Douglas Rushkoff joins Joe Rogan to critique digital culture’s erosion of empathy, autonomy, and identity—like Facebook’s $100B+ ad exploitation using users’ likeness without consent, or Twitter’s illusion of control. His Present Shock thesis explores how algorithms and "digiphrenia" fragment lives, while Program or Be Programmed warns of media biases reshaping human behavior. Rushkoff links tech dependency to pharmaceutical overuse (e.g., Adderall’s $15B/year market) and fame’s hollow validation, comparing Lindsay Lohan’s struggles to pre-digital stars like Barbara Eden. They conclude modern systems prioritize metrics over meaning, leaving individuals disembodied and society structurally unfulfilled despite abundance. [Automatically generated summary]
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And one of them that really struck me was, well, 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 them that you got, in telling the world that you got mugged there, it was lowering their property values.
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 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 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?
You know, we live right across the street.
You know, you're going to lower our property values.
I'm like, are you selling now?
Is that 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 someone, you know, someone was afraid, oh, what if a newspaper covers it and it's bad?
Because you're not feeling the impact of saying that to someone's face.
Yeah, there's a weird communication that takes place online.
It doesn't have any consequence.
You can do it anonymously.
And it's like these barbs that you can just send out and illogically, like in ways that you would never, if you had to deal with someone one-on-one, because you would feel it.
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?
You can't have really shitty thoughts and get through.
And I think that if you're really shitty online, if you have those thoughts, even if it's only online, I really believe that negative energy is going to leak out.
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.
Like if someone says you 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 a crazy guy.
I can tell in talking to you for 10 minutes you're not that kind of guy.
The kind of guy that would do that.
It's 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 realize, oh, he was crazy all the time.
He just figured out how to get through life.
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.
I think there's a good thing that comes from criticism, though, because it's even really harsh criticism is because if they're ridiculous, and if you look at what they're saying, if it's ridiculous and mean and 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 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, it makes me more flexible, you know, as a thinker.
You know, if you can wrap your head around, you know, oh, where am I wrong?
I've been a pro, you know, boing boinger, cyberpunk type person.
But, you know, I keep feeling like rather than using these things to reach out to other people and connect, you know, 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 it's 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 space.
Yeah, I feel like we're in a stage of progression, this interconnectivity progression where we're starting off with, you know, we were 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 make a Twitter account on 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 like completely interconnected with each other.
I met this guy, this show guy, 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 10 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.
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.
And that's like, 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.
It's like, 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 know, you could cycle seven of them and maybe people wouldn't even know it's the same ones.
You know, 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.
But ironically, on the long run, it ends up making more money.
I mean, 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, you know, God knows what, to some institution anyway.
So the fact that it is live, and it is an MP3 mainly, it is mainly a podcast.
You know, you think on the first hand, because I'm looking to 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.
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.
Like, 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.
Or was broadcasting from the same city that you were in.
Remember when Clear Channel took over and it was like, oh my gosh, if we're getting a recording that's done by a computer 3,000 miles away, this is my local rock and roll station.
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.
You know, 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 who 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'll tell you about things, but everyone's more connected than ever before.
It will, and it's going to replace everything terrestrial.
I mean, in that sense.
So if you're saying what 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.
What 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?
So can you have this very traditional narrative 20th century industrial age culture live right aside this sort of steady state economy and peer-to-peer currencies and local CSAs?
Can we have an iPhone and organic chard and no slavery in Africa to get either?
It seems like that's what a great percentage of the world would like, but we've made shockingly little progress in moving towards that potential utopia.
Right, but then, but, you know, if as long as we got a hope or, you know, 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 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, off that thing.
I remember when the net first came up, it was like it was people in Austin and slackers and cyberpunks.
The idea was that the net was going to give us more slack.
You know, 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 if we take command of the way we're programming these things, then we can use them to sort of to create 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?
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, like a computer itself, the ability to watch a video, the ability to go to the movies.
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 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 meshing up roots to heal yourself with 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, 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?
