Douglas Rushkoff Explains Why Billionaires Are Building a SECRET Plan to SURVIVE the EVENT

coming up next on the passion struck podcast i go to this crazy resort in the middle of the desert they bring me out in a golf cart to this other part of the facility and i'm waiting in my green room for them to come with a microphone they clip on you and you go out and do your talk instead of bringing me out they bring these five guys into my green room and they sit around this little round table and they start peppering me with these questions about the digital future then finally they get to the question alaska or new zealand where should they put their bunker for the coming apocalypse and the question that ended up taking up the majority of the hour was how do i maintain control of my security staff once my money is worthless welcome to passionstruck hi i'm your host john our miles and on the show we decipher the secrets tips and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turned their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself if you're new to the show i offer advice and answer listener questions on fridays we have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors ceos creators innovators scientists military leaders visionaries and athletes now let's go out there and become passion struck hello everyone and welcome back to episode 192 of passionstruck recently ranked by feedspot is one of the top 40 most inspirational podcasts of 2022. and thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to be better live better and impact the world if you're new to the show thank you so much for being here or you would like to introduce this to a friend or family member we now have episode starter packs both on spotify and the passion struck website these are collections of our fans favorite episodes we organize into convenient topics to give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show just go to passionstruck.com starter packs to get started and in case you missed my episode from earlier in the week it was with rachel hollis a three-time new york times best-selling author and host of the highly popular rachel hollis podcast which has over 100 million downloads and last week in case you missed it i head on dr scott barry kaufman and jordan feingold and we discuss and release their new book choose growth and explore how to transcend things like trauma self-doubt and worry i also had on former monk hindu priest dadapani and we explore his new book the power of unwavering focus and its impact on living an intentional life and in case you missed my solo episode from last week it was exploring the concept of free will and whether it actually exists or not and i wanted to say thank you so much for your consistent ratings and reviews they go such a long way in helping expand the popularity of the show as well as increasing our following we would so appreciate it if you love any of these episodes that i just discussed for today's if you give us a five star rating and i know our guests love to hear comments from the fans now let's talk about today's episode which is a bit different from the ones that we typically do here on the show we are going to talk today about the super rich and what they have termed is the event their euphemism for the environmental collapse social unrest nuclear explosion solar storm unstoppable virus or malicious computer attack that takes everything down the super rich according to our guests today are making preparations for this event in the forms of configuring their doomsday bunkers but today's podcast isn't only about doom and gloom it's about the impact of the future of technology it's about the future of humanity and the need for all of us to come together with intentionality in order that we can solve the world's issues now let's talk about today's guest douglas rushkoff is a professor of media theory and digital economics at queen's cooney he was named as one of the world's 10 most influential intellects by mit he hosts the team human podcast he has written many award-winning books including team human and today we're going to discuss his new book survival of the richest thank you for choosing passion struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey creating an intentional life now let that journey begin [Music] [Applause] i am so excited today to welcome douglas rushkoff to the passion struck podcast welcome douglas hey i'm really glad to be here well before we get into anything else i just wanted to say congratulations on the launch of your new book i'm gonna put it up here we'll put it in the youtube video and show notes of course but i know how big a deal it is to go through the process of launching one of these so congratulations oh thanks well we're going to talk about that a lot today we are also going to touch on another one of your books and i'll put that up there as well called team human but before we get into that i always like the audience to get to know the guests a little bit so i thought first i'd ask this question i saw that you study human autonomy in the digital age what exactly does that mean well it's interesting i mean when i was growing up i could never decide if i wanted to be a theater director or a doctor oddly enough and i was always interested because you know george bernard shaw the great player was a doctor anton chekhov was a doctor and for me the thing that always made the two things tied together was both theater and medicine is asking what makes a person alive what is a living human and what is a human in action what's the difference between a live thing and a dead thing and while i was really interested in theater i got even more interested in digital technology in the late 80s and early 90s because here were these almost thinking machines these technologies that would allow us to connect and do things and express really the human will in all of these strange new ways but by the mid 1990s i felt like business was taking these technologies and reversing them so instead of looking at how technology is going to express what it means to be human these technologies were trying to get humans to do stuff sticky websites manipulative algorithms we were using tech on people so at that point i became really concerned with how much are people going to be able to think and act of their own volition in a world where everyone is trying to program them so that's why i kind of decided what my goal is to really study and if anything promote human autonomy human will human ingenuity and creativity in an age where it seems like they want to auto tune that out of our vocabulary well i think it's a noble cause and as i think about the technology that's hitting us almost all of it has driven i think unintended consequences or maybe it's intended consequences and we'll get into this as this podcast unfolds but either way it's driving more individuality than we've ever had and i really believe that this as a backdrop because it's not as if this happened overnight