<iframe title="Douglas Rushkoff:" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/q7grRir4KPQ?feature=oembed" height="113" width="200" allowfullscreen="" allow="fullscreen" style="aspect-ratio: 1.76991 / 1; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe> ```timestamp-url https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7grRir4KPQ ``` ```timestamp 04:40 ``` When businesses reach the limit of how to make money from their stock, they go "meta", they make a derivative of the stock. The current business sensibility is to go meta, to rise above, to get an overview of everything, to create symbol systems - the narrative template originating with the Postmodernists. Bertolt Brecht used this with his plays. The problem now is that it is being used to dehumanise people and make them cogs. we reach the limits of those narratives and particularly business reach the 4:33 limits of those narratives and what businesses do when they reach the limit of the ability 4:39 to get money out of something if they can't move on is they kind of go meta 4:46 on what they have so if you've reached the limit of your stock to make money 4:51 you get a derivative on the stock you kind of go meta one level of abstraction 4:57 above the thing and you make money off the financialization it's like what the web two people were 5:03 talking about when they said don't have a web business create a platform that aggregates everyone else's web business 5:10 and that's the digital sensibility that we're in now which is kind of going meta 5:16 on everything rising above and seeing the whole system at play 5:22 and it's this in some ways a useful thing it's like having this map of the territory that you can get above it and 5:28 see it or you have a symbol system to represent reality it's what post-modernists really were great at 5:34 when they talked about oh there's the thing and then there's this word we use to represent the thing and then that 5:40 makes a symbol and then the symbols can interact and now we're working on the level of symbols but then you could have 5:45 meta symbols over that so the kind of the new narrative template that people are trying to use when the thing that 5:53 they're doing runs out of blood when we can't suck any more out of it like 5:58 facebook what does zuckerberg do i'm gonna go start meta not facebook but meta this is one 6:06 level above it's one one step out and i think it's useful it's fun it's what 6:12 bertal brecht did with his plays we're not gonna just have narratives we're gonna be watching the play we are 6:17 alienated from the place so we could see it from a distance and be rational and make better choices not be sucked into 6:23 the emotionality of it so it's that but it's not really working because right now this 6:30 sort of meta style of narrative is very dehumanizing it's giving people the 6:35 opportunity to see other human beings as kind of cogs or as this problem oh then 6:41 how do we get people to do this and how do we get people to do that people who are using that kind of language have 6:47 usually are people who've gone meta on the world and want to kind of operate it more like a sysop of reality 6:56 so what i'm trying to do is to engender another set 7:02 of narratives that don't have to do with the first set which is all about 7:07 winning and getting to the end and having an end game and being the master or these newer ones which are really the 7:14 same thing but winning means going meta means going to mars or getting above 7:20 everybody else or uploading your psyche or being a meta wise ruler over things 7:27 but rather move into the moment to see everything that you're doing has an 7:32 immediate impact on everybody around you to become a kind of a presentist who's 7:38 less concerned with cause and effect and a little bit more 7:44 concerned with what are we doing for its own sake you know and it's sort of a a different narrative posture 7:50 i have like 10 responses to your opening statement there my first observation is 7:57 that living in the moment in the now is kind of the antidote to the meta framing and 8:05 i see that but in a way your book is critiquing the tech elite and the rationalists 8:14 what you just said there is almost critiquing my work and my efforts in a way because 8:20 what i've been trying to do and i don't use the word meta i'm trying to create a 8:26 systemic overview of what humans face how energy anthropology neuroscience money 8:33 energy debt the environment climate social and individual human behavior all 8:38 points to what i refer to as a great simplification so am i scientifically 8:45 also going meta and how would that fit into your critique first question it's fine to be able to see things from above 8:51 but you don't live there then you know your solution set may not be executed from there what you 8:58 see is oh i've looked at all these systems the way they're all interacting we're going to have to friggin simplify 9:05 the other approach that someone might go if they go above it all and see it all from there is think oh 9:11 we're playing a god game like civilization or simcity so i think the 9:16 solution here is going to be to erect some giant poles on the north pole that 9:22 somehow spit sulfuric particles into the atmosphere which will then 9:28 through the fractal of atmospheric interaction change the i mean giant 9:33 geothermal blah blah or i've seen the way it is so now i need to convince humanity to take this drug or follow 9:42 this principle or go on this social network or i'm going to build a network that binds together all of the social 9:49 networks what you've done is basically created scientific intellectual 9:56 proof you found the evidence through systems of what i'm saying in other 10:02 words you're not going to live in a system or as a system you're going to live in a system and the great 10:08 simplification would ultimately mean meet your neighbors share things chop wood make love enjoy a 10:17 sandwich with joe every moment that you spend engaged in real time making eye 10:22 contact with another person is a moment that you're not contributing to you know climate change and environmental 10:29 destruction and domination and exploitation okay so two comments to that 10:34 well three one i totally agree with what you just said number two is 10:40 using the medium of podcasting and the internet 10:45 i am actually reducing my own ability to live in the moment because my potato patch is 10:51 completely consumed by colorado potato beetles and weeds this year because as 10:57 my girlfriend says i spend too much time worrying about the future and not enough time doing the chores around the farm 11:03 and that's true my third point to what you just said is can a narrative of having a sandwich 11:11 with joe and making love with your partner and chopping wood and walking in nature 11:18 can a narrative of a simpler life compete with the tick tock 11:24 hijacking of our brain that is accelerating by any month so let me pose 11:30 that to you well it's better and more fun and it's better i don't know that it's more fun oh i think it is 11:37 i think it is i mean the entertainments available on our devices 11:44 are they're kind of like the television set in the common room of a prison or an 11:51 insane asylum i'd rather watch repeats of the golden girls then sit in my cinderblock cell 11:58 just like i'd rather you know to move or go on twitter than sit alone in my room 12:03 worrying about monkey pox you know they're compelling in their way you know i even what makes these technologies 12:11 addictive when they are as we all know from neuroscience is not that they satisfy 12:16 any need it's that they don't satisfy the need you get addicted to things that don't actually fill that void so if 12:24 people can have the alternative then i think they'll have a good time but the alternative is really hard in a world 12:31 where we are so afraid of each other or we look at other people as as marks to 12:37 manipulate and where the object of the game of life for so many young people now seems to be 12:43 to get more followers on a platform and become famous rather than engage 12:48 meaningfully with other humans i i still have two at least two follow-up questions i'll even precede my two 12:55 comments with this question you were known as being a a rave expert and aficionado 20 some 13:02 years ago were you this articulate and use this many colorful adjectives before 13:07 your rave years or have you always been this way like because you have like nine points in your paragraphs that i have to 13:13 follow up on i've always been this way i'm something of a lateral thinker so i 13:19 make connections between things horizontally you know and that's part of being 13:24 non-narrative non-beginning middle end and for me it's always been so reassuring to see the patterns