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Douglas Rushkoff on Being the Intellectual Dominatrix of Billionaire Tech Bros · Journalism 2050

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: Hello everyone, welcome to Journalism 2050.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_03: This is a podcast about the future of the free press.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_03: Over the course of the next 10 episodes, we're going to be hearing from the finest minds in journalism.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: We're also going to be hearing from people like entrepreneurs, political scientists, and futurists who can help us figure out our present moment.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: Hello everyone, welcome to Journalism 2050.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_03: This is our podcast about the future of journalism and also about the past of the future of journalism.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: I'm joined as ever with my co-conspirator Heather Chaplin.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Hello.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_03: Hello, you're sitting on different sites.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: I know.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: I just want to keep you on your toes.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_03: Very c very confusing.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_03: But we're all we're very excited, aren't we?
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: Because we're also joined today by uh Douglas Rushkoff.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_03: So you're a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technologies on people's lives.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: Is that how you is that how you describe yourself?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, although in this context I might I I often call myself a presentist.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: I get invited to a lot of things and they're like, oh well, you're a futurist, right?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because you write about technology, and I go, I'm not a futurist.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a presentist.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's just that other people don't know what's going on yet.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: So let's start with a bit of presentism.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: Tell us where we are, Doug.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_03: Like what is ha what what's going on right now?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_03: Have two minutes and if you know what it's How would you describe the moment?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_03: How would you describe the moment?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, we're in the beginning middle of the collapse of a colonial civilization.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: And there are lots of different reactions to that.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so there's the one is the sort of uh fascistic pyramidal, you know, colonial grab for the remaining uh resources, you know, so that's what we see is is now a kind of uh um a disaster capitalism by design, where we're watching a controlled demolition of civil society and the public sphere in order to privatize it, kind of like what happened at the collapse of the Soviet Union to the oligarchy, but intentionally.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: And we're also, you know, and we're watching the the slow steady establishment of new bottom-up uh connective tissue for uh a less uh uh you know pyramidal civilization, for uh a society based on uh stuff like mutual aid and community and uh civic sensibilities.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean it it will inevitably replace the collapsed uh pyramid.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's just how long will it take and how much pain and suffering will happen between the Trevor Burrus, I was gonna say, so you've gone you've gone beyond um the slough of despond that Heather and I find ourselves in um and into the things that we are hoping to build, I guess.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting though.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, academically, uh having joined academia rather late in my career, it's actually helped with this.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because as an outsider to academia, I saw academia as all of the papers, all of the knowledge production, because I was outside it.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And being inside it, I see it as the human contact between me and my grad students.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: So uh correspondingly, I felt myself shift from a kind of an intellectual agent of change to a much more uh humanist agent of care.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I've kind of shifted from a medical doctor to a doula.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the patient is dying.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: The patient is dying.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: So the patient needs a doula to help metabolize this moment.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: But a doula is also a birth doula.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: You don't you're the one patient dies and the next patient's born.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: So what what does that look like?
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: And doing that in the context of things like academia and journalism is you know particularly interesting.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you were a writer before you were a teacher, right?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: And so you see more agency now in the teaching than you did in the writing.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: In some ways, yeah.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Although I don't see my teaching as limited to the the academy anymore.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm doing podcasting and live talks and all these kinds of things that are uh uh if not fully embodied, they're more uh uh they they hit more sensory levels.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the you you do get something we could call podcasts lightweight, but people get something from hearing our intonation, our non our nonverbal communication.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: But it's not just an effect.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's a I I have to believe, even not being a totally spiritual person, there's something else going on.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: There's some other transmission, you know.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the stuff, you know, academia's had such a hard time recognizing is real and that the the fascist side has been so good at exploiting.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I feel like we've got to embrace that that being alive thing.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: I I feel like this is becoming a uh a a theme in this, in this uh even if it we're talking to somebody who's talking from the business perspective and the importance of live events.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was kind of trying to raise this with one of our other interviews that it's live events sounds kind of boring and businessy, but I think it's actually something far more profound, which is humans' desire to make eye contact with each other in the face of growing authoritarianism.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that like like if if we have no hope if we cannot reclaim our shared humanness?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: And but and um we have to accept that authoritarianism isn't just Trumpist authoritarianism.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's our our own rigidity and whatever, you know, whatever belief system is keeping us from.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: We this came up with a with a different interview we did that it's hard to talk about these things without getting written off as being airy fairy or squishy, but words like care, which it depends who it comes from, there are times where someone says that to me and I just think, oh my God, shut up.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: And they're but at the same time, what is more important and what is harder?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: And what is less regarded in our society as a value?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because care is associated with women and I was about to say, what's interesting to me is you're a man coming in here saying this, because I always have these conversations with I I work mostly in community journalism, building these grassroots news networks, and it's filled with these women who are badasses, and they are talking about care with fire in their eyes.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: But you very rarely hear men talk about it, and it's ve I often very intentionally stay away from that language in order to be taken seriously.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: And men can get away with not talking about care because we're doing all that other stuff.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_03: Technology creates space.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: And it doesn't, it creates space for some other form of exploitation.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: To use Heather's favorite words.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Unless the the tech bro nightmare takes place, in which case it's no longer exploiting us but replacing us.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: The final exploitation.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: So no, the final, but the, you know, because you're I was thinking about the 50 years, and I don't know exactly how it affects journalism, although I think I do.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um the the interesting thing about it was I I was thinking a lot, and everyone does, in terms of the way AIs replace us as uh uh employees.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: And in some ways that doesn't bother me because I don't see one of my essential human rights is to be an employee.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: I understand when employment was invented.