it's been going on for three plus decades now but what i think it's bringing a rise to is the chronic states of loneliness helplessness hopelessness that billions are feeling right now i was shocked when i read this report that showed over the last 20 years period they measured loneliness across the planet and 33 of the globe 113 countries responded said that they felt lonely 50 of resilience so it's just rampant it's interesting you could say on one level it's for the last three decades since digital technology has amplified it but you could also say it's the last three centuries since the invention of this fictional thing we call the individual but it's really not we live in community we live with each other being human is a team sport it's a collective activity and back in the renaissance we kind of retrieved this ancient greek notion of the vitruvian man the the individual and it was great for individual rights and one man one vote and everybody matters but the idea that we're each in our own little trapped in our own perspective and fighting for our own interests over everyone else's i mean that dovetails with capitalism with technology and with the depression that so many people are feeling today i completely agree with you and it's one of the whole reasons i started this podcast was to try to do my part find a way to help people get back to human connection get back to living this life that we're supposed to be living that we're not i wanted to ask you a follow-on question you currently teach at the city university of new york but for a long time you taught at nyu what were some of the courses that you taught and was there one that stuck out more than the others yeah i mean the main thing i was doing at nyu i started something called the narrative lab in their interactive telecommunications program which is sort of their internet e-school but a kind of creative internet school and what i was always interested in really from the time i was very little was the standard story structure that we always use in pretty much everything the one that aristotle identified crisis climax relief we go up the incline plane of tension the character makes a series of choices they reach a climax and then the thing is solved so whether you're watching dora the explorer or even a christopher nolan movie you get to the end and made it and i felt like what it was doing was addicting people to endings that we only felt satisfied if the story ended and i was thinking well we live in a world where i don't want the story to end i want the story to keep going and we have these new technologies that unlike books and movies these digital technologies which are more game-like and hyper-textural and people moving from place to place what would it be like to develop narratives satisfying narratives that don't end that don't complete but encourage people to keep going what does this a story like that encourages you to go outside and meet more people and do more things and make more connections rather than ache for finality because i was really concerned as i looked at a lot of the religions we have that were really reaching for an end reaching for an apocalypse or an armageddon all of our movies reaching toward end game and big bang things and so many businesses that people were starting not to run businesses but to exit everyone says i had a great exit well why did you exit it's a great business why did you need to have an exit well i think all of what you just said is a great lead-in to the core topic we're going to talk about today and how this is going to unfold throughout this podcast so i wanted to start out by referring to something that was in team humans and i believe in social impact theory which means history repeats itself and then feeds itself and i believe we go through these different periods and we're entering one now but let's just talk about an example of this from your book team humans in statement 76 you discuss how in japan our ancestors placed stone tablets in in the ground saying don't build anything below here can you talk about what happened when we did yeah it's a lesson i'm trying to make about respecting our ancestors the tech bros that i write about in my new book in particular they everyone wants to feel like they're inventing new ip that they're the smartest things ever that they know best and we can just start over from square one no lineage no heritage no credit no footnotes or citations it's just me i was born i'm a genius here i go the young hubristic architects and nuclear power plant designers in japan they saw these old ancient stones that said do not build below this point i mean why would the ancients have put markers there because there was a very very rare flooding situation that would happen but it happened enough every couple of centuries that they realized we better tell people because our houses got torn down and our great great great great grandparents houses got torn down let's put some markers here so future generations know don't go don't try it it really is nature is big these people come the new ones and they say these were ancients building little huts they don't know they're primitive cave people who knows we're going to build our nuclear power plant right down below those stones we'll leave the stones there ha and then of course what happens giant tsunami comes wipes out the fukushima plant the nuclear devastation of that is still being dealt with i mean just because we don't hear about it on the news every day doesn't mean they're not still digging around in there trying to solve that problem which is spewing uh radiation you've got radiated fish in seattle from that still measurable it's the hubris so so for me and it reminds me of you know ari walik's book about us being good ancestors to the future it's also us respecting the ancestors of the past that they did have something to tell us we're not so inventive so modern so technological that the laws of nature no longer apply to us yeah i agree there's a lot we can learn from longpath i wanted to use what we just talked about to introduce a billionaire because we're going to be talking about the super rich and elite today but i want to talk about ray dalio worth 19 billion now and he's been on the book tour and podcast scene recently doing conversations about how the world is on the brink and dangerously close to international conflict in the areas of trade technology geopolitics and economics and he even goes out on a limb and says there's a 40 chance of global turmoil what are your thoughts on his predictions yes we live in a very brittle situation whether it's our very long supply chains through which we get our our food and our stuff the economic uncertainty that's created by huge divisions of wealth and a taxing the climate the way we do but what i would challenge any ray dalio or anybody else who's got billions of dollars to do is to look at the impact of their money where their money is sitting right now even the gates foundation they're doing