and see 13:32 the way things are so self-similar across different things so i keep doing that i guess as a way of saying see 13:40 it's almost calming to people to see oh right that's just the way it is it's that way at the gym and the restaurant 13:46 and the bedroom and the stock market so ah i can rest it's another way i it's 13:52 it's something like your systems theory except done more from my experience on the ground seeing the things and i don't 14:00 have the actual vision to see how it's all connected and all that which is okay 14:05 it's sort of an experiential presented anthropology that i'm doing 14:11 and i find it reassuring to me and to other people because then they're like oh you mean there's nothing i have to do 14:17 no there's nowhere to go there's nothing to do and look at all these guys all the 14:22 wealthy guys everything for them is about an exit strategy right they need a friggin exits right they're storing 14:29 businesses with exit strategies because they've got to run their their relationships have exit strategies and 14:35 prenuptial agreements everything's got an exit strategy and when you're living and building with exit strategies in 14:42 mind you end up creating a world that requires an exit strategy which is kind 14:47 of where we're at today wait a minute there's nowhere to go there's nowhere to 14:52 go you know i was raised by well-meaning wonderful kind of immigrant american 14:58 parents who lived in a really bad neighborhood growing up and the object of the game for them and and i do not 15:04 blame them i'm not criticizing them you live in a bad neighborhood what do you do make enough money to get out of the 15:10 bad neighborhood and get somewhere better that's was good that was i get it it's beautiful but 15:17 now i look at it and go wait a minute the whole world is becoming a bad neighborhood so you can't earn enough 15:23 money to get out of this neighborhood it's like no we're finally at the place don't move you can't move you we gotta 15:29 actually make the neighborhood a place that's that's livable so kind of what you're saying is that to 15:36 incorporate my world view a little bit my view comes from your world view your work 15:43 really scared and then changed me your work i before your work i still 15:51 have believed that if we just transition fast enough faster to green good 15:59 solar electric something then it'll all be okay and we're just going too slow and your work 16:05 to help me see oh wait a minute if we go really fast we're going to have to dig so much [ __ ] out of the ground we're all 16:11 going to die we're going to you can't get that much molybdenum out of this planet to transition to whatever 16:18 it is in those and i was like that was a relief in a way because it was like the last gasp of techno solutionism 16:25 was robbed from me and i could finally surrender to now we just have to 16:32 in the best of ways we get to make do this is it we're here so stop using so 16:38 much friggin energy it's just that easy so you were already in the mind space that 16:45 technology from a demand human behavior standpoint isn't going to solve things 16:51 or improve our lives but my work made you realize that even from a supply 16:57 side it wouldn't be able to do that so you've merged the two yeah so 17:03 the energy surplus that we are drawing down our fossil 17:10 mineral and energy bank account 10 million times faster than it was sequestered 17:15 has enabled this economic pulse of riches basically 17:21 for our culture and what you're saying is that those riches created this accordion 17:29 of hierarchy and incentive and ultimately a growth-based economic 17:35 system that became transactional and became 17:40 win versus lose as opposed to live in the moment and experience yeah 17:46 and this stuff this acceleration of riches and extractive riches 17:53 is not genuinely human demand for those things it's market demand people don't need 18:00 these more energy expensive things we don't it doesn't it doesn't my dad 18:07 had one transistor radio that he bought when he was when he went to the army that he gave me when i joined the boy 18:13 scouts that i still have it works it's fine it's fine he took care of it it was 18:19 expensive i guess it was fine so having all these upgrades and all these things it doesn't actually make things 18:26 better it makes it feeds the markets need we've become so many hundreds of 18:32 millions of hungry ghosts where we expect technology and monetary 18:37 markers to satisfy our demand but it's it's a treadmill 18:43 as evidenced in my own life i used to have a house in north carolina and i had one in ohio and now i live in wisconsin 18:50 and i have a a storage shed that i pay 125 dollars a month it's 10 feet by 20 18:56 feet packed solid with stuff from my old house 19:01 i haven't opened it in seven years all this stuff so that's what like eight 19:08 grand i've paid to store stuff that gave me dopamine when i purchased it has some economic value so i haven't 19:16 discarded it but it's a freaking trap that we the wanting is stronger than the 19:22 having in our culture and so we need to buy more to get our 19:28 short-term fixes part of that is because of the economic system and the momentum part of it is 19:33 because of marketing and advertising and part of it is because of our social natures that we look around and other 19:39 people are doing the same thing so we think it's normal yeah but i don't blame the people as much as the companies so 19:47 if you buy like an epson printer epson printers have software in them that 19:53 brick them after a certain number of pages they justify it they say oh where there's a sponge in the computer that 19:59 will eventually get saturated and then it might leak on your thing so the people at epson want you to get a new 20:06 printer and are happy for you to throw this one in the landfill because they make more money so i would argue i would 20:12 take it a step further and i don't blame the corporations i blame the system that was evolved that incentivizes them to do 20:19 behaviors like that right right because he the guy right the the guy epson who comes up with that idea for them to make 20:26 more money is listening to the shareholders the shareholders are listening to the vcs the vcs are listening to the banks and again we're 20:33 back to an economic operating system that was invented by 13th century monarchs that's an interest-based central 20:39 currency that makes money by lending it out and getting it back at interest that's why we have to grow our economy 20:46 and all these tech heads who think they understand operating systems and think they're going to disrupt this or disrupt 20:52 that the one thing they won't disrupt is venture capital you know they mark andreessen they unless all of them they 20:58 become venture capitalists rather than undermining or disrupting you know 21:05 daddy's real plan for for people so i assume that you don't think that we 21:13 can program our technology to solve the problems that tech has created no but i think we 21:19 can build technology with a very different premise in mind i think right now we're 21:25 building technology from the perspective of how can i get people to 21:32 look more buy more click more whatever right so we build technologies that act on people and i think we could think 21:39 about well what if we build technologies that allow people to act that you know i know it's it's 21:46 heresy but technologies that are like tools that people could use to accomplish things they want to do 21:53 or get done that would just be interesting could you just give an example of that even if it's hypothetical well like a shovel right it 22:01 helps people dig holes a telephone helps a person talk to 22:07 another person far away a television lets someone see something 22:13 that's happening somewhere else so these are tools even you know the automobile 22:19 to some extent was to help somebody get from one place to another and that's 22:25 fine but when we reshape the american landscape 22:32 around the needs of the automobile company you know when we decide oh in 22:37 order to sell more cars which is going to be good for america because they'll hire more employees let's 22:43 move let's zone things so that people live at least car distance away from the 22:49 place they work that'll require them to buy cars that'll be good for gm stockholders it'll be good for gm 22:56 employees and good for america you know and as long as you don't worry about any limits on our physical reality you can 23:04 keep going that way you know forever we didn't have to worry about limits for the longest time 23:11 but now i think they're they're upon us and 23:16 i don't know that you saw this douglas but french president macron yesterday spoke the quiet part out loud 23:24 he said that the era