April 2, 2013 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:54:00
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Here we go folks. | ||
| I know we had some issues. | ||
| I know in the past it hasn't always gone perfectly. | ||
| But today we're gonna try our hardest. | ||
| We're gonna try our hardest. | ||
| Get shit together, folks. | ||
| Put it together. | ||
| This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is brought to you by Audible.com. | ||
| If you go to Audible.com forward slash Joe, you will get one free audio book and you will get 30 free days of Audible service. | ||
| If you have never used Audible.com or heard of them, it's an excellent resource for audio books, perhaps the best on the net. | ||
| And that's a strong statement, but I stand by it. | ||
| More than 100,000 different titles, great books like our friend Chris Ryan's Sex at Dawn, that's available on Audible. | ||
| You can get that for free if you go to audible.com forward slash Joe. | ||
| If you don't use audiobooks, you're a silly bitch because they're awesome. | ||
| It's great if you have to travel, if you get stuck in traffic, if you're sitting on a bus. | ||
| It's an amazing thing that can take an otherwise wasted moment in time and actually make it enjoyable and make it educational and enrich yourself while you're on the bus, bitch. | ||
| Get it together. | ||
| And if you go to audible.com forward slash Joe, you can get it together for free for 30 bucks or for 30 days, rather. | ||
| 30 days for free audio service and one free audio book. | ||
| Go try it. | ||
| Check it out. | ||
| We are also brought to you by Hover. | ||
| Hover is a domain name company that's owned by the same people that own Ting. | ||
| And if you know how gushy and lovey we are to Ting, you know that we feel the same way about Hover. | ||
| The idea behind Ting, what I love about it, is that they're trying to give you a great deal on excellent service. | ||
| And they're trying to make things sort of as easy and ethical, as simple and fair as possible. | ||
| And that same sort of attitude is taken up by Hover. | ||
| They try to provide you with things for free that other domain name companies will make you charge for, like who is domain name privacy? | ||
| If you go to Hover.com forward slash Rogan, you will get 10% off your domain name registrations. | ||
| I actually have domains registered through Hover. | ||
| I got a bunch of them that I'll probably never use. | ||
| But I had an idea. | ||
| I can't tell you right now, man. | ||
| I can't tell you. | ||
| I had a project in mind. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| I have kids and projects. | ||
| I start them up and then I go, Jim, what the fuck am I doing with this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's the weed. | |
| Silly website idea. | ||
| But if you wanted to register a website, I mean, I obviously run actual web. | ||
| I mean, I have JoeRogan.net and there's other websites. | ||
| But if you want to start your own, Hover's the way to go. | ||
| Go, check it out. | ||
| And I believe you get free domain name registration if you sign up for more than a year. | ||
| Isn't it something like that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Free domain with a year. | ||
| Yeah, it's an awesome company. | ||
| So go check it out. | ||
| Hover.com forward slash Rogan. | ||
| Go there. | ||
| Save some money. | ||
| We are also about to buy, is that it? | ||
| No, we have one more, right? | ||
| Oh, Stamps.com. | ||
| Stamps.com, which if you've ever seen those silly Death Squad kitty cat t-shirts that Brian Redband creates, and if you haven't seen them, go to DeathSquad.tv. | ||
| They're pretty badass, and especially the hypnotic Lookin' one. | ||
| Psycho. | ||
| Psychedelic cat. | ||
| I love that little fucker. | ||
| But Brian sends all that stuff through stamps.com. | ||
| If you are someone who runs your own business, going to the post office can be a real pain in the ass. | ||
| It's a long wait in line to deal with some unenthusiastic person that doesn't really want to weigh your shit and tell you how much it costs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, it's a pain in the ass. | |
| It's a huge drag. | ||
| And then there's like those people waiting behind you like, really? | ||
| You're bringing boxes of shit in here? | ||
| You can actually do all this stuff right from your desk. | ||
| All you have to do is go to Stamps.com and check out how it works. | ||
| You buy and print actual official US postage for any letter or package using your own computer and printer. | ||
| It's an amazing thing. | ||
| They send you a digital scale. | ||
| It calculates the exact postage. | ||
| There's a little microphone. | ||
| If you go to stamps.com, there's a little microphone in the upper corner. | ||
| corner if you click on it and enter the promo code JRE you will get a $110 bonus offer which includes digital scale and up to $55 of free postage. | ||
| It's an excellent service folks and again if you run a business and you don't use stampsbike.com you're really being silly because it will make your life so much more simple. | ||
| If you have to dread those treks to the post office. | ||
| I'm sure that scale will be good for weighing out tobacco too. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| How dare you in the middle of a Stamps.com interview? | ||
| I don't think you're really talking about tobacco, sir. | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| I do not believe you. | ||
| Listen, we in no way endorse selling illegal tobacco and then shipping it using Stamps.com. | ||
| That is not what Stamps.com is for, okay? | ||
| It's for flags. | ||
| If you're selling American flags, if you've got maybe ammo that needs to be shipped legally, state to state... | ||
| Yes, go to Stamps.com, but please, no illegal tobacco. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at it. | |
| It's a pretty badass scale right there. | ||
| That was... | ||
| Alright, ladies and gentlemen, just go there. | ||
| The code is J-R-E. Use it. | ||
| Stamps.com. | ||
| It's fucking awesome. | ||
| Go check it out. | ||
| That's Stamps.com. | ||
| At the top of the home page, enter JRE. Enjoy, relax, repeat, rinse. | ||
| Douglas Rushkoff is here, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Cue the music. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Do you know how to do it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's kind of. | |
| It's got too much tobacco in it. | ||
| The Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | ||
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Too loud? | ||
| Yeah, it's alright. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sorry. | ||
| We have an adjustment thing here. | ||
| If it's too loud, we can actually lower your volume where you're at. | ||
| Are you this one right here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is that better? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is that better for you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah? | ||
| Okay, cool. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
| Didn't mean to blow your ears off. | ||
| Thanks for joining us. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Douglas Rushcroft, if you do not know of him, would you call yourself a media analyst? | ||
| Media theorist. | ||
| Media theorist. | ||
| Author mainly. | ||
| Author mainly, yeah. | ||
| And your new book is called Present Shock, When Everything Happens All at Once. | ||
| Everything happens now. | ||
| When everything happens now. | ||
| I saw quite a few of your videos online. | ||
| Really, really interesting conversations. | ||
| And one of them that really struck me There were several of them that struck me, but one of them was your story of being mugged, and you told people on an online room where you got mugged, and people were upset that you, in telling the world that you got mugged there, it was lowering their property values. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that was a bad one. | |
| That's so crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it was one thing to get mugged, which is kind of freaky in itself. | ||
| You know, and whatever, you know, shame and weirdness goes with that. | ||
| But, um... | ||
| I guess what I was trying to do, I mean, deep down was probably elicit, you know, love and affection from people on my list. | ||
| You know, so I put up, oh, you know, and there was a social, some social responsibility to it. | ||
| So I put up where I got mugged because everyone should know this is maybe a dangerous stretch here. | ||
| We got to maybe get a light. | ||
| But, um... | ||
| Yeah, so I sent it out, and then the first two emails I got back from this loving list of parents was, how dare you say exactly where it happened? | ||
| We live right across the street. | ||
| You're going to lower our property values. | ||
| I'm like, are you selling now? | ||
| No, we're not selling, but it was a really weird time when people needed their property values to go up because they were trying to get bigger mortgages and pay down and do all that. | ||
| And it was just like so panicky there about that, that some, you know, someone was afraid, oh, what if a newspaper covers it and it's bad? | ||
| It's so weird when ones and zeros trump humanity, you know, and in that case, that's exactly what that is. | ||
| That's ones and zeros trump humanity. | ||
| Well, yeah, and two kinds of ones and zeros, you know, the ones and zeros of money, you know, and the ones and zeros of sort of digital technology, which I think Can create a kind of a distance that you wouldn't get. | ||
| Because you're not feeling the impact of saying that to someone's face. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a weird communication that takes place online that doesn't have any consequence. | ||
| You can do it anonymously and it's like these barbs that you can just send out and illogically. | ||
| In ways that you would never, if you had to deal with someone one-on-one, Because you would feel it. | ||
| You would look at them. | ||
| You would feel the response. | ||
| You would be like, why are you saying this? | ||
| Like, why are you being such an asshole? | ||
| But because you are anonymous, so people are just like in this unnatural communication thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then the part that then worries me after that is, if you get used to doing it like that in an anonymous way online, Does that start to make the behavior a bit more normative when you're even with your identity? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I guarantee it has to. | ||
| It has to. | ||
| There's no free rides when it comes to that. | ||
| I really feel like your thoughts... | ||
| There was always a thing... | ||
| I remember when I was in high school, someone in my school newspaper wrote a funny critique about the Boy Scouts. | ||
| And one of the things that he didn't like about the Boy Scouts was that they wanted you to keep your thoughts pure. | ||
| And he's like, you know, well, my thoughts are my own thoughts, you know? | ||
| As long as I don't do anything, I don't think there's anything wrong with my thoughts. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know if that was really smartly argued, I remember reading that going, wow, this kid's pretty clever. | ||
| But then I thought about it, I'm like, but if you're thinking about creepy shit, you probably are kind of creepy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, and it's not going to get any better. | ||
| You know, you're just going to eventually one day you're going to snap and then you're going to do something. | ||
| Do the creepy thing? | ||
| Yeah, if you really are, like, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, everyone has their own definition of thoughts being pure. | ||
| You know, like, a more lenient person might allow a lot of, like, healthy sexual things in the idea of thoughts being pure. | ||
| As long as it's not creepy. | ||
| But there's other people that would just sit around and say, well, let me just think about creepy shit all day and not do it and I'm fine. | ||
| But you're not. | ||
| There's no free ride. | ||
| There may be, though. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Well, I mean, what you're describing is the benefits of an absolute police state as long as it was always right. | ||
| You know, that's no problem. | ||
| You know, that's the problem. | ||
| I mean, you can always get your minority report, you know, just in case maybe they're wrong. | ||
| I'm not really subscribing to that. | ||
| I'm just saying that you really can't have really shitty thoughts and get through. | ||
| And I think that if you're really shitty online, you have those thoughts, even if it's only online, I really believe that negative energy is going to leak over. | ||
| Yeah, genuinely shitty. | ||
| I mean, it's just how do you decide what's shitty and what's not. | ||
| But yeah. | ||
| No, it's... | ||
| People, when they're... | ||
| The meaner you are online, Without your face, the meaner you can be online with your face and the meaner you can get in real life, you know, until you just got... | ||
| Mean people. | ||
| Do you investigate people's Twitter? | ||
| Like if someone says something weird on Twitter, do you go to their Twitter page and see just all their cunty shit that they write to everybody and go, oh, they're just crazy guys. | ||
| Well, I will admit, I focus way more on the cunty tweets and emails and things than on the ones that are loving and positive. | ||
| I'll get like 10 emails, oh, your book was great, oh, I loved it, you've changed my life, my children, you know, worship at your altar. | ||
| He's like, delete, delete, delete, delete. | ||
| What's wrong with you, Reshkov? | ||
| Who is this guy? | ||
| Your book's hot! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Why did he say this? | ||
| Yeah, this is the biggest piece of shit I've ever read. | ||
| What? | ||
| A thousand people loved it more than life itself. | ||
| Right, but I'll spend the rest of my week trying to convince this one guy. | ||
| Oh, no you don't. | ||
| Why I'm not a bad guy. | ||
| Why the book is actually okay. | ||
| Oh, you gotta learn the internet. | ||
| Yeah, well, now it's too many. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a newbie. | |
| Well, it's hard. | ||
| It's hard not to engage people because it's like a person saying it to you. | ||
| It's very similar. | ||
| And to someone who's public, you're out there. | ||
| Your name is out there. | ||
| The videos are out there. | ||
| Anyone can find out about you and see you. | ||
| They can reach you, too. | ||
| And reaching you on Twitter, they can send you some shitty thing just to get a rise from you. | ||
| And then they're just making you dance. | ||
| And you're dancing to someone else's spell. | ||
| So you've got to learn how to just look at yourself and go, does this make sense? | ||
| No, I do, but what it actually... | ||
| Fuck that guy. | ||
| Oh, yeah, and be able to leave it. | ||
| But you've got to be able to do that to the point where it's healthy and not beyond. | ||
| Because at some point, if everybody's going, Roshkoff, wake up! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your book needs to be this when it's, you know, you can do this, but you can't do that. | |
| Well, in the end of the sale, the market would tell me, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, the market would tell you, but you're not a dumb guy. | ||
| You would never do that. | ||
| You would never make a book like that that was so off and out of line. | ||
| You would look at yourself along the way. | ||
| I can tell I'm talking to you for ten minutes you're not that kind of guy. | ||
| The kind of guy that would do that is like, there's certain people that are functional crazy. | ||
| And they can, like, figure some things out and chase some things down. | ||
| And then they'll get stuck in some sort of a weird rut and you can't talk them out of it. | ||
| And, you know, you realize, oh, he was crazy all the time. | ||
| He just figured out how to get through life. | ||
| You know, those are the ones that will go off on crazy tangents. | ||
| And people go, what are you doing? | ||
| Because the guy wasn't really nuts in the first place. | ||
| You're not nuts. | ||
| You're all right, man. | ||
| You don't have to worry about that shit. | ||
| Get that one out of your... | ||
| You need to keep a posse of people around you to keep telling you you're not insane. | ||
| Then you can... | ||
| Then we can... | ||
| I think there's a good thing that comes from criticism, though, because it's even really harsh criticism. | ||
| It's because if they're ridiculous, and if you look at what they're saying, if it's ridiculous and mean, it really reveals far more about them than it really does about you. | ||