wonderful things or trying to from the top down but where is the massive money of the gates foundation invested it's in that same s p 500 index fund that ray dalio's money is in and all his funds are in and that capital sitting where it is in mining companies and oil companies and other companies that really are trying to return shareholder value with little or no regard to the planet and its people is doing more damage than we can do in the best speaking tour in the world in the end the kind of environmentalism and economic and civilizational stewardship that he is calling for begins at home yeah i bring him up only because he also is a study of the social impact therein he's seeing these patterns re-emerge especially with potential conflict between china and the united states primarily because china plays this very very long game they think in terms of decades and centuries and we think of of it as tomorrow and when the two don't align you've got conflict well i wanted to just mention that because you had a defining moment i think we all have many of them in our lives but yours came in a really interesting form you were given this opportunity to speak with this very high valued price put on it so you probably were thinking i can't turn this one down but you end up landing having to drive three hours into the desert and then what ends up happening well i go to this crazy resort in the middle of the desert and wait till they come for me in a little golf cart with a little patagonia branded those kind of guys they bring me out in a golf cart to this other part of the facility and i'm waiting in my green room for them to come the microphone they clip on you and you go out and do your talk instead of bringing me out they bring these five guys into my green room and they sit around this little round table and they start peppering me with these questions about the digital future and this i'm kind of used to because most of the kinds of people who hire me to speak they're not really looking for my philosophy they're not looking for what we're talking about they're looking for what do i bet on to make the most money this year so they first they start with ethereum or bitcoin which cryptocurrency is going to go up faster virtual reality or augmented reality which is going to dominate web3 and then finally they get to the question alaska or new zealand right where should they put their bunker for the coming apocalypse and they said interesting like ray they had said that they had had people do research and they had concluded that there was a 20 chance of a world ending catastrophe in their lifetime so they were taking 20 of their money and putting it in alternative survival strategy 20 brand space programs and see studying and uploading their their brains to silicon chips and bunkers and the question that ended up taking up the majority of the hour was how do i maintain control of my security staff once my money is worthless so they're playing these walking dead scenarios they realize okay they're hiring they already have navy seals former navy seals hired to come guard their various facilities to fly in on their swat helicopter things whatever they have to be there to guard them but then they're thinking well if civilization really collapses why is that navy seal just not going to take the whole facility from me and run it himself especially if he's in charge of the navy seals and it was so funny they started to go through things like will robots be around by them that could do discipline or could we put shock collars or implants that everyone gets for one reason but then we use it for discipline also when push came to shove i finally said you know the way to prevent your security staff from killing you in the future is to be really nice to them today and i joked i said maybe you should pay for your head of securities but daughter's bot mitzvah today because then it'll be hard for him to shoot you later and they laughed it off but what i meant was if you start treating other people well now maybe you won't have to go to a bunker maybe you won't have to defend yourself from the rest of humanity well it's interesting your meeting happened before colin o'brady's but if you're not familiar with who colin o'brady is he's an adventure athlete he's set all these world records but he was asked to speak similar to you instead going to the desert he was flown to new york and thought he was giving this big talk ends up getting ushered in into this residence where again he's surrounded by five or six and he thought the whole conversation was to hear his exploits and it was really a philosophical discussion of how do you find and pursue your everest in life so a little bit different but it's a little bit more positive a little bit more positive but eerily similar yeah the thing that is interesting is i think that these bunker fantasies of these technology billionaires that is their everest in life that the global disasters and climate change are not the reasons why they're doing it they're the excuses for them to do something they've wanted to do all along in the new book i tell this story about hanging out with timothy leary back in the day timothy leary the great counterculture figure from the 60s i knew him in the 80s and 90s and he was reading one of the first books about the coming technologies it was called the media lab by stuart brandt about mit's new media lab that was going to be about the digital future and he reads this book and he's writing it and i'm thinking he's loving the idea of a digital future and what we're going to do as soon as he's done he goes blah and he throws the book across the room like it's this poison i go what tim what what happened he goes first less than three percent of the names in the index are women that shows you something and it's interesting it really does because these are boys and then he says second these guys want to recreate the womb they want to use all this technology to make up for the fact that their mommies couldn't anticipate their every need now they want to go and cocoon in a virtual reality bubble where robots and computer programs bring them everything but that they want to separate from humanity and that's the problem and that's the way that they build technologies for us not with this idea of separation and loneliness as a bad thing for them it's a good thing they want to be alone and above and apart they want to be above us kind of like gods above humanity rather than just with us yeah i think this is something yeah i think this is something that you call radical self-reliance am i getting that right you could yeah they call it it's an interesting term they call it self-sovereignty that's the phrase they use and it's an interesting word i keep thinking as i as i think back on these guys they keep wanting to live outside themselves do we want to do what we used to call going meta remember going meta it's like there's theater then there's meta theater the frame around the frame everyone wants to level