Modern WisdomHow Billionaires Are Preparing For Doomsday - Douglas Rushkoff
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
115 min read · 23,358 words- 0:00 – 0:56
Intro
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
... any of them that are land-based, we can go take them over. There's more of us. I think these are very penetrable. (laughs) The ones that are totally locked away, their agriculture systems are totally self-contained. Have you ever seen somebody doing vertical farming at home? You get a bad batch, just take it out and go build another one. You can't do that when you're locked away. What do you do? You go out with a crew with a couple of guys with machine guns to run and find some more sterile topsoil? But of course you got the nuclear fallout and the zombies and the killer bees and whatever it is (laughs) out there that you're supposed to be hiding from.
- CWChris Williamson
It seems to me kind of an inevitability, I've had a lot of conversations on the show about existential risk, talking about the work of people like Toby Ord and Nick Bostrom. Are we gonna get turned into gray goo or a big bunch of paper clips? You know, this small background risk of a gamma burst destroying us all, or is the polar, the polar, uh, end's gonna flip and then all of the technology's gonna fall out?
- 0:56 – 8:26
How Billionaires Are Preparing Now for Doomsday
- CWChris Williamson
It seems unsurprising to me that the people that have the absolute most resources on the planet, who are exposed to this kind of thinking, who are probably technologists in one form or another, techno-utopians, would take that, run with it, and think, "I essentially have an unlimited number of resources. How can I try and insulate myself from this problem?" That, to me, doesn't seem very surprising at all.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
No, but I wonder what the order of events really is. Is it, "Oh, I've got all these resources so I have a lot of stuff that's at risk and I wanna spend a lot of my energy protecting myself," or is it, "I've achieved my great wealth and all my technological monopolies and stuff by treating other people and places as if the world is already ending, so I really like to have some evidence that s- the world is ending so I can justify having (laughs) essentially used a bomb shelter mentality all along."
- CWChris Williamson
How would you say millionaires have treated the world as if it was already ending or billionaires have treated the world as if it was already ending w- from before now?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Well, I mean, there's so many examples. Like, one I just heard was on, um, (smacks lips) a, a piece that Cory Doctorow, a friend of mine, wrote about, uh, Epson printers. And apparently, they make... A certain Epson printer is pre-programmed to brick itself after a certain number of pages. And he interviewed the company to find out why, and they justified that there's a tiny little sponge somewhere in this printer that absorbs the loose dust, and after however many, 5,000 or 10,000 pages, they believe that that little sponge might be filled up and some of the dust might sprinkle out onto the filing cabinet or, or the piece of paper under which you've, you, uh, where you put the printer. And to prevent that disaster from happening, and because you can't replace that two-cent sponge, I mean, my God, that would be i- an impossible feat of, of administration, they will save us all by breaking the com- com- uh, the printer and forcing you to throw it into a, a waste pile somewhere, you know, a big toxic waste pile that some Brazilian children pick at to find the renewable, you know, rare earth metals in it, and then send some other children to get the rare earth metals out of a mine to build a new printer for you. Now, the guy at Epson who makes that decision is not stupid. He knows, "I am contributing to climate change, I'm contributing to the end of the world by doing this, but I'm gonna make enough margin selling an extra few printers that I'm gonna be able to distance myself from the reality I'm creating by earning money in this way." So, this series of decisions that are made, or the guy, the guy I spoke to at one of those, uh, uh, foo camps who, uh, was one of the guys who put the algorithms in the social media feeds that addict teenagers to, uh, uh, you know, clicking and whatever and worrying about themselves, doesn't let his kids touch the stuff. He's got a private, you know, uh, uh, organic farm with a goat share. His kid goes to a Rudolf Steiner school and is not allowed to touch anything. So, he's already got a kind of organic farm bunker in the middle of nowhere and behaving as if everyone else's kids are the ones who are being left behind. So, if you've got an apocalypse coming, you can kind of say, "Okay, that's why I'm doing it this way."
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm. Okay, so you're saying that a, a large apocalypse justifies this sort of zero sum me and mine versus fuck everybody else, that sort of mentality is-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... i- is born out of that?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
On the one hand, yeah. And I guess on the other hand what I'm looking at is this, just a sort of, uh, uh, innate techno geek nerd, and I share it sometimes too, fear of women and nature and unpredictable stuff. And a lot of us who got involved in tech from the very beginning liked it because it kinda creates a bit of order. I remember when, uh, I was with Timothy Leary when he was reading, uh, Media Lab, the book by Stewart Brand about Nicholas Negroponte's... Oh, MIT's got this big thing called Media Lab. It was really the first place where they were building all the, you know, computers, the first place to look at digital. Marvin Minsky was there, and AI, and, and Stewart Brand wrote this book about the, the Media Lab. And I was with Timothy Leary when he was reading it, and he's circling everything with flare pens and I'm thinking, "Oh, he loves all this talk about the digital future and anti-aliasing and, and, and robot consciousness and all." And when he's done with the book, he goes, "Bah," and he throws it across the room like it's this... And he goes, "First up, only 2% of the names in the index are women. You know, that's how you know they've got a problem." Then he said, "And second, these guys are trying to recreate the womb. They, their mothers were unable to anticipate their every need, and now they wanna build this, this technological bubble where they can sit and have algorithms and robots, you know, bring to them what they want before they even know they want it." And so there's that kind of fantasy that goes along with the perfect tech solution that, that...... again, uh, a, an apocalypse is a really good, uh, justification for, for wanting to, to build that private, uh, you know, private sanctuary.
