#124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media

Douglas Rushkoff is obsessed with technology and how it impacts our lives. In this interview, he offers insight into how we shape and are shaped by technology, what’s happening with mainstream media, and some tips on remaining sane online. Rushkoff is an author, professor, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, culture, and institutions create, share and influence each other's values. He is the author of 17 books including the 2019 release Team Human, and he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens. -- Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We contaminated Twitter, the internet. We contaminated the internet. These were play spaces. You know, they, they built the internet, yeah, for scientists to be able to communicate with each other. What did the scientists do with it? They ended up telling like fantasy Star Trek episodes and sharing recipes. It took a network where every node is going, hello, who are you? Let's play. Hello, let's play, let's play. It was that. It was a cultural explosion. And my advice to the regular listener, reader, person, the person like me is honestly, go to real media for your information. Go to social media for your play.

• 0:55Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. The goal of this show is to master the best, what other people have already figured out, so you can unlock your potential. We interview world-class doers and thinkers so you can better analyze problems, seize opportunities, and master decision-making. Every episode is packed with lessons and insights that never expire. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member-only episodes, access before anyone else, transcripts, and other member-only content, you can join at fs.blog/membership. Check out the show notes for a link. Douglas Rushkoff is here today. Dr. Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways that people, cultures, and institutions

• 1:40Shane Parrish?

  create, share, and influence each other's values. He's the professor of media theory and digital economics at CUNY, Queens, where he founded the Laboratory for Digital Humanism. Rushkoff was named one of the 10 most influential intellectuals by MIT. I wanted to talk to him because I wanted to explore some of the ways that we are shaped by technology and also the ways that we're shaping technology. As you can imagine, we talk about media, culture, misinformation, and technology. I don't always agree with him, but we have a pretty good conversation. It's time to listen and learn.

• 2:24Shane Parrish?

  Well, first, I want to start with, what are you obsessed with right now?

• 2:27Speaker 00

  I'm obsessed with what feels like a, a totalizing, polarizing, fascistic environment, right? Politics aside, whatever people's views, I feel like they're getting so bizarrely entrenched. They're everyone's, everyone, you know, has this sort of, almost this might makes right enforcement of values and ideologies. There's a stiffness to everybody's approaches. And whether it's their business plans or their social agendas, or I, I used to think,

• 3:09Speaker 00

  oh, you know, when, when, when I'm kind of on this side of things, I look at, oh, look at that other side, they're being all stiff. Or if I'm on that side, then I look at this side and go, oh, they're being all stiff. Then when I get kind of more McLuhan-esque about it, you know, McLuhan used to write a lot about media environments that we kind of live. Neil Postman did too. The idea that culture is like the, the medium on which the bacteria grows, that somehow we're in an atmosphere of this kind of extremism and polarization. And then I'm obsessed with, how do we engender a more human, softer, more

• 3:47Speaker 00

  flexible, empathetic approach to living when we're in an environment that's this rigid? And whether or not we'll be able to do that, or whether humanity itself is just going to succumb to this, to this kind of bizarre operating system.

• 4:03Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about that extreme polarization. Like, is technology creating that? Or is it amplifying something already within us? Or how is that happening?

• 4:12Speaker 00

  You know, it's hard to know whether the media and technologies that emerge emerge and are successful because of a pre-existing cultural affordance for that thing, or whether the new technology or medium comes and then makes us all like that. So you could say the printing press and the book led to all the sorts of individual perspectives and individualism that then characterized the Renaissance. Or you could say people were kind of getting into the idea of being individuals, and they made things like the book and the printing press and perspective painting

• 4:57Speaker 00

  popular because that's what they were ready for. Or you could say television was a global medium and brought everyone together, and that's why we got that kind of Oprah Winfrey-like hands across the world, crashing of the Berlin Wall. Or today, you could say digital technology is a one, zero, yes, no, you know, right, wrong, choose one of the above cookie cutter medium. So people's lives and politics and approaches end up getting that way. Or were we already kind of in a technocratic, scientistic culture that had killed God since Nietzsche? And the computer comes along, and of course, there we are.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  There's the realization of that worldview. So I would say it's like both kind of affect each other. But what you have to do then is like, so you get, we get what we asked for, right? We got our post-God, Nietzschean, computer automated, soul-killing, auto-tuning technology. And now we, okay, how do we mitigate some of that? How do we retrieve that which is being left behind in this new environment?

• 6:07Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me a little bit about that. How do we do that? How do we use these tools to not only have autonomy, but also create a better empathetic understanding of alternative points of views and an interdependency with other people?