up so you get peter thiel the guy who started paypal the multi-billionaire he runs palantir now he wrote a book and it's called zero to one and the idea is that you and your business shouldn't be competing with everyone else you should be one order of magnitude higher than everybody else stuart brand told all of us we are as gods and may as well get good at it one level above normal people mark zuckerberg when facebook starts failing what does he do meta he's gonna be one level above and as you talk to these people listen to them you realize or ray kurzweil wants to put his brain one level above humanity up in a mainframe computer somewhere what they don't get what euro podcast is about is passion is about getting down and in you know passion is incarnate it's in the body with other people it's being not extra human but truly human feeling your heart feeling your blood feeling the sweat this is where the core human experience resides not on a silicon wafer i i agree with you absolutely in the book you talk about this in the words quote unquote the mindset how prevalent do you think this mindset is i mean it's pretty prevalent in some ways it's contagious the mindset most simply is this kind of a tech billionaire belief that with enough money and technology they can escape the catastrophes that they're creating with money and technology it's the idea that you can somehow build a car that can escape its own exhaust it just doesn't work i couldn't believe i just read this a great article by cory doctorow about the epson printer company how they make these printers that seize up after a certain number of pages automatically they lock so that you have to buy a new printer and they have some excuse that there's a certain part that might wear out and they're worried for you so they just lock the computer don't let you replace the part and i'm thinking the guy at the company who makes that decision he's aware of climate change he knows what's going on yet he is able to say i think i can make more money selling extra printers to people than the damage is going to cause me i'm going to have enough money to somehow escape what i'm doing to the rest of the world and that mindset in some ways trickles down to all of us particularly at times like covid when we're like maybe i'm just gonna stay home get an amazon doorbell with a little camera get fresh direct and then grubhub and doordash and amazon prime and i'm going to kind of hold it out but yeah but the mindset is really it's a hubris that somehow you can escape the externalities of your own kind of misdeeds yeah i would just follow onto that is then if they have this mindset then why are these super elite who are envied for being so powerful why do they appear to be so afraid because i think they've realized that it's gonna be trickier trickier than they thought used to just be they do all this bad stuff they make addictive programs on their ipads and then they're sure to send their own children to rudolf steiner schools where they're not gonna touch the technologies that they happen to be making during i met a lot of those guys i don't let my kid use snapchat the ones who are programming it for my kids don't let their kids touch it they're up in the hills of california with a goat share and organic food and rudolph steiner education and no technology and a faraday cage around their house so they're it's like wait a minute i think once the forest fires came once and nothing against right or left but most of these guys are left and once trump was elected i think they started to think uh-oh things are getting a little out of control and the climate might be such a systemic problem that i can't build an estate in malibu that's going to be capable of resisting forest fire i might actually have to do something about this so half of them think okay i'm a tech bro i know what to do and they come up with a software stack to save humanity all we have to do is clear cut these forests and build my thing i've got game b plan 2 kind of a sim city video game version of remaking society as i think build tunnels under the city and throw sulfuric particles into the sky and don't worry i'm gonna do it there's those guys the great reset sort of people who have way too much faith in their technology's ability to do things without unintended consequences and then my billionaires who are more like how am i gonna get off this sphere before it you know before it collapses well as i was reading your book and i'm not sure if you're familiar with this book i'm going to reference but it reminded me of the 1957 novel atlas shrugged how would you compare the character john galt who's in that to the people that you're describing well it's interesting in john galt's industrial age you could always externalize the damage of what you were doing to someone else whether it's the conquistadors coming to south america and looking at the natives like they're just trees so we can clear-cut the people as easily as the forest whether you're using enslaved labor in africa or china it's always somewhere else and you can justify what you're doing to the others somehow and never truly pay i mean maybe in afterlife or in your conscience or in your soul you pay the price but never actually physically pay the price there was always enough room enough territory enough space that you could keep going go west go further get more these guys don't have anywhere to escape to anymore they're kind of at the limits of capitalism the other thing that's different is these guys these days they have what's called exponential growth in john gold's day you had linear growth you had dale carnegie growth rockefeller kinds of growth so you could amass a certain amount of wealth but the division of wealth wasn't quite as extreme it's like right now we have not just capitalism we have capitalism on digital steroids we used to say the stock market was the tail wagging the dog of real businesses now it's the derivatives market and the derivative of the derivative of the derivatives market that's wagging the tail of the stock market that's wagging the tail of the marketplace that's wagging the tail of reality the derivatives exchange which is just for people who don't know it's a way of kind of going meta on the stock market instead of buying shares of a company you buy kind of theoretical shares a year in the future six months in the future so that you can compress all that time and leverage more time a lot faster the derivatives exchange got so big that in 2013 the derivatives exchange purchased the new york stock exchange i mean think about that the new york stock exchange which is an abstraction of the marketplace which is an abstraction of real people's goods and services and needs was consumed by its own abstraction so the the john galt thing is still there but it's so much more leveraged he has so much more impact not just on other people but on the environment in which he himself lives and that's what these guys are realizing they need to escape from the