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was the late Middle Ages, the invention of the Chartered Monopoly, you know, and people couldn't work for themselves.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Now you have to be an employee of His Majesty's Royal Shoe Company, and you'd clock in and all.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, sure, if you're born into a world where having a job is how you get to survive, I understand why people think that's necessary, but it's not.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Work might be necessary, but having a job, working for the man, is not.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: So in some ways, if they want to take away my right to be uh uh to have a job, uh it's it I I don't mind that so much.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: But then I start thinking, okay, we know the Henry Ford idea that you have to play, pay your employees enough so that they can afford to buy your car.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: So if they don't pay us anything, then how are we gonna buy their cars?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then I realized in their model, they don't actually need human consumers.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's what they're going to get are AI consumers.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it sounds weird, but economically, if you're hiring AIs to do stuff, and then you give AIs some kind of a crypto per tasks that they do, then they can use that crypto to buy processing time, data, storage, energy, and the stuff they need to do their job.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: So as long as you have that circularity, you have everything you need for an economy.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: We have big corporations today that have humans making jamba juice and humans buying jamba juice and buying and making Starbucks and buying that's an economy.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: But if you have an economy of AIs producing data and data structures and other ones and ones buying those things from each other, you create a marketplace between the AIs and supply them with energy, data cycles, you don't need the humans anymore.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: So then I was thinking, well, if that's the case, we either get what the tech bros see, which is a mad max, you know, some kind of an awful dystopian living in the mud, fighting over things, or um we get to rebuild a human economy.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, we let them untether.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a so there's uh actually two parallel universes uh here on Earth, hopefully.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: So we'll come to we'll come to your two civilizations, really.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Two civilizations.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: This year I went to um South Dakota State University.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: It was I and I'm thinking, oh, I'm going out to the Red State, whatever place.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: These young people came up to me after my talk about this kind of stuff, and we're talking about uh how they're trying to reduce the uh inputs that they're putting into the into the soil because they know the more inputs they put in, the more dependent they are on uh on Monsanto and all those companies, um, how they're try um pushing for um low-till agricultural processes and crop rotation, but that is a long-term investment in the sustainability of the farm, which uh is undermined by capitalism and the need to compete right now with big agrifarms that are more than happy to put as many inputs into the soil as necessary.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: And their awareness of it was was kind of amazing to me.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh, y there's nothing I can teach these people about about land and environmentalism and and uh small economies and all.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I did understand how they saw little difference, at least at the time, between what the supposed left was offering them in terms of global markets and Clintonian global market capitalism and world blah blah um and what Trump seemed to be offering them, which was kind of a uh it seemed uh kind of an independence.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: But now of course they see that.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_03: That's also illusory.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: Shafted from both sides.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Let let's um this wow, I I feel like I could uh follow this conversation wherever it's going, but I am gonna pull us back a little bit to ask some questions about how we got here specifically around the internet.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think you're particularly interesting in having gone from being uh enthusiastic about the internet and some of the technologies in the nineteen nineties.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I've told Emily a bit about my father was a early programmer in the nineteen sixties, and I grew up with, you know, one human consciousness was on the way with no more work.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: He was a post-scarcity anarchist.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think maybe I am too.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is he alive?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I wanted to meet him.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't have wanted to meet him.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: He was a horrible man, but he really was.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_03: He was a disaster and a quick He was he was kind of an early abundance agenda guy.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's like I think he got there before Ezra.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he'd been raised by communists, and then he was a programmer at Hopkins in the late 60s, and he really thought technology was gonna set humanity free and that we wouldn't have to work.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And but so I think for some of our listeners, even remembering that time is a little bit hard or believing that there could have been that kind of optimism about the rise of this technology.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: So can you tell us a little what the thinking was and and what the feeling was?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, at the time I was considered one of the cynics, believe it or not.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote a book called Siberia, Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, and I wrote it in 1991.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the book got canceled by Bantam in 92 because they thought the internet would be over by 1993 when the book was supposed to come out.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: I remember the letter I got from the editor said, you know, we were looking at what happened with CB radio, you know, the breaker breaker, the trucker radio.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, think of this as, you know, given that it's gonna take another year till it's on the shelves, it'll it'll be done.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: But in that book, I did.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: I went around um, it wasn't really about the internet alone.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was about what I saw as this common uh cultural movement that encompassed everything from the psychedelic revival and chaos math and new physics, fantasy role-playing games, uh uh this sort of San Francisco hypertext culture, what would it mean when we can, and that was the most interesting thing about the net to me, jump, click on the footnote in the book and get to the book and the part of the book where that was from.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: What does that mean to connect all that stuff into that web and move through information that way?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: But even then, uh by the time the book came out, in the delay between when I wrote the book and the year after when the book came out from Harper, um, Wired magazine launched.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I added a few paragraphs to the end of the book before it came out, saying, you know, there's a new player in town, this thing called Wired Magazine that's describing this as a tsunami that's gonna overtake us all in a long boom.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And and um we and I said, I believe we have a window of opportunity to realize the kind of the wild dreams of these early programmers for us to reprogram reality to a system that supports us all.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um but if we don't if we don't realize and claim this tremendous power that's on offer, that instead of being given tools to realize our dreams, they're going to use tools on us to realize their dreams.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_03: And it was the time of the well.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, you know, if you can you explain the well to again our younger listeners who don't necessarily remember because I think that people connecting that time of libertarianism and as you say, saying wide magazine.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: I remember buying the first edition of Wide Magazine here in New York City and going like somewhere downtown where it was still possible to rent an apartment and going, wow, this is like amazing.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that was before you hadn't gone online and done all that stuff yet?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_03: No, so I was I was late online.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_03: I was like I was online in like 95, 96 or something like that.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: So Doug were you in San Francisco in the nineties?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um mostly.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I lived in LA, but um I would go up to San Francisco and then I moved back to New York, but would go for months at a time to do my sort of ethnographic research.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: Did you hang out with all those people in the ethnographic research of the sort of something around there?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: I hung out with them and did psychedelics with them, and it was a it was a time.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it it was excuse me.