It's like the two places I've gotten emails from in 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, you know, strange and trying to try something weird and good, or like Lansing, Michigan, where there's no GM plan.
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.
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.
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 with 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 surpassing us.
You know, some singularity or, you know, some moment in the future where computers get smarter than us and then we're not really needed anymore.
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's 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.
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, you know, that 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're not happy when we fuck people over.
I know people that have done bad things in business and bad things ethically and bad, you know, and they're not happy people.
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.
Like, I used to see, I won't even say his name, one of those millionaires down at Nick's Games.
Most of the explanations you see, you know, I watch these business sites and the market will go down and they say, oh, mark it 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 feature.
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.
Like 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?
That's essentially like a way that people are tapping into this bizarre system.
You're supposed to make money on when you've done it.
But 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 explain that for people who don't know what that means.
So if you buy a stock, I mean, you know, 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.
But what 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, this 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.
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 like 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.
How could the government even ever deny how incompetent they are when they allowed that?
Like that alone.
Someone should just have a broadcast on national television, one of those town hall sort of events where you sit down with the main people that run the country and go, how the fuck are you allowing this?
How have you not fixed this?
Why would you ever try to do anything else before you fix this?
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, you know, 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.
Okay, 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 registered as a bank, or you're going to have to be connected to one of us.
And that's when PayPal kind of becomes part of eBay rather than whatever these crazy guys might have done.
And I suppose there's this point where innocently these companies that get bigger and bigger and bigger are 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.
But I think it's really because they're 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.
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, you know, 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, holding down.
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, will read 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 this thing to go up so they can send their kids to college.
It's interesting how circular it gets.
I mean, for how unvirtuous that circle is, though, I think unwinding it is 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.
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 how about the weirdness that comes when you go to a Google, 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.
Yeah, but again, it's not, 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.
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.
And it keeps getting stronger and stronger and stronger.
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.
So fire had a change that had a media environment, had a technological environment.
With fire now, people could go live further north in colder places.
And little apes, you know, who were smart enough to have fire could get away from big, dumb apes who, you know, couldn't travel north to chase them.
You know, we got different races.
All sorts of things happen 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, right?
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.
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, 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 that the clock was from the printing press, from written text, from even fire.
And in a 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, where we just have more choices than we know what to do if we spend more time processing choice itself than we do getting the things that we've chosen.
It's like the call waiting is almost like the typical kind of digital choice.
It just enters, all right, I'm talking to this loved one, I've got a call waiting.
What do I do?
You know, just to be put in that, just to 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 you know, how that interrupts what used to be a more continuous way of just moving through life.
They go two steps forward, one step back, two step forwards, 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.
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 get bigger and bigger and deeper and deeper into my lives and eventually put probes in my brain and – Do you not trust them because Justin Timberlake played him in a movie?
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.
The thing I'm concerned about, I mean, this is what in the book I call it digiphrenia.
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 don't feel, I felt like Facebook was now doing things on my behalf.
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.
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 then turn their marketing to you.
I mean, it's a really clean relationship as long as they don't fuck you.
I mean, there's a point at which, you know, I'm all, I'll let Netflix and IT, whoever's in behind my TV remote, I mean, now they know all that stuff, right?
Facebook is one of the most popular websites online.
And it's also one of the best ways to waste time.
Like you could waste a day easily just looking up 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 fast you got.
You know, you could do that all day.
You could do that all day, and that could be entertaining.
And you're not getting shit done.
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 have this like a radio channel or like an information dump.
The one where you take a picture and it, like, you can send it, but it dissolves in like three seconds or five seconds.
So it's like kids, apparently, I mean, this is the dark secret.
Kids are leaving Facebook.
You know, the demographic, the younger, like, you know, they are in the 16 is like 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.
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 a 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.
And also, I mean, in some sense, a lack of privacy could help that along, too.
It's like if, you know, if Google camera is finding like tens of thousands of people who are just smoking joints in the street of every American city, you know, at some point they have to go, okay, let's just let people smoke pot, let gays get married.
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.