| But look at what they're saying, and is there any merit to it at all? | ||
| Does it make any sense, or is it just nonsense? | ||
| Is it just a guy being an asshole, or if you weren't you, could you find merit in it? | ||
| Like, I've found criticism from the biggest assholes, but it was like, there was like a hair of accuracy into it that made me, like, reconsider certain things. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and the most valuable thing about it for me, entertaining it to some extent, is just, it makes me more flexible, you know, as a thinker. | ||
| If you can wrap your head around, oh, where am I wrong? | ||
| It can make you a little indecisive because it's like, well, he's right and he's also right. | ||
| Sometimes things are complicated. | ||
| I know, but that's, for me, the object of the game. | ||
| That's why I keep writing. | ||
| I'm writing about the now, being present. | ||
| If you're actually present, You have to be present with yourself, and you have to be present with who you're with. | ||
| That's the thing that everybody looks to be avoiding, one way or another. | ||
| Whether they're doing it because I've got to earn money, or they're doing it because they've got to check a device. | ||
| I mean, there's the constant SLSing. | ||
| I see so few people. | ||
| I walk into rooms now, and I feel like... | ||
| I don't feel like I'm in a room with these people. | ||
| There's no sort of social cohesion. | ||
| They're not really present. | ||
| They're each in their own little segment. | ||
| Interconnected with the internet. | ||
| They're friends. | ||
| Yeah, and then not connected with each other. | ||
| I'm a net fan. | ||
| I've been since late 80s. | ||
| I've been a pro Boing Boinger, cyberpunk type person. | ||
| I keep feeling like rather than using these things to reach out to other people and connect, we're using these things for business. | ||
| They've gotten super aggressive. | ||
| The behavior's gotten way worse. | ||
| And I don't even think it's our fault. | ||
| I honestly think in these cases, it's because we're living on an operating system, an economic operating system that just needs to feed off the net when it should be our space, not the economy's space. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like we're in a stage of progression, this interconnectivity progression, where we're starting off with just regular telephones, and that has moved to cellular phones, which everybody carries, which is going to move into some Google Glasses type thing, which is going to eventually, I mean, down the line, if you extrapolate 100 years or whatever it's going to take, there's going to be some really crazy interconnectivity that people share. | ||
| And I think this stage that we're going through right now, the anonymous stage of being able to, like, make a Twitter account or some fake name and just start saying mean things to random people, like, that ability is going to go away. | ||
| You're not going to have this anonymous portal. | ||
| Like, I just think, if you look at the way things... | ||
| I feel like the way I look at the future is, like, the thing that's going to be really scarce is secrets. | ||
| I think we're going to be able to connect with each other in some way that we probably can't even imagine right now, whether it's some neurochip or something that you embed into your body, whether it's nanotechnology, whatever it is. | ||
| There's going to come a day where we're completely interconnected with each other. | ||
| Beauty of that, though, is if it really worked, it would bring us back to the now that we've been avoiding all this time. | ||
| To the face-to-face live interaction where you can't fuck with each other because you're here. | ||
| You know, there's this guy. | ||
| It's a strange way to look at it, yeah. | ||
| I met this guy, this show guy, you know, a stage magician guy who could tell when people are lying. | ||
| I don't know if you've ever seen this guy. | ||
| He's, like, worked for the FBI and stuff. | ||
| And he can, like, he does all these tricks. | ||
| He lines up ten people and he says, okay, one of you think... | ||
| And he can really tell, period, when people are lying. | ||
| And I was thinking, if he can tell that people are lying, because he's got this talent, it means that on some level, we all know, we all have that ability. | ||
| So we all on some level know when the other one's lying to us. | ||
| So it's kind of been, if you're actually in the moment, It's all exposed anyway. | ||
| Yeah, I think there's a weird feeling that you get when someone's being deceptive. | ||
| There's a weird feeling you get where you're like, there's a sense of disturbance when you're communicating with them. | ||
| But you can't put it in a tangible... | ||
| There's nothing you could say, oh, it was X amount of weight. | ||
| So here, I know this is a real thing. | ||
| Here, I put it on a scale. | ||
| But there's some weird thing that happens. | ||
| You can tell if someone's upset at you and not saying it. | ||
| They can be saying all the right words, but there's a certain coldness or a lack of warmth or there's a little something. | ||
| I wrote about those women in Housewives of Orange County. | ||
| I got obsessed with them because they were just having all these awful disagreements all the time. | ||
| I'm trying to figure out why is their communication breaking down? | ||
| So this is what I do. | ||
| I know. | ||
| So I concluded in the end that it's because they've put so much Botox in their faces that they can't actually execute facial expressions in an honest way anymore, in a way that the other person organically can react to. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So these women, in trying to kind of freeze time at age 29, ended up making themselves inaccessible to the now that they're in. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Because, you know, you see one who'll say, oh, you know, my daughter, I think she might have cancer. | ||
| And the other one's like, oh, I'm so sorry! | ||
| But she's frozen in a smile, right? | ||
| So then they go to the first one, and she's like, I can't believe I told her my daughter has cancer. | ||
| And the other one, she says she's sorry, but I can tell she's not. | ||
| It's just a metaphor. | ||
| But it's true. | ||
| They're like stuffing cotton in their mouth and you can't understand what they're saying. | ||
| They're ruining the facial communication, the expressions of facial communication. | ||
| What a weird world we live in where they're shooting poison in their face to freeze it. | ||
| But to freeze it in time is the thing. | ||
| They're trying to stop time. | ||
| I understand the urge to stop time, but when you stop time, you lose the moment. | ||
| That's kind of the whole point I'm making. | ||
| The net, it can stop time in a certain way, but you're going to lose certain moments then. | ||
| So I'm all for being on the net and having a net moment. | ||
| But even here, I've heard you do those ads before for those sponsors, and you could just cut and paste You could cycle seven of them and maybe people wouldn't even know it's the same ones. | ||
| You could cut and paste from another show and throw it in, but you decide, no, I'm actually going to sit here and read these three ads with my friends. | ||
| Well, if I didn't do it like that, I'd be really bored. | ||
| I would never want to just read an ad. | ||
| So we always do it that way. | ||
| You make more money. | ||
| That's the model of the industrial age, of course, is to print out more. | ||
| Yeah, and the only way we could even do any of this stuff the way we're doing it is because we don't have anybody that we have to approve it. | ||
| I don't have to go to NBC and say, hey, this is what we're thinking of doing. | ||
| I know you have these commercials, but we're just going to talk shit and occasionally we'll get to the point of the commercial. | ||
| But ironically, on the long run, it ends up making more money. | ||
| Certainly more money for the people who are actually doing it. | ||
| Maybe by the other system you can make more total money, but it's going to go to God knows what, to some institution anyway. | ||
| So the fact that it is live And it is a what? | ||
| An MP3 mainly. | ||
| It is mainly a podcast. | ||
| You know, you think on the first hand, because I'm looking to do, make a kind of radio choice myself. | ||
| And it's like, well, I can do this for the man and make this amount of money kind of guaranteed. | ||
| But I'm going to have to stay between these sight lines. | ||
| Or I can go this other route and actually do the thing I do. | ||
| Yeah, there's not even a choice there. | ||
| Not in this day and age. | ||
| It's not necessarily... | ||
| There used to be a time where you would have to choose. | ||
| Well, this internet thing, who knows if it's going to work out. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| You have an option to immediately jump in and get a gigantic group of people that are going to start retweeting and tweeting and listening to your stuff. | ||
| And you'll develop a giant following in no time. | ||
| And as that's happening, all you're doing is selling ads for companies that you actually believe in. | ||
| That's the only way you should do it. | ||
| Fuck working for some company that tells you not to swear or not to do this or not to discuss that or... | ||
| That's not the stance we're taking on this particular complicated issue. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| That's the enemy of real thought. | ||
| The enemy of real thought is committee. | ||
| I don't know what you're really thinking if everything you say has to go through a committee before it comes out of your mouth. | ||
| I want to know what the fuck you're thinking, especially in the sense of a radio show. | ||
| You know, a guy on the radio, that's like the whole thing. | ||
| It used to be, like, even DJs. | ||
| It used to be, this DJ likes this music, so this is why it's awesome. | ||
| Or it was broadcasting from the same city that you were in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Remember when Clear Channel took over, and it was like, Oh my gosh, so we're getting a recording that's done by computer 3,000 miles away. | ||
| This is my local rock and roll station. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What happened there? | |
| Well, they have those Jack FMs, which is essentially like playing shuffle on your iPod. | ||
| It could be anything of a number of things that they approve. | ||
| And they pretend, we're wacky. | ||
| We just don't have any rules. | ||
| Like, oh, we're Jack FM. And it's like a standard model. | ||
| There's like 100 Jacks across the country, and probably even more than that. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I think radio is completely on its way out. | ||
| I think they're fucked. | ||
| I think it's a silly way to do it and no one's going to stick with it. | ||
| After a while, you're going to have internet access in your car within no time. | ||
| That's easy. | ||
| They could do that right now. | ||
| I already get that with podcasts on the iPhone because I have my iPhone Bluetooth to my car. | ||
| So I'll just immediately say, oh, I'd like to listen to a Duncan Trussell podcast. | ||
| And I've done it at a red light. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Where it's so easy. | ||
| At a red light, it's one, two, Duncan. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| So the one aspect of radio that I feel like I would miss is that local terrestrial quality of it. | ||
| Because, I mean, yeah, we could still have, you know, you could have a L.A. channel and I could have a, you know, this part of New York channel and, you know, We could do that technically with digital, you know, where you'd pick your so-called regional thing, it'll be local stuff, but the medium's not biased towards that. | ||
| The medium is, it's all equivalent, you know, and I wonder, would we drift further away from local and kind of the things that matter to us in the here and now, or, you know, or would we choose that stuff? | ||
| I think, you know, instead of like a local radio station, you're going to have a million people in LA making their own music, making their own, putting their own shit out there that you can choose from. | ||
| You know, whether it's a music list, like a Pandora list or something like that someone puts together, or whether it's podcasting. | ||
| I just think the idea of a local representative was always gross. | ||
| It was always gross. | ||
| Wolfman Jack was always gross. | ||
| Because for every Wolfman Jack, there was a million other dudes that probably had interesting ideas as well, and they had no outlet. | ||
| So you have one guy has this outlet from this particular time. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That idea sucks. | ||
| The idea that we're dealing with now is way better. | ||
| It's like a billion outlets, six billion outlets. | ||
| And there's no local anymore. | ||
| There's people that are in that town that will tell you about things, but everyone's more connected than ever before. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And because they are, I mean, the economy, as we know it, also has to go away, too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, once you have six billion people doing podcasts, I mean, and you've got two billion left doing farming, it's like, where did all the businesses go? | ||
| And you also lose those iconic figures like the Wolfman Jack or like Howard Stern. | ||
| Well, I mean, I think you could still choose. | ||
| You would just have major – every once in a while, something major would happen. | ||
| Right, but it wouldn't be that one guy who's your town's guy. | ||
| I grew up in Boston. | ||
| It was Charles Laquadera. | ||
| Charles Laquadera and The Big Mattress was like this, he would call this morning show, it was called The Big Mattress. | ||
| He was a great guy, Laquadera. | ||
| Really nice guy. | ||
| I met him too eventually. | ||
| But he was like the number one radio DJ in Boston. | ||
| Everybody knew it. | ||
| When I was doing construction, I'd go to job sites, people would turn on, turn on The Big Mattress, listen to Laquadera. | ||
| And that was a show. | ||
| It was like, that was the show. | ||
| And the only way to get a show like that is to not have a lot of options. | ||
| To have a show that everybody agrees we're all going to listen to, it's going to be only three options. | ||
| Disco? | ||
| No, we're not listening to disco. | ||
| There wasn't the internet quality options. | ||
| That changes the whole game. | ||
| There's never going to be a CBS radio on the internet. | ||
| No, it does. | ||
| It does, it will, and it's going to replace everything terrestrial, I mean, in that sense. | ||
| So if we're saying everything's going to be replaced, everything terrestrial is going to be replaced, first it's radio, then it's other stuff. | ||
| All we have to make sure then is before we lose all those things, which we're going to inevitably lose, to say to ourselves, what is it we value about those things that we want to bring into These digital things before we're untethered in there, you know, before it's all the way. | ||
| Yeah, what we want is our cake and we want to eat it too. | ||
| We want the digital era and we still want mom and pop stores. | ||
| You know, we're trying to like keep it all together. | ||
| And that's the question is, can you get both? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You know, so can you have this, you know, very traditional narrative 20th century industrial age culture live right aside, you know, this sort of steady state economy and peer to peer currencies and local Can we have an iPhone and organic chard and no slavery in Africa to get either? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| I'm hoping so. | ||
| We move towards it or not, you know? | ||
| It seems like that's what a great percentage of the world would like, but it's – we've made shockingly little progress in moving towards that potential utopia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But then – but, you know, as long as we got a hope or try to envision, I would say, okay, but this shift that we're undergoing now from an analog era To a digital one is a bigger shift than just that. | ||
| There's a whole different digital media environment that we've gone into. | ||
| So we've gone into this from this time is money, expansionist economy, live by the clock universe to one that's potentially asynchronous. | ||
| It's just off that... | ||
| I remember when the net first came up, it was people in Austin and slackers and cyberpunks. | ||
| The idea was that the net was going to give us more slack. | ||
