat but um you're right steve bannon served as the ceo 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 you 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 crew's safety two former biospherians broke into the facility in april 1994 to expose the situation let me tell you this we want 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 to talk 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 um glass of the biosphere to let oxygen in and undermine this holiday all plans even unlimited are just 15 a month a holiday deal this good obviously deserves an enormously expensive holiday song like all i want right okay we can afford that you don't forget the music budget we're going to stick with whatever's in the public domain give it a try at mintmobile.com switch upfront payment of 45 for three months 90 for six months or 180 or 12 month plan required 15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra new customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy see terms hi there i am fully charged and here to tell you toy story 5 is now on disney plus it's been too long cowboy woody buzz and jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech what holy butterscotch you said it jesse so save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home and the best part it's perfect for the whole family power up your movie night and watch disney and pixar's toy story 5 now streaming on disney plus rated pg 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 there 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 then drove to the biosphere and did that like the next day or were you in psychedelics or something at the time or just chilling and they just walked in well it wasn't on psychedelics it's not like you go to timothy leary's house not like everybody's just why didn't they you know well in milbrook yeah well in rome it's not like you go to timothy leary's house it's not like everybody's just well in rome it's not like everybody's just why didn't they you know well 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 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 photographic memory saying it was in something like bloomberg business week but i'm not sure and basically the author of the article was given full access to steve bannon right to just shadow him for like a couple days or whatever in washington dc where he's got the townhouse where i guess now he does all these years later the war room and stuff at the time he's the head of bright part and so bannon has this big party with all these you know dc acolytes and everything the author's walking around with them and bannon's giving them a 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's like i don't know i don't he goes i'm a leninist and the author's like wait wait like like lenin like the bolshevik you 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 a january 6 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 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 but they're not tear their 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 things and you're not going to go to the people who are building things and you're not going to biden and harris are more like um but you don't think institutions have torn down society in oh they're like 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 agra there and do all that right it was the same thing same uh it's the same stuff um 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 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 haven't heard that one yeah yeah look can we pull that up teal likes monarchy yeah yeah that's what they 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 yeah 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 ideals 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 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 agree with all of it but i'm like whoa the way you can see why he's 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 extremists 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 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 wrote 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 if think about this way you're a billionaire sitting in your house you don't interact with people except your servants and your and your family right so 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 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 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 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 center 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 how many square miles yeah they're a square foot yeah so that's a yeah 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 hub 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 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 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 dis a lot of it was discussing kaifu lee's 2018 book i believe it was called ai superpowers did you ever read this so kaifu 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 eats the whole population you know you have power you're running these places and then we're living in a surveillance 1984 state that that would be a total l right so how do we how do we try to advance progress do good for humanity also like get america in a good position without sacrificing everything that makes that purposeful in the first place i mean the easiest way would be it's funny even go here but um citizens assemblies 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 a agency over their own regions what what's allowed to happen there you know it's interesting china in china's ai policy i would think is i i think is superior to ours why um because they realize that hand in hand with ai development they got to do renewable energy because of all the you know but they they emit more smog that than like china does yeah but that's why they've had they've been working on it though but they're also you know we're the global leader they're they're the global leader in solar wind and geothermal and all these other kinds of uh of energies and we've put an intentional stop to it you know the other thing they're funny you were talking before about crypto and about how so much of crypto was 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 right crypto bitcoin is is we spend energy we we burn fuel in order to value this thing and we buy chips in order to mine more of it so the main economic activity of bitcoin was nvidia chips and energy and then we like people like oh this bitcoins that doesn't seem real then we did nfts and we got this last burst oh let's burn more burn more all right 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 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 uh water yeah now all these guys we've been talking about today well not all of them but you know the 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 with 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 were very matter-of-factly 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 guards that they won't kill you when you know money doesn't mean 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 with with doug rushkoff but then you texted me 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 and tell me how you even got into this conversation or what happened i mean yeah like i said i used to get to do talks for like corporations sometimes or rich people whatever and this was a um turned out it was a hedge fund that invited uh their 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 and um 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 talks you know they come out i've never done it 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 he said no no you don't have to talk and they start talking 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 uh uh it's normal they're serving refreshments right it's daytime it's the one in the afternoon and shit no no no no it was before covet or anything it was a nice resort i had a private um hot tub in my unit it was like a i like bungalows and they go around they had little golf carts taking you around i mean it was this is nice like the electric golf carts yeah it was a whole thing very cool um um so but they come in they're asking me like bitcoin or ethereum okay like where to place their bets you know alternate re or augmented reality or virtual reality oh i remember that was huge that argument and then finally it was like alaska or new zealand and you're like what 2018. this is 2018 this happened like what it's like we're here we're 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 asking you in the context of climate change no and i was like but 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 did they think it was climate catastrophe uh 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 why that's the first thing i would think about yeah in his thing he had a heated pool in there and he had a heated pool in there and he had a heated pool in his thing he had a heated pool in there and he had a heated pool in there and he had a heated that's the first thing i would think about yeah in his thing he had a heated pool in there 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 gonna get the spare parts for your heated pool after the apocalypse and he's like opens this moleskin book and he's like porch for the heat like he hadn't fucking thought of this it's like these are like walking dead level scenario when they're sending 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 benzene and the radiation and whatever and then so they're like oh no we've got this we got scientists on that and this and reverse this and the top water in the landfill 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 money don't matter right exactly and they're like oh uh uh then there's thank you guys for checking out this clip if you haven't already subscribed 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's 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 this holiday all plans even unlimited are just 15 a month a holiday deal this good obviously deserves an enormously expensive holiday song like all i want right okay we can't afford that you don't forget the music budget we're gonna stick with whatever's in the public domain give it a try at mintmobile.com switch upfront payment of 45 for three months 90 for six months or 180 for 12 month plan required 15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra new customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy see terms hi there i am fully charged and here to tell you toy story 5 is now on disney plus it's been too long cowboy what jesse buzz and jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech what holy butterscotch you said it jesse so save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home and the best part it's perfect for the whole family power up your movie night and watch disney and pixar's toy story 5 now streaming on disney plus rated pg