- CWChris Williamson
Ah, it's kind of like permanently existing in a science fiction novel that has probably inspired a ton of the work that you've done.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Talk to me about, talk to me about what spending time with Timothy Leary was like.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Oh, it was, it was great and a little bit horrible at the same time. You know, being with Timothy Leary was kind of like being on acid. (laughs) You know?
- CWChris Williamson
Kind of like being on acid, or-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Well, yeah, sometimes it was-
- CWChris Williamson
... it was being on acid?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
(laughs) Sometimes it was being on acid, but sometimes it was just like being on acid. So it was, um, a, a, a beautiful zone in some ways, but it was unforgiving. It was like it, he, he would, he would play, um, kind of dominant psychologist with you all the time. You know, reflecting back to you whatever he saw as a, a, you know, a neurosis or an impediment to whatever you were, you know, "Just say it. What? Go ahead, come on." You know? And of course, "Geez, just, can't you chill?" It was-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, so the social mores, the sort of typical things that people would be allowed to just let slide, Timothy would, would decide to point the finger at it and call out the elephant in the room?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Right. So it was a, it was sometimes a, a taxing-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
... zone to be in.
- CWChris Williamson
I have some friends, I have some friends that are like that, yeah.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah, I mean, and I'd, I, I get it, you know? No re- no, no compromise. Especially, you know, and I knew him, by the, uh, time I knew him he was already in, in his 60s and probably thinking, "I don't have time for anything but ..." You know, and if you, and if he did treat you like that, it's because he considered you a friend. You know, someone who would come in, a lot of times famous people would come into the house like an Oliver Stone or Liza Minnelli or someone, and do stuff that was obviously kind of, of, of silly or egotistical or something. And he wouldn't say anything till they were gone, because he didn't see, uh, also 'cause they're high status people. You don't just tell Oliver Stone, "I don't wanna do your friggin' ayahuasca that you brought in from South America in a bottle. I don't know what that is." You know, so it was, it was sort of that.
- CWChris Williamson
Funny. Okay.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- 8:26 – 16:31
What Introduced Douglas to this Subject?
- CWChris Williamson
So, when it comes to billionaires and how they've been preparing, I mean, I've seen an absolute ton of articles over the last five years-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... I would say mostly, uh, the farmland that's being purchased in Middle America. Um, New Zealand seems to be one of the most popular places, uh, seasteading, um, these opportunities for people to air-gap themselves from society-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... in one form or another. Obviously we've potentially got, you know, multi-planetary species not a million years away from now happening. Uh, uh, how did you get introduced to thinking about this seriously?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
I mean, and I don't know if seriously is the right word, but certainly thinking about it (laughs) wa- was, um, uh, this, uh, uh, talk that I was supposed to give to, um, some, you know, wealthy tech investors. They hired me. Like, they hire people like us basically, they think understand something about the future. Um, 'cause we said something they didn't understand once and they go, "Oh, that must be a futurist!" Uh, so they hired me to do a talk about the digital future out in the middle of the desert, you know, so a big money thing. So I went, you know, so I subsidize my, my thinking with, uh, whatever that is, these, these kind of hired intellectual dominatrix (laughs) sessions.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
So, "Let's bring in an anarcho-syndicalist to punish us for our wealth." (laughs) You know, we-
- CWChris Williamson
I love the, uh, I love the-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
... have a chance.