| And it's ended up, for most people, kind of doing the opposite because they're always on and working and being monitored and all that and distracted. | ||
| But, I mean, I think if we take command of the way we're programming these things, then we can use them to sort of create You know, the gorgeous culture of Slack to create, you know, what a few of us are kind of discovering we can do, like you're doing with this, right? | ||
| You're just doing your thing. | ||
| Yeah, I think we're trying to resist the inevitable. | ||
| And that inevitable is a symbiotic computer relationship. | ||
| There's going to be some sort of biomechanical connection. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Says one man talking through a microphone to another man with headphones. | |
| To a million people listening in their car or wherever the fuck they are. | ||
| Asynchronously, right? | ||
| I really don't feel like we can stop that. | ||
| It seems like the things that we got so excited by as these higher functioning primates are these new things that we've created that input us or give us input in a way that our body's completely not designed to get. | ||
| Like through your earphones, like listening to a podcast. | ||
| A computer itself, the ability to watch a video, the ability to go to the movies, the stimuli that's coming at us is just – we're not designed for it. | ||
| But it's reconfiguring itself to be as seductive as possible because that's what it's for. | ||
| It seduces into itself so that the companies behind it can make money. | ||
| And because we move constantly in a path of progression. | ||
| And if you look at the technology, it's always going to move into a stronger – we're never satisfied with any particular result at any particular time. | ||
| We want more choices. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We want more choices. | ||
| We want it to be powerful, more fast. | ||
| We want better graphics. | ||
| We want bigger booms. | ||
| That's not realistic enough. | ||
| Let's take it to the next level. | ||
| In this desire to get these experiences, we're pushing the technology. | ||
| Ultimately, that's what's getting pushed. | ||
| But then what's interesting to me about that is while all that's pushing ahead, what we get in a digital media environment is we end up retrieving like weird medieval Values. | ||
| You know, you get Burning Man and Etsy and people doing peer-to-peer stuff, trying to have their local currencies, which they haven't had since medieval times. | ||
| You know, you see the stuff that gets retrieved and paganism and, you know, mashing up roots to heal yourself of things, maker culture, all these things are what we've lost over the last thousand years. | ||
| That's what the Renaissance and the Industrial Age was about, you know, stamping that out and putting everybody on the assembly line at Ford. | ||
| So it's fun that as we move forward, we get these great old recurrences, which to me is reassuring. | ||
| It means that we are bringing something with us into this next place. | ||
| I think it's also that the current system is so flawed that people are willing to try anything and that they're actually actively thinking about what can we do differently? | ||
| Can we make a local currency? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is interesting. | ||
| It's like the two places I've gotten emails from The last many years of people doing social currencies are either from a place like Ithaca, New York where they're doing it because they're just strange and trying to try something weird and good or like Lansing, Michigan where there's no GM plant. | ||
| There's no bank that's going to give money to a factory to open up to hire people and they're desperate. | ||
| They're like, well, I've got skills. | ||
| I know how to fix a refrigerator and they have needs. | ||
| So can't we just make an economy that way? | ||
| You know, those are the places where people are actually asking where they're ready. | ||
| I just don't like that readiness seems to involve being just so, not just fed up, but uncomfortable, you know, that you've got to do something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We're clearly going through a change. | ||
| We're clearly going through a change as a culture that we weren't prepared for, and we're sort of making our way as we go along. | ||
| And there's a lot of mistakes along the way, and the evidence that points to it. | ||
| One of the best pieces is your story about people getting upset at you because you got mugged and called in the story and said the location. | ||
| That's one of the best examples of people losing the script. | ||
| Along the way, in this crazy thing that we're doing where we develop currency and then there's things called property values and there's mortgages and equity and all this crazy shit. | ||
| Along the way, we're going to have to figure out how to stay human. | ||
| And when you see instant failure, like, oh my god, I got mugged. | ||
| You fucking asshole. | ||
| Why'd you say the place? | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| I mean, every single one of my books, and I've written like 12 now, they're all finally about how do we bring humanity into this thing that seems to have lost it. | ||
| So I did it for business. | ||
| I did it for the economy with Life, Inc. | ||
| is the book you're talking about. | ||
| I did it for Judaism was something called Nothing Sacred, saying Judaism should be this ongoing conversation. | ||
| Keep it alive. | ||
| Keep it human. | ||
| Don't let it lock down. | ||
| And now this one, it's weird because it's like I'm kind of admitting that it's what – I guess I've realized it myself but I'm kind of saying, oh my gosh, I'm a humanist. | ||
| I'm a humanist and a technology enthusiast and how do you be both? | ||
| Because so many of the other folks who are sort of pro-technology, sort of my posse, they're all sort of talking about not human beings being enabled by technology but technology It might not be that simple. | ||
| I've been thinking about it a lot lately and one of the things I think is why do we have this idea of competition and why would the computer enjoy that idea with us? | ||
| Our idea is based entirely on our biological makeup, our need to reproduce, our need to prove ourselves to our mate, our need to protect against strangers, all these instincts that a computer is not going to have at all. | ||
| So the idea of competition with humans for resources or even the idea that survival is imperative. | ||
| And that you have an ego and you can't die. | ||
| They're not going to have any of that. | ||
| So why would they be in competition with us? | ||
| Why wouldn't it just be like a new... | ||
| It wouldn't be because of them. | ||
| It would be because of the way we reprogram them. | ||
| Once they become sentient though, that's really... | ||
| Then they wouldn't do the bad thing. | ||
| Because why not keep us around? | ||
| But it doesn't matter. | ||
| I don't even... | ||
| It's not a matter of them being able to do that. | ||
| Because I don't even think they will. | ||
| I don't think they can. | ||
| It's more a matter of people in the here and now saying that human beings are really only important insofar as we can be the shepherds and organizers of information, right? | ||
| Information is the thing that's evolving towards greater states of complexity. | ||
| And once human beings are no longer the best at making complex information but computers are the best at it, then there's just no need for humans anymore. | ||
| Would the computers kill us or not? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Would they give us a good time? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| But just the whole idea that we should be developing technology with this in mind, I don't know, it negates what I think is an essential, for us anyway, centrality of humanity in the equation. | ||
| Well, I think people don't recognize how much we need each other. | ||
| We don't recognize how important positive interaction is with other people to your health and the way you feel about life. | ||
| There's clearly a relationship that people have to each other that we're in denial about. | ||
| We lock ourselves up in our apartments or in our homes and we shut our car doors and we roll down the window. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why people are willing to give people the finger when they're in the car. | ||
| You would never do that in real life. | ||
| You feel like you're in some sort of a contained world. | ||
| And even though you're not even anonymous, you're still like, fuck you. | ||
| You know, how many people do you give the finger in real life? | ||
| Like nobody. | ||
| But once a year, I'll give somebody the finger. | ||
| Somebody does something crazy and they beep at me. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| It's a beautiful thing to do. | ||
| But eventually, I think we have to accept the fact that we're only happy when the people around us are happy, when we're in harmony with the people around us. | ||
| We're not happy when we're in conflict. | ||
| We're not happy when we fuck people over. | ||
| I know people that have done bad things in business and bad things ethically, and they're not happy people. | ||
| No, but then in the current culture, they can compensate for that with medicine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Antidepressants. | ||
| That gets them through the night. | ||
| What you have to hope, I mean, I always do, which is a vain hope. | ||
| I hope that the people who do bad stuff but then make up for it with drugs still feel worse than I do. | ||
| You know, not taking those drugs and trying to do good stuff. | ||
| You don't want to believe that, you know, these kind of guys. | ||
| I used to see, I won't even say his name, one of those millionaires down at Knicks games. | ||
| And I'd always think, I sure hope he's not happy. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| Which isn't very fair. | ||
| Well, all he's doing is playing some really crazy game that was around before he was ever born. | ||
| He just got into it and got really good at it. | ||
| The game itself is bananas. | ||
| Just the stock market itself. | ||
| Just the idea that the wealth of a person can vary day by day because of confidence. | ||
| You know, consumer confidence in a product and shift and change with recall. | ||
| And then you're watching these numbers go up and down like, what the fuck are you even talking about? | ||
| Most of the explanations you see, you know, I watch these business sites and the market will go down and they say, oh, market down because of such and such in London. | ||
| And then it's like by the time that piece comes out, that market's actually back up and they're already constructing their, you know, let's tie market going back up to another random market. | ||
| You know, it's like the explanations after the fact have so little to do, you know, with whatever some algorithm decided it was going to suddenly ultra-fast trade something and throw the stock up. | ||
| You know, it's like at this point, it truly is – that's the best place to see humans combating machines is on the market where it's like there's human traders competing with these programmed algorithms and the algorithms are certainly winning the war. | ||
| And if you look at their screens while they're doing it, it is almost like code. | ||
| The average person who doesn't understand it doesn't know what the fuck the stock market's saying. | ||
| The symbols and the SAO and this and that and the ones and the zeros. | ||
| You look at all that, you have no idea what that is. | ||
| I mean, how is that really different than a computer code that you're reading? | ||
| I mean, that's essentially... | ||
| Like a way that people are tapping into this bizarre system. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it is now. | |
| I mean it was. | ||
| At one time, sort of the price of something had to do with something. | ||
| It's like there's a factory. | ||
| Oh, if the factory went slower today in the rain, the market will go down on that. | ||
| It was like real. | ||
| And I think it's gotten certainly further and further from whatever. | ||
| What is going on in that company or the earnings or the things, you know, it's absolutely abstracted to the point now where people don't even invest in companies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You invest in something like when Facebook went public, people bought it at like 9 in the morning and like 9, 10, they're all pissed off that it hasn't gone up. | ||
| It's like, wait a minute, I was supposed to... | ||
| Triple my wealth. | ||
| Triple my wealth. | ||
| It's like, no, you don't make money on the trade. | ||
| You're supposed to make money on when you've done it. | ||
| But, you know, now we've got derivatives and derivatives of derivatives. | ||
| And derivatives of derivatives of derivatives on there, which is just a way of kind of shrinking the time span. | ||
| Explain that for people who don't know what that means. | ||
| So if you buy a stock – I mean you buy a stock and you hope it goes up and then you sell it in the future. | ||
| If you'd rather make up that time right now, I can sell it in the future right now. | ||
| I can basically sell that future sale because I think that sale is going to be a good one now. | ||
| I can say, what if I did that trade? | ||
| I'm going to have it now. | ||
| When am I trading then? | ||
| I'm trading on an abstraction from what something's going to be worth at some moment in the future. | ||
| So it's like I'm trading on the stock over time. | ||
| And then someone else can say, well, I'm going to trade on the abstraction of that. | ||
| I'm going to trade on whether or not people think the stock in the future is going to be worth more next minute than this minute. | ||
| It's like, well, what's that? | ||
| So basically what you're doing is you're buying the stock over time, over time, over time, over time. | ||
| You're creating these things, these derivatives of Whatever the original investment was, which is kind of just a derivative of the thing. | ||
| There's the pork belly. | ||
| There's the derivative of the pork belly. | ||
| Derivatives of the derivatives. | ||
| Derivatives of the derivatives of the derivatives of the derivatives. | ||
| All ever tighter ways of saying what is pork belly going to be worth on February 3rd. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Why is that legal? | ||
| Well, it's legal because the economy requires it. | ||
| We have a kind of money that has a clock in it. | ||
| It's lent into existence and has to be paid back. | ||
| More than got lent out. | ||
| So our economy needs to expand by hook or by crook somehow. | ||
| It has to grow in order for it to survive. | ||
| That's just the way central currency works. | ||
| They need to find more surface area for the money, more ways for people to buy stuff. | ||
| So instead of just having – there's not enough of a company to buy, so now we can bet on – How that company is going to do in some future. | ||
| Now we can bet on that or we can bet on that. | ||
| But what we're really doing is trying to kind of compress all of this time right onto the head of a pin so we can bet on that. | ||
| So I don't have to sit and wait 3,000 years for Facebook to be worth something. | ||
| I can trade on its future worth now. | ||
| But the whole joke of that is people who are trading that way, they're these computers that are trading faster than them. | ||
| So I put in one of my super fast, crazy, you know, derivative trade. | ||
| Goldman Sachs sees that order coming in on the computer. | ||
| They're so close to the exchange. | ||
| They can execute an order before my order even goes through based on having seen that I was going to do what I'm going to do. | ||
| So they can literally trade in my future. | ||
| I am in their past. | ||
| That's digital time shifting. | ||
| That sounds like they're cheating. | ||
| That's like someone running a Quake server and they're local and then you have like 150 ping. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| It's all bullshit. | ||
| The irony of it is it's gotten so big. | ||
| Derivative trading is bigger than regular trading now. | ||
| So that the New York Stock Exchange actually just got bought. | ||
| The exchange itself got bought by its derivative exchange. | ||
| So it's almost just like the proof is in the pudding. | ||
| It's like the derivative owns the market at this point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that's – how did anybody allow that? | |
| How could the government even ever deny how incompetent they are when they allowed that? | ||
| Like that alone, like someone should just like have a broadcast on – When they made the decision, they genuinely thought it would be good for business. | ||