of abundance is ending and 23:29 i was kind of shocked because i didn't think to hear words like that from 23:35 you know a leader of one of the g7 nations but europe is really in a pickle right 23:41 now i mean energy prices are 15 to 20 times what they were 23:47 18 months ago natural gas is 90 23:52 an mcf whereas in the united states it's seven right and it's not the thing is it's not genuine abundance right there's 24:01 all sorts of abundance that we get if we stop understanding the burning of stuff 24:07 as abundance right well the burning of stuff gives well in my video which you've seen 24:16 i have a sentence that we're turning billions of barrels of ancient sunlight into microliters of dopamine 24:22 so it gives us fleeting experiences but it's not real abundance because it's 24:28 once it's gone it's gone and what remains is the 24:33 more acidified oceans and depleted ecosystems for other species and the energy can't be burned again for 24:41 other generations or maybe some really important stuff that we might want to use it for so it's it's the era of waste 24:48 is over i mean we end up with something more abundant you know we get more 24:54 abundance of spirit abundance of joy abundance of connection all those other 24:59 abundances that we've surrendered to really the abundance of the market as 25:05 executed through the extraction of fossil fuels from the planet well if you look at the amount of gdp per capita in 25:13 the united states over the last 70 years it's this 45 degree angle pretty much straight line up if you look at the 25:20 percentage of americans that are happy or very happy it's flat line to slightly 25:25 declining so right there it's evidence that material abundance does not equal 25:32 spiritual psychological physical abundance and it's like we're we're in this 25:38 treadmill this rat race that we're being pulled forward by the we've outsourced our decision 25:44 making to the financial system and i would argue and i do argue that billionaires and 25:53 politicians are enthralled to this dynamic and this dynamic is kind of like 25:58 we're fueling a runaway train until we run out of fuel and then it's going to hit a wall and we 26:04 have to respond and prepare and i don't think there's a personally i 26:10 that's kind of what you said earlier we're gonna have to roll our sleeves up and and do things in 26:16 the now and i don't think there are any solutions to this dynamic i think there are a million responses 26:23 depending on who you are what you care about where you live what you're doing what your vocation is right and the more of us who 26:30 respond appropriately the less disastrous and calamitous the 26:36 hitting the wall is going to be and that's where your work and mine um intertwine 26:42 and so given your lifelong research on 26:48 technology and and media how is it possible for a human 26:54 to make the phase shift in their mind and in their behaviors that they realize that these tick tock 27:01 and these youtube algorithms that are sucking them into being a hungry ghost with their 27:08 online activities and maybe their consumption activities in real life how does it happen that a human develops 27:16 the discipline and maturity and control to move beyond that towards spirituality 27:23 well-being psychological maturity and and is able to turn that impulse 27:30 off towards meeting the future halfway in in the way that you're envisioning it's 27:35 it's possible for sure it's possible i mean first off i don't want to suggest 27:41 that most people are like to blame yeah i don't think anyone's to blame really we're in a 27:47 situation nobody's to blame but we're all complicit in a way when you've got 80 families that own half of the world's 27:55 wealth or whatever it is that uh there's a little blame that we could start talking about there are a few 28:02 people with a whole lot of money when the system reaches the end point that it's at when it gets 28:07 this brittle the reason why it's this brittle is because the ginny number the distribution of wealth is becoming 28:14 absolute you know there's a few people who have all of it and everyone else is really poor i agree with that but is it 28:20 their fault though i mean some of them are certainly sociopaths but is it their fault they're following the rules of 28:26 this metabolic economic growth system that you just said started in the 13th century when 28:33 interest-bearing debt was invented well it's their fault because if they're that wealthy and they're affecting that much 28:38 change through their actions they should be more educated and informed about what they're doing but that aside i just 28:45 don't want i i don't want to suggest that the person addicted to twitter is 28:52 also responsible for all this stuff i mean and yes each of us is a high leverage point but the way i would 28:59 engender a different sort of society it takes a while but i would think of 29:05 school differently i would be less results and job oriented in school and much more 29:13 socially oriented you know i have more kids show up each year in my college classes with a note from their 29:20 psychiatrist saying please excuse johnny from classroom participation because he you 29:25 know has social anxiety and oh that's not that's not good and people are 29:31 thinking that you go to school in order to get pumped as data from these teachers which is why then they're happy 29:36 to throw everybody on on an ipad for school and it's like no no no 29:41 you know you've got to use whatever a time we have a certainly institutional time like that to have people engage 29:48 live and learn to make eye contact things like that to be clear i wasn't saying that the 29:54 people that are addicted to twitter are to blame no i know you were it i just wanted to make sure they didn't feel blamed yeah 30:01 okay thank you for that i'm just wondering i think a lot of people especially with the attention to 30:09 polarization and addiction and the algorithms and ai and all that i think a 30:14 lot of people recognize this is unhealthy for our society and 30:20 unhealthy for themselves so what is the breakthrough as an individual to say 30:26 i'm going to be in charge of my social media usage instead of the social 30:32 media usage being in charge of me i recognize there's a great simplification or post 30:39 growth or end of growth or something different that's a less material consumption future in the distance and 30:46 i'm going to live more in the moment than be hijacked by these technology what is the 30:54 path by which an individual human recognizes takes ownership and makes 31:00 behavior change in that realm it's hard you know i i had a bunch of answers and 31:07 i thought a lot of people were following them you know whether it was you know the burning man psychedelic kids and my 31:15 friends in portland and san francisco who are doing free love and organic food 31:22 and all and then i've seen so many of them 31:27 seduced by the blockchain into now they're thinking oh well i've 31:33 got a web three based eco solution to blah blah and i'm like wait a minute what do you 31:40 need that for what what are you doing what well so that we can go global so that we can scale the solution oh so you 31:46 need to scale it why do you want to and then that i was saddened by how how easily 31:53 you know people believe in and want to contribute to that kind of funeral pyre 31:58 called bitcoin so let let's talk about that real briefly because that sounds 32:03 like another example of win versus lose 32:09 they're not enthralled with blockchain because they see it necessarily as 32:16 the social answer to our cultural problems but because they want to get in 32:21 earlier on a speculative trend and win so that they have a little bit bigger 32:26 cushion for an exit strategy there's that right yeah it's always in the background it's like oh this is good 32:32 for the world and da da da da da and if you get in now you're going to get a token that i promise it's going to be 32:37 worth a lot more really soon so personally i actually do think there's a 50 chance that bitcoin goes to zero and 32:45 a 50 chance it goes to 500 000 or a million or something like that but that's not because it's changing society 32:52 but that's because we are headed for a time and look at japan and europe as 32:57 near-term examples where tightening our belts and recognizing that the ear of abundance is 33:03 over and we're going to have to consume less is not going to be politically popular 33:09 and so we're going to have to forgive debt like biden did yesterday 33:14 and give more stimulus like we did in 2020 or guarantee italian and spanish 33:23 bonds by the ecb or japanese central bank buying 50 percent of japanese stocks 33:31 and a higher percentage of that of japanese bonds we're going to create more 33:36 financial