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Well, I would say first, by not insisting that we find the answer to these tools in these tools. Every conference I go to now is about how are we going to kind of retrofit the blockchain to solve the problems of the internet? Or what wellness apps can we create to help people manage their screen time? And it might be that technologies, digital technologies are not the solution for digital technologies. It may really be as simple as Sabbath, you know, having, having a day when you're not plugged in. Not to be anti-tech, but we can bring our technologies along with us in certain ways, but not in other things.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  I was, I was just watching, you know, my daughter got home from this party and all people were doing at the party was, you know, typing into their phones and taking Instagram pictures and all that. And it used to be you'd go to a party, I mean, in the old days, even a big, important party, and there might be some press there or a photographer there. And that was like, they were working, they were working the party. They had to cover the party for their medium, you know, because Madonna showed up or, you know, whoever, some person, so they're, they're there, you know? But now I look and I see, wow, all these kids are working journalists in their life. They're reporting and I get it. And then you go to your device because you want to know what's happening, I guess.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  But you're not in touch with what's happening. You're reading reports from amateur journalists on their day, on what's going on. It's this, this, I'm talking about obsession, this obsession with recording everything, but they're not, they're not even, and I wrote about this, you're not even living in, living in the present. So I, I'm really looking forward to a day when people start. Appreciating their experiences for their own sake again and realizing that if you're reporting on the party, you're not at the party. If you're reading about the party, you're not wherever you really are, that, that there's, there's this, and no one thinks of it this way, but it's like everyone's become a journalist. Either when

• 8:32Speaker 00

  they're in an experience, they're writing about it as a journalist, and when they're not somewhere, they're reading the journalism, the diaries of everybody else. And that's, it's fine. I mean, spending an hour reading people's diaries, but then, you know, what do you want to do?

• 8:48Shane Parrish?

  I want to go to that comment you made on journalism and everybody sort of being a journalist and how that relates to the information we're consuming about misinformation and facts and our perception into the world. Like, if we're consuming information by amateur journalists or people who believe that they're journalists, and they're all reporting something, and they're reporting through their lens, you know, without sort of any training and obviously bias, and we're existing in this world of sort of, I would say misinformation, which is intentionally possibly misleading, but there's also all of this information out there that is sort of generally irrelevant or high noise to signal. How do we filter that? How do we think through that?

• 9:30Speaker 00

  One way to filter it is to filter ourselves and our own expression. You know, I, I remember when Blogger came out, and Blogger was like the first, one of the first web blogging platforms. Evan, Evan Williams, later of Twitter, did it. And I was, I was at a conference talking to Evan about it. It was just a baby platform. And he was like, oh, are you going to use this? And I was like, well, I don't think I should use it. I'm already a journalist. I've got, you know, I'm on the New York Times Syndicate. It wouldn't be fair for me to go in there. This is a play space, you know, it's for, it's for, you know, amateurs in the best sense of the word, for them to do it and talk. It's a social network. It's not for some professional journalist to be, you know, I have a platform. It's not right.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  And he was like, no, no, it's for everybody. It's for everybody. You could use it the way you use it. And, you know, I played around with it some. And I mean, I ended up with a blog somewhere on my, on my website, I guess. But what I started to feel like was, yes, it's great for everyone to be able to type what they're feeling and stuff. But just because you can type doesn't mean you can write, right? And just because you can write doesn't mean you should write. It was like, in the old days, in the old days of the late 80s, early 90s, the only people who could write a book were the people who were willing to sit and type a whole book, you know, when it was hard, when you couldn't just cut and paste things.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  And it was a whole big thing. Or even on a Commodore 64, it was still a whole big thing. And, and it's like, the tools made it really easy for people to type lots of words. But that didn't necessarily make them writers, any more than, you know, Adobe Photoshop makes somebody into a graphic designer. Yeah, you know, an amateur can now do some cool effects. But when you look at something that's really done by a real artist, you can see, oh, that's design. When you read something by a real writer, you know, well, that person knows how to write. Same thing is true of journalism. There's this stuff that you learn, either in a journalism class or in journalism school about sourcing. And what does it mean to have two sources for everything? And what is, what is off the record? And what is on

• 11:39Speaker 00

  the record? How does all that work? And I remember, in the early days of the net, I would go and talk at high schools and colleges. And the question I would always get was, you know, what makes, what makes your journalism any better than my journalism? Why should you have all these readers and I don't? And I'm like, because you're a fucking sophomore in college, just spouting off, you know what I mean? And, and I've worked at this, you know, I didn't answer it like that. But that's the real thing. And, and the tools create the illusion that, that what we say matters, or that because our text can look all like

• 12:20Speaker 00

  it's in a Substack, that means it has equal value to everything else that's up there. And it just doesn't. The, the thing that's going to happen, I guess, is as deep fakes and other, other kinds of media come out that make it really impossible to distinguish. Between what is being said and what is not. We're going to, again, just as we did before any video existed. We're going to rely on the integrity of a journalist and the integrity of a publication for, to, to measure the reality level of something. And we're not there yet. We're still just looking for the opinion that, that makes us feel, you know, the most delightfully angry than we are, whatever the hard truth might be.