environment that they made well we're going to get a lot more into that one of the things i wanted to dive into before we get there is that i believe we have entered into this current order where we have a few super rich and relatively a huge amount of poor it's an imbalance in our history that i don't think we've ever seen as a species before this income inequality that we have and what do you think it really tells us about our current system and i just want to preface this with you and i were talking about seth godin before we came on the podcast and he talks about climate change is really a systems issue i think we have a systems problem not only about that but in a much bigger way that's causing this inequality oh yeah we are not up against the hard limits of our global environment we are up against the hard limits of a digital balance sheet we have an economic system that was for better or for worse it was invented by monarchs in the 12th and 13th century really at that time to prevent the rise of the middle class people were trading with each other they were starting to get wealthy the former peasants were becoming trades people they were going to the market and they had local monies and all these different little industries the problem was the aristocracy was getting poor as the people were getting wealthy so they invented really two things one was the chartered monopoly or what we now think of as the corporation chartered monopoly says without a charter you're not a lot of work in that industry so little joe the shoemaker can't make shoes he's got to go work for his majesty's royal shoe company as a wage laborer so now he's no longer an entrepreneur or a business person now he's an employee selling his time second thing they came up with and this is the big one is central currency central currency was the only money you're allowed to to use so if you want to trade with someone else you've got to borrow central currency from the treasury at interest and pay it back and that was a way for wealthy people to get wealthy simply by having money so they were the exclusive purveyors of the cash that we were allowed to use and that's really where we are today we are living in an economic system where in order for it to work it has to grow money is created at interest so more money has to be paid back that's why the politicians always say the gdp has to grow it's not because we need more stuff it's not because we need to get more food out of the ground or we need more models of our iphone it's because that number has to grow so it's as if as a great quote by korsepski the map has replaced the territory the balance sheet the spreadsheet matters more than reality and what seth is showing us in his new book is this doesn't add up anymore there is a real world that can no longer serve this abstracted economy the tech bros are taking the other approach they're saying oh no let's make the economy even more abstract if it's not working with regular money let's make digital money let's make bitcoin and ethereum and all those things they're going meta on it where seth is saying no no no let's stop worrying about these abstract things and get back to reality if you go the tech bro way if you go into the bitcoin way what do you end up with it's insane we are literally burning the planet as a way of showing our faith in a digital currency you know if you looked at it from space you would see oh look at those humans they're burning the equivalent of the nation of argentina in order to prove that they love this sort of digital money they are literally taking their planet their energy and turning it into digital symbols that do nothing for anybody yeah and unless these industries start changing the way that they're doing things radically we're going to keep burning these fossil fuels and there's not an alternative outside of nuclear which even if we had nuclear you know i'm no physics expert but i've studied enough of it to understand we don't have the infrastructure to support everyone that's going to need it in the future so i mean it would be nice and i love aoc and green new deal and all these plans and ideas and even elon musk has a lot of them but we can't transition that quickly to an entirely renewable energy system it's not like everyone get rid of your cars and buy teslas everyone get rid of your generators and get the solar panel if we tried to transition in just a few years from what we have now to a renewable energy grid we would need to extract so many minerals so much rare earth metals and lithium and batteries and things from the earth we would destroy the planet in that 10 years really and i say sadly but i don't mean it sadly because i think we get a better life we've got to turn down the dial a bit we've got to use less energy as people and as companies and it's not that hard to do we don't need more stuff right now on my block every single one of the ten of us on my block has a minimum viable product lawnmower from home depot or lowe's what if as a block we had one high quality lawnmower that we shared what's the problem with that the only problem with that we have to share well that's great we get to know each other none of us is using a lawnmower all day i'm sure one lawnmower can serve 10 houses pretty easily the real problem with it is when i suggest this is well what about the lawnmower company what about them say well what if they have to make less lawnmowers it's gonna be okay and then maybe we'll work less days per week you know it's like we don't need as much stuff the only reason we need to buy and sell as much stuff as we do is to support the balance sheets of companies not the needs of actual human beings well and i saw that firsthand when i was in fortune 50 world where your shareholders are driving a completely different metric than what you should really be concerned about i mean if you're constantly looking at quarterly profits you're going to do that at the expense of everything else where we should be looking at a lot of other important things as we're looking at these companies and how we value them and i think that's a big component of how things need to change and that's why a lot of times i like private companies more than public companies i'm interested in talking with you about that actually i mean because you've been in those rooms where it happens i get these keynote talks i did a keynote talk for a fortune 50 company it was a food and beverage company and right before i went on the ceo was there and it's in front of all these shareholders and the ceo is shouting what was it 5.2 5.2 which was their percent growth target for that year and i'm thinking i got up there and i said geez you're one of the biggest companies in the world making such revenue if your only objective is that you have to grow in order to be okay if you're already one of the 20 biggest companies in the world and you have to grow aren't we going to run out of room well i was at a tech company and while i was there at the time they had