claims on reality than the biophysical reality supports therefore 33:42 things like bitcoin will probably go up but i do question 33:48 the efficacy of ethereum and blockchain and some of these other 33:53 things as social answers because what's going to happen with more 33:59 efficiency using web 3 is yes it's true that you can create a 34:07 mortgage contract using the smart blockchain technology 34:13 that's totally proven and trusted and therefore the mortgage broker no longer needs to exist you can do it 34:20 for cheaper without him or her and using the blockchain 34:25 but we still need the house and the house requires energy and materials and stuff 34:32 so i i do not think that kryptos gets us away from the biophysical 34:39 requirements of our system number one and number two is i think the whole thing accelerates 34:45 our our wealth and income inequality i don't buy that blockchain is going to make us 34:51 share the wealth because i think the people that get in first are going to own so many tokens that if crypto does 34:57 manage to go up 10x from here or 20x or whatever there will be some trillionaires and a lot of people will 35:03 have nothing exactly reducing the friction of an unjustly organized 35:09 economy will just increase the division of wealth more rapidly exactly i agree with that 35:14 right just as digital technology the refusal of technology developers to 35:21 challenge the underlying operating system of corporate capitalism really just means that their digital 35:27 technologies are pumping steroids into capitalism as already practiced and 35:35 capitalism was dangerous enough when it and extractive enough in the coal mining 35:40 era and to accelerate it to this extent it's just it's bringing these these 35:46 these sort of apocalyptic possibilities much more rapidly into the road ahead 35:53 which is why that's why i wrote about these guys the technologists are the ones who see it first they see it coming 35:58 they know they're the ones who are calling me for advice on their on their bunkers on their mars missions on their 36:05 domes and they're the ones that's why i'm not saying i blame them but they're the ones it's the andreessens and theos 36:12 and musks who have to be shown a better way who have to be taught 36:18 the way through is way better than the way out so i have a quote that i'm going to read 36:24 you from you you wrote it not in your book but in your newsletter that you sent out this 36:30 morning i don't know what you would call that your sub stack or or whatever piece people subscribe to which i have since i 36:37 met you we must recognize the tech billionaire who has enough money and sovereignty to 36:43 build a private space program through which to secure his own safe passage away from the rest of us as the loser 36:51 who has squandered his opportunity for community and solidarity not the winner who doesn't need it what 36:59 do you think about that i agree with that 37:04 i mean i think i i was thinking about when i saw um jeff bezos on uh msnbc 37:12 when he did his uh you know launch of the blue origin thing and he comes back and and stephanie rule 37:19 who i usually like was like weak need you know like oh my god what you just did what you did and what was the 37:25 achievement there we've been shooting people up into space since like john glenn and alan shepard right it wasn't 37:30 the achievement but the achievement there was that a single dude was able to 37:36 do this without nasa without government without collaborators that he could do 37:41 it himself and that's sort of sad so i have a lot of thoughts on this first of all i think 37:47 the best thing to come out of that bezos shot into space was william shatner 37:52 captain kirk was aboard one of those and he came down and you could tell that he was so 37:59 visibly moved as a human of course we all remember him as captain kirk so there was this weird 38:05 thing there but he was like crying like the earth is so profoundly beautiful 38:11 from outer space and we're all bickering and fighting and polarized out here but we're this tiny 38:18 blue marble floating in space and it took him to get that vantage point which some 38:23 people call the overview effect to feel that and so so let's talk about 38:30 this compulsion and i think it's in a in a system that has an accordion 38:36 of wealth aspiration is kind of like the human compulsion of so many hundreds 38:44 or thousands of people every year that climb mount everest it's there's another horizon there's a mountain to climb 38:51 and we're not satisfied with what we have here which is why this whole 38:56 let's go and grab resources from asteroids and let's colonize mars 39:02 and we're going to science the [ __ ] out of it and grow potatoes even though there's no uh photosynthesis there 39:09 i think it's a real cultural carrot that even though people 39:15 if they really thought about it there's eight billion of us we're not eight billion of us going to mars either 39:20 there might be 20 and it's going to be mars is going to be in the worst 39:26 global thermonuclear war runaway 8.5 climate scenario venus hot house earth 39:33 is going to be a paradise compared to mars and so this whole thing i think is this 39:38 dopamine carrot that is completely not grounded in reality and i fully believe 39:44 that we're headed for an earth trek future not this colonizing outer space because 39:49 all of our prior sojourns into space were based on the economic and energy 39:56 surplus of the day which we're about to hit a wall and not have so i i think you know the most 40:04 insightful thing that i've thought while you're talking now is rather than have stories about the 40:11 great simplification to the general public to prepare people for what's coming 40:16 it might be a better effort to persuade the elon musks and jeff bezos's of the 40:22 world what the world really needs in the next 10 or 20 years and it ain't looking 40:27 at the stars for the next dopamine conquest right well and the one way to convince them that 40:35 is to have us not worship them for thinking that way 40:41 you know elon musk has so many young fans who really believe that his way 40:47 is the way right that you get that you escape from from the planet 40:53 so we so we educate those young people about our biophysical and our neural realities on what really uh gives humans 41:01 satisfaction and meaning and community and then to the extent that educating them about 41:07 it helps them pursue it but i think we just offer them different models of 41:12 experience i mean these guys are role models for them right now and they are 41:18 terrible role models you know elon musk believes it's okay to sacrifice the 41:23 lives and experiences of the 8 billion people now in order to dedicate ourselves to the 41:30 you know 10 trillion that he thinks are going to be star-seeding the universe so 41:36 this is nick bostrom's logic right and mcallister just wrote a book of what we 41:42 owe the future are you aware of that thinking yeah i think personally 41:47 i think that line of logic is ecocidal it's ecology blind and 41:54 ecocidal so what i've discovered in talking with people in silicon valley and talking 42:00 with farmers and biophysical economists is that a lot of these tech bros and 42:07 these wealthy silicon valley elites some of them are really good people 42:12 they view the world from an ecology lens and not an ecology lens 42:18 and here's something that a lot of people forget you're well aware in my story that we use a hundred billion 42:24 barrels of ancient sunlight per year which works out to a fossil labor force of around 500 billion 42:32 human labor equivalents so since you and i are around the same age douglas 42:38 since you and i have been on this planet every single year our culture has had a 42:45 higher access to this energy subsidy than the year before other than 2020 2009 and a couple 42:53 years in the 70s so all of our technological plans all of the 42:58 technology of today and our aspirations and narratives about the future 43:04 are subsidized by this invisible energy surplus that has been getting bigger 43:10 globally every single year and that is going to start to decline in the next decade and then what does technology do 43:17 for us right well aren't we supposed to have what's his name's hubbert's peak or something do we want to go there that's a really 43:24 complicated story i don't know but that's the thing it's complicated but i was thinking originally that as we run 43:32 out of energy and it becomes really expensive then people will naturally start changing their behavior you know i 43:39 mean if gas cost 10 or 20 dollars a gallon even if you elect trump that doesn't change and you stop using it so 43:46 natural gas right now is the equivalent of 20 a gallon in europe i mean it's 43:52 