| At least in the short term. | ||
| I will never understand where it all goes. | ||
| The business people promised them to figure it out before it got really bad. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| We figured it out before it got really bad. | ||
| How much bigger is the derivative economy? | ||
| I don't know exactly. | ||
| I mean it seemed – I was looking, trying to find out what the sort of trading was. | ||
| It seemed, from what I could tell, like – 94% of trades are now derivative. | ||
| What the fuck is that? | ||
| Because there's such bigger volumes. | ||
| Oh my god, that's insane. | ||
| You're not going to buy 10,000 shares of Honeywell today because that's whatever, $60,000 or something. | ||
| But you could buy 10,000 futures on Honeywell because they're really cheap. | ||
| Oh my god, that is so crazy. | ||
| 94%? | ||
| Of trades are futures. | ||
| I'm scared! | ||
| I think it's ultra-fast, too, as a whole other... | ||
| There's sort of two different... | ||
| Two different realms. | ||
| But yeah, it's huge. | ||
| They must all be crazy. | ||
| Everyone involved in that must know that they're bringing on the Matrix. | ||
| They must know that they're the first steps before the digital machine takes over. | ||
| They must know. | ||
| They must know that there's no humanity in that stock market shit. | ||
| That's chaos. | ||
| Well, the thing is, and again, I don't want digital technology to get blamed for this, right? | ||
| Because the real operating system they're promoting is not... | ||
| The digital operating system, it's the economic operating system underneath it. | ||
| It's this 13th century central currency, interest-bearing, debt-based economy. | ||
| And none of the guys who I thought would get us out – Ev Williams with Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, the kids from Google, right? | ||
| Each of them had a real shot, even Bill Gates, at breaking – The central economy and flipping things the other way. | ||
| How do you think they could do that? | ||
| Not going public, not doing it with venture capital, saying if Google can hack web search, if Facebook can hack social, if Twitter can hack everybody, Why can't they – if they're so busy disintermediating all these different things, why doesn't any one of them yet want to disintermediate central banking and say, no, Mr. Chase, we don't actually need you. | ||
| We're going to do our whole thing through Kickstarter, say. | ||
| Like one of your – didn't one of your things – Yeah. | ||
| That's an interesting point of view. | ||
| I think they probably would never want to take that stand because they would be killed. | ||
| I would imagine there's a lot of money in them not being successful with that quest to ensure that they remain in control. | ||
| Is there a point at which you're doing PayPal? | ||
| We're going to let people do individual transactions. | ||
| That was their original model and they were going to make money on the float. | ||
| And then the banks came to them and said, oh, you're not allowed to do that. | ||
| You're not a bank, PayPal kids. | ||
| You've got to be, you know, registered as a bank or you're going to have to be connected to one of us. | ||
| And that's when, you know, PayPal kind of becomes part of eBay rather than whatever these crazy guys might have done. | ||
| And I suppose there's this point, you know, where, you know, innocently these companies that get bigger and bigger and bigger hoping to do the right things and then it's like... | ||
| We're not going to let you do this if you don't play by our rules. | ||
| But I also feel like there's companies that if you're willing to go smaller, if you're willing to let it grow a little bit slower, that you can scale up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can become A big ethical corporation? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I always wondered why a big corporation couldn't be ethical. | ||
| Why can't you have a big corporation with a good ideology behind it? | ||
| You know, but I think it's really because of shareholders, right? | ||
| And shareholders are impatient. | ||
| Shareholders are there. | ||
| They're not really there, right? | ||
| They're distant. | ||
| Their shareholders are people who just want to see a number go up by the next quarter. | ||
| And if you have to make a number go up by the next quarter, Then you're going to have to be thinking about something other than doing good in the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If it is ones and zeros at all costs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If that's the game you're playing. | ||
| But if you've got shareholders, then you're going to throw you in jail if you don't do that. | ||
| I mean that's your fiduciary responsibility. | ||
| And it's a fascinating thing that a corporation can do something that an individual would be a total piece of shit to do. | ||
| If it was one person that was involved and this one guy, what he did was he gave the loans to the Third World Company, the countries that they couldn't pay back. | ||
| He went over there, monopolized their natural resources himself, dug the oil line himself, polluted the river himself, raped and killed the villagers himself. | ||
| He'd be like, Jesus Christ, lock that fucking guy in jail. | ||
| He's making people work for $5 a week. | ||
| That guy, there he is. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Hold him down. | ||
| You know, but because it's a corporation, you're like, well, they're making money for their... | ||
| Exactly, and how many people who on the one hand, you know, will read You know, good magazine or something or listen to us and NPR and be all sad about that stuff still has a 401k plan with stocks in the very companies that are doing those things. | ||
| So who are they? | ||
| They're the ones who actually own the company. | ||
| They're the shareholder who wants the thing to go up so they can send their kid to college. | ||
| You know, I mean, it's interesting how circular it gets. | ||
| So, I mean, for how unvirtuous that circle is, though, I think unwinding it is just It's just as easy. | ||
| So it's like, okay, instead of doing these sort of long-distance, long-term, disconnected investments in mining companies, I'm going to invest my money where I see it and people I actually know in the place where I am who are trying to do something, you know, and bring it, if not local, at least into your present, at least into your visible reality. | ||
| Yeah, and it really is. | ||
| The pursuit of the end goal of simply only ones and zeros done through a corporate way is really anti-human. | ||
| I mean, that's the real anti-human aspect of it, is that it will engage human suffering. | ||
| As long as it's willing to extract ones and zeros from that. | ||
| Like it calculates how much human suffering are we willing to cause? | ||
| How much devastation to the environment are we willing to cause? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Which is why then the question becomes, I mean in the nightmare scenario then, is you Invest that into technology so that your robots, no, they're not in competition with us, but they are playing the corporate program. | ||
| They have no desire other than to extract value and meaning from us. | ||
| And those computers, running algorithms, recognized trends in the marketplace before a human could ever see it coming and then counter. | ||
| And meanwhile, as we're making ourselves dumber about technology, I'm wearing this Codecademy t-shirt, right? | ||
| I want people to learn to code. | ||
| As we become We're stupid about our computers. | ||
| Our computers are getting smarter about us. | ||
| They're doing big data repositories of every keystroke. | ||
| They know stuff about us. | ||
| Teenage girl was pregnant before her family did. | ||
| They know when kids are going to be gay before they know themselves. | ||
| They're really smart. | ||
| How about the weirdness that comes when you Google something or you look for certain things online and then say you go to a YouTube and there's ads for things that you've recently looked at. | ||
| That is scary. | ||
| Tantalizing ads. | ||
| Oh, I see you're into Jeeps. | ||
| Why, we have a Jeep for sale, and it's a new Jeep, and here's a video you can click on. | ||
| And they're A-B testing that, you know, and they're saying, which did he react to last night? | ||
| Girl in Jeep or not girl in Jeep? | ||
| Girl in Jeep. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Give him that next time. | ||
| Give him tits. | ||
| This guy needs to see tits. | ||
| Like, they'll show you everything that you're into. | ||
| You're like, you son of a bitch. | ||
| How do you know about all this? | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| And it's just the beginning. | ||
| We're accepting it. | ||
| Slowly accepting the needle into our vein that pumps in nano-cells that eventually replace human tissue. | ||
| If there's going to be a commercial, there's going to be an artificial guy who's going to be saying, why would you want to be natural? | ||
| You're going to rot. | ||
| It's not fun. | ||
| Life gets even better. | ||
| You'll get to be a thousand. | ||
| You'll buy your little nanobots, too, from the most reputable company, the one that you really like, and the great user agreement. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then after it's in you, it's like they get bought by Google and all of a sudden your user agreement shifted. | ||
| It's like, do you want to remember your children's names? | ||
| Okay, then sign this new user agreement. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Otherwise you get no data. | ||
| You have enough for two people. | ||
| Two phone numbers. | ||
| You're 9-1-1. | ||
| Yeah, just like your phone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If it's not registered, it only lets you call 9-1-1. | |
| That'll be the same thing. | ||
| Well, you should have paid your bill, Mr. Rushkoff. | ||
| I don't know why you didn't want to pay your bill. | ||
| Now here you are, with no recourse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're going to look at a shiny guy from the future. | ||
| He's a thousand years old and he looks great. | ||
| He's going to be all artificial. | ||
| Yeah, but again, with all that artificialness, it's not necessarily, although it maybe is, it's not necessarily the technology that's the problem in this equation. | ||
| It's the company that owns the technology. | ||
| But ultimately, what's getting done? | ||
| The technology is getting pushed. | ||
| That seems to be the case in every single situation. | ||
| Ultimately, at the top of the execution food chain, when you look at what is being done at the end level, it's really the game changer. | ||
| The technology constantly increases. | ||
| And with every overtake, with every new gigantic invention and bundles of money that go along with it and all the people that got fucked over, at the end of the day, the technology keeps moving forward. | ||
| It keeps getting stronger and stronger and stronger. | ||
| It does, but it's not just stronger, though. | ||
| It's fundamentally different. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing that McLuhan was trying to bring up. | ||
| Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, he was looking at the different environments that different media, different kinds of technology create. | ||
| Fire had a change – had a media environment, had a technological environment. | ||
| With fire now, people could then go live further north in colder places and little apes who were smart enough to have fire could get away from big dumb apes who couldn't travel north to chase them. | ||
| We got different races. | ||
| All sorts of things happened because of something like fire or the invention of text. | ||
| The invention of text changed – well, for me, it changed the way we look at time because now – I can write something now that I'm going to be accountable for later, so we can have contracts. | ||
| With text, we got history. | ||
| We got the Judeo-Christian line of thought. | ||
| We got law and ethics. | ||
| We got the calendar. | ||
| Then that all went along and we developed. | ||
| Then we get the printing press and we get the clock. | ||
| Right now, the clock, all of a sudden, we go, oh, wow, now we can actually break down the day into these little pieces. | ||
| We put one up at the town square and that's when time became money. | ||
| That's when it's like, okay, now you can work for an hour for me. | ||
| Instead of making a thing that you're connected to and selling it to me, now you can work for the hour, or two hours, or three hours. | ||
| We've got a standard. | ||
| And now we get the digital media environment, which is just as different as the industrial-age media environment than the clock was from the printing press, from written text, from even fire. | ||
| And in the digital media environment, there's this... | ||
| It's not just more tech. | ||
| It's more of a sense of moving through time in a choice-to-choice-to-choice-to-choice way. | ||
| You know, where we just have more choices than we know what to do. | ||
| We spend more time processing choice itself than we do getting the things that we've chosen. | ||
| You know, it's like the call waiting is almost like the typical kind of digital choice. | ||
| I'm talking to this loved one. | ||
| I've got a call waiting. | ||
| What do I do? | ||
| Just to be put yourself in that interruptive state is very digital because you want to have the choice because that person wants to reach you, but how that interrupts what used to be a more continuous way of just moving through life. | ||
| Yeah, it certainly gives us more options than we're naturally designed to handle, and the more people have on their Facebook page, the more likely they really have zero connection to those people. | ||
| We're designed for Dunbar's number, 150 people, and you get 5,000 people on your Facebook page. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Who are these people? | ||
| What's going on now? | ||
| Then you're marketing. | ||
| What kind of interaction are you really having? | ||
| Well, it's not the same. | ||
| It's not a human-to-human interaction. | ||
| The other weird thing about Facebook for me, again, is how it compresses time. | ||
| So it's like, there are these people from like second and third grade. | ||
| I'm finally, you know, 45 whatever years away from that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then it's like, you know, two weeks ago, hi, I'm Marcy from second grade. | |
| It's like, Oh, my God. | ||
| I'd finally – I'd left that behind me. | ||
| It's not Marcy. | ||
| I don't know who she is. | ||
| It's who I was and who she relates to. | ||
| It's just – it was in the past for a reason. | ||
| And now it's here. | ||
| But then on the front end, I've got the computer on the other side calculating everything about my keystroke. | ||
| So they know my future, right? | ||
| They know who's going to be pregnant, who's going to be gay, who's going to be this, who's going to be that. | ||
| So it's like, OK. So it was like my past is all in here and now my future is all in here and everything is just sort of crushed in on me there. | ||
| I don't feel – I don't feel autonomous anymore. | ||
| I don't feel like I have agency. | ||
| I don't feel in charge. | ||
| I can't get away from anything, and I can't actually be moving towards anything with a sense of free will. | ||
| But can't you though? | ||
| I mean, you're sort of in control of how much you interact with it, how much you choose to use it. | ||
| That's why I dropped Facebook. | ||
| You dropped it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I was just like, bleh! | ||
| Too much? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But you still use Twitter? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Twitter stays there. | ||
| Why is Facebook problematic? | ||
| The real problem with Facebook is I'm not in charge of what I do on Facebook. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because Mark Zuckerberg can use me or my likeness in an ad of something that I don't even know what it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He can't do that anymore though, I thought. | |
| Oh, really? | ||
| He undid that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think that was something that wasn't supposed to happen, supposedly, or they backtracked about that. | |
| They do. | ||
| They go two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. | ||
| It's sort of an ever-evolving user agreement. | ||
| I mean, where the part that I had gotten concerned about was, you know, I'm on there as an author, right? | ||
| I'm on there, buy my book, love me, you know, and like my ideas. | ||