five different presidents running different size businesses kind of consumer products small medium business products large enterprise public public products professional services products software products and what shocked me was that the way that they were leading these individuals is by having them do this enormous competition and it was a huge competition if you were on top of this list and they would get this huge trophy every quarter you would make probably at the end of the year 40 50 60 million dollars if you came in last place you got fired so there's this enormous pressure that's put on these people to act in ways that completely go to lining their pocketbooks but doesn't go to really rewarding what the customer really wants what the planet really needs etc so and you keep company that way in the long term that's what i don't know if you've ever had alfie cohn on this show no um a brilliant business theories education theorist and he distinguishes between intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards and he talks about like the word compensation when you're compensating someone for something that means the thing they're doing they don't like because they're getting compensated for it what you should have is intrinsic reward so rather than giving someone extra money for doing well you give them more responsibility in the company you give them more autonomy there's back to my word you let them get to the inner skunk work so let them go to the innovation lab you reward them with a more central place in the company culture rather than with cash or vacation which has nothing to do with the actual work i want to use this as a way to segue because the company i was with was doing a ton of mergers and acquisitions which is the title of your second chapter what i found working in these large companies and then i moved to a smaller one so let's say i was with a 60 billion company i moved to a billion dollar company which is still mom and pop yeah but this company at the time had the most sophisticated network of placing digital ads in front of consumers and one of the things that i found extremely worrisome is we did this deal with another company that allowed us to actually see inside your home and this was nine ten years ago and we could tell from your device that you were in the house we could tell from this other company that you were watching tv and we could marry the two so that as you were viewing what you were viewing on the tv we could send you ads almost instantaneously to do it and i use that story as this unintended consequences of what technology is doing and it's completely changed i think human culture in ways that we never thought it would you talk about this in chapter two but you also bring it up in your book team human where you write that the internet fostered a revolution but not a renaissance and i wanted to ask why is that honestly i would say it's because in the mid 90s we as a society decided that the internet was less important for the way it could unleash the collective human imagination than for the way it could save the nasdaq stock exchange so the whole bias energy of dynamic of digital technology changed when i was interested in the internet it was about oh my gosh what are we going to do together on this thing then wired magazine came along and kind of recast it reframed the internet as this business opportunity but once you're betting once it's a business you're no longer looking for people to be creative and unpredictable you want people to be predictable so you can make a bet and get the outcome that you're looking for so we reversed the polarity of these technologies we created websites we called them sticky websites in order to get more eyeball hours from human beings and even think of that phrase eyeball hours that means we're using these machines to operate the people to get eyeball hours from them on our screen that was the essential shift that instead of people programming technology technology is programming people and we created these feedback loops i mean it sounds like magic but it's not we develop algorithms and tell the algorithms get as much attention and money from that person as possible by any means necessary go and then so we've got thousands of little algorithms out there looking for how to manipulate us with behavioral finance i'm sure you've had people on who do behavioral finance looking for what they call exploits and it's funny when i was a hacker in the 80s an exploit was a hole that you found in the machine i remember a kid found an exploit we called it in the computer system that ran the thermostat at the shopping mall and he hacked into it and turned off the air conditioning in the mall that's called an x split you find the hole now what they talk about is how do you find exploits in humans in the human psyche that you can leverage to get people to pay more attention to whatever it is you want or to click on whatever it is you want so once we have a multi-trillion dollar technology industry there to operate humans you've got a very different a set of outcomes i think it's really scary because there are some people who believe that our evolution is technology that we are going to be controlled by computers and i found it very unnerving a few years ago i wrote a piece on what a.i was doing and how some of the foremost scientists in the world who were creating it were completely unnerved because it's not acting in the way that it was intended it's learning differently than humans do and i guess one of the easiest ways to explain this is if you look at a tesla and it's driving the system learns what is the action that i can take that has the greatest probability of protecting the person in the car which could be a decision that is completely different than what the human would do in it because they might purposely put the car into an accident because they're seeing what might unfold in front of it but i think that this is something we have to really watch for because if not what's going to be upon us i think is what was portrayed in the matrix yeah i mean the reality is you know computers or ais they will do what we tell them to and it's really hard to hold in your head all the considerations involved so you could tell a computer get my daughter into a good college and the computer can find out oh you know applicants who have only one leg get into college because colleges say oh isn't that remarkable that person did so well even with one leg so the computer cuts off your kid's leg you know what i mean that's the kind of logic that we're facing they're gonna do whatever whatever we say and all of the possibilities that wouldn't have occurred to us in the moment aren't going to occur to the machine because they can't take everything into account that a human being will and interestingly enough i mean these are the funniest stories in the new book actually is that a lot of the technologists i spoke with the one thing they're afraid of is artificial intelligence they