- CWChris Williamson
... idea of you s- of you s-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... you standing there, full leather outfit with a whip and everything-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... but it's a wh- instead of you hitting anyone it's just you gesturing with a whiteboard behind you. I could see that happening.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah, really. No, my PhD is my whip, right? (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
But, um, they, they, so I'm, I'm out there to do this thing, and instead of bringing me to do the talk or micing me up, they bring these five guys into the green room and they sit around this little table and start peppering me with all these questions about the future, and, you know, and it started out the, the regular binary tech investor questions, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, virtual reality, augmented reality, you know, and I'm not the person to ask that either. I would've said Betamax instead of VHS, you know, I would've said CompuServe instead of AOL. I'm always wrong 'cause I pick the better thing, not the one that's gonna win, right? MySpace, you know? (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Whatever. MySpace gives us more, it's better, it gives us more, we can do, pick our own backgrounds, you know, or HTML I would've said, you know, 'cause I don't need friggin', you know, WordPress. Um, so I'm always wrong with that. I'm right about the big picture, but always wrong about which company to bet on. But anyway, so they're doing that with me and then finally one of the guys says, uh, "So, uh, Alaska or New Zealand?" And then the rest of the thing, rest of the time was them, uh, peppering me with questions and asking me about, you know, how to, how to survive, and I was, I was really shocked and started really asking them more questions than they were asking me, like, "All right, so how are you gonna deal with, you know, germs, and where are you gonna get your water, and are you gonna have your own fresh water supply, or are you gonna be depending on, uh, uh, underground water that's being contaminated by whatever happened in the outside world? How are you gonna guard yourselves?" And then they said that they hired Navy SEALs to come fly in, and it's interesting 'cause it's always Navy SEALs they say, nobody picks Army Rangers. It's like, from my movie experience, I like Army Rangers, especially if you're on the ground, if you're not seasteading, I want army guys, right? They're great. Uh, something feels more... I don't know. I like them. I, I like their, their media image, their movie, their movie image better than Navy SEALs for me in terms of my protection. But all of them had Navy SEALs, I don't know if they had the same ones double contracting, all contracted to fly out in, like, helicopters to come to their thing at a moment's notice, and then I'm finally asking-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, so these guys, these, these-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... Navy SEALs or whatever are on hair trigger alert to be wheels-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... up within 90 minutes if the-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... if the nuke, if the nuke alarm-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... goes off or something?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah. One of them has people at his plane all the time ready, you know-
- 16:31 – 26:33
The Possibilities of Seasteading
- CWChris Williamson
What about seasteading? Did you have a look at that? Have you spent much time researching this?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah. On the one hand, it'd be kind of fun, you know? "Let's go to the sea," you know? (laughs) "Maybe I could build my own little raft with solar-powered propulsion, and, and eat fish, and grow alfalfa or whatever, and, and desalinate-"
- CWChris Williamson
What's alf- what's alfalfa?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
You know, it's like you put it on... It's a salad green or something, I think. Whatever.
- CWChris Williamson
All right.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
One of those things.
- CWChris Williamson
I w- I thought it was a type of algae. Okay, cool.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah, or you could do algae, that'd be even better, right? Like blue-green algae, or, or, or, uh, uh, what's that stuff that people eat? I forgot what it's called now, but there's g- all those little... Yeah, we could make that stuff. I mean, the, the, the real fantasy, though, is for frictionless community, that I can float my sort of hexagonal raft to the nation of my choice, and attach to it, and now I'm in this nation of people all in their rafts, and we have our own system of government, and, "We approve cloning, but don't approve abortion, and we do approve this and that, and these are our rules, and we have a blockchain, we have our own currency and all that." And then if this country starts to have a rule or something I don't like, I could detach my raft and, "Bzz," you know, solar power float to that country over there. The- they got the rules that I want. So, it's that, it's that idea of, of a nation with no skin in the game, with no exit cost. You know, it's like you could change... As easily as you could change your cellphone company, you can change your, your nation. And, um, I don't think real community works that way. I think you do... Gotta be with people who believe stuff you don't like, and there's some rules that you disagree with, and...
- CWChris Williamson
Was, was part of that not the justification for the way that the United States was put together, though? That you basically do have 50 kind of small countries all put together?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yes, you're sharing a, a currency and a language, but broadly, it is... You know, you don't like it here, you can move there. What- what's the... What's wrong with somebody who wants to just up and leave when stuff doesn't go the way they like?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Oh, any federation is like that. It's certainly fine for my Mastodon servers, you know? You're on one, and talking, and then you're like, "Oh, I don't wanna be on this one. I'm gonna go over on that one." But they're all federated, so that you can still follow anybody in any one of them. No. I mean, in, in, certainly in a digital realm, or in a brand loyalty, it makes total sense. As a way of, of fostering long-term, difficult relationships between people over time, I don't know. I, uh, I don't, I don't have a problem with frictionless, if people wanna change their town every week and move around. It's just, what is it biased toward? So, when I look at the plan, when I hear them describing it, that if you don't like this, you'll just float away, it's a free market version of civics. And I, I get it, and there's cool things about it. But to me, it betrays what it's all really about. It's, "I don't like the rules on your country," which they don't, right? "We can't just develop tech. I'm not allowed to do all the cloning I want, and there's these regulations about genetic engineering. So, I'm gonna take my ball, my billion dollars, and go and make my own friggin' country out in the middle of the ocean. Nya-nya-nya, and you can't do anything to me. And I have to do it out in the ocean, 'cause I don't yet have enough money to get my rocket ship, my Blue Origin, up to Mars and terraform that place. But when I can, I will. You know, see ya."