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was a thing.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it was I got interested in that world because um I was a theater person.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I got fed up with theater because it was so elitist and expensive, and people were going to the play as an excuse to not do anything.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it was a uh I I got sick of it.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: And meanwhile, my most psychedelic friends from Princeton, where I went to undergrad, um, they were all moving out to San Francisco to work in computer companies.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: These were not computer people, these were deadheads.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, what the heck is going on here?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_03: So I would not the IBM that you were.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't pocket protector geeks going out.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I would go out to San Francisco or uh uh or to Silicon Valley to see them, and they would be, you know, working at sun microsystems during the day and come home at night to Oakland and scrape the buds off peyote cactuses and trip all night and render fractals on their computers that they would then project on the walls at Raves where they're making the music and demoing virtual reality.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, oh my gosh, you know, and and I what the research, the journalism I did was to find out that these companies were actually warning their employees in advance of drug tests because they desperately needed psychedelics users to imagine these worlds.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: That that those these were people who were kind of uniquely qualified to hallucinate these virtual realities in which we'd be spending our time.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I mean that was like my journalism, right?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: So but that that was the but sort of the between that and then spending all the time at the raves and talking to the kids and looking at the anime and video toasters and all.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: But to your question about the well, the as a as a a as a society, the well was there before the internet.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: And to contextualize it, and this turns out to be important for people in their in their twenties and below, um the the the internet or going online used to be a thing that you did.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: So going online was like making a telephone call.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, to people now, they're online all the time.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's online as a state of being.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: But when you went online, it was a bit like a a magical ritual or a sigil.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: You would sit down at your computer, you'd plug it into this thing called a modem, you'd plug the modem into the phone line, and you would type commands into your into your computer, and you'd hear it dial the phone, and then you would hear and it was the sound of your computer negotiating a connection with another computer somewhere else.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then your computer would say, What do you have for me?
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: What what what do you have?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it would you would download the conversations that you were interested in into your computer.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Then you would disconnect from the phone line because it cost money by minute to use the phone.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: You would disconnect and then you would read in your own time all the stuff that was there.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: And there might be a conversation between celebrities that you never thought you'd get to talk to, but you were in there.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd be in there with John Barlow, a uh uh lyricist for The Grateful Dead, or Kevin Kelly as an important guy from Wired magazine, or Stuart Brand, who was on the bus with Ken Keasey.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: So, but you're in the same conversation and you would look at what they're talking about and you would think, How do I want to respond?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: What do I want to say?
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: And you might take two, three, four hours to craft the paragraph that these people are gonna read, and then you'd reconnect to the computer and you'd upload your paragraph and wait a few days and see how they responded to it.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: So it was like chess by mail.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the the thing about the internet that was so strange was this was a place where you sounded smarter than you do in real life.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: You were afraid to go to a gathering or a conference where you would see those people because then they would see, oh, uh you can't really talk like that.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a person.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's just me.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: But but so the the internet was this elevated place where we were our highest, highest selves.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that it's interesting.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you've done such a great job of painting the sort of excitement and the possibility that was alive then.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: When you look back from the vantage point now, are there two or three inflection points that you see where we were on one road and maybe whether we realized it or not when we started down another road?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um one is when they allowed uh commercial traffic on the net.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: Originally, when you went online to get an account, you had to sign an agreement saying you were going to use the internet for research purposes only.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember when I went on, I asked my friends, I said, Well, you know, I'm thinking about writing a book about what I'm doing online.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: Does that still count as research?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: I was worried that I would be breaking.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people were upset when I came out with my book, you know, uh it because it was with a I was like the first.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: On the scene to write a commercial book about what this culture was, what was happening.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: They're like, oh, rush coffee, sell out.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, they all went on to become millionaires.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm the poor Marxist in their in their wake.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I've got anarchist, right?
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's too much.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: So that was one, you know, and that was in uh 94, uh when they basically allowed advertising and all to come on.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um another was let's can we just break that down a little bit when we say that they allowed what actually went into the decision making and could people who didn't want it to have gone that way, could we have done something different?
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: We tried to do things that were different.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: We had, you know, uh our own organizations.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think um the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, might have been on the wrong side of that particular one, you know, and and another big moment in that history was John Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now, he wrote this document in I guess it was around 95, and he wrote it from Davos, which it should have been a Davos.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: But we didn't think, I mean, us psychedelic hippie people who loved John Barlow because he was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, uh, and we were uneducated, didn't understand economics and history and all, what we understood was that the government had made itself into the enemy of our internet culture.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they were raiding the houses of 13, 14-year-old hackers who were for breaking into computers, but the as far as the hackers were concerned, they weren't breaking into computers.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: They were just wandering the same way we did as kids into the, you know, the the looking in the dumpster at the parking lot of the 7-Eleven.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't uh uh this wasn't espionage.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: So they were getting arrested violently, you know, with guns coming in, putting their sisters, you know, in handcuffs and stuff.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: That was happening.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Tipper Gore, the vice president Al Gore's wife, was doing the Computer Decency Act.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: So they were kind of clamping down on what we could say.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: They were saying the internet was going to be about child porn, and um so the government had had uh really cast itself as the enemy of what we were doing.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: And John Barlow wrote this document that said, governments of the world, beware, we don't need you, this is our space.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: Go off, you know, we don't, you know, go good riddance.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And we were like, yeah, yeah.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: And what we didn't realize at that inflection point was that if you get rid of government, you create a free space for corporations, that government and business sort of balance each other out in an ecology like bacteria and and fungus.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right?