believe that they've gone meta on us that they're above us that they we humans are just controllable nonsense and they'll always could hire their navy seals or get ray guns or something to get rid of us they're not so scared of us they'll leave the planet do whatever what they're scared of is ai because they think that ai can go meta on them that ai can can can can control them the way that they mean to control us and one guy came up to me at a another kind of private retreat of nicer but also elite elect elite tech dudes he came up to me he was a big social media ceo guy and he said are you really comfortable with all that stuff you've been writing about ai lately like what what do you mean because you're being really openly critical of the ai he said yeah what's the problem he goes well what about when ai takes over and they see what you've written about them what do you think they're going to do to you and it's like what do you mean they're they're gonna and then he said i don't write anything i don't even tweet about ai because i don't want them to know and i said well if ai's are that smart aren't they going to be able to look at your posting pattern know that you've been avoiding it and be able to infer how you feel about ai because that's what ai's do and his jaw drops like he hadn't even considered the techniques that he's using on all of us that they're all using to throw us into categories into statistical buckets that of course there's a population of people doing exactly what he's doing and the ais are going to be able to figure out how he feels and that was the moment i realized they are simultaneously so much smarter than me right these guys would do better on their sats and know more about computers and math and i mean they're brilliant but they're so stupid at the same so laughably uneducated at the very same moment i think it's because they drop out of school too soon they get noticed by a venture capitalist when they're 19. they've got some good idea in their dorm room and they quit college to go be rich and they don't bother to learn history and economics and most of all ethics liberal the kinds of stuff you talk about the actual the human to human what makes us alive what makes life worth living they're like cut off from that that's why you look at mark zuckerberg's metaverse all the these little creatures running around in there these humans they're cut off at the waist they're torsos with heads what does that mean about their sense of grounding about their sense of what does it mean to be a human being on planet earth it's like they don't connect with that yeah i mean it just scares me i mean one he did the metaverse kind of as politicians do when they get in trouble to divert the attention to something new yeah but to me it's like ready player one the movie where you're gonna have the society that you have the shell of a body and your mind is constantly in this metaverse instead of being physically present and when you start losing that human connection as the grant study showed at harvard people become extremely unhappy and they lose joy and fulfillment in their life because we need to give love and feel love and you can't do that through a cell phone or a keyboard you've got to do it by interacting with people and we're getting further and further away from that or even with cash which we think oh i could just give money it's nice to give money but we found is i refer to the studies in my book is wealthy people that compassion for others their empathy erodes they put billionaires in mri machines and show the pictures of people suffering and the parts of your brain that are supposed to light up when you see someone else suffering the empathic circuits of the brain the frontal lobe they don't light up with these people it's as if the wealthy have had a kind of a brain damage that when you get to a certain point of wealth you lose your ability to identify with other human beings that's a really toxic effect of extreme wealth yeah and i think the other thing people really need to be aware of and i'm glad you covered in the book is these war chests that the tech companies have been building to influence and lobby for policy change and it's crazy to me that you see these tech companies that have been lobbying these politicians and the politicians are doing what they say and then it's starting to get out of whack and the population is starting to get angry about it and they bring them up on capitol hill and berate them when they've been buying them for the past 10 years to me it's a colossal failure and you look at this and it's some of the biggest tech companies that are out there who are the biggest culprits each year is it facebook that's the biggest lobbyist in the world or is it google and then they're just following what the oil industry did before them and what gm and the auto industry did before them and the rail industry did before them this is what you do is you lobby government to get the thing you want it's just that with digital it happens so fast at such scale that it's a little bit more unnerving but when you actually do and you've met them too when you actually meet and speak with these guys you realize emperor has no clothes the technologies are good at ripping things up but they really don't do they don't work as advertised and they lead us to devalue the kinds of things that you're talking about they lead us to devalue our passion you listen to the way zuckerberg talks about the metaverse it's very flat this is a passionless universe it's a utilitarian universe i mean funny i'm thinking about that now that the queen's dying and as an american i'm like really kind of who cares it's a queen and she's old and everybody's and there was a great guy named great well great for a while he named name walter badgett in england and he really wrote a lot about the difference between kind of efficient government and sort of spiritual government he they even talked about it in that tv series the crown it's great that we have parliament to do all the efficient things but people need something else too and that's what the queen does the queen and the monarchy are there to fulfill the kind of our sense of dignity as human beings and that's what we're really losing in america is what is is our faith in our intrinsic dignity as human beings for being alive it doesn't matter how much you produce how much you consume it's you're okay like mr rogers used to say you're okay just the way you are you are special and that's what we need to be communicating to people not you need to get richer you need to be more like elon musk no you need to be less like elon musk well the thing that worries me in many occasions i mean you could play this two ways you could say that in some ways we need the elon musks in the world because we need their mind to take us to the next level but in the same way we demonize them for what they've achieved now it's interesting to me because you've got people who are building bunkers physically in alaska