- CWChris Williamson
I, I understand the place that this comes from, I think. You know, like personal sovereignty, individ-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... individual agency, all of these things are things that almost everybody that I respect is pushing forward at the moment. You know, it's the anti-, the antithesis of the victimhood narrative at the moment.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
It's taking control and responsibility for the things that you do. I think that's pretty much a universal good.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I also understand what happens when you take that too far and it encourages people to not properly integrate into the local group that's around them.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, you know, you could say ... And I see this particularly amongst dads, particularly, particularly amongst wealthy dads that are maybe late 40s to 50s. They have spent a long time building companies and acquiring wealth. And then they get to this stage, and there's something about it where they, they seem to kind of say, "Fuck you," a little bit, to the rest-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... of the world. And th- it's like a, a retreat, in a way. It's more individualistic. It's more atomized. It's, it's like me and my family, and fuck everybody and everything else. And I do, I do see this, so I do understand-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... what happens if you take that personal sovereignty thing and you roll it forward across many tens of millions of dollars, and e- a l- a lot of resources, and a lot of spare time, and a family that you don't want to have hurt. Like, I, I understand how that-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... how that could come about.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Or, yeah, or a family you don't even wanna be with anymore, for that matter. (laughs) I mean, it just
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Or you wanna air-gap yourself from everybody, including-
- 26:33 – 31:46
Society’s Knee-jerk Reaction of Totalitarianism
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. The reason that Jim Rutt is saying that the difficulty in moving from Game A and ascending to Game B, being the woke movement, is not any of the first order effects of wokeism. It's the second order effect of the knee-jerk reaction when the pendulum swings back against wokeism, which is hyper-individualistic, it's atomised, it's Doomer optimism, it's Elon Musk shitposting his way through AOC. It's QAnon, it's all of this stuff.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Right. Well, he might be ... I don't know whether he's a first or second order effect of it, but yeah, um, I think he's more in the camp of partly Game B is to get away from this stuff. I mean, I think he's a first order. He, he's in the first order effect of it, but ... yeah. And it's, it's, it's tricky and it's because, and again, this is really hard to say 'cause it makes it sound like there's an equivalence and there's not. I don't mean to equate right and left or Trump and AOC or anything like that. There are different degrees, there's way different levels of stuff. I mean, I would way rather, you know, be in, uh, AOC's country than, than Trump's country. But there's a, a ... the problem is not just Trump and his cronies. They are the, they are the figures. They are not the ground. They're the images. They're not the atmosphere. It's the atmosphere itself that it's as if the air we breathe has become totalitarian, has become that in this, it's this extremist thing. It's like an accelerant. Like we're not breathing air, we're breathing nitrous or something. You know, like nitrous does to an automobile. It's like vroom. Right? And everything is, is amplified and accelerated and extreme. And I feel like any political movement, any cultural movement now on whatever side of the political spectrum it is, ends up, um, kind of revved up, um, partly by the digital media environment that we're in, and partly by whatever, whatever this thing is going on, um, in, in the air, that there are these currents that are moving things around. And, and then you've got guys like, um ... you have some wizards out there, like Bannon is a wizard, Musk is a wizard, that make it look like they're the ones actually doing, making these currents, but they're not. They're just, uh, seeing them and riding on them. You know, I don't think Trump was, was ... did anything. I think Trump was more like Charlie Sheen. You know, there was this kind of standing wave of culture that was happening and he just jumped in it. It was like, "Ah!" You know? (laughs) So we look at him as the picture, but, but it's not, it ... he just, he just, he just, uh, embodied the phenomenon.
- CWChris Williamson
It is very interesting to think about this, this knee-jerk reaction. That's a model that I think I'm gonna try and, try and use as I continue forward. I mean, when you consider the prepping movement's been around for a long time, right?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
You know, people predicting the end of the world and, uh, trying to avoid alien abduction or whatever it might be, and then Doomer optimism, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with, uh, is a ... that's the middle ground version of this. And then the end game is the billionaires, and I had a look at th- there's that company called Vivos?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
They sell luxury underground apartments in converted Cold War munitions storage facilities and missile silos. So that's, that's taking it up to absolute extreme.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah. Swords to ploughshares, baby. It's (laughs) it's almost biblical, right? Except it's not really ploughshares, it's sw- swords to shelters. Uh, yeah. I mean, they sell them. There's a ... the ones I like are in Europe, they're called like Oppidum or something. Those look nice. They have swimming pools and saunas and things. You know, when are we gonna-
- CWChris Williamson
I just want to go there. I ... wh-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Do I have to wait until the end of the world or is there an opportunity for me-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Why don't we-
- CWChris Williamson
... to just go now?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
I know, that's the thing. Can't we just go now, but not have to do it underground?