| I can't do that. | ||
| I can't solicit the likes of other people, of readers, of people who I'm supposedly advising about this stuff, especially about sort of media ethics and integrity. | ||
| I can't invite them to like my page when that very act of liking is making them vulnerable to marketing that's going to be passing through me beyond my control. | ||
| Yes, and no, because they're also providing you with this excellent connection with all these people that's available through Facebook, which is not as limited as Twitter with 140 characters. | ||
| No, and I'm willing to pay for the privilege to reach those people, but I'm not willing to have them and their likenesses used to represent things. | ||
| I don't think that they understand what liking makes someone vulnerable to. | ||
| I don't feel – so I mean in some sense, this is patronizing I guess. | ||
| What I'm saying is I think I know stuff about this technology that they don't – if they all knew really how this worked, if they all knew the implications of what they were doing, then I would say let's go for it. | ||
| But ultimately the worst consequences is what? | ||
| Marketing? | ||
| They're going to be marketed to? | ||
| They're going to be represented. | ||
| So their image would then be put on something. | ||
| Oh, so, but no, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| I'm 100% sure they dropped that, right? | ||
| Didn't they drop that thing of using their photos in advertising and for profit? | ||
| Yeah, like, they're not allowed to just take your photos and just go, hey, what about Facebook? | ||
| No, they're not going to do it with your photos. | ||
| You're talking about Pinterest. | ||
| Or you're talking about the photo thing they bought. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I was talking about using – but you were saying like using it for advertisements? | ||
| I'm talking about sponsored stories and how they use people in a sponsored story. | ||
| At least the day that I quit at that point, nothing – Oh, you could turn that off. | ||
| But yeah, there's things like that that are on, but there's ways to turn them off. | ||
| I'm confused. | ||
| What is a sponsored story? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| See, people don't know. | ||
| I feel like most people don't know. | ||
| And just to be there, it just didn't seem like – And it also, because I so don't trust who they are and what they're about, I don't trust them as a company. | ||
| The way I want to trust the kinds of companies, I like it bigger and bigger and deeper and deeper into my lives and eventually put probes in my brain. | ||
| Do you not trust them because Justin Timberlake played him in a movie? | ||
| Is that part of it? | ||
| Oh, he played the other one. | ||
| He played the other one? | ||
| He played Sean... | ||
| He played the good guy? | ||
| No. | ||
| What's the MySpace story and how much of it is about coke and whores? | ||
| Is that what happened with those guys? | ||
| They just take that money and go crazy? | ||
| If you're going to take Facebook, if you're going to say, I don't trust Facebook, you can't trust Twitter, you can't trust Google, you can't trust any of the stuff you use nowadays. | ||
| But I'm aware, right now, I'm aware of the ways that Twitter... | ||
| Is broadcast. | ||
| I feel in control of how I'm tweeted and retweeted. | ||
| Twitter's almost worse though because they're actually to the point where you try to go back in time in your timeline, you can't. | ||
| There gets a cutoff point where you can't download your own tweets unless you know the exact link of that input. | ||
| Didn't they end up giving you your history? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They said, I still can't do it on mine. | |
| And that's the same with, like, TwitPix or all these photo ones. | ||
| Like, some of them... | ||
| So now you're saying that, which is okay, you're saying that you want your, if you're going to do tweets, you want, in addition for your free tweeting, you want them to maintain... | ||
| An archive of you and everyone else forever. | ||
| Well, I personally don't have a problem with it, but what I'm saying is that's kind of more ridiculous to me than Facebook. | ||
| The fact that I can't even access stuff that I've... | ||
| No, I mean, you can if you save it or whatever. | ||
| The thing I'm concerned about, I mean, this is what, in the book, I call it digifrenia. | ||
| You know, I feel like the problem with digital for most people is not this idea of information overload, that there's too much stuff coming at them, but they can't maintain more than one online persona Simultaneously. | ||
| There's too many sort of individual instances of us. | ||
| And if you're going to have different instances of yourself, you know, even your email inbox is an instance of a sort. | ||
| If you're going to have all these different things out there filling up or interacting, you want to be damn well sure that you're in charge of each one of them. | ||
| And I felt like Facebook was now doing things on my behalf. | ||
| It was like one step of control. | ||
| Well, you make a very good point in that having more than one version of yourself becomes very problematic, especially if you're involved in any, like, real... | ||
| I mean, I'm sure you probably interact with quite a few people every day, and to do that on Twitter is semi-manageable. | ||
| Do it when you can, but to do that on Twitter, and then have to hop over to Facebook, too, it's like, you should have one portal. | ||
| You know, one portal. | ||
| At least one that's... | ||
| It was always said, you know, because I don't really... | ||
| I didn't go to Facebook much, and I go there, and there'd be, like, some... | ||
| Relative, you know, who's like, oh, I just heard of your mom's passing. | ||
| It's like six months have gone by before I found that message and, you know, want to console them or whatever. | ||
| It's just such a – for me, it was such an awful interface anyway that I was just losing stuff there. | ||
| But, yeah, it's – I don't think it just has to do with, oh, well, I get more correspondence from other people, so I've got to limit it more than others. | ||
| I think it really has to do with – Well, if anything, it's at least I'm a canary in the cage for what's coming for everybody else. | ||
| I mean, you know, people only used to get one or two emails and now it's just streaming in for everybody. | ||
| Yeah, if you send me something on Facebook, I don't read it. | ||
| It's just to let everybody know because they pile up. | ||
| I don't have time to read them. | ||
| So I'm with you in a certain way. | ||
| I still use Facebook to put up links, but it's connected to my Twitter and I'm pretty cognizant of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When I put a link up on Facebook, I make sure it's short enough to fit into a tweet with a link. | ||
| But at least with Twitter, you understand what you're putting out. | ||
| You put out this little 140 things, it went to your people, and those words are out there. | ||
| With a tool like Facebook, you don't really have the same sense of... | ||
| Ownership over what's going on. | ||
| And you don't actually have it, right? | ||
| Your picture is used. | ||
| Douglas went into Starbucks just now. | ||
| Yeah, I could turn it off. | ||
| So everyone should turn it off. | ||
| So again, I feel like it's a useful tool, but it's just part of the untrustworthiness of a good portion of the net. | ||
| Yeah, well, I could see that with someone else being in control of the interaction and someone else being in control, ultimately, of, like, when you sign a user agreement and you have all this information that you just sort of put up online, you're entrusting it to them, and in turn, they're marketing it to you. | ||
| I mean, it's a really clean relationship as long as they don't fuck you. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's a point at which, you know, I'll let Netflix and whoever's behind my TV remote. | ||
| I mean, now they know all that stuff, right? | ||
| I mean, I'll let them craft commercials around me. | ||
| I'll accept in this little arrangement we have with business, I'll accept anything incoming. | ||
| But don't use me for your outgoing. | ||
| In other words, once you're taking the person's identity and then saying, oh, Alice down the street liked this sitcom too. | ||
| You should watch that. | ||
| And then what I'm watching is getting broadcast to them or what they think I'd be watching. | ||
| That's where it starts to be like, oh, now I'm being disembodied. | ||
| Now I'm being taken somewhere else. | ||
| I think, yeah, it's a great – Facebook is one of the most popular websites online. | ||
| It's also one of the best ways to waste time. | ||
| Like you can waste a day easily just looking at people that you used to have sex with. | ||
| You know, just finding them and going, what is this bitch up to? | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
| Look how fat you got. | ||
| You know, you could do that all day. | ||
| You could do that all day and that could be, you know, entertaining. | ||
| And you're not getting shit done. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like, I try to use Twitter. | ||
| One of the things that I do with it is whenever someone sends me something fascinating in a link, I retweet it. | ||
| And because of that, you become like a portal for cool shit. | ||
| And people know that if they send me cool shit, I'll retweet it. | ||
| And so you get all this cool shit just starts coming to you when you sort of have that idea. | ||
| And then you send it, they send it to you, and then it becomes this really exponentially expanding thing where, you know, you have this like a radio channel or like an information dump. | ||
| What percent of the tweets that you get do you think you pass on? | ||
| It's not that high a percentage because it's not always... | ||
| You're a thin filter. | ||
| Well, I'll have to look at it. | ||
| I mean, if it's really interesting, I'll look at it. | ||
| But sometimes they'll send you something like, oh, dude, that's nonsense. | ||
| Like, what are you talking... | ||
| Did you see where this came from? | ||
| Like you read the link and you're like, no, that is not Bigfoot and that guy's refrigerator. | ||
| Shut the fuck up, man. | ||
| Stop telling me this. | ||
| But that makes you a reliable, a reliable filter. | ||
| Yeah, you can't just retweet things. | ||
| But I do, occasionally, if someone sends something really preposterous, I will retweet it just to see how people react. | ||
| You know, there's, um... | ||
| Or if someone, if people get mad at me, I'll retweet it just to see how they react. | ||
| It's just, we live in strange times, man. | ||
| It's, uh... | ||
| The Twitter interface is a very bizarre one. | ||
| The idea that you only give them 140 characters and people abuse the shit out of that. | ||
| Sometimes people send me like 30 tweets in a row explaining something to me. | ||
| Like, dude, stop. | ||
| Well, now you know it's all – do you know things like Snapchat? | ||
| Have you played with that? | ||
| No. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| The one where you take a picture and it like – you can send it but it dissolves in like three seconds or five seconds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, right. | |
| So it's like kids apparently – I mean this is the dark secret. | ||
| Kids are leaving Facebook. | ||
| The demographic, the younger, like the younger than the 16 is like – It's falling totally off and they're doing things like Snapchat because they don't want to be putting everything they're doing on their permanent record. | ||
| I mean they're finally kind of hepped to this. | ||
| So this picture, like they can show someone their pussy and it only lasts for three minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then you screenshot it though and then you save it and re-upload it. | |
| Well he knows. | ||
| But if you screenshot it, it at least tells them that they've... | ||
| I mean so it's been defeated. | ||
| But if you screensave it, at least the person who sent you the thing knows. | ||
| That you did that. | ||
| They've given that control. | ||
| But yeah, but just this quest for truly present-based, non-archivable silliness. | ||
| But you know, it's because when we were silly, we got to do it in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven. | ||
| There was no camera in the back either. | ||
| It was really just... | ||
| What happens in the 7-Eleven stays at 7-Eleven. | ||
| Now it's like it's every single silly thing they did. | ||
| If they didn't post about it, their friend posted about it. | ||
| So it's still up there and it's like may as well be patched into the side of the Parthenon. | ||
| Not only that, but the ideas behind what you can and can't do are enforced by these archaic laws that were written when none of this digital technology was available. | ||
| So because of that, you get a lot of weird shit happens. | ||
| Like there's one girl who got charged with child pornography because she was sending photos of her naked body to boys in her class. | ||
| And so the cops arrested her and charged this young girl, she was 15 years old, with child pornography. | ||
| She's a child. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you talk about losing the scripts. | ||
| That's really losing the script for life. | ||
| I mean, that is the nuttiest shit ever. | ||
| You found a child porn kingpin right there. | ||
| She happens to be a child. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Zero tolerance, son. | ||
| It doesn't matter if she's a child. | ||
| But, Dad, it's her vagina. | ||
| It doesn't matter, son. | ||
| She's a criminal. | ||
| She's victimizing. | ||
| Masturbation is rape, exactly. | ||
| She's feeding a dark hunger. | ||
| She's feeding the dark hunger, son. | ||
| We need to discourage this in a big way. | ||
| Solitary confinement. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But that's really just a temporal lag, hopefully. | ||
| Yeah, I believe so. | ||
| I think... | ||
| Better laws then catch up. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Also, I mean, in some sense, a lack of privacy could help that along, too. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| If Google camera is finding like tens of thousands of people who are just smoking joints in the street of every American city, at some point they have to go, okay, let's just let people smoke pot, let gays get married. | ||
| I would say yes, except the smoke pot thing. | ||
| There's money in enforcing it. | ||
| Is there more money in enforcing it than there would be in selling it? | ||
| No, but it would be to different people and you have to pry it from the hands of the people that are making money by keeping it illegal, whether it's the private prison industry, whether it's the prison guards unions. | ||
| Whether it's different pharmaceutical companies that would stand to lose profits. | ||
| There's going to be a bunch of people that are trying to stop anything, any change. | ||
| Especially changes in legality because there's a big business in locking people up for shit. | ||
| I know. | ||
| So they're going to have to maintain An illegal population, right? | ||
| In order to stay alive, they're going to have to arrest more and more. | ||
| If they're going to have corporate growth, a greater percentage of America has to be in prison every single year until it's an asymptotic curve and there's like one guy left. | ||
| That becomes a really interesting scenario if marijuana does become legal and you can trade on the future of marijuana. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| There are some stocks that are marijuana stocks. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, that people trade. | ||
| How is that possible? | ||
| Well, they're the companies that I guess have already laid out a marijuana strategy or they're ready for it. | ||
| Look at that percentage of the U.S. prison population that are non-violent drug offenders in the 1980 and then in 2012. 10% and in 2012 it's 25%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The war on drugs, folks, they're winning. | ||
| More people are in jail. | ||
| I guess, does that mean they're winning? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| As long as we have a private prison system, it's good for the economy. | ||
| The whole thing is fucking bananas. | ||
| It's just the fact that in this day and age, you still can't make a logical argument as to why certain things are legal and illegal. | ||
| Certain things that are legal, which are devastating to your health. | ||
| And then when you find out that information's been withheld and that companies may have known about certain risks, no one seems to go to jail. | ||