• 13:04Shane Parrish?

  Well, it used to be that we held up organizations like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal as arbiters of sort of fact from fiction. And that seems to be becoming increasingly hard as the media landscape for how we tell stories and the attention culture sort of pervades. How do you think about that?

• 13:24Speaker 00

  I mean, as a, as someone who's been traditionally progressive, I get really upset when I see the way MSNBC or CNN will even slightly slant or misrepresent a story in order to get the most impact. Because once they or the Times are doing it, then where are you supposed to turn? You know, so when I see a piece in the New York Times that, you know, the headline and the first few paragraphs are arguing that, oh, you know, when Israel opened up its schools, its elementary schools, COVID rates went up.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  And then you finally read all the way down and you go to the links and find the studies. And it's like, okay, when Israel opened its bars, its restaurants, its theaters and its public schools, COVID rates went up. Like, because they're playing into the schools open, schools closed, schools masked, schools not, that's a bigger headline, it gets more clicks. But you've ended up, for whatever reason, whether it's your politics or your need to get clicks, you've misrepresented a story. And once you do that once, how do I trust them? No, does it mean that I'm going to go to, you know, Rand Paul or whoever's his, you know, or Alex Jones's site about, you know, and I can read about, there's, there's one

• 14:47Speaker 00

  website that was talking about these doctors were talking about how the COVID vaccines have these. Eggs in them that hatch aluminum parasites that replicate and they had, they held up a model of what the aluminum parasite looks like and how it swims and it's not really alive, but it, it's kind of alive. And it was like, man, and people, you know, there, there's people are sending me this. They're like, like, look, look, oh my God, you've got to talk to them on your podcast. This is really important. You know, don't get the vaccine. It, it's hard to then have, actually, you should be reading this instead. So now it's like I'm telling people to watch NewsHour with Judy Woodruff. They're, they're pretty normal.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  You know, NPR stays, stays kind of as centrist as it can right now. You know, there's some places, BBC is pretty straightforward. But, you know, if I'm telling people, don't, don't look at the Times. That's, that's a scary moment.

• 15:48Shane Parrish?

  So, so what's the argument on behalf of the Times? Like, we have to exist as a business in a, in a changing environment. And in order to compete, we have to be more sensationalized than we used to be and maybe sort of like take positions or slants that we never had to. Otherwise, we'll go out of business.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  I don't know that that's, I think their argument, the only valid argument is, look, we got really big and we're, we're throwing so many articles into the fire in order to keep this going. That, that the New York Times used to be able to write one paper a day. And now we're writing the equivalent of like five papers a day because of how much we have to update the site in order to get stuff that we're have less adequate monitoring and control over stuff. And just like anybody, our journalists get whipped up into a frenzy by COVID denialism and vaccine rumors that they end up trying to promote whatever it is, the CDC.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  Is trying to say, and the CDC has its own problems because the CDC is not thinking in terms of giving the public accurate information. The CDC is like our doctor trying to tell us the things that they need to tell us to get us to take our medicine. And that's different than journalism. You know, when I look at Fauci, he's looking for patient compliance. So that's what he's saying. He's not a journalist.

• 17:16Shane Parrish?

  Go deeper on that about the CDC and sort of like their sort of maybe institutional bias in terms of how they're communicating. And they were wrong at the start, right? Like they were quick and wrong.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Well, they were right. What they were right about was they looked, so the CDC's job is to reduce the transmission of a virus through a community by whatever means necessary. They looked at the situation at the early moments of COVID and thought, you know, masks may or may not be of some minimal help in the general population who may or may not be even coming into contact with any COVID. There's like, you know, 300 cases or a thousand cases in the whole country where meanwhile there are healthcare workers who can't get the equipment that they need.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  So if health workers are exposed, they have a higher likelihood of getting the thing. If they get the thing, then our hospitals are crippled and can't take care of people and the virus becomes more rampant. What we have to do is let people know, look, the general public, right now, you don't need masks. Who does need masks right now are these healthcare providers. So don't use masks. You should be okay and these people will use masks. They're managing the disease. It is true. If you're wealthy, if you're Steve Jobs and you've got all the money in the world and you could live an ideal life, wear a mask, of course, right now, you know, because who are you coming into contact with?

• 18:52Shane Parrish?