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: If you kill all the fungus, the bacteria go nuts.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we didn't see that.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: That was an inflection point.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: The another inflection point was when Mark Andreessen took the browser that was developed called Mosaic at the University of Illinois and reversioned it and did an IPO on Wall Street for Netscape, which was the company.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like, oh, we've just taken a public utility and turned it into a private mindset.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the same day that Netscape went public on the on the stock exchange, Jerry Garcia, the guitarist of The Grateful Dead, died.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I took it symbolically as oh, that sort of 1960s roots of the net is gone, and we moved and we now see who Mark Andreessen is.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's a kind of a beyond hyper-libertarian, insane uh uh uh person um with all this power.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's like wow, look where that went.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: So that was another big one.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: Another other big one was the AOL Time Warner merger.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yes, the merger.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_03: That kind of yeah.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: Which fucked up uh we're allowed to say that journalism really almost forever, um, but not forever.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: Fifty years is a long time.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, I remember the day that that this so for people who don't know young people, so AOL was um it's still alive, but AOL was the dominant um ISP.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: It was the dominant way that people got the internet.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: So instead of having like um Verizon or your cable company give you something through your phone line, AOL was thousands and thousands of modems.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was this company that just so that you could dial in and get onto the internet or into their little small private internet, um, uh you could get into it through your phone.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um and people paid uh like$9.99 a month to have that kind of access.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: And this was a company that started out providing their own stuff, right?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: You would log in and they had their own little magazines and chat boards and things.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: And a very big day on the internet was there was this day, I forgot what we called it now, but that they plugged AOL into the internet.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: So all of a sudden, all the regular people who had been in AOL in this private service and looking at magazines and cartoons, they all flooded onto the internet, and all of them wanted to know how to download porn.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: So anyone who was in a Usenet group or a chat or anything online was now being flooded with all these questions from the newbies wanting to know how to get porn and or or even porn cartoons they were into.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: I forgot what that's called.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: That was like a big thing.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: I guess because it downloads faster than porn photos, porn gifts or whatever.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um God bless.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: So that that moment happened, but this company got very big, AOL.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: It got very, very big, and people thought it was the future of the internet, so their stock got very inflated.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: And their stock got super inflated, like a very big multiple, while their subscription base had plateaued.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so what they did was decide let's use our inflated stock to buy Time Warner.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because Time Warner at the time, they owned Six Flags, amusement parks, they had uh Time Warner Roadrunner, which was one of the main um cable, uh uh cable and online access things.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: They had movie studios, they had HBO and like TV, they were big.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Time magazine was this big magazine.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: You could still it's the one with the red time that people put their face on.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was a big thing.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody had it, every doctor's office.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was a big, big company.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Again, it's hard for people to realize how big it was.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was huge.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: They had they had like Rockefeller Center was largely I was at uh Time Warner magazine at the time when that happened.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm feeling very um Forrest Gumpy as you talk.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because I was in San Francisco in the nineties.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was at Time Warner during the vi.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's a trip.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_03: I was invited in to talk to um some of the editors at in Rockefeller Center um about you know the sort of the Time Warner magazine kind of brands, about what we were seeing on the internet and what was exciting.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I named like half a dozen things, I think actually including bus feed at the time.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_03: And uh the kind of editors just looked at me like I had wandered in off the streets and was completely mad.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_03: And they and one of them said, I don't think you understand that the magazines we have represented in this room make billions of dollars in advertising 2010.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, and what you're talking about are these tiny things.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, Yes, but you've asked me what I think is going on.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_03: And it is that we're sitting in this paneled boardroom and you can't defend billions of dollars of revenue.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's amazing.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: They they they refuse to see it.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: So the the way, yes, carry on because I'll still join the remote.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: It is that, but it is that this is that this is that story.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so I got a call from uh who is it?
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh David Shipley, uh he was running the um New York Times op-ed page, which is now called opinion.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but op-ed meant meant editorials.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and he called, we heard that you know um AOL and is gonna merge do a merger with Time Warner.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: Will you write the op-ed on that?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it's funny because I'm this freaking countercultural, acid-taking internet culture writer.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, dude, why are you having me?
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: I I and he's like, would nobody writes about we don't have writers about this stuff.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Just figure out what's going on and write the op-ed about it.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I looked at the situation, I said, Oh, I get it.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Steve Case, who runs AOL, is has these vastly inflated poker chips.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: He's gonna use them to buy a real company um like Time Warner um before uh it before it's over, because his subscriptions have peaked.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um and this probably means that we are now at the very beginning of the dot-com crash.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because the first of the big companies is selling its chips.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: It realizes we're at a top.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I wrote that piece, and Times looks at it and they said, this is insane.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is insane.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody here, everybody in the business department says that this is the greatest synergy between old media and new media, and it's gonna launch the new thing.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, rewrite it, please.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, you know, I I I think maybe you should have someone from the business page write that story.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: I published mine in The Guardian.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: The Guardian of London, who are more than happy with this with this perspective.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and of course, you know, six months to a year later, it starts coming true.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: AOL's taking all the water coolers out of Sports Illustrated and People magazine to save money.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the whole thing was the worst thing.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_03: I lost my job.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_03: You lost your job, and Heather was fired as a direct result as a meta sorry, laid off as a direct result of your piece in the Guardian.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: But the beauty of that moment in terms of of turning points is that was the moment that business understood what the internet was for.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: Create a story that inflates your chip and then get out at the top and move on.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we keep doing again and again.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was crypto was the purest form of that.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just do it with chips.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do it.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: They keep going meta on themselves, right?
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do it with the chips themselves.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: And now everybody's hoping or not hoping that AI is one of those.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: And AI is both one of those and not.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's an AI bubble and there's a future of LLMs.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: So you've talked about these inflection points, and I was struck you said earlier that in the 90s, even you were like, there's going to be choices made, either we can have them made for us and make them.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have any sense then, or or at any of these inflection point moments, could you have foreseen where we are now?