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, they would be a horrible human being.
A personal person, one person who's responsible for all the deaths that came from aspirin alone.
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.
Yeah, something to do with electronic connectivity and the use of our 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, are like, 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.
But aren't they necessary because they're trying to continue to improve the product and they're continuing to add more functionality and I stop believing that, or at least with the rate at which they do.
I sometimes feel like there's a, it used to be sort of Windows and Intel.
That, you know, 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, you know, 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.
You know, that 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 least, of the fewest amount of computers.
I don't know many people at Apple are going, how could we sell, how could we need to sell less computers so that we're, you know, people don't have to throw out these old ones.
But I like the idea that they've managed to recycle these cars and keep them working and keep them running.
And it's really cool to see.
Aesthetically, it's beautiful.
It's gorgeous.
I mean, you see a modern street in this day and age, and you see these beautiful, like, and you could tell they're proud people because these are shiny cars.
I mean, 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 madmen 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 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, you know, aren't they, you know, it's about their decadence.
And it's like, no, it's about their innocence.
You know, they believe and they got, you know, it's that, you know, and you look around LA, it's like everybody's got Haywood Wakefield in their house and trying to get those old GE refrigerators with the sort of rounded covers.
You know, there's that longing for, it's like the industrial age just feels so real.
There's that also, like, when you see those cars, there's like such a human element in that old stuff.
Like even like 60s muscle cars, like those are 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 they're like, looks like something that just like came out of a machine.
They screwed it together and it came out of a machine.
You look at like a 69 Chevy, that does it like a Chevy Camaro, a 69 Camaro.
But it's like, though, they didn't, it's like, so they get rid of all those guys, screw it in the screws, and it's like, do they just then let them stay in their houses?
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.
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 in a weekend?
What if people don't really have to work that much for us to have everything we want?
To 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, a 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, then it's like the old cliche.
Well, yeah, but you know, so 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.
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 support it.
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 you did.
You know, if he's a toll collector.
Right.
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, it can be that's 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 that it's not his fault that they broke his heart.
And you have, we have to do, like, you break it up with like little, we'll sit down with little chairs and then have a discussion about the last couple of ones that we've seen and what it really means.
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.
I mean, if you're inside Bloomberg's bubble, if you made it in there somehow, you know, when an apartment was a million, now you've got $10 million of real estate or something.
But, you know, anywhere else, it didn't quite, it's not quite that.
I mean, most things about it are kind of 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, you know, 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 is an artist or a writer of regular means could live there.
And yeah, there's 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 getting stabbed in the subway?
But, you know, like you're saying, though, if that lower 98% or 99%, whatever it is, gets fed up enough, it'll network with itself rather than trying to get something down from the top.
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, ends just the mean, 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.
A lot of people know more about these issues now than did before.
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 who've got health bills they can't pay and all that because it's just owned by credit companies.
There's a lot of people out there that have a spare $5 or a spare $10 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 do you think is like, what is the best way, besides podcasting and 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 large backyard and it became sort of a community thing where everybody would get together and have like a barbecue.
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 7.30.
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 like let people know, they're like, look, that is an impulse just like washing your hands too much or just like there's a like a lack of satisfaction in the satisfying or the completion of that impulse.
Check your Twitter.
You 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 just like a nutty person washes their hands 100 times.
I certainly think a lot of these things are 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.
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, yeah, yeah, yeah, 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 there's any, 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.
And 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 is 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 connecting to this world.
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.
Actually, there's a website, somaspace.org, that he's got it laid out.
Originally, it was an Olympic trainer, Irving Dardick, who figured this stuff out.
He was doing, like, exercising people different times of the day in different parts of the month.
And 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.
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.
And he called his doctor.
He's like, am I in trouble?
I'm scared.
I got this heart condition.
The guy's like, you're going to be fine.
You're going to be fine.
You're just going to be doing a lot of things over the next few hours.
Just accept that.
So he takes it and he said he just starts fucking organizing his office and he sat down in front of his notes and he said, I got more work done than I've ever gotten before.
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