| If anything happens, people get fined a little bit. | ||
| But if that was an individual, a person that did that, Oh my god, there would be a horrible human being, a personal person, one person who's responsible for all the deaths that came from aspirin alone. | ||
| You would want them dead. | ||
| That's why there's some ways to get more conscious of it though, because it's all of us, right? | ||
| It's all of us who are part of that system or owning that corporation as shareholders or whatever. | ||
| And there are these things like, have you ever seen slaveryfootprint.org? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a fun website. | ||
| You've got to do it. | ||
| When you're feeling good about yourself, though, what it does is you put in everything that you own, if you have a car or not, where you live, and this and that, and it calculates how many slaves are working for you right now. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Like with cell phones? | ||
| Yeah, getting the molybdenum for your iPhone or whatever it is. | ||
| You know, losing their fingers in some sweatshop. | ||
| Is that a real thing? | ||
| Molybdenum? | ||
| Molybdenum? | ||
| Yeah, it's a metal. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| It's a rare metal. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I never hold that one. | ||
| I've just recently heard of Coltan. | ||
| That's the stuff that they get in the Congo for cell phones. | ||
| Something that's really good with connectivity. | ||
| For the batteries or connectivity? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Something to do with electronic connectivity and the use of your cell phones. | ||
| I found it to be so bizarre and one of the more bizarre things in life that the most complex stuff that we use like cell phones, like computers, that the very base of it, the origins – there's a mine. | ||
| There's a hole in the ground. | ||
| They're pulling out the metal. | ||
| There's a mine but there's also human suffering which is why I don't like the idea that my – computer which could really do everything I need it to do is rendered obsolete by changes in operating systems that really are unnecessary except to sell another computer. | ||
| You know, the difference does not But aren't they necessary because they're trying to continue to improve the product and they're continuing to add more functionality? | ||
| I stopped believing that, at least at the rate at which they do. | ||
| I sometimes feel like there's a – it used to be sort of Windows and Intel. | ||
| Windows would make a complex operating system so that you'd have to get the next Intel chip and then Intel would create a tweak on that that makes you need the next Windows operating system. | ||
| They sort of would leapfrog each other. | ||
| And it feels like that with, yeah, your iPhone does better things now than three iPhones ago, but what about all these iPhones in the garbage and all these people who lost all this stuff? | ||
| The amount of time compressed into one of these devices is really intense. | ||
| At least one of our goals when we're developing new technologies and new technology pathways should be, Well, what's the one that's going to actually require the sales of the fewest amount of computers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Many people at Apple are going, how could we need to sell less computers so that people don't have to throw out these old ones? | ||
| Have you seen those photos of Cuba, of the old cars? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because Cuba doesn't get new cars. | ||
| They have cars from like the 50s and the 60s and they keep repairing them. | ||
| Yeah, but a lot of them are gorgeous though. | ||
| Yeah, they're beautiful. | ||
| But they do drive like shit. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| If you drive like a modern-day BMW and then you go back to one of those stupid Chevys from the 1950s, those things are dog shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| They brake terrible. | ||
| They handle like a horse on roller skates. | ||
| They're ridiculous cars. | ||
| They're so stupid. | ||
| So if you had to be thrown into Rebel without a cause today and you hopped in that car, it wouldn't be the experience we're thinking. | ||
| They're dog shit. | ||
| They're terrible. | ||
| You could, with a Prius, you could easily get away from some guy in a 55 Chevy. | ||
| There's no way he could keep up. | ||
| Those things are terrible. | ||
| They can't take corners, the brakes, or those stupid drum brakes. | ||
| I mean, they might as well have a rock that you throw out that's attached to a rope to slow your car down. | ||
| Still, you take a 57 T-Bird over a Segway. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Just because it could rain. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What? | ||
| I like the idea that they've managed to recycle these cars and keep them working and keep them running. | ||
| It's really cool to see. | ||
| Aesthetically, it's beautiful. | ||
| It's gorgeous. | ||
| You see a modern street in this day and age and you see these beautiful... | ||
| You can tell they're proud people because these are shiny cars. | ||
| They're painted nice and they're done well and they're restored well or at least maintained well. | ||
| I mean, I don't know how many miles some of these cars have on them, but they do look, it does look amazing. | ||
| I know, and there is that, you know, I feel like there's a hunger for stuff, not just 50s, but also sort of 60s Mad Men period, that the nostalgia for that is sort of, that's right before this digital age started. | ||
| That's like the height of the TV age and, you know, putting satellites in space. | ||
| There was that innocence, you know? | ||
| You know, it's funny because people look at these kind of shows and say, oh, Aren't they – it's about their decadence. | ||
| I'm like, no, it's about their innocence. | ||
| They believe and they got – it's that – and you look around LA. It's like everybody has got Haywood Wakefield in their house. | ||
| Trying to get those old GE refrigerators with the sort of rounded covers. | ||
| There's that longing for... | ||
| It's like the industrial age just feels so real. | ||
| This is solid when people made stuff. | ||
| It wasn't just kind of printed. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Also, when you see those cars, there's such a human element in that old stuff. | ||
| Like, even, like, 60s muscle cars. | ||
| Like, those were sort of, like, human-created works of art, as opposed to, you know, you look at, like, a new Mazda or something like that, a real modern car. | ||
| And it looks like something that just came out of a machine. | ||
| They screwed it together and it came out of a machine. | ||
| You look at a 69 Chevy, that's something somebody fucking screwed together. | ||
| There's some men working behind that. | ||
| There's some people put tires on the wheel and bolted it down in place. | ||
| There's some guys who work some wrenches. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| You look at that thing, that's a mechanical creation. | ||
| It's not a computer creation. | ||
| We're slowly moving towards the Prius. | ||
| And I'm fine with computer creation aesthetic if it means that we don't have to work. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's like they didn't – it's like so they get rid of all these guys screwing in the screws and it's like so they just then let them stay in their houses? | ||
| No, those guys are fucked. | ||
| No. | ||
| Those guys have to pick up a new line of work. | ||
| They have to evolve with the times. | ||
| Yeah, but that's the whole thing too. | ||
| It's like so now we have the big problem in America is unemployment and Obama's talking about getting jobs, jobs, jobs for people. | ||
| Who wants a job? | ||
| I don't want a job. | ||
| You don't want a job. | ||
| People don't want jobs. | ||
| People want the stuff that you get When you have a job, they want the money that you get for having a job, but they don't want the jobs. | ||
| So meanwhile, though, we've got more than enough stuff. | ||
| We're burning food every week to keep market prices high. | ||
| Bank of America is tearing down houses in California because they're in foreclosure. | ||
| You can't just let someone live in it. | ||
| It's going to bring prices down. | ||
| So they tear them down? | ||
| They tear them down. | ||
| Why do they tear them down? | ||
| Because they would have to sell at distressed prices that would then lower prices of other properties that they're trying to keep up. | ||
| It would cost them more. | ||
| I mean, if you own 10 houses in a town and one isn't going to sell, you'd rather tear it down than... | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if the bank comes along and creates some sort of a program to give houses to needy people, then... | ||
| It's going to lower the real estate values of the mortgages that they've invested in that are already teetering. | ||
| So they can't do that. | ||
| So charity itself becomes unprofitable. | ||
| Well, it's never been quite profitable. | ||
| That's like less than unprofitable. | ||
| What if we figured out that, okay, we only need, rather than having everybody work 40-hour weeks, which is based on a clock of the industrial age, how much can we have people work and have weekends, what if people don't really have to work that much for us to have everything we want? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What if 10% of people could work, you know, Two days a week, and we get everything. | ||
| So you go in, you do your work. | ||
| I'm going to do my work in April 2007, and then I'm going to go again in March. | ||
| What if it got – that you really didn't need everybody working all the time for everybody to have stuff? | ||
| We couldn't deal with that, not because we don't have technologies to do that. | ||
| We can't deal with it because we don't have an economy. | ||
| We don't know how to divvy out the spoils. | ||
| The reason that you have a job is so that you can – Be entitled to a share of what's actually in abundance. | ||
| But because there's not enough jobs for people, we've got to rip up stuff and ruin stuff that's in abundance because we can't give it out. | ||
| There's also this social issue of not having jobs when people don't feel like they've Made their own way or pulled their own weight. | ||
| They feel not worthwhile. | ||
| That's a welfare issue, right? | ||
| Yeah, but you've got to replace employment with work. | ||
| Employment is a new invention. | ||
| Employment, again, industrial age. | ||
| We used to work for each other and ourselves. | ||
| We only got jobs when we got the clock, when we could work on the clock. | ||
| Then we're employed. | ||
| But we don't have to be employed in order to work, in order to have meaning. | ||
| If you don't have to have your job, you don't stop. | ||
| So you just have to find a new niche into the system. | ||
| You have to find a new thing that you do. | ||
| A new way to contribute to the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I completely agree with that. | ||
| Too many people find sort of a pre-existing way to interact and they don't create their own way to interact. | ||
| And in doing so, you oftentimes miss on one of the best things, which is accomplishing things. | ||
| Whether it's accomplishing starting your own restaurant and keeping it open, or having a car shop that only fixes a certain type of automobile that you really love to work on. | ||
| When you can figure out a way to do something that you actually have a passion for, it's like the old cliché, it stops becoming work. | ||
| You don't really have a job, you have a thing that you love. | ||
| Right, and you're in flow at that point. | ||
| But how many people have that? | ||
| And that's a real problem. | ||
| In this kind of economy, you can't have it. | ||
| When you have this kind of education system, you can't have it. | ||
| What about just real naturally dull people that need to be pushed in a certain direction? | ||
| Well, yeah, but not everyone has to be the one that figures out how to do a new method of biodynamic Rudolf Steiner farming on their organic community-supported agriculture plant. | ||
| Someone can just go there and plant carrots. | ||
| It's also the issue of how human beings are raised in the first place, which is so huge and not really addressed. | ||
| The reason why some of these people fall into these mindless jobs is because never along the line have they been stimulated. | ||
| Never along the line by their family, by the school systems, by their environment, by their atmosphere, by their fellow knuckleheads in their community. | ||
| They're all just surrounded by people who are either like-minded or less or supported and you're kind of fucked. | ||
| And then when something comes along that eliminates that job for that guy, that robot job when he was 45 years old or 50 years old, he has to start again and sort of reignite some sort of passion and curiosity or die off like a dinosaur. | ||
| And it's hard, too, because he was liking the thing he did. | ||
| You know, if he's a toll collector, you know, and you get better and better at it. | ||
| And then you start, you know, then test to see how many people you can make eye contact with when you're getting the tolls and how many lives can you change with that eye. | ||
| I mean, gosh, you could live the bodhisattva life as a toll collector. | ||
| You know, they take that away from him. | ||
| And it's not just that he can't be retrained, he doesn't have motivation, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's not his fault that they broke his heart, you know? | ||
| They should have a show where a guy's a toll collector. | ||
| And just see how he interacts with people. | ||
| And then give him projects. | ||
| Like today, you're just going to casually mention your penis. | ||
| And let's see how many people freak out. | ||
| Back to your reality roots. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That'd be funny. | ||
| After you're going to do a toll collector, you've got to do it pretty fast. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| That'd be a weird way to experiment how people interact when they don't have to. | ||
| When it's really quick. | ||
| You know, how many people treat you like shit? | ||
| How many people are like, how you doing? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Everything cool? | ||
| All right, man. | ||
| You take care. | ||
| You know, you're going to get a broad variety of the way people interact with you. | ||
| I think that would be kind of fascinating. | ||
| It wouldn't, like, hold up as a series. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But maybe as a one-hour special. | ||
| One-hour special. | ||
| The Toll Guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, just have a guy. | ||
| And you have to do, like, break it up. | ||
| It's like, we'll sit down in our little chairs and then have a discussion about the last couple of ones that we've seen and what it really means. | ||
| People love that fast track thing now, though. | ||
| They don't want to pay a toll. | ||
| They want to put that little thing up there, and they just go through. | ||
| Like, New York is one of the weirdest scenarios ever, because somewhere along the line, they just decided to make people pay to get to the city. | ||
| It used to be that they were paying to get the bridge built, but they paid that fucking thing off a long time ago. | ||
| Every bridge got paid off a long time ago. | ||
| But the revenue is so intoxicating, they just kept with it. | ||
| We can't understand that in California, because we don't really have a place we could get anywhere. | ||
| Those bridges were built, but now they gotta all be rebuilt. | ||
| They rebuilt the Henry Hudson Bridge. | ||
| They were building it, building it, building it. | ||
| And by the time they finished, they had to start rebuilding it again. | ||
| It took that many years. | ||
| Two reasons why that's nonsense. | ||
| The big one is the dumbest way to make traffic. | ||
| You have a spot where everyone has to stop on the way into the city. | ||
| That is so stupid. | ||
| Stupid. | ||
| When you are going from Long Island to Manhattan, that is the most maddening shit to do at 8.30 in the morning. | ||
| You want to fucking kill somebody because it's so stupid. | ||
| You're making me stop at your little box. | ||
| You should make people pay either... | ||
| Either you could justify the construction of the bridge, the maintaining of the bridge, but they should pay for it through their taxes and that's it. | ||
| There shouldn't be a spot where you have to stop because that's fucking dumb. | ||
| The only reason why you would want to do that is you want to check cars for bombs or nutty people. | ||