- CWChris Williamson
So when are we-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
So one of the guys ... Yeah, they, they ... but there was one, you know, one of them, and it's interesting 'cause you ... one of them was from a very Christian company called, I forgot what, Rising S-... corporation, and they build, um, they take shipping containers and stick them under the ground, originally for people for, like, tornado shelters and fallout shelters and things like that. Then when the, the rich people got into the apocalypse buzz, they're like, "Oh, this is a good business." So instead of just putting one, one train car down there, you know, they'll put, like, 12 shipping containers all networked together. And they've got pools. They've got (laughs) heated pools and fake daylight, and, and I'm, I, I, one, there was one of the guys I was talking to was doing one of those. And I was like, "Dude," it's like, "my neighbor has a pool not... Right? But, uh, down there, they have a pool." And there's always a truck in front of there bringing some other part or gizmo that broke, like a heater or a regulator, you know, a thermostat thing. Like, where are you gonna get that? Where's that guy in your plan? (laughs) Where's all the, you have a 3D printer making the parts for your pool? You know, can they do that yet? Of course not. And he's like, "Oh," he opens his little Moleskine book, and he's like, "Parts for pool." (laughs) And I'm like, "Okay. You really worked this out, buddy." (laughs)
- 31:46 – 37:59
The Parts of Preparation that Billionaires Struggle with
- CWChris Williamson
That's funny. Okay, so what, looking at what you know about the current approach that the super rich have when it comes to saving themselves from the apocalypse that's coming, what are the most fragile elements of their preparation?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Um, security, definitely. You know, they, they, any of them that are land-based, it, we can go take them over. There's more of us, even if, you know, a thousand of us get shot on our way in. Plus, if we've got motorcycle gangs with Uzis or whatever they have, I think these are very pen- (laughs) penetrable. (laughs) These are penetrable. Uh, they're, they're, some of them have farms and shit, so there's that. The ones that are totally locked away, um, their agriculture systems are s- are totally self-contained. Um, a lot of them have, like, their topsoil is in these little rubber tubes, and then you try to grow. I mean, have you ever seen somebody doing vertical farming at home or whatever? You get a bad batch, it's like you get a bad panel, and well, you just take it out and go get some topsoil and build another one, or a, uh... You can't do that when you're locked away. You know, or what do you do? You go out with a, with a crew, with, with couple of guys with machine guns to run and find some more sterile topsoil? But of course you got the nuclear fallout, and the, you know, zombies, and the killer bees, and, you know, whatever it is (laughs) out there that, that you're supposed to be hiding from. So the, the self-contained, um, uh, universe, uh, the, the sort of the thing that failed with biosphere, um, will fail with a lot of these 'cause they think everything's gonna regenerate. Um, so those are the, the, those... And, and the, they're not really sealed from germs. And I mean, uh, COVID got everywhere somehow. You know, eventually somebody's bringing something or a bird's gonna poop, and, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna catch whatever people have. You know, uh, as I see it, these things are, they're so brittle. They're, they're brittle from the get-go. They're, they're brittle, they're a brittle approach to survival. If you talk to a real prepper, and I have, smart preppers, their, their preparedness plans always involve the communities in which they're embedded. They prep by teaching people in their communities how to prep. They do foraging classes and farming classes and self-defense classes 'cause they realize we, the only way to be prepared is to be prepared together, not prepared alone. The lone prepper does not, does not survive.
- CWChris Williamson
How comfortable or uncomfortable is it for you spending time around people that have both the desire, means, and resources to be able to enact something like this? I had a conversation a little while ago with a friend, and, and he mentioned that he'd spoken to someone that's maybe in a similar position to the gentleman that had paid you to go and t- teach him how to survive the end of the world. And this guy had said, uh, "W- I'm an apex predator. Apex predators don't need to concern themselves about what happens to their prey." And this guy, uh, as far as my friend was concerned, was like, he meant it. Like, he genuinely believes that he is close to the absolute top of the tree of this entire planet, and that the externalities are kind of the same as stepping on a bug. And that story struck with me. That was like two years ago that I heard that story. It really stuck with me because I think, wow, there's, there's people out there that, that have that kind of mindset and that have the resources to be able to, uh, live the philosophy that that mindset creates.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah, I mean, and that's the mindset that I'm really writing about in, in my book. I mean, that's really what it's about. You know, uh, most of the people wanna know, "Oh, you wrote this man- How do I, how do I survive? What are your tech, what are your tips and techniques?" And I'm like, "No, no, I'm kind of trying to undermine." It's called escape fantasies of the tech, of the tech billionaires. But you're right. It comes from, you know, and that's why I look at really two strains. One is, is a, a certain thread of the scientific revolution, you know, which, which was Francis Bacon. And, uh, you know, Francis Bacon was sort of the father of empirical science, and he's credited w- with saying that the, the purpose of, of empirical science, the promise is that it wi- well, will allow us to take nature by the forelock, hold her down, and submit her to our will. Okay, great. So science is basically a rape fantasy, right? We're gonna (laughs) take nature by the hair, hold her down, and, and have our way with her. That's what science will let us do. Again, it's that apex predator's understanding, yes, you are man, you are man, you know, so we can take, we are in charge of nature. We can dominate nature. And as any truly enlightened person realizes, that's, that's not even the way you get power, much less, um, the way you survive. You don't dominate nature, you learn to work with the patterns of nature, the, the patterns of your body, you know? I mean, you, some of the stuff that you've talked about too, about, uh, the natural cycles of, of waking and sleeping, and b- if you learn the patterns, you, you ride them and you become strong and healthy and all that. As opposed to trying to defeat the patterns of nature with what? With speed and sleeping pills and Prozac, and you know, because you can't...... recognized you 'cause you refuse to submit to the (laughs) day and night (laughs) or the seasons. Sorry, there's seasons. You can't change 'em. Go with it. Just go with it. Um, it's okay. It's gonna be okay. Sun will come out again. Um, so there's that, and then the, the capitalism is the other one. We know... you talked about externalities, and externalities are built into colonial capitalism. In order for the markets to grow, which they have to grow because we're on this central currency, interest-bearing, economic operating system, in order for it to grow, we gotta take over more places, enslave their people, and extract their resources, and those are externalities, the enslaved people, the pollution. But if we have technology, which is the sort of the latest part of this puzzle, we can build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust. There will be externalities, but those are other peoples' problems, you know? And if it's too much, if the whole world gets filled up with the exhaust, then well, then we go, and we get Blue Origin, and we go to the next one.