oil if you price natural gas in oil terms today it's 550 a barrel in 43:58 europe so this is starting to happen but i have two two things let me briefly say about hubbard's peak he was right that 44:04 the united states peaked in 1970 he thought the world would peak in the year 2000 he was wrong about that part of the 44:11 reason was because of debt and credit and globalization but what we've done is we've used debt 44:18 to pull energy forward in time and i would argue that 2018 now november 44:24 probably was the peak in global oil production but the decline rate is now going to be 44:30 sharper because we've used all this shale and and other things 44:35 so i i think the peak is upon us now the second point i would make this is a open 44:41 anthropological question for you douglas when things get worse 44:47 and when our economic times get tougher and when energy gets less affordable and 44:55 less available will we on mass acknowledge that reality and make 45:01 behavior change like you just suggested or will we paradoxically 45:07 swing for these tech narratives even more because they give us 45:13 the dopamine and the comfort of some fantasy and even though we subconsciously 45:18 believe that don't think it might happen it offers us uh a mental escape route what do you 45:24 think about that no i think it's a third thing is what happens and it's not 45:29 cheery but the shortest way of saying it is we'll blame the jews that's what we 45:34 do so we'll create it we'll create an out group and it's someone else's fault that brought us here right and then that 45:40 will keep us occupied and the more we attack them and kill them and isolate 45:47 them the greater our mythological superstitious belief that they're secret 45:52 ones somewhere else that are still doing this thing and it's where it's how we've done it 46:00 before the difference though is that these are extinction level problems so rather than 46:08 it just being you know widespread poverty in the villages of eastern 46:14 europe in the early 1900s so let's blame these jews and make people feel better for a while about it now it's 46:21 these sort of existential problems that again we'll still blame on an out group of some 46:26 kind because the most logical scenario is we put some kind of authoritarian 46:33 leaders in place and then when the authoritarian leaders can't solve our problems because they're 46:39 just really kleptocrats taking wealth from the system those leaders then will 46:44 blame the out group and people will be so angry and hungry and poor that they 46:51 will be pretty easily convinced to attack the outgroup so i'm uh that's sort of the the 46:57 scenario i'm feeling will will kind of be there first which is why we need to 47:02 do things that will engender solidarity among people if we can move towards you 47:08 know commons based management of resources even on a small local level 47:13 that these kinds of experiences will change people's understanding of the 47:19 others in their in their neighborhoods and in their in their world well we're doing it already with putin and ukraine 47:25 and russia we're blaming them for for what's going on so so how do we do that 47:30 how do we engender solidarity locally do you have any examples or models uh 47:36 worker-owned businesses are a great start you know then all of a sudden there's no boss we're the boss what is 47:42 that it's not long-distance shareholders that own your company or some you know even a local ceo and we're seeing a lot 47:49 of that a lot of sort of boomer-owned businesses who the boomers kids don't want to take them over they're letting 47:54 the employees buy the business and then it's changing the way those businesses operate and it's changing the neighborhoods where those businesses are 48:01 because all of a sudden now the business is concerned well we live here so what do we want from this business we wanted 48:07 to contribute to the schools we wanted to not pollute our area we wanted to create jobs for our kids we wanted to 48:13 build residences for older people so all of a sudden businesses become more integrated with our our communities 48:21 rather than extractive of them so there are examples for better or for worse the 48:26 you know some of the local schools movements are interesting the chartered school movements with parents coming 48:31 usually they're you know white parents who want a school want to say they're sending their kids to public school but 48:36 don't want them in with those other kids from over there so they create an elitist little school but there's still 48:43 mechanisms for people regaining control of their local local utilities the rebirth of public 48:51 libraries i mean public libraries are something i could not imagine us having the courage or fortitude to start today 48:57 but the fact that they still exist we're starting to see them as cultural hubs and again a public library 49:05 models what a commons is what do you mean our town owns these books and i can just take one anytime i want and read it 49:11 as long as i can bring it back and i can't tear it up or i'm going to lose my card so there's enforcement there's it's 49:18 like oh that's how it works so i think we are starting to see that um it's just 49:23 they're in places that are kind of more subtle and more local than most of us are usually willing to look i don't know 49:29 if you know josh farley he was my phd advisor and he runs or he's a professor of 49:35 community development applied economics at at the university of vermont but his research shows that 49:42 humans that cooperate it's like lifting weights for your 49:48 muscles that the act of cooperating itself becomes additive that then you 49:54 want to do more cooperation and so if we could have models of that in communities 49:59 i mean my single i don't know what to do with what's coming but if i had one thing 50:05 it would be to build social capital and social networks ahead of the economic 50:11 upheaval that's coming and i know you from prior conversations you kind of 50:18 agree with that the question is is how do we scale that and a question i would pose you is how do we scale that in the 50:24 face of all these tech narratives that capture people's 50:30 attention and clicks and dollars do you have any thoughts on that we can't scale it we can replicate it we can model it 50:38 what we're talking about doesn't happen at scale and that's why it sounds like i'm critiquing it but i'm not that's the 50:45 danger of the systems thinking is we've made the analysis on that level but i 50:50 don't believe we can we can find the solution set on that level i think then 50:56 it it will help us confidently return to our villages and 51:01 neighborhoods and do the things that we need to do without worrying about them 51:06 scaling instead we can we can come up with with great ideas and do them and then let 51:13 other people replicate them so you know if if workers buy a window making 51:19 factory and have great success doing that we write about it we post it and 51:24 let other people try to do it too i mean that in a sense that's scaling but it's not scaling in 51:30 the way that we think of scale it's it's more distributing the the knowledge 51:35 so to summarize the systems ecology overview of of the human predicament is 51:41 important to know but then once you know it you kind of have to discard it and start building 51:47 from the ground up in your community i think you may i think it's like you know in in judaism we have the bait midrash 51:55 and the synagogue you know and the synagogue is where you pray and you get all the great spiritual feelings and 52:01 stuff and the bait midrash is where you actually argue out the law and uh 52:07 the rabbis used to say um if you get to a new town um and you you find out where the 52:12 synagogue is walk to the synagogue you find out where the bait midrash is run to the bait midrash and i feel like the 52:19 kind of knowledge that we're gaining the system's knowledge is in a way like the 52:24 synagogue it helps us see the big picture it's james kirk going or william 52:30 shatner going into space and seeing oh i get it it's our friends at the you 52:36 know humane technology friends going to burning man and doing a lot of acid and seeing oh these social networks are 52:43 really kind of [ __ ] up for people or peter thiel going to the amazon and doing a bunch of ayahuasca and seeing oh 52:50 but then what do you do when you come back it's so much more local and immediate and moment to moment and that 52:58 unfolds the big thing we've got access to the system that's the beauty of 53:03 systems you know we are the butterflies flapping our wings you don't need to be running the new york stock exchange to deflate 53:10 the entire economy so you are a firm believer in bottom-up response to what's coming i'm