  But how do you trust them after that? Like, how do you, as an average citizen, how do you trust them to give you proper information? Based on what you just said, I don't disagree with you. I'm just saying like now, how do I, how do I think?

• 19:07Speaker 00

  What they should have said was, right now, we're in a mask triage situation. And just like you're running to the store for toilet paper, you could be running to the hardware store and taking all the masks. But that would be a really bad thing to do. That'd be really bad for the community. You've got to right now, think of this disease and the whole country rather than this disease and you right now. We want you to have resilience and have water in your house and food and be able to live for a week or two, but we really need these masks. If you've got them, get them to the hospitals. We're going to produce more and hopefully by the time this disease is rampant in the country,

• 19:51Speaker 00

  if it gets that way, we'll have upped the production on masks. So then you can have them when you need them.

• 19:57Shane Parrish?

  And what do you think would have happened if they did that? Do you think?

• 19:59Speaker 00

  Everyone would have panicked and run out and bought the masks. Of course. So what are they looking at? So then they have to think, all right, we have to manage this disease. It goes all the way back to the first public relations people. It was like Walter Lippman and Ed Bernays and those folks around World War I. And when they came up with the idea of public relations, basically of in some ways, manufacturing consent for certain things, using whatever means and stories you have. What they believed was, you know, there's they, their ideal government was there would be this kind of council of experts and scientists who would be in a big building next to the White House somewhere.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  And they would figure out, what is it that we need America to do? And they would say, okay, the scientists go, look, we've only got 30,000 masks and we've got 30 million people. We've got to make Americans give the masks to the hospitals because that's, and we know that's what's right, right now. How do we do that? Then they hire Bernays or Lippman or public relations people to come up with what's the very best way to do that. The CDC didn't have the very best people, right? They were thinking like a doctor. How does the doctor talk to the patient? And what do we have to say? And, you know, what do you do if you miss a dose?

• 21:28Speaker 00

  And why do you have to take this? Why do you have to take all the antibiotic? And all those things that doctors tell you. And they tried to treat the American population as the patient, you know, that you can kind of not lie to, but, but do what you have to to manufacture their, their, their compliance. And, you know, in this environment, when you have a, a political faction whose, whose strength and power is based on delegitimizing anything to do with, with organized government, that's a really difficult environment

• 22:10Speaker 00

  in which to play fast and loose with facts.

• 22:14Shane Parrish?

  Keep, keep going down that path in terms of delegitimizing when you have one party sort of interested in that perhaps. But you also have organizations that are, you know, arguably making that a bit easier too, with, with what you just talked about, right? Not giving accurate information because you're trying to create a behavior. So maybe you're withholding some information that you shouldn't be withholding, which feeds into this sort of like delegitimization.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Right. I mean, the question is, does fake news genuinely derive more traction from each error made by government or major news media? In other words, when there are real gotchas, does it work? Or would they still? I mean, would it still be that the COVID vaccine puts something in you that then 5G towers activates? And that's why you can't see it when you look in the vaccine. But once it's in you and they put a spoon on your head and everything's gonna get magnetic.

• 23:17Shane Parrish?

  Do we stop paying attention, basically, to the?

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Right. Once they're doing that, does that story gain more power? Because the New York Times has slightly misrepresented the real takeaway of an Israel COVID study? Ultimately, yes. Once you start playing that game. You're gonna lose to whoever plays that game more ruthlessly. You know, if you're gonna be on the side of supposedly factual, evidence-based reality, you gotta stick with that. And it doesn't mean you can't believe in the soul and astrology and everything else that you want to. You know what I mean? You could, I'm not saying

• 24:00Speaker 00

  you've got to be a staunch atheist, scientistic extremist, but you know, your reporting, you know, has to be news that's fit to print. You know, that if you're the paper of record and you want to stay the paper of record, you gotta be, you gotta be careful about that. You know, shit happens, right? The Gulf War and bad reporting or whatever name was that said the wrong things about the Gulf War and God is in, that happens. But you want that to happen, you know, once a decade, not, you know, not daily. And if you're gonna play that game on cable news, if MSNBC and CNN and whatever are gonna put

• 24:39Speaker 00

  on, you know, newscasters who are opining throughout these, you know, broadcasts, then they're gonna be seen as a opinion, opinion news.

• 24:50Shane Parrish?

  What's the, like, how do we get out of this? I don't, I don't see a legitimate path to sort of like how we return to a more centrist, fact-based, you know, not left or right-leaning in any sort of way, let alone the extremes. How do we?

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Oh, well, 99% of us really don't need to know about any of this stuff, honestly. You know, the-

• 25:16Shane Parrish?

  I don't consume the news. I gotta be honest. Like, I don't follow a lot of it.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  I don't, I mean, a lot of people were asking me a few weeks ago