- 37:59 – 51:28
Desire for a Better, More Enjoyable Future
- CWChris Williamson
I remember having a conversation ages ago with a astrophysicist that specialized in detecting alien civilizations. So there's SETI and then there's METI as well, and METI is Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and there's a lot of, uh, big questions being asked around whether METI's even a good idea in the first place. And I asked, "What are some of the most likely, uh, signs that other civilizations would have?" 'Cause some would be underwater, some would be, uh, silicon-based, some might have thoughts that take decades to go through, et cetera, et cetera.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
(laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
And he said that global warming, that, uh, the, uh, use of any type of energy is inevitably going to cause kick-out of pollution into the environment, which has to change the environment. There are only a small number of ways that you can do stuff like smelting, uh, like generating any kind of energy and the externalities that you get from that, and it made me think, like, maybe it, maybe it is the case that we can't techno-utopia our way out of this. I have some friends that believe that the solution to the side effects of technology is more technology. I know that you talk about this.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, but I don't know. Increasingly, I'm, I don't know, uh, kind of a little bit less certain about that.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
I know, and then, it's funny. I was talking with, um, uh, uh, Tyson Yunkaporta, who's this really smart, um, Australian, um, an- indigenous person and scholar, and, um, he says he thinks that Western civilization is in a state of depression after having seen the movie Avatar (laughs) 'cause Avatar is the opposite, right? Avatar is a civilization that is basically expending no energy beyond, you know, sort of what they eat and, and, you know, the, the... beyond the, their, their metabolism of their bodies, you know, in harmony with nature, and it's this picture of something that we could... I can't imagine how we could, you know, go forward to that. I mean, I was gonna say, "Get back to that," but you, you can't go back ever. But how could we move forward? And I, I do believe that the, the, the most sustainable and most fun society that we could live in would look a bit like a permaculture farm or something, and there would be less tech. I mean, I, I'm not anti-tech. I love tech, and it's been fun. It's been fun, but I love, you know, nature, and people, and flesh and stuff more, you know? And I don't know. I, I... I- i- if, you know, if we could, um... degrowth is a bad word. I, I won't say that. If we could sort of unwind-
- CWChris Williamson
Simplify.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
... a bit. Simplify. Yeah, there's nicer ways of saying it. We would, um... I- if we moved to a situation where we don't need to, to have the GDP grow every year, or we don't need to do more just for the sake of maintaining the balance sheet, but we only did more that we needed to do more in order to, to, to feed, and clothe, and care for other people, um, we could get rid of a lot of, a lot of unnecessary stuff, you know? Uh, all the plastic that we're buying at Walmart and throwing away, and, you know, there's just... I get it. It's good for the economy that if everyone on the block has a lawnmower, it's better for the economy than if one person has a lawnmower that we all share, but it's a nicer society if we have one lawnmower on the block and everyone shares it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, so there's the EGO, which is the embredded- embedded growth obligation, right, which is what you're talking about. The GDP needs to continue each year, et cetera.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It feels to me like there's an ECO as well, which is an embedded comfort obligation-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... that humans never want to regress back to a less comfortable type of life than the one that they're in at the moment.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah, and the... but then we gotta also then think about, how are we defining comfort? You know, I guess it's more comfortable to sit in this Costco chair than on a rock, right? But there's... I don't know. There's, there's comfort. There's many kinds of comfort, and so, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, I mean, less, less comfort would come from not having spinal issues, you know, in your 50s, 60s, and 70s because you've not spent a ton of time sat down. It would come from suffering less with diabetes-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... because you were moving around a lot more. But the problem that you have is that what is good for you in the long term often feels difficult in the short term, so you'd switch out the C in ECO for comfort for convenience, you know, an- an embedded-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... convenience obligation. Like, why is it that I should walk to the store to get my 10,000 steps in for today when I can Amazon Prime it, and it'll be here by 7:00 PM? Why would I do that? And i- i-... it takes... I, I always think about this. (laughs) We've got a... Me and my housemate have got a cold tub outside, right? I... We've had to buy a $5,000 piece of kit so that I can find discomfort. I elect to find discomfort and inject it into my daily life, because my natural existence is so bereft of anything that looks even remotely difficult, right? I have to go out of my way to try and find podcasts or books that are going to mentally tax me. I have to go out of my way to go into a building which-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... has a selection of handles with weights attached to them, because normally I don't have to pick anything up that's heavier than a sandwich. Like, I am having to artificially inseminate so much discomfort into my life-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... because the ECO, that Embedded Convenience Obligation, continues to get more and more and more convenient over time, and humans often mistake a convenient or enjoyable experience for a worthwhile one. And until... I, I, I don't think that that's fixable.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
I d- I simply don't think it's fixable, to be able to get humans to look past, "This is difficult now-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... but good in the long term." Even if you'd given it to our cave- caveman ancestors, even if you'd gone... Within one generation, you can go from rocks and f- fire and no wheel to all of the stuff that we've got now. Even they wouldn't have wanted to go back, because I- i- it is a race to the bottom of the convenience stand.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Right, although some civilizations didn't, you know? That lasted a long time in a sort of homeostasis. Uh, i- it has happened.