a firm 53:17 hoper in a bottom-up response to what's coming i just feel like 53:23 each of us will do so much less damage with our errors 53:28 if we enact our plans for a just 53:34 and environmentally friendly world as individuals seeing what catches on 53:40 rather than as kind of great reset uh policy and actors doing stuff on a on a global 53:48 or cosmic level i don't disagree with that i just want to be informed but that's why i need you right but i need 53:55 people like you is so that when i call you and say dude do i buy a 54:01 tesla or do i buy a car that's like this and you say doug if your car works keep the 54:08 car you have and try to use it as little as possible okay go okay nate i got it 54:13 because you've done the research because you know it's like there's people out there who really believe that they 54:18 should trade in their car and buy a tesla in order to do less damage even though their car is another 10 years in 54:25 it well that's a clear answer on that example but but yeah yeah but my local things are stupid unless they're 54:32 informed by smarter people yeah or not necessarily smarter people but more 54:37 systemically aware people yeah just to understand who understand what's going on who could tell me look all right if 54:44 you are going to do solar that's cool but there's all these other things you got to know about solar before you 54:50 i'm going to transition my whole town to solar by the end of thursday well the other challenge the other challenge with 54:56 solar in addition to the things that you and i have talked about on your podcast and our private calls 55:02 is i had someone come recently to do an estimate on my office here to install 55:08 solar and i just wanted a certain amount of kilowatt hour potential and they were 55:13 like no in case you add more appliances you want to over build and it's like we haven't gotten away 55:19 from the more is better dynamic in our culture and they couldn't sell me just enough 55:25 for what i have now and just a portion of of what i have for they wanted to like outfit the whole 55:32 thing in a 1.5 x way and you know that's not going to change 55:38 until our cultural you know balance sheet changes i don't think 55:43 like you say it starts from people in their communities recognizing 55:48 you know what the best choice for me is to keep my car because it has 10 years more and 55:54 then those individuals decisions other people see them and it makes sense and 56:00 that the the level at which i'm trying to work it now using my skills you know what i do and not to keep bringing it 56:06 back to this to this friggin book but i thought what if i write a book that gets people laughing 56:13 rather than crying let's laugh so here's five billionaires asking me for bunker 56:19 strategies here's you know richard dawkins and his scientism friends 56:25 yelling at you telling me that i'm a silly moralist and then ending up on jeffrey epstein's plane right 56:32 hanging the lolita express you know at catering to his kind of eugenic understandings of the world so if we can 56:40 laugh at these guys at these billionaires if we can see the pathos 56:47 in their winning and realize ah the last thing i would want to do is be one of these 56:54 frightened little billionaires spending all of their energy and staying up at night worrying about whether their 57:01 bunker is hermetically sealed against monkey pox it's like oh 57:06 i don't want to be like musk i don't want to live i don't want to buy dogecoin because he tweeted it i don't 57:12 want to become the next you know jeff bezos with a forest inside my company or 57:18 an apple with a freaking fortress with a with a you know a giant moat around it or whatever 57:26 there's another way i'm not afraid of girls i'm i'm gonna talk to one you know 57:32 i'm i think old people are cool and wise i don't want to shut them up and i'm happy 57:38 if they don't have a retirement plan and need to come over and hang out with me i'm going to get this 90 year old's wisdom it's just like it's like so to be 57:46 able to laugh at this it's a it's not a tragedy what we're living through it's a 57:52 black comedy we've elevated the silliest people we've elevated people who stopped 57:58 thinking when they were children who stop going to school at 19 who believe 58:04 that people should be encouraged not to go to college so they could just do stupid things sooner it's like 58:10 this is laughable and if we laugh at it then it's not a tragedy then it's a 58:15 comedy because these people are smaller than us not bigger than us and we can go about our lives and have so much more 58:22 fun and meaning and play together if we're not worried about trying to become the next one of them so we just need a 58:29 we need more people to recognize the truths and what you just said and 58:35 walk away from the narrative yeah rather than me i wouldn't say we need more people to get what i'm saying because it 58:43 i feel like it's a little hubristic but i would say i am very interested to see 58:50 that if more people are laughing at the aspirations of our 58:56 billionaire class if that might just help 59:01 trigger less extractive selfish 59:06 individual understanding of success maybe a movie or a netflix show to that 59:14 extent yeah the something the something dilemma 59:20 i mean it's funny if i was gonna do a manifesto now i mean i kind of did team human was my manifesto to say just find 59:26 the others you know i feel like i may do the most good by kind of signing 59:34 off by doing a mic drop of a real kind because what i'm doing now by having a 59:40 podcast and writing books is sort of modeling the idea that oh you know you should have ideas and then spread them 59:45 as far and get famous and make talk here listen to the sound of your voice and 59:51 and i think everyone should have their turn but then maybe the smartest thing i do is kind of 59:56 disappear you know continue being a public school teacher at college in my neighborhood be available if people have 1:00:04 questions or want to know something but kind of sign off and go extremely local 1:00:10 as a wave what did rushkoff do where'd rushcroft go oh rashkoff he hung up the phone he's living he's 1:00:18 like oh and maybe maybe that's the answer i see the appeal of that but at 1:00:23 the same time i also tell my students that now is the time to maximize our 1:00:28 impact not minimize it and if you consider ai and 1:00:34 youtube and spotify and all the tools we use as the tools of the devil 1:00:40 at least we can use them to do god's work metaphorically i forgot who told me 1:00:46 that that analogy but i i i hear you i there are a lot of times that i don't want to do this and i 1:00:52 don't like the rules of the game but we're in the game and to make 1:00:58 an impact on other humans i i think at least for now we have to continue to spell out why 1:01:05 being happier and healthier does not require billions and why we could laugh at some of the idiosyncrasies and flawed 1:01:13 logic of these tech elite and i i think you have to explain that 1:01:19 to more people before they're able to laugh at it because the marketing and 1:01:24 advertising and ai driven algorithms are so freaking powerful in our current 1:01:30 world and then if we do it then we have to do it in a way that doesn't employ 1:01:36 their dastardly tactics at the very least in other words so you 1:01:41 don't push uh boost this post you know you know you know you know so that there's a 1:01:48 difference between the kinds of cultural expression we're doing 1:01:54 and the manipulative propaganda of of the others you're 1:01:59 far more of an expert on this than i am but i could argue that both in your book 1:02:05 and on this podcast the content therein there will be some algorithms that will down regulate this 1:02:12 conversation yeah that's what the algorithms are for yeah it's happened to me on a couple of 1:02:17 my podcasts i'm like how how could no one have liked that 1:02:22 it's because it's a very uncomfortable thing that that was talked about 1:02:28 i have a few more questions that are of the personal nature that i ask all my guests if you have a few more minutes 1:02:34 sure especially if they're personal so you are a college teacher what's the 1:02:40 name of your class that you teach um but it depends on the semester right now i'm teaching propaganda 1:02:48 to undergraduates and i'm teaching a course called interactive storytelling which looks at how do you tell stories 1:02:55 in interactive media where you no longer have total authorial control over your 1:03:00 story so in the propaganda is it to teach students what it is and how to avoid it or uh how to be adept at 1:03:08 creating it a little of both i mean it's it's more to come to recognize 1:03:14 when propaganda is being used i mean and the uh ethical