| Or you're just trying to discourage. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I guess- Maybe it's environmentalists trying to discourage, get people onto LIRR and do rapid transit the way God intended. | ||
| And discourage people from coming into the city because the easier it is to get into the city, the more the traffic sucks and it sucks already. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| We'll make it suck and then charge for making it not suck. | ||
| There's the special lane. | ||
| It's $20. | ||
| You can't fix the suck that way. | ||
| You're just making more suck. | ||
| For $20, we'll give you the green light. | ||
| Do you live in Manhattan? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you live in New York? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did. | |
| I live in New York. | ||
| I live in Westchester County now. | ||
| I lived in New Rochelle for a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hastings on Hudson. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a beautiful area. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| Westchester has got some nice spots. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It does. | ||
| It's a little snooty, some of it. | ||
| So there's a couple of towns in Westchester that kind of retain some connection to reality. | ||
| It's not just... | ||
| Westchester's weird. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Though you'll be in a neighborhood where you're seeing these mansions with these giant lawns, and then you'll go half a mile, and you're in the projects. | ||
| And you're like, whoa! | ||
| It's not a project so much. | ||
| It's a little more Jersey-esque. | ||
| I mean, when you drive through with oranges, it really, you get that sense. | ||
| I mean, most of Westchester's pretty... | ||
| Pretty affluent at this point. | ||
| But it's not as affluent as Manhattan. | ||
| Manhattan's the most affluent in that area, right? | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| I mean, if you're inside Bloomberg's bubble, if you made it in there somehow, when an apartment was a million, now you've got $10 million of real estate or something. | ||
| But anywhere else, it's not quite that bad. | ||
| Those places are madness. | ||
| Those multi-million dollar apartments. | ||
| The way of living in a big city like that is so alien. | ||
| It only exists in Manhattan, where you have so many people living in apartments. | ||
| It's a different community. | ||
| In a sense, it's more connected than Los Angeles is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, it is. | |
| Most things about it are more consonant with our era and our digital economy and all that. | ||
| A better carbon footprint to stack people up like that, that they have everybody having lawns and fertilizer and whatever else they get in the suburbs. | ||
| So, I mean, it's good on most of those levels. | ||
| It's just New York itself is so crazy expensive through God knows what sort of real estate shenanigans are done. | ||
| That's what sort of then, for me, colors The experience of urban joy there. | ||
| No one who's an artist or a writer of regular means could live there. | ||
| Yeah, that's where it gets really crazy, where you see a small apartment that's like $3,000 a month, and you're like, okay, that's just nuts. | ||
| That means a guy who makes $50,000 a year has to give up three-quarters of his income to pay his fucking rent. | ||
| That's nuts! | ||
| Right, so it's like, I mean, I don't know if you need crime To make it better. | ||
| But you go back to the era of Basquiat. | ||
| He couldn't live in Manhattan now. | ||
| None of the folks from then. | ||
| Or the Ramones. | ||
| Well, they were Queens, actually. | ||
| Or Warhol or any of his... | ||
| Do you remember 42nd Street? | ||
| The real 42nd Street? | ||
| Yeah, but that's the thing, though. | ||
| It was also criminal. | ||
| It was awful. | ||
| Terrifying. | ||
| Yeah, it was terrifying. | ||
| And yeah, there's certain some part that waxes nostalgic, but that's not a good old days that you really want to return to either. | ||
| It's just like, how can you have a New York that works and is still artistic and alive and vibrant and fertile and not have people, you know, getting stabbed in the subway? | ||
| Yeah, and how can you have so many rich people living together? | ||
| Because you have to be rich to live there. | ||
| I mean, it's really difficult to pull off living in Manhattan if you don't have at least, you know, upper middle class income. | ||
| So, you know, it's a strange, strange place, unlike any place in this country. | ||
| You know, there's no place in the country that's so overvalued. | ||
| You can get a decent apartment in San Francisco for half of what you'd spend on an apartment in Manhattan. | ||
| I think, although San Francisco now has gotten the worst something. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| It's one of those lists. | ||
| Well... | ||
| There's some places outside of San Francisco that are just insane. | ||
| We're near Stanford. | ||
| They have, I think it's called Atherton. | ||
| It's the highest real estate in the country. | ||
| And you look at these people that I know have this house up there. | ||
| It's an acre and a half. | ||
| It's worth $15 million. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was looking at this house like, what are you talking about? | |
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| But it's like everybody in that neighborhood, they're all tech people. | ||
| They all made insane amounts of money. | ||
| In the various tech bubbles and booms over the years, and all that Google money's up there, and all that Apple money's up there, and there's just a lot of fucking people that have incredible amounts of cash up there. | ||
| So real estate, they need houses, this is where they live. | ||
| So real estate's through the fucking roof. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, you will look, if you look at, like, I enjoy doing that sometimes, like, hmm, could I live in Phoenix? | ||
| Let's see what, you know, what the neighborhoods are like in Phoenix, and I'll go look at real estate in Phoenix for a goof. | ||
| You look in Atherton, and what's $11 million? | ||
| You're like, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| That's $11 million? | ||
| Well, they gotta be, you know, bike distance from Facebook or wherever they say it. | ||
| It's an amazing bubble of money. | ||
| A strange one. | ||
| A really strange one. | ||
| Because again, you go a mile over and we've stopped at this Wendy's and it was like a really sketchy Wendy's. | ||
| This place is kind of fucking dirt baggish to be a mile away from a 15 million dollar house. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| Well, there's no middle anymore. | ||
| That sort of got spun out in the spin cycle at the end of this industrial age here. | ||
| Well, you can't say there's none, but I mean, there's certainly a diminished... | ||
| Very little. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very little. | ||
| But, you know, like you're saying though, if that lower 98% or 99%, whatever it is, It gets fed up enough, it'll network with itself rather than trying to get something down from the top. | ||
| It's not even fed up. | ||
| It seems like we only act when we're forced to act. | ||
| We need a desperation. | ||
| We need to have no options and then we move into this new stage of understanding what the fuck the real problem really is. | ||
| Trevor Burrus: Yeah. | ||
| And that's different. | ||
| And again, that's the whole point of being in the present, of presentism, is that instead of going on some long march on some other 20th century movement, sort of this eyes on the prize and justify the means battle to the future thing, we go, "Screw all that. | ||
| We just want it now. | ||
| We're going to just do it. | ||
| That's what was so encouraging about the Occupy movement. | ||
| What are your demands? | ||
| What do you want from us? | ||
| We don't want anything from you. | ||
| It's like, we're not going to state our demands. | ||
| We're going to actually do this thing. | ||
| And that's where... | ||
| But do what thing, though? | ||
| The real issue... | ||
| Well, try to occupy the world in which we live. | ||
| I liken the Occupy movement to white blood cells. | ||
| Like, they recognize there's an issue, and they gather around it, and it's like it calls attention to the issue, but they're gathering around a sick spot. | ||
| I mean, they know there's something wrong here. | ||
| And so everybody's like, look, this is the spot. | ||
| It's all going down right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then they try to educate. | ||
| They do teach-ins and learn about stuff. | ||
| A lot of people know more about these issues now than did And they see it as a super long-term project. | ||
| I mean this year they did Occupy Debt and the Debt Jubilee. | ||
| So what they're doing is buying pennies on the dollar, the debt of people like who've got health bills they can't pay and all that because it's just owned by credit companies. | ||
| So they buy the debt and just relieve it. | ||
| So it's kind of cool. | ||
| They take $10 and relieve like $1,000 of debt. | ||
| It's well worth it. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| That's a great idea, and I think that's a great community idea. | ||
| There's a lot of people out there that have a spare $5 or a spare $10 that you wouldn't even think about, but if you get enough of those people, you can enact some real change and really help people. | ||
| What is the best way, besides podcasting, besides books, and besides Having actual conversations with people where you explore these ideas. | ||
| What is the best way to get people to understand that true happiness really does come from a sense of community? | ||
| One of the interviews that I saw with you, you were talking about your youth and you were talking about living in a place where you all shared a It's a large backyard and it became sort of a community thing where everybody would get together and have like a barbecue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it was in Queens and we had – it was like one barbecue pit at the end of the block. | ||
| That was just on all weekend. | ||
| That's when we were lower middle class. | ||
| My dad got a better job. | ||
| We leave Queens. | ||
| We go to Larchmont, Scarsdale, these Westchester towns. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's like you don't barbecue with the Joneses anymore. | ||
| You barbecue against the Joneses. | ||
| It's like every single family has got its own like $300 Weber grill in the backyard. | ||
| And no one would think, you know, it's like you can invite someone over, I suppose, but it's not that. | ||
| Barbecuing was this solo family activity. | ||
| I was thinking, well, as far as the grill company is concerned, that's better. | ||
| They'd rather everyone have a grill and nobody grill together because then they get to sell more grills. | ||
| I've looked in my, not the neighborhood I'm in now, but neighborhood I almost went to, it's like everybody on the block had a snowblower. | ||
| I'm thinking, that's really weird. | ||
| There's like 10 houses with 10 snowblowers. | ||
| How many snowblowers do you need per driveway? | ||
| It's like, can't every two houses share one? | ||
| Or every four houses share one? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It doesn't make sense. | |
| Yeah, but what if you want to just get up in the morning and you don't want to talk to Mr. Johnson and see if you can use the snowblower first because you've got to be at work at 730. You don't want to talk to Mr. Johnson is the thing. | ||
| Maybe he's a douchebag. | ||
| Maybe he is. | ||
| Maybe you should be able to have your own snowblower. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| There isn't even a douchebag. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There isn't even a douchebag because he's working overtime to save up for that goddamn snowblower. | |
| Easily, right? | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, there's not a lot of people that are happy out there. | ||
| There's Thoreau's quote that most men leave lives of silent desperation. | ||
| Yeah, or today loud desperation. | ||
| And Marshall McLuhan's quote that humans are the sex organs of the machine world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that has this desire to keep up with the Joneses. | ||
| You've got to pay for those Weber grills, you know. | ||
| Disconnects us, you know. | ||
| I walk in a room now and it It feels different when I see people sitting on their devices. | ||
| You used to walk into a room with a bunch of guys. | ||
| You walk in here and you guys have devices, but you can feel the family. | ||
| You can feel you guys are on an animal level, in touch with each other's vibe, right? | ||
| On whatever that subtle level is. | ||
| And I go into rooms now and I don't feel the same group dynamic, group presence that I used to. | ||
| Even teaching a class. | ||
| You know, twenty years ago versus going into one today when everybody's tweeting what's going on in there. | ||
| It's just a different... | ||
| I'm not saying it's worse, although I think it's worse. | ||
| A qualitatively different experience. | ||
| They have more choice over what they do. | ||
| They can divide their attention the way they want. | ||
| They have more autonomy over all these things, but they're losing. | ||
| And maybe it's out there on the net somewhere. | ||
| Maybe by the time we're in the great, great second life, we reconnect. | ||
| But they're missing a certain subtle animal contact that we don't yet fully understand. | ||
| Maybe it just needs to be mitigated. | ||
| Maybe we need to just understand and explore the ethics of when to and not to use cell phones, when to and not to connect, and encourage more connection. | ||
| And let people know. | ||
| They're like, look, that is an impulse just like washing your hands too much. | ||
| There's a lack of satisfaction in the satisfying process. | ||
| Or the completion of that impulse. | ||
| Check your Twitter. | ||
| Check your Twitter again. | ||
| What are you getting out of that? | ||
| Why not pay attention to the person who's in front of you? | ||
| You're doing it to like a nutty person who washes their hands a hundred times. | ||
| That's the whole reason I write. | ||
| My book started. | ||
| The book before this one was called Program or Be Programmed. | ||
| And the idea was just to give people sort of the ten biases of digital media. | ||
| They're really good for doing things far away. | ||
| They're not good for doing things with someone in the same room because they're there. | ||
| Really simple stuff like that. | ||
| Or this time idea, which is that digital technology is asynchronous. | ||
| It doesn't live in time. | ||
| So don't you try to keep up with it because it's not in your temporal universe. | ||
| It's in its own. | ||
| And you can make it conform to yours, but certainly don't run and chase it. | ||
| It's that. | ||
| At this point, it's education. | ||
| It's just having the conversation, letting people That's the whole thing. | ||
| If they become more aware, then they stand a chance. | ||
| I certainly think a lot of these things have sort of snuck up on us and we could all do with a lesson or at least an idea of how to manage them more humanly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And the trick is for people not to see, and this has been my whole thing, Not to see the messenger of this as the one who's saying, oh, this stuff's so bad. | ||
| Oh, whoa, the children are turning more violent. | ||
| You know, that whole kind of PBS-ish hand-wringing thing that so many writers are out there. | ||
| It's like, are you for technology or against it? | ||
| Are you for it or against it? | ||
| You know, and if you're not just going, yay, yay, yay, go business, they think you're against it. | ||
| And it's like, no, no, I'm for technology. | ||
| I'm just against the way we happen to be using it right now. | ||
| I don't think it's a coincidence that people are, I think, fundamentally less happy now, I think, than they have been in a long time. | ||
| If you look at the amount of people that are on medication for happiness, that's really what it is. | ||
| If you're on an antidepressant, essentially you're on a medication for happiness. | ||
| And whether or not that's because of a chemical imbalance that you suffer from or because of the fact that your job sucks and your life sucks and you're just filled with suck every day and you're responding to that. | ||
| Well, for whatever it is, if you look at those numbers, one or two things that's happening, probably both. | ||