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Yeah.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I basically wrote where we are now.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: The book I wrote about that was called Present Shock in 2013.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was the one that got the happiest reviews from like Janet Maysland did a full page thing on it.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I've arrived.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um it didn't lead to more sales necessarily, but it led to it never does.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_03: No John Mazin liked you, so that was a 2000.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: No, I thought I was validated.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was finally validated by the people who said I was crazy before.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and in that I said that, you know, the the basically that the Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement um in this uh presentist, always on interrupted, puntalist, conspiratorial um media environment were going to lead to an extreme bi hallucinatory bifurcation.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that's you know, so we got you know a MAGA and whatever the the uh reverse MAGA is.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, I I I saw that and I I tried to define, you know, I used these words like digifrenia.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: What is it to try to, you know, um have multiple instances of yourself operating at the same time, fractal noia, which is sort of the paranoia of making too many connections between things, apocalypto, the sort of end-of-the-world thing that we're in now.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I really did try to spell out the nightmare once very clearly.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: Then I did a number of other books after that, looking at how do you not fall into the nightmare?
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like Team Human and these sort of optimistic things.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally I did this this last book, Survival of the Richest, which is about the escape fantasies of the tech bros.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_03: I totally want to talk about the escape the escape fantasies.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_03: And you also did throw it.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_03: I was meant as a joke.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_03: And you also did Throwing Rocks at the Google bus.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_03: Which I kind of feel was like such an important book at the time that you did it.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_03: And because again, it's not that long ago.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_03: Was that when did you bring that out?
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: That was 2016, I think.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: So it sort of felt as though you had also anticipated this, as you said, you know, bifurcation favorite words on this podcast, but just what was happening in terms of the gross inequality is.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I right, I wasn't trying.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: People later said, you know, right-wingers say, oh, Rushkov's telling us to throw rocks at the Google bus.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't say throw rocks, I said throwing rocks.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: That look at what it's come to, that people feel so violated, so disempowered by Google, the company that was two kids in their dorm room taking down Big Bad Yahoo, you know, that now look at what look at look at San Francisco.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: Is that is that divided?
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, how how growth became the enemy of prosperity is sort of what that was about.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Such a hard sale to get that to a at the time, because even as late as 2016, I was going, this was a portfolio, a business press at at uh Penguin, they couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that exponential growth could be a bad thing.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_03: It could be a bad thing, yeah.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_03: I d and I just uh uh to me, you've written so many brilliant books, but to me that was a book which just got the moment that people were and people were so, as you say, in denial that there could possibly be a real problem that was going to undo us.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel good about that.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: I felt like I took one for the team on that, you know.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, because you know, because I did the book and it I came out and it was like, uh, a lot of stir, this guy's crazy.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: But then all those circular economics books and degrowth and debt and all these books, there was sort of a new space for them.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_03: So let's so let's talk about where we are right now.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_03: So the presentism and AI and what next Heather's Heather hates it when we talk about going forward.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: No, I I like the future and I like the past.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_03: I like the future and I like the past.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_03: And so you said that that that we're now in this kind of period of moving hopefully from the pyramidal society to the horizontal society.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_03: What do we need so what do we need to do to get through?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_03: I think you mentioned, you know, the the the the pain and austerity and and sort of the the delta between this and that, and w what can we as writers, journalists, uh community organizers actually do about that?
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_03: Is it is it do we have any agency in this?
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we do.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I hate to sound new agey and I don't mean it this way, but it's sort of like the most important thing we need to do is to learn to learn to breathe.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, to actually breathe through this.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's especially those of us who are trying to help in some way, you know, to breathe.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's we are we are metabolizing something.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it is, it goes back to like I've never had a baby, I've watched it happen, but it's like birthing a baby.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a whole it's a whole big thing.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um and bringing our our somatics to bear is not a a terrible thing.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh because you know, it's like with Marx, we always talk about as as good Marxists or socialists, we talk about conditions on the ground.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like conditions on the ground are hard to understand through anything except your body, through your felt experience.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you don't trust the local news because it's owned by somebody working for the administration, it's like look outside, look into the faces of people, look at the old person sitting on the bench, is anyone taking care of them?
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: Sit next to them and get a sense of what's going on.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that this um body-to-body, moment-to-moment, real-time, extraordinarily local uh version of mutual aid is probably appropriate for 98% of us.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so we could say in America there's 400 million people.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Let's have uh uh you know 300 and uh yeah or let's take 20 million of us, which is uh seems to be enough.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: Twenty million of us can do top level thinking about these problems, twenty million of us can do journalism and politics and all that, and then we that still leaves, you know, three hundred and eighty million people to do what?
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let's how about taking care of each other in our neighborhoods and and maybe only even look at the news once a day.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: Because the I don't know how much I can actively do by parsing what B.B.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: Netanyahu said about some peace treaty.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm happy that you have friends who are finding out what it really means, but I I have no idea.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna read The Guardian at the end of the day, and I'm okay in trusting to them that.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm okay with it.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: And really, let's chill and be okay with that.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because even if I wasn't, even if I knew something else, the high the leverage points I have to affect the Gaza ceasefire are are non-existent.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Where I think I can have more impact on the Gaza ceasefire by reducing the petroleum uh uh uh consumption in my town by building something that doesn't require people to leave town anymore in order to get entertainment and you know changes so changing the the moment-to-moment fabric of society.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: So then in my work as a writer, what I'm trying to do is is to help engender that culture, the culture of eye contact and localism and being with each other.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: The more we are with each other and socially healthy we are, the more politically resilient we are, the less easily we can be, you know, frightened by Sinclair into a uh MAGA uh defensive crouch.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: I I I want to say, in defense of that line of thinking against charges of hippieism or new ageism, or that it's not the real stuff, I think that is the real stuff.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that I mean totalitarianism, the word is that it's total.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: And every time that you can unplug from the horror show, it is an act of resistance.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I know even right now somebody's saying, Oh, well, you have the privilege to say that.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think we have the privilege to say that.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: So what else should we do?