arguments that its practitioners 1:03:21 have made over time for why it's appropriate you know there there are people like 1:03:28 walter lipman who was a great progressive through much of his life came to believe that people are going to 1:03:34 believe whatever the pictures are in their heads so it may as well be us putting those pictures there then you 1:03:40 know hitler or someone else but there are certain pictures that can't 1:03:45 spread like the pictures that i'm creating with my stories they're they're at a disadvantage 1:03:51 because truth of this sort that is unpleasant and complex and in the future 1:03:57 and there are no easy answers those pictures can't easily become propaganda is that a 1:04:02 fair statement yup and those don't necessarily have to be what spread 1:04:09 in order to engender the behaviors and attitudes that those ideas require it's laughter 1:04:17 and having a sandwich with joe and making love with your partner and walks in the woods and playing with your dog 1:04:22 and those things i think so i think so those things that have been so undervalued the things that we've 1:04:29 been told i remember there was once a commercial i believe it was for amazon that had this like old lady knitting 1:04:34 something and making it like for a christmas present for somebody and they were like don't do that you could 1:04:41 actually pick this thing somebody wants on amazon and i'm like oh wow they've actually successfully reversed christmas 1:04:50 you know so yeah well this whole process of learning about the human predicament and 1:04:57 overshoot and everything is both a tragedy and a comedy at the same time 1:05:02 because i can now just you know wistfully understand the 1:05:08 the humor and the sadness in that story that you just said maybe over time i'm learning to be a 1:05:13 lateral thinker like you so back to your class at the end of the class i don't know how much of all this 1:05:20 energy and resources and climate you talk to but generally what specific 1:05:25 recommendations do you have for young humans who come across this this giant story of environment and 1:05:32 resources and technology for their futures as 20 21 year olds 1:05:37 a lot of the people who came before you wanted to solve 1:05:43 these problems in a biggest splashiest way possible 1:05:49 usually by creating like i want to create the website that aggregates all of the 1:05:56 efforts around the world and serves as a knowledge base for all the environmental 1:06:01 things so that every and in reality there's way more websites 1:06:06 aggregating all the everything than we will ever need what you actually 1:06:12 consider just doing the thing first you know consider doing the actual thing 1:06:19 rather than making a video about the thing or a website about the thing 1:06:25 media is cool but media is secondary to 1:06:30 the thing think about do you want to be do you want to live on a porn site or do 1:06:35 you want to make love do you want to publicize environmentalism or do you want to just do it you know and there's 1:06:42 a whole lot of competition in the space to make the videos and the tweets and 1:06:48 the things about what's happening in the world there's very very few people actually doing stuff 1:06:55 so you will do better and be noticed and have more fun 1:07:00 if you engage directly i asked what you would advise 1:07:05 young people not what you would advise me 1:07:11 no but i am talking to young people you know what i mean no i know i know what you mean and you're not and and i would 1:07:17 say one out of every thousand or ten thousand of those young people should be making media about this stuff rather 1:07:24 than doing it but we don't need that many people behind the camera you know when i go to a show and i see everybody 1:07:30 holding up their phones to capture that freaking thing why 1:07:35 why there's this one film this one even grateful dad i was always happy when i go to a show that there was a section of 1:07:42 people over there with their microphones up on crutches getting the show and one of them i knew i'd be able to get a tape 1:07:49 from so i didn't have to sit there myself recording it and you know those 40 1:07:54 people recording it is enough well right there is a microcosm of living in the meta narrative versus living in the 1:08:01 moment i mean we're worried about the filming the experience of the thing rather than experiencing the thing yeah 1:08:06 and sometimes it's beautiful it's great some people that's the way they enjoyed europe they went with their coda chrome 1:08:12 and came back with the slides that's what they do that's how they knew they were there but there's an extreme form 1:08:18 of that and certainly when it comes to what we actually do to make our world a 1:08:23 better place there's something really rewarding about actually doing it i hear you 1:08:28 so what do you care most about in the world douglas 1:08:33 i would normally say either climate and the destruction of our climate is the thing i care most about but i'm learning 1:08:40 to see the climate as figure rather than ground that climate as a subject on tv 1:08:48 as a thing as a problem climate education disease 1:08:54 poverty that there are these things and what i'm caring more about is what i 1:08:59 would call the ground rather than the figure is the the ground 1:09:04 itself the environment in which this is all taking place 1:09:10 and i'm most concerned that we've distracted ourselves with the kind of 1:09:18 the spectacle of figures and we've lost 1:09:25 reality that we've disengaged from this and that there are these answers 1:09:31 here in the soma in the the lived experience 1:09:36 that is so ineffable and i've listened to a lot of the guys who are trying and and and women who are trying to express 1:09:44 it and it's it's not linguistic it's so experiential the ground it's 1:09:50 what marshall mcluhan was trying to say the medium is the message the medium the ecology of our of our our 1:09:58 experience and that's i genuinely believe that 1:10:04 centering that restoring that opening our nervous systems to that 1:10:10 will change everything about how we how we live so instead of just seeing climate and 1:10:18 poverty and economic malaise there's visceral embodied 1:10:25 recognition of these issues that are in a real personal on the ground level that that's where we have to 1:10:31 engage with it rather than these themes we see and think about in our brains 1:10:36 right you know they're not subjects there's there's this landscape there where 1:10:42 we're here right now in this landscape and i feel like we've like 1:10:48 our feet are not on the ground we're looking at the screens and seeing the pictures of what's going wrong and it's 1:10:55 like no wait a minute take the goggles off put your feet on the ground we're here now what so of all the issues some of 1:11:02 which we may have mentioned on this call um what are you most personally concerned about in the coming 10 years 1:11:08 or so in in our world it's hard to have a most i'm 1:11:13 concerned about climate refugees i think they're already here they're already 1:11:20 around and each climate refugee is a whole person as much as you or me 1:11:27 or any you know what i mean they're a whole freaking person and there's not just dozens or hundreds there's like 1:11:33 thousands millions of them without homes and to be tens of 1:11:38 millions before long yeah so they're sort of the most immediate for me because it's like 1:11:44 and i know that there's species that we're wiping out at the same time and i don't think as much about the little bird that's all gone or whatever but i'm 1:11:51 a person so i'm still kind of anthropocentric in the way i think about the world so you know i'm thinking about 1:11:59 the people below below or too close to sea level in bangladesh where are they going to go in contrast what issue or or 1:12:08 thing have you observed that you're most hopeful about in the coming decade or so 1:12:13 i am hopeful about young girls these tweens 1:12:18 even on their little social media things they are drawn or being drawn 1:12:26 to solidarity and two things they're all into solidarity a mutual 1:12:32 support and go girl and power to you when there was that awful shooting that 1:12:37 happened at ariana grande's concert in manchester a few years ago and the tick tock and instagram became 1:12:46 alive with young girls offering support to each other and ariana and it was like 1:12:52 oh my god what what what came forth was so moving between that 1:12:58 and manifesting they're manifesting you know and it's a magical world view you know someone will 1:13:06 say oh i want this and that and people are going to manifest you can manifest that it's not 1:13:12 a reaching it's not a goal orientation it's the idea of manifesting and manifesting 1:13:20 