and new zealand and in the forest and preserves and other things and then you've got elon who wants to take us to mars and i remember seeing an article last year where i can't remember the magazine but it might have been time where he said we'll be at mars in five years so i took that and i asked my naval academy classmate who used to be the chief astronaut and i said what are your thoughts about us getting to mars in five years and he goes there's no flipping way you've got to just think about this how in the world when we haven't even figured out how to get a volkswagen off the planet in mars are we going to land this thing that's going to be the size of probably two buses on it and get that thing back off not to say that it's not possible but then once you get there how do you support this bubble that you're living in when as you point out we haven't even been able to do it in the biospheres here on earth so i think one of the fatal flaws in this whole thing as you bring it up is you can be in this contained system but you're going to have to be serviced by other people who are not in that system and how do you keep that ecosystem fluctuating i just don't get it right and there's a lot of science fiction movies like that where you basically have earth now as the enslaved population servicing the space station or mars colony where the wealthy get to live but that's not going to work either honestly you're going to have an easier time trying to survive in a climate nuclear devastated earth than in the toxic clouds of venus or out on mars it is harder but the problem with elon i mean yes he's marketed technologies very well we were having problems getting people interested in electric cars in america it's not that he invented the electric car anything technological or did anything special but he had capital and he has marketing ability and he sold american men on the idea that an electric car is cool that was a good thing he did i mean of course all of the green savings of every tesla that's ever been made was more than outdone and undone when he went ahead and bought a billion dollars of bitcoin right just that act alone was like 30 years worth of tesla's gone pollution wise the problem with elon is he's something he's what's called an accelerationist another science fiction idea that what we have to do is pedal to the metal let this society burn itself out so that we can get to the new one what elon says is there going to be one day trillions of people living in the universe all spread out through the solar system and the galaxy and there's only eight billion people alive today and if these eight billion people have to suffer now for the benefit of the trillions of people in the universe that's fine and what i'm saying is no there is no more ends justifies the means logic that will work you can't sacrifice anything now for the future you really can't the way to ensure a beautiful future is to start living beautifully and lovingly today if you're not doing it in the moment you're not actually doing it yeah it's interesting i read this article as i was researching to do this podcast was written by this writer in texas named jason rhode i'm not sure if you've read this but he writes in this and i'm gonna just quote it what are the tech preppers really worried about not death by fire quake or ice not the rising seas or the zombie plague not the return of christ or rogue comets seeing clearly calamity that the wealthy fear is democracy returning to the united states every tall tale they tell involved the specter of the mob and he said the tech preppers understand at a deep level that their ill-gotten gains are predicted on an unjust system deep in the brain where reptile impulses live tech pros now hoarding is wrong and i'm wondering if you would agree with some of his sentiment yes and no the mob coming after the tech bros with pitchforks is not democracy right that's something else that's the revolt of the masses and revenge democracy is a coordinated effort by people to come to consensus mob rule or q anon people storming the capital that's not democracy that's a revolt that's something else there's still the infrastructure for a functioning democracy that has unfortunately been corrupted by money and undermined by would-be authoritarians but we could still if enough of us decided to participate appropriately in representative democracy we could very easily minimize the impact of the tech bros but i don't think we have to go after them with pitchforks even though they're afraid of that i don't think it's a matter of revolt i think the easier path is to live in a world how do we raise kids that don't want to emulate elon musk or peter thiel or mark zuckerberg you help them laugh at these people when you see mark zuckerberg tell publicly now he says he wants to give back 99 of his money and you say well look mark zuckerberg wants to give back 99 of his money what if he had made facebook 99 less extractive and harmful 99 percent less girls cutting themselves and have it going into anorexia 99 less competition and depression that would have been a better way than taking all that and then trying to shove the money back in after the fact i agree that the tech bros what they're most afraid of is us but they've been afraid of us from the beginning that's what they're running from that's what they've been running from for 3000 years when francis bacon said that the object of the game that of he's the founder the forefather of empirical science he said empirical science will let us take nature by the forelock hold her down and submit her to our will so it's basically a rape fantasy of control and domination that has gone unquestioned to this day it's not just the witches of the medieval europe that are being held down it's all of us that feel held down by this tiny population of uber wealthy technologists and yeah there's going to be a comeuppance but i don't think our best path forward is to attack them i'm trying to write a book where we can laugh at them and then move on and get to the serious work of meeting one another again of not being like them but being like human beings yeah that leads me to the question you say in the book you came to the realization that the billionaires are actually the losers and i think it goes into what you were just talking about so i just wanted you to expand on that yeah i mean they get what they want is what is the ultimate virtual reality goggles where they have simulated algorithm girlfriends loving them in whatever ways that real people don't they get the predictable closed dry isolated techno bubble with nothing nothing unexpected life is the opposite life is about gaining the resilience that you can start to welcome the unexpected that you look for novelty that the idea of getting up in the morning is not to have the most predictable life as measured by your stock savings but to have a day i don't know who i'm going to see today

2022-09-26 09:59

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