| One, we're getting fucked over by these pharmaceutical companies and they get unethical doctors to prescribe that shit with impunity. | ||
| There's that. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But then there's also, like, people are not connected to this world. | ||
| They don't feel whole. | ||
| They don't feel satisfied. | ||
| And if you're in great pain, it's better to only be in moderate pain or mild pain if you can take a pill. | ||
| I mean, what's hard to do is to get people to go, oh, well... | ||
| Actually, that pain is kind of a good sign because it means that we all need to kind of work here to change the way the world is and take some action. | ||
| The pain is trying to get you to change. | ||
| The pain is trying to get you to avoid the pain and you should use your logic to say, well, what's causing this pain? | ||
| Well, there's a disconnect. | ||
| I'm not emotionally satisfied. | ||
| I'm not connecting with my fellow humans. | ||
| I'm missing something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Unless you're up against the wall and there's nothing you can do to change your circumstances, in which case you're going to take the pill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, that's the danger there. | ||
| But I do think the more people can start to get in touch, you know, for me, it's these rhythms, you know, the rhythms of life, you know, the 28-day lunar cycle and the fact that each week of a lunar cycle, your neurotransmitters change, right? | ||
| So you have an acetylcholine week followed by a serotonin week followed by a dopamine week followed by a norepinephrine week. | ||
| It's like every month there's one ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom. | ||
| If you know that, then you're like, oh, this is the dopamine week. | ||
| That's why I feel like this. | ||
| Or I'm getting strangely analytical. | ||
| How do you know when it's a dopamine week or an acetylcholine week? | ||
| Actually, there's a website, somaspace.org. | ||
| He's got it laid out. | ||
| Originally, it was an Olympic trainer, Irving Dardick, who figured this stuff out. | ||
| He was exercising people at different times of the day and different parts of the month. | ||
| They've been looking at biological clocks for many years. | ||
| Ever since the Major League Baseball pretty much discovered jet lag, that people get more jet lag when they travel west to east than east to west, they realize, oh, these clocks are not folklore. | ||
| There's actually something going on here. | ||
| So there's circadian rhythms for the day and the night, but there's also all these other rhythms controlled by different weather and astronomical features. | ||
| And traveling like that really does fuck with those rhythms, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but as people get in touch with them, I think it could help us get out of some of these drug relationships that we're having, where we're taking drugs in order to compensate. | ||
| For those shifting neurotransmitters because we're trying to be on all the time. | ||
| I'm in sales, so I got to be in sales when I'm in dopamine week or in serotonin week. | ||
| That's hard. | ||
| Well, there's also the arrogance of the human mind to think that it can manipulate the human mind. | ||
| The human mind going, look, I don't like how things are running here. | ||
| I think I am going to take over the running of me. | ||
| And I'm going to invent some shit that makes me run more to my liking. | ||
| I'd rather just be okay with everything. | ||
| I want to be high all the time and okay with everything. | ||
| Okay, can you get that? | ||
| And then one day they're going to get what you feel like when you're on ecstasy. | ||
| And it's going to be, keep it all day. | ||
| Just be on ecstasy all day, enjoying the world. | ||
| Wow, you've never seen this guy this color blue. | ||
| You've got to be so happy. | ||
| They don't let you have those, though. | ||
| They don't let you genuinely have those drugs. | ||
| Because if you're as high as you are in ecstasy or as high as you are in pot, then you start figuring things out. | ||
| Then you start unwinding that relationship and becoming less dependent on... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, even just a shift in the levels of things and the approach to things gives you, oh, this is a new consciousness space that I'm occupying here, whether it's a brief moment or a long, drawn-out, crazy trip. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, that's different than the sort of palliative care of, you know... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, that does the exact opposite. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| The ones that are available that you could buy on a regular basis are the ones that bring you closer to the hive drone. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Drone drugs. | ||
| Even caffeine and alcohol are easier for them to tolerate. | ||
| The one that's interesting that sort of is playing both sides of the field here is Adderall. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because they use it to control little kids. | ||
| Adderall, it's like Ritalin. | ||
| It's one of these ADD drugs that keeps those kids from acting out or whatever in class. | ||
| But also, the counterculture is taking it for... | ||
| You know, to write, or work, or to get that kind of a... | ||
| More like to work, right? | ||
| I've never fucked with it, but the people that I know that have said it, it kind of campers creativity. | ||
| Right, I guess it's more for... | ||
| It's more like a speedy thing. | ||
| Yeah, cramming for a test. | ||
| Yeah, getting work done, organizing shit. | ||
| My friend Robert Schimmel, rest his soul, he accidentally took it once and he had heart issues. | ||
| It was kind of a crazy story. | ||
| He picked up the wrong pill, it was someone else's prescription, and took an Adderall. | ||
| Then he called his doctor. | ||
| He's like, am I in trouble? | ||
| I'm scared. | ||
| I've got this heart condition. | ||
| The guy's like, you're going to be fine. | ||
| You're going to be doing a lot of things over the next few hours. | ||
| Just accept that. | ||
| So he takes it and he starts fucking organizing his office. | ||
| He sat down in front of his notes and he said, I've got more work done than I've ever gotten before. | ||
| But... | ||
| Well, yeah, that's why they call it speed, right? | ||
| Yeah, but it's a – you pay a price. | ||
| Yeah, it's the ultimate industrial-age drug, I guess, because it makes you more productive, more efficient at this time. | ||
| I've had quite a few friends who've had an issue with it, several. | ||
| A good friend, very smart guy who just went. | ||
| It just got off of it and he went crazy with it for like several months and he was starting up a business and working at a tech company and it was a lot of hours and he just took a little Adderall to help him along the way and next thing you know he needed an Adderall every day. | ||
| Yeah, they do say there's this sort of I think speed, long-term speed use is the Closest they can model schizophrenia with drugs. | ||
| You know, if you've been on Speed Freak for a really long time, you get way closer than with any, you know, psychedelic or something. | ||
| Yeah, well, it just seems like it just red lines your system. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lindsay Lohan's plea deal, one string attached, I want Was that TMZ? Yeah, she's supposed to be in that prison or that rehab for the next, whatever, 60, 90 days. | |
| She's trying to get a plea deal so she can get Adderall on that. | ||
| Wait a minute, they're putting her in jail again? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What for this time? | ||
| I think it was for Hit and Run back in 2010 or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't remember. | |
| Poor kid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've been following it. | |
| Boy, there's another weird aspect of our new society that children become famous. | ||
| Back in the Shirley Temple days when they invented that, who would have ever thought that you would get a person like a Lindsay Lohan where you raise them from the time they were a child and they never know anonymity. | ||
| They just long to escape every day, longing to get fucked up and just drift away in a drunken stupor and not have to think about it. | ||
| Yeah, and they can't leave it, is the thing, because they're also addicted to it. | ||
| Yeah, and if you do leave it, it's almost worse to have been a has-been than to be a never-was. | ||
| A never-was. | ||
| You see a person walk down the street, you never go, oh, look at that loser. | ||
| He was never famous. | ||
| You just go, oh, there's a guy. | ||
| I'll tell you, it reminds me, there was this moment that I still don't know exactly how I feel about it, when they did the Brady Bunch reunion. | ||
| It's like 10 years after the show, whatever, 20 years. | ||
| And Jan didn't show up. | ||
| They had a different girl for Jan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I was like, you go, girl. | |
| In other words, she broke free. | ||
| Jan moved on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| She probably, Eve Blum, she probably got all this crap for not going. | ||
| And a lot of people probably thought, oh, because she's probably too screwed up or some problem, whatever. | ||
| And I'm like, no, you know, you went. | ||
| You went into the future. | ||
| And you were not going to let that just define you no matter what. | ||
| Yeah, or she wanted money, and they didn't want to pay. | ||
| And they wouldn't give her to her, yeah. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| I know, but that media's good for projecting. | ||
| But there's something very sad about people that live completely in the past, like if you were on a show in the 1970s, and you're still going to those autograph signing things. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| I heard, who was it, Barbara Eden on the radio. | ||
| You know, Juma Jeannie? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I was thinking, man, that's one of those things. | ||
| Well, Barbara Eden also was in the time where you didn't make money. | ||
| Like, you didn't get that residual cash. | ||
| Residuals the whole time, yeah. | ||
| Where people are still selling I Dream of Jeannie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sure they are. | |
| She would still be getting a piece. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But no, she didn't get a slice. | |
| Back in those Gilligan's Island days, those guys didn't make any money. | ||
| They got fucked over. | ||
| The Gilligan's Island days was... | ||
| Back in the day, they never knew about syndication. | ||
| They didn't have any idea that things were going to be worth so much money and then in a digital form forever. | ||
| Dude, I was supposed to be at my next thing by now. | ||
| Whoops. | ||
| It's like 5.13. | ||
| How long is this podcast allowed to be? | ||
| We just go. | ||
| You just go? | ||
| People download the whole thing? | ||
| Yeah, we never go for more than three hours. | ||
| Do you have to leave? | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm supposed to go. | |
| Where are you going next? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I mean, I've already missed 13 minutes of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We could at least apologize. | |
| Jason Calacanis, he does this conference called Launch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is it? | |
| And it's like Silicon Valley, Entrepreneur-y, what's going to happen next in technology. | ||
| So is it like an interview or a podcast? | ||
| And then another podcast. | ||
| No, a video podcast. | ||
| Well, this is too. | ||
| But that's like only like you click on the thing. | ||
| For a digital theorist, you're a little bit out of touch with numbers, my friend. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And then Richard Metzger. | ||
| Do you know him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Richard Metzger. | |
| He does a Dangerous Minds website. | ||
| Richard Metzger. | ||
| No, I was going to Kurt Metzger. | ||
| He would like it. | ||
| He's local. | ||
| He does a great – he used to do Disinfo. | ||
| He invented that whole website. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Oh, he did? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, Matt Staggs, the publicist. | ||
| Yeah, he's on Disinfo. | ||
| Yeah, that's who I know him from. | ||
| Alright, so you gotta get the fuck out of here. | ||
| I do. | ||
| Dude, this has been an awesome conversation, really fun. | ||
| Yeah, it's great to meet you. | ||
| Great to meet you, too. | ||
| Thank you very much for coming on, and people, please go pick up his book. | ||
| It's called Future Shock. | ||
| Present Shock. | ||
| Excuse me, Present Shock, When Everything Happens Now, right? | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Available now. | ||
| Is it available on audible.com? | ||
| They just, they're the company that just emailed and said they want to do the... | ||
| They want to do the audio? | ||
| Yeah, they want to do the audiobook. | ||
| They better. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| It's crazy that it's not. | ||
| It needs to be done, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Audible. | |
| Go get it. | ||
| Go get on it. | ||
| But you can get it right now on Amazon.com, on your website, DouglasRushkoff.com. | ||
| Rushkoff.com, yeah. | ||
| Thank you very much, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's been a lot of fun. | ||
| Good to meet you. | ||
| Thanks to the sponsors of the podcast. | ||
| Thanks to Audible.com. | ||
| If you go to Audible.com forward slash Joe, you can get one free audiobook and 30 free days of Audible service. | ||
| Thanks also to Stamps.com. | ||
| And if you click on the link on stamps.com and use the code JRE, you get a special offer, no risk trial, plus a $110 bonus offer, including a digital scale that you should not use for illegal purposes. | ||
| Thanks also to Hover. | ||
| Hover.com forward slash... | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Rogan or something? | ||
| I have too many fucking things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| You shouldn't make it all the same. | ||
| Yeah, I should, but... | ||
| I don't have control of that shit. | ||
| Hover.com forward slash Rogan. | ||
| Go there, get 10% off your domain name registrations, and they give you a free shit like who is domain name privacy, and they're awesome. | ||
| And thanks also to Onnit.com. | ||
| Go to O-N-N-I-T, and if you use a code name Rogan, you save yourself 10% off any of our awesome supplements. | ||
| Alright folks, that's it for the week. | ||
| I got shit to do, yo. | ||
| I'm busy. | ||
| I got a lot of things happening. | ||
| And next week is going to be a little sketch because I'm on the road for most of the week, so we might bang out one only next week. | ||
| Try to get through it. | ||
| This is all temporary, and we love the fuck out of you, dirty bitches. | ||
| All right, so we'll see you soon. | ||
| Oh, Indianapolis this weekend, Saturday night, April 6th. | ||
| I'll be in Indianapolis with Tony Hinchcliffe. | ||
| And if you've seen my Live at the Tabernacle special that's available for $5 on JoeRogan.net right now, This set is 100% new. | ||
| There's nothing from that on any of these shows. | ||
| So to answer all these people's questions, should I go see you if I just bought the special? | ||
| It's all new shit. | ||
| I've got an hour and 20 minutes now of all new shit. | ||
| And I'm actually happier with it than my last special. | ||
| It's a beautiful thing. | ||
| Kevin Prayer this week, we're going to have some good podcasts, so if you're... | ||
| Like, freaking out and needing a podcast. | ||
| There you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're doing Penn Jillette on Thursday. | |
| Oh, excellent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Reggie Watts tonight. | |
| Excellent. | ||
| Yeah, Penn Jillette. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| You're going to do it? | ||
| Is he in town? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think just he's in town one day or something like that. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, he's awesome. | ||
| He's a great talker, too. | ||
| That guy will go on and on and on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think we have Cheech and Chung next week, too. | |
| Oh, and Cheech and Chung together? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Douglas Rushkoff, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Thank you, everybody. | ||
| We'll see you soon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye. |
Export Selection