- CWChris Williamson
But would they have ever got... They wouldn't have ever stepped into that technological advancement and then regressed back, right? They simply wouldn't have made the step forward.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Probably not, right.
- 51:28 – 1:01:07
How Individuals & Society Can Improve
- CWChris Williamson
so gi- given all of this together, how, how has this informed the way that you move through the world? Because you've been talking and thinking and writing about technology for quite a while. How are you dealing with the crushing weight of existence itself and, and, and not-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... losing your mind being exposed to all of these ideas?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Um, for me, uh, uh, by trying to slow down, to try to have less hubris myself. Um, to, to... I mean, I'm on sort of book tour or something now, so I guess I'm talking a bunch. But, to sort of talk a little bit less, um, to adopt the, the comportment more of a kind of a country doctor, you know? I'm, uh, just a local country doctor looking at problems and, and offering ideas, but not, you know, grandstanding, great solutions, um, encouraging the, a multitude of local solutions rather than singular, giant, top-down things. It's the, it's the, the, the $100 million X Prize, you know, geo-engineered, let's put sulfur particles in the, whatever, in the atmosphere, but those are things that I'm sort of, um... Although all of them are tempting because you just push a button, "Let's see." Um, I'm trying to engender, uh, a multitude of small solutions and give people more faith in their, um, that doing something locally really does count, you know, and, and trying to resist scale. And for me it's tricky because if I see scale as the problem, you know, as, as in, in most cases, if scale is the problem, then how do I operate as like a, whatever it is that I am, a writer and thinker, not at scale? You know, how do I... And, and I don't think... I mean, compared to a lot of people, I don't really have scale.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
I mean, Gary V has scale. I'm still, you know, on that (laughs) in the Twitterverse, um, well, I'm a 60,000 person, which is nice but not one of those people. Um, so it's funny, uh, on the one hand, I, I... it's sweet that I worry about scale, operating at my scale. I'm like, "Oh, no, am I too big? Am I too powerful?" You know? (laughs) It's like, okay. I'm t- I'm glad that I'm worried about it, but, um, when I look at it objectively, I don't think, uh, that that's really my, uh, that's gonna be my great problem. Um, but yeah, and to try to get, uh, uh, uh, person-to-person, you know? Every founder that I can convince that it's okay to end up with $50 million instead of $5 billion, is a win. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Why?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Why? Because if they don't feel obligated to make $5 or $10 billion with their company, then they don't have to pivot to something awful and extractive. You know, when you hear now Mark Zuckerberg saying, "Oh, I will... I'm gonna give back 95% of what money I made on Facebook," it's like, well, what if you had made Facebook 95% less manipulative and awful and extractive? You wouldn't have... The world would be, the world would be different now. That kid, that poor kid, plucked out of his freshman year at Harvard, you know, by Peter Thiel or whoever it was, and he transfers parental authority onto this venture capitalist and pivots away from a, "I just want to make a platform that's gonna help nerds like me get laid," to this, you know, s- uh, uh, uh, data, you know, uh, data mining nightmare, um...... boy, um, we'd be living, we could be living in a different world. I mean, it would probably someone else woulda done it, or woulda happened some other way, but, um, yeah. It's, it's, it's scale. It's people being satisf- it's just so hard. You know, again, it's sort of like your convenience thing. Once you get it, why would you go back? You know? Once you have, you know, a million and a half Instagram followers, (laughs) why would you undo that intentionally?