through solidarity uh is something that's coming out of that little girl's community that makes 1:13:26 me realize oh there is a sweet sweet hope just like you see you 1:13:33 know plants grow through the cracks in the cement sidewalk i'm seeing 1:13:39 the greatest qualities of the human spirit emerge from the most commercial 1:13:46 online services so i see the human spirit in in them and and coming out of them 1:13:53 that's beautiful and i have to ask why young girls and not young men and do you 1:14:01 have an explanation for why that might be i'm not saying it's not young man i've just seen it i saw it in young 1:14:08 girls i think young men right now without getting into the whole 1:14:13 intellectual dark web understanding of things young men right now are having a really 1:14:19 hard time because of what as our civilization goes through what will 1:14:25 likely be a century-long hangover from male domination it's a hard 1:14:32 thing and you see a lot of young male culture online tend 1:14:38 towards more kind of gamer stuff because they're going through 1:14:44 a hell of a lot but it's there i see it in minecraft 1:14:49 and in the the building communities online and the hacker community i see it 1:14:56 on github where people put up their code for free use this take this i see the 1:15:02 original spirit of the net that the tech billionaires tried to destroy i see that coming back as people just want to make 1:15:09 stuff and feel good about it go to the the 3d printing lab at the public library and look at these 14 year old 1:15:16 kids most of them boys making weird stuff with each other and sharing code 1:15:22 so i see it i see it too but i have a daughter so i kind of witnessed the ariana thing up close and it gave me it 1:15:29 gave me hope that's beautiful thank you last question my friend if you were 1:15:35 benevolent dictator and there was no personal recourse to your decision what 1:15:40 is one thing that you would enact to improve our human and planetary futures 1:15:47 i feel the need to push back 1:15:53 against that sort of envisioning thought experiment 1:16:00 because it even in the best sense imagining that 1:16:06 stuart brand is right and that we are as gods and may as well get used to it 1:16:13 starts up a fantasy pattern of peter theo elon musk jeff bezos i am 1:16:22 a master of the universe i am above and i can do this what i guess what i would 1:16:27 do if i were benevolent dictator of the world 1:16:32 is erase the concept of benevolent dictator 1:16:38 of the world is is surrender that ability and make it 1:16:44 so that is not even something one aspires to 1:16:50 you know because the benevolent dictator it's like it's like the question i ask in the book where one of the guys is one 1:16:56 of these tech bros is talking to another during the january 6 riots and said if you could press a button and make those 1:17:02 guys disappear would you do it no if i could press a button and have all those guys think differently would i do it no 1:17:09 no because how dare i how dare i yes i don't want people to die there i don't want that to happen but the answer is 1:17:16 not to press a button and make them think differently it's too easy and it refuses to acknowledge that 1:17:25 to everything there is a season there's a time for every purpose under heaven and how 1:17:31 dare i interfere you know if i'm going to intervene i'm going to intervene 1:17:37 on the localest level possible if i can get to that place bezos place 1:17:43 that god place whatever it is i'm gonna speak really softly and move really 1:17:49 slowly i'm gonna move slow and fix things i understand that just to 1:17:56 articulate why i ask my guests that i think there's zero chance of a benevolent dictator 1:18:03 but i think that everyone has a different expertise i have endocrine disrupting chemical experts and 1:18:10 financial experts and evolutionary biologists and to weigh in 1:18:15 from their lens and their expertise and you're a technology historian and systems uh 1:18:22 architect to weigh in on their one thing to educate the listeners on 1:18:28 yeah that's one thing they would do that would be a lever point even though it's a fantastical thought experiment right 1:18:35 well i would just want to do it from lesser so if i were governor of my state 1:18:41 right or mayor of your town yeah i mean governor of the state is at least it's it's scaled right it's upscale from 1:18:48 mayor of my town i would want to distribute 1:18:54 commons in a box a kit for any town to easily implement a 1:19:00 commons around whatever their shared resource might be you know a 1:19:06 plug-and-play commons in a box because people don't quite understand how commons work so an easy kit a pdf or a 1:19:12 set of cards he's like okay pick the resource okay decide how much of it could be used okay decide what the 1:19:18 penalty is or you know so they go oh and now we have a commons yeah so i think if 1:19:24 people experienced commons's it would help a lot of things so yeah i could i could do that one 1:19:30 without worrying about setting off a disaster i just don't want to do that bad thing where you scale something because you're 1:19:37 god and then everybody like turns gray or something okay good answer comments in the box and 1:19:43 the reduced scale benevolent dictator at a governor of of new york thank you my friend any other closing 1:19:51 words of of wisdom no i do love you i do love you i want you to be more confident 1:19:56 i think that's my word of wisdom you you 1:20:01 you more than almost anyone i know have the actual goods 1:20:07 you have the actual goods and i don't think you need to worry about anything other than sharing the actual 1:20:15 goods the imprint you found you you speak truth and don't let anybody tell you you need 1:20:22 a better story or better this a better that you don't you did the work you did 1:20:27 the work it's up to other people to tell your freaking story and to take what you're doing you are my hero already so 1:20:35 you just keep on keeping on and don't you ever worry that there's anything deficient in 1:20:40 what you're what you're doing and have done thank you i hope it doesn't come across that i'm insecure about all this 1:20:46 i think the insecurity is that i'm a people pleaser and i don't want to let people down who first come across 1:20:54 this story and they're freaking shell-shocked and it's too much to bear because i feel an empathy for others 1:21:01 so that's why i'm doing this podcast is to send out a signal to those who want to take a deeper dive 1:21:09 and how all this fits together and how to make change in their own lives and you're doing it and you're doing it 1:21:14 appropriately successfully little by little i just don't want you to ever think i sometimes sometimes i hear 1:21:20 through the humility sometimes that maybe you're thinking you're not doing this right and you are but not only are 1:21:26 you doing this right but you've already done the heavy lift you've done that you went in you found now you brought it out 1:21:32 and now and i would argue that the bad news is good news i used to say you know the problem with those jews is we're not 1:21:39 spreading the good news like like the christians have christ we're spreading the bad news hey it's just us it's us 1:21:46 we got to take care of each other that you know and but there's such a relief in hearing the you mean 1:21:52 oh my god you mean really it's that [ __ ] oh okay this almost like it's a 1:21:57 relief in that so it's really that means that the answers are so much simpler then we 1:22:02 really really really gotta just use less energy this is gonna stop it's just we have proof this must stop this must stop 1:22:10 we cannot keep going this way no there's no workaround other than stop it forgot just stop it 1:22:18 and that's a relief right isn't it a relief it's just simple it's simple like you say it's a simple it's just it's so 1:22:23 much easier oh we stopped that and when we stopped that life gets better to boot it's all good it's a win-win yeah it's 1:22:31 clear to me and now you have you have emboldened me to to go shout across the 1:22:37 rooftops for another few months all right and go open the storage unit take out the stuff i'm gonna go in there this 1:22:43 weekend i have some time send me something send it to friends give it away there's probably cool stuff maybe 1:22:49 there's like a little red truck or something for me in there a little toy i will find something for you in there 1:22:56 douglas all right all right thanks for watching i love you live i'm 1:23:01 sure we'll talk soon and take good care if you enjoyed or learned from this 1:23:06 episode of the great simplification please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit 1:23:13 thegreatsimplification.com for more information on future releases