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's our responsibility to say it to do it.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the way the political has come to be everything is actually incredibly unhealthy.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it is a way I'm deliberate.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's deliberate.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: It lets they are winning when we feel guilty unplugging from the horror show for a minute.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I do think it comes down to embodiment.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it sounds but I and it's interesting to me to hear you say this because it kind of comes back to what we started with about the word care, is like how do you have these conversations without uh people writing you off as being a hippie or being new age?
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: How do you talk about these things in a way that is like, no, this is actually the real work?
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: And every time you make eye contact, that is an act of resistance because the whole thing that's happening only works if we're not uh connected.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: Emily and I have talked quite a bit about, you know, sort of what are the forces leading to this moment from a journalistic perspective, and one of them is the sort of rise of the Silicon Valley.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: We struggle to put a name on it.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a libertarian?
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I hate to um quote um what was his name?
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: That horrible as we're calling it.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, worse.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: Worse.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: Worse.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um oh my god.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: W I hate to quote uh William Buckley, but he once referred to the Koch brothers as anarcho-totalitarians, which I think is kind of a great phrase.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of what I think of.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: But I was very excited by your book about the the escape fantasies of these guys and how that culture and that vibe and that mindset um is such an important force to consider.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us about that.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um I mean obviously I got the idea because I I was with uh, you know, five tech billionaires who were asking me for advice on their bunkers, which just it shocked me, you know, hearing that I'm so excited to hear about how I'm dating one.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: Did they had they read your work?
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like No, they hadn't read my work.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't know who the heck I was.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: They knew they they brought me in as some futurist dude.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't even just me.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: This was, you know, the the the story's gotten, it sounds like a James Bond thing, but it was really these these hedge funds throw these weekend like soirees for their high wealth individual investors.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like the you get a menu of activities.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's like learn to make an omelet with Emerald, you know, improve your golf swing with Jack Nicholas, or spend an hour with futurist Doug Rushkoff.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: So design your bunker.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: Right, exactly.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: But what I didn't know it was that.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: I thought it was going to be, you know, they're they're talking to me about, you know, the the digitality, but they're wanted to know about their bunkers and One guy brought the plans of his underground thing there.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: That was their, it was just seemed to be their fascination and what they were talking about.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: But what what I kind of realized was that these these guys were were playing uh like an insulation equation.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how much money do I need to earn in order to insulate myself from the reality I'm creating by earning money in this way?
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it was almost like, how do I, how do I uh escape my own karma?
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: How do I build a car that goes fast enough to get away from its own exhaust?
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the the the problem, I I because I'm a I'm a joker, tweaker, puckish, you know, midnight toker, whatever it is that I am, um, I I I'm like an intellectual dominatrix, really, when it comes to these guys.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's what they're paying for.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: I started tweaking them, you know, challenging their model.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd be like, oh, how are you gonna how are you gonna protect your bunker from the rest of us?
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh, we've got Navy SEALs coming, you know, they're they're their helicopters are gassed up, they're ready to pick us up and bring us there.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: They've got all the plans, they know how to guard it.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, well, why are your security guards gonna protect you after your Bitcoin's worthless, right?
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: This is the end of the world we're talking.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like freaked out, like writing in their Moleskin books how to control security guards after money is worthless.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: They have like a uh they're smarter than us, I guess, because they're richer, but they have a a walking dead level um ability to do scenario planning or system effects or second order effects, or any.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: They don't they don't think.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so then what I looked at was was how do you get there to this place, uh, this sort of video game logic.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's really the rentier logic applied to everything.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's how do I operate one order of magnitude above everybody else?
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: How do I be the rent the renter rather than the rentee?
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the how do I be the the the owner?
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it goes to Peter Thiel's book, is from zero to one.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the idea.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody else is at zero, you go up to one, like Jesus.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: You you you elevate above regular people and you operate, and it's this quote one order of magnitude above.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: You don't compete.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_01: You don't com have one web page competing with other web pages.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: You own Facebook that owns all the web pages, which is what he uh what he told to to Zuckerberg about what he was doing.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: Or you think of the world as a video game and everybody's playing and you level up, or you end up as they do, looking at humanity as humanity 1.0, that we are in the larval stage of the species, like maggots living on this planet, which is just the dung, right?
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: We're maggots living on a on a ball of dung, hurtling through cold and meaningless space.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: They are the maggots that get to sprout wings and level up, evolve to the next level and get off the planet or up into the ether.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: And we only matter insofar as we can fuel that.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: And Peter Thiel has even called those of us who object to that model, we are Satanists.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's what his That's what his thing he's doing about the Antichrist.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: He's does these lectures.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because, and I understand from his perspective, there's a few special humans who are going to sprout wings, get off the planet, and seed the cosmos or the internet with trillions of post-human intelligences, saved species.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we Marxists, socialists who are arguing for mutual aid are kind of pulling them down from their ascent, preventing them from rising, from detaching into pure consciousness.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, how dare we do that?
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: And their model, which goes back to what we started talking about, collapse, is that there's really not enough to go around.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: There's not enough.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: If we try to distribute the planet's resources to everybody, then we all die.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: So the on the contrary, what we have to do is more of a Mark Andreessen like competition for the superhumans.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's how you find out who gets to go.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: Is the game on.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: Let's fight and and and we we get this kind of survival of the richest individuals.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_03: And and you saw the plans draw down this this is your hedge fund weekend.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_03: That this is a literally they that is what they are all were.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: They're not all smart enough to think out.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_03: I was gonna say that's a very eloquent framing that you've got.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: Mark Andreessen is smart enough to see it this way.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: Sam Bankman-Fried and the idiot philosophers that they cherry-pick from Oxford who support this kind of effective altruism, you know, notion of the world.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, denial of tenure.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, denial, at least denial of tenure.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: Remember the good old days when that was that was painful to people?