- CWChris Williamson
Well, you also see, espec- I mean, Austin at the moment, and a lot of the people here are talking about homesteading, they're talking about community housing in one form or another where they're gonna, them and nine other families and their kids are gonna go and they've got 100 acres of land out in Lockhart. And they're gonna, they've been learning about regenerative farming and they've, uh, such and such, uh, certain person's wife is a teacher, and this person-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... is a doctor and, you know, "We're basically gonna set ourselves up here." And I understand the impetus because there is a direct line to draw from what you've just said there, which is kind of this, uh, more simple type of life where you are looking at slowing down. But it doesn't take much of a change in direction for that to s- just fall into the very, um, individualistic me and mine versus the world mentality-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... that we were just lambasting 10 minutes ago. Like, it's not that far away, at all.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Right. And then you gotta look, I mean, and, and while I certainly appreciate what those families wanna do, I wonder, I guess not everyone can do that, right? There's not enough land for everyone to do that. We (laughs) -
- CWChris Williamson
And it's expensive. It's very-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
The only people I know that are doing that are, are pretty rich.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Right. So they can go and build an eco-farm with solar panels and hydroponic blah blah under the ground and get their alpacas and goats and all the good stuff. Yeah, exactly. It's tricky. It's like the guys I know in the tech world who still go home to their organic farms with the, with the, with the goats and Rudolph Steiner tutors and whatever. Yeah. I, I certainly understand the impetus too, but that's almost a, that's a, a heavy lift. That's a heavy lift, and it's, it may, it may go against some core simplicity principles. But yeah, I mean, for me, it's just meeting the people where I live, trying to spend, you know, less time online, more time helping, you know, not assuming I know what's best for people but what do they, what do they need? Oh, you just, you know, this woman needs a lift every Thursday to get freaking groceries. This kid needs a math tutor, you know? You do, you do what you can and it, it embeds you in your community in a way that, um, that feeds your, it feeds your heart a lot better than, you know, 60 likes on that tweet. You know, it, it really does.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. That's what you're doing on an individual level and-
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... what's, what's the fix on a more macro level? Is there anything that can be done or are we just along for the ride in the slipstream of billionaires at the moment?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Uh, well, I mean, I think there are things that could be done. One, um, I don't think, and I know this is controversial, but I don't think the billionaires truly have our best interests at heart. A lot of them anyway. I think they, and the ones that do, don't. Um, the ones that do are deluded. Um, so I think that one, one thing we can do is deflate their power by not using their platforms so much, not buying their stuff so much. You know, I'm now, I'm checking out Mastodon as, you know, the, a new, it's a, uh, alternative kind of Twitter, social network place that's a federated non-property thing to see. Just 'cause it's like I don't know if I wanna support this kind of troll thing happening on, on Twitter and elsewhere. You know, I don't want a Tesla either. You know, and it's not like I know Musk is trying to do good things and, uh, and parts of his personality are, are quite benevolent, but others, it's just brittle. It's a brittle single point of failure, you know? (laughs) What I said and I feel like there's, there's some loose screws there that are, that, that, uh, may not, uh, that, that need to be, uh, balanced out with other people doing other things. Um, so yeah, I, I guess my, my macro solution is for everyone, um, to avail themselves of opportunities to, you know, engage locally, to realize that, you know, we don't all need opinions on every big thing. I remember when, um, my, my example (laughs) when, uh, uh, Biden was pulling out of Afghanistan. Three or four different journalists came to me to ask me for their articles, "What's your opinion of Biden's, uh, Afghan withdrawal strategy?" And I'm like, "I really know nothing about how you withdraw (laughs) from a war." I just... "Well, just weigh in." I can't weigh in. I shouldn't weigh in. You know, and everybody's tweeting, "Oh, this and that and the other." I'm like, "How many, what if we just set aside 100,000 of us as the experts and just 100,000?" You know, it's like I used to say, you know, every time that Britney Spears would have like a nervous breakdown, there'd be like 100 or 200 camera trucks outside her house. And I'm like, "Couldn't we cover this with five camera trucks and share the feed, you know? And maybe take the other 95 and put them in situations (laughs) that matter (laughs) to war zones and learn about other stuff?" So there's, there's that. It's like, uh, uh, the, the world, the big things matter, but we can take the weight off a lot of these big things. We can make, um, the, the macro problems less brittle by being more, um, self-sufficient. I don't mean self but, but community sufficient, locally sufficient as, as places. Uh, so yeah. Find where does your food come from, how local can you get it? Where's your CSA, your Community Supported Agriculture group? What's going on in your community, you know, that, that most of us can operate at that level I think, and, you know, have like representatives that work at these, at these, uh, more macro levels on our behalf.
- CWChris Williamson
All right, Douglas, let's bring this one home. Where should people
- 1:01:07 – 1:02:15
Where to Find Douglas
- CWChris Williamson
go if they want to check out the stuff that you do online?
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
Um, rushkoff.com is me. Uh, teamhuman.fm is my lovely podcast. Um, and check out this new book, which is not, um, as depressing as it might sound, Survival of the Richest Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, which the real purpose of this book was to be a comedy, to help people laugh. If we can laugh at these guys, um, then they're, the, the whole thing starts to feel less scary and, and urgent in that brittle way. And, you know what I mean? It's just like, "Oh, right. I get it. They're just silly. Don't worry about them. They're silly." You know, don't, don't try to be Musk. Let Musk be Musk and you can be you.
- CWChris Williamson
All right, Douglas. Thank you.
- DRDouglas Rushkoff
(laughs) Thank you.
- CWChris Williamson
(upbeat music) What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks, and don't forget to subscribe. Peace.
Episode duration: 1:02:15
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