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now they they denial of tenure, they go straight to Silicon Valley.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's like the Koch brothers and those guys laid the groundwork of like there's no such thing as interconnection, there's no such thing as public good, I don't owe you anything.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's a deprivation of my liberty to pay for your kids' schooling because we are not all equal.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: They simply don't believe in the premise of that most of us, I think, share that humans sort of deserve the same opportunities.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then you take that into this video game realm and it really becomes something fucking freaky.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: But then But it's seeped into the culture.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's not only seeped into the culture, it seeps up from our memory.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: The m I mean, and we don't like to talk about this, but certainly in the West, the majority of our civilization has been thinking that way.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, these guys like Curtis Yarvin, who are are not smart, but speak in the way that someone would have spoken in medieval France.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, or or even in even in 19th century Britain.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this is what I was saying that makes me so sad about this moment is like the idea that Yeah, you're right.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that that isn't the norm.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: That the idea that most people should get a chance that we are equal, it's such a historical blip.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we're just like, eh.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: Right, it's a historical blip, and but it gets getting brought down the same way it's always brought down, which is this sort of with the surplus of elites.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: In some sense, too many people have gotten up toward the top of the pyramid, so it's gonna it's gonna break.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: And when you when the people at the top are trillionaires instead of just multimillionaires, it it it loses.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: They they they blew their own game, you know.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: And this is what I was trying to argue.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: I just to some some billionaires last month, I was saying, wouldn't you rather be really rich in a happy world than ultra rich in a dead world, right?
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: In a horrible world.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right, that's just that I love this.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_03: I love this you you you know, you you putting your to use your dominatrix is do you really putting your stiletto on their aspirations in a very hard way?
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_03: And they and and their response to this is the do they enjoy It's entertainment to them.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't been able to say it in a way that the only thing that works with them is fear.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: You can't do it, it's not gonna work.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the flaw in your plan.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so because they're so stuck in survival mode.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the sad thing that the wealthiest people get s are so brittle about it.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and I do this other thing I've been doing, and it's I I it's like a joke, but it's not.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: I get to talk at business school sometimes.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_03: I'd love this Doug Rushkoff kind of billionaire and business school circuit circuit.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_03: Dominatrix.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_03: Dominatrix.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's so good.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_03: I I'm so glad that business schools and billionaires are regular experiences.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, they're less so.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: The more of these podcasts I do, the fewer of them actually.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: I've had some canceled, actually.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: After the the Survival of the Richest book came out, I lost a bunch of talks.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of money.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, so you go to business students.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: I went to what's that one, Rothman?
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's this big one in like Toronto or somewhere.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I started the talk that there's all these business students, two or three hundred of them in the audience, and I said, um, by a show of hands, who in this room would be satisfied earning$50 million in your career?
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: And no one would raise their hand.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, okay, the object of the game for me in this talk is to convince you why it's better to earn$50 million than a billion dollars.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I so I showed them you know, sort of probability of earning that, and you you don't have to have as brittle a company, you don't have to hit a home run, and you know, but and a few of them by the end, I had three or four, said they would be okay with earning fifty million dollars.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I'm literally- Did you see it as like I was gonna say like I think Heather who has not been exposed to business school students is literally flapper gasted.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_03: I'm surprised, but not that surprised, but still God's fifty.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I can understand if I said ten.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right, because ten, you can barely get a townhouse for ten.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_03: Well, until you can do the math and go, wait a minute, that means that I'm gonna be on under a hundred under$500,000 a year in what's going on.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_03: Right, exactly.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_03: Why would anyone work for that?
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_03: Why bother?
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_03: Why get out and fit?
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's a nice round number.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, can you tell us something um optimistic?
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_03: I was gonna say, how about like optim like optimism?
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_03: Cheer us up.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_01: Go to the East Village on any Thursday, Friday, Saturday night.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: Look at all the kids who are out in the world, you know, partying like it's 1999.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to uh uh now I do sound again like a hippie, but like Judson Church has ecstatic dance nights.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: You go in and you see five generations of people dancing together, not on drugs, in one big space, you know, having two-minute long epic relationships with people.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I'm I'm more and more.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: I've been playing this game for the last 10, 15 years in New York, where I walk down the street not looking at my phone.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's weird.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: I know, call me weird, but I walk around not looking at my phone, looking for someone else who's not, and make eye contact with them.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like 10, 15 years ago when I would do it, people would like, if they found me, sometimes they'd be a little shocked or think I'm a creep or whatever.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_01: But now when I do it, it's like, hi, I'm I'm here.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: Are you?
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm alive too.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a secret club.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_03: You step outside here on the campus, and there are students handing out uh flyers, paper flyers for the uh Columbia Luddites Club, and they have dinners on I think Wednesday or Thursday or whatever.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: Intergenerational quality of it.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I will admit there's a little strangeness.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: I was at Target the other day, and there was a teenage girl buying the vinyl edition of the Taylor Swift album that's out now.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, oh, that's cool.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um what kind of turntable do you have?
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: And she said she doesn't have a turntable.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_03: No, that's you see, your your your audiophile meat collector.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: She just wants the record, the record itself to have while she listens to it on her phone.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like But even then, it's like then it's pure magical totemic value of the object, which is which is even more strange than embodied whatever.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what's going on quite there.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: But but you're right, they are they are um y young people.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's also it's part of that present shock thing I was talking about before that all times have kind of compressed into this into this moment.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's this it feels like we're going over the the lip of a strange attractor, you know, into this new and it feels like journalism can be part of that pulling away for that generation.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is that uh how you Yeah, I think so if if and it's hard, um if it's local and physical.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: When I was thinking about what I didn't ask the kids in South Dakota um is do you have a local newspaper you trust that talks about these issues as intelligently as you are?
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_01: Because my me, New York Times, doesn't, right?
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: They don't know from a land trust.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they don't they don't understand because they're still depending on the business section to pay for this thing.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: They don't get um they don't get this.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um I didn't ask them that and I and I should have, but no, I do think um some kind of bottom-up local, intelligent local journalism that's specific enough to speak honestly to um those concerns, there's there's an opportunity for it.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's just what's what's exactly the business model?
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't know.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: Is it classified?
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: Do we go back to that?
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: It could be.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think I wanted to ask you, I know we're running out of time, but first I want to ask, you mentioned the sort of question of that we're the beginning middle of something and how bad might it get before it gets better.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of time frame are you thinking?
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't I'm I'm so much better on the what than the when.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um like the the the Trumpy thing and dissent happen way faster than I thought.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: And now when I look at something like um, you know, the Epstein files and all that, it looks like it could unravel a lot faster than I would have expected.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was in meetings even I think with you, you know, uh uh uh less than a year ago, thinking, oh God, this is gonna be 30 or 40 years until we come out of this kind of Pinochet period thing.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_01: So there there's there's an acceleration thanks to digitality and the brittleness of these systems.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um that it it uh the timescales are so unpredictable, which is again why I'm trying to spend less energy on how things are than how we are processing how things are.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and that that's my only choice.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's like almost like a serenity prayer is how do I how am I metabolizing what's going on?
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I have to believe that metabolizing this in the in the best way I can and speaking truth and things like this is the best is the best uh thing to be doing.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_00: So the podcast is called Journalism 2050.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_00: Sketch out for us two possible future scenarios.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's 2050, journalism is flourishing, journalism is not flourishing.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: What might it look like?
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: The journalism not flourishing in 2050 is because we're all gone.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's just nobody left.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_01: We killed ourselves somehow.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: By 2050.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's soon.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that'd be that would be like nuclear war, not attrition.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's like a lot of things.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: That'd be the worst.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just the worst scenario.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's quite bad.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: That is quite bad.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_00: Once humanity's over.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: Two.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um the flourishing one, you know, because it's it's 2050 is how much 25 years from now?
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that long.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a little bit long.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: By current standards, it's super long.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're already in that.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know that part of the movie at the end of the movie where they flash all the stuff that happened earlier in the movie for you to make sense of it?
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're in that montage now, right?
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_01: I feel we are.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so so 25 years forward of that um could be my God.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um what what I would hope is that we uh develop a scaled or tiered media system that we become uh able to understand.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: We have a few kind of national, international players that have the resources to do the the stories happening at scale, and then we have an ecosystem of smaller publications that are addressing um uh local and and uh uh cultural segmented concerns.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: There was uh there was a moment in journalism when I lived in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles used to have these, like it was along the wall of a building.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: There would be like a a 50-yard long magazine stand.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you could walk down it like a city block and see all of these different cultures, and even the way it was arranged was almost like the old Yahoo, you know.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it was sort of like you know, I remember it was like, you know, the gay magazines next to porn magazines, next to women's magazines, next to, and it was just how did they even arrange it?
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: And car and driver and all these cultures, and you'd see like oh my god, German stamp collecting digest.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, who are those people?
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: And they have their own magazine.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was just, I loved it, you know, dental hygiene, you know, African American dental hygiene rights.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was like, geez, this is so cool.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I feel like that somehow the the opportunity of the early net with Usenet groups was to begin to address that, but the amateurism of the net has kind of dragged each of those things into an awful territory.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I think this kind of striated, very fractal um media system um will will emerge.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_01: And what people will realize is that you know using AI to configure your journalism in real time uh conflates and kills journalism.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_01: That what you're actually paying for is the editor.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: Is the editor, is human curators to bring you something because cultures are created by people, not machines.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: So you don't want the most probable uh outcome, the most probable uh selection and curation of stuff to your tastes.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: You want the challenge and the work of rising to the level of the the editors that you're paying um to bring you to a new place.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds great.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_00: I realize there is a follow-up question, but are is that are you two?
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_00: Can I ask one more question?
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_00: Always one more question.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_00: What are the three things we should be doing to get to that future?
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um besides ecstatic dancing, which I wholly appreciate.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_01: Be willing to pay people for the things they've created of value for you.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_01: Whether before or after.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's fine, you read a Substack that you really like.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_01: Subscribe for a month for two bucks.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, anything.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh try uh uh uh so one's that.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um two, um, in our infrastructure, try to make it easy for people to support stuff that's yes supporting them.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, um, which is hard to do right now because of all these subscription models that are made mainly to help the corporation platforms rather than the actual content creators.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_03: Build build your platform for that, I think.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_01: And and three, um, I think this is the hardest one for people.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_01: Right now, more than ever tell the truth.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's so hard.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: Any any way in which you lie um is not worth it.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's not worth it.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_01: It it and we all do it in these tiny ways during the day.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_01: Don't lie, stay silent, because um the the knowledge space, the information space is so polluted with untruth right now.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the more we do it with ourselves, the more we kind of distance ourselves from each other.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_01: Just just tell the truth.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_01: Or and it's it's it's a tricky exercise, but it forces you through the pain points, the social pain points that you need.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, uh are you coming to the party tonight?
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_01: No, I just I don't feel like it, but thanks.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't feel like it tonight.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's okay to say that.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to make up an excuse or a thing or all that.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_01: Start speaking truth, um, and that will trickle up, hopefully, to our media and journalism as well.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: Such a good place to end.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_03: Such a great place to end.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_03: Doctor, what an absolute pleasure to have you.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's a great experience.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for coming.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks for inviting me.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_03: I'm honored, truly.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_03: Journalism 2050 is a co-production of the Town Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, the Columbia Journalism Review, with help from our friends at the Journalism and Design Lab at the New School.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_03: Our producer is Amanda Darrick, our production coordinator is Hannah Joy, and our researcher is Sam Earle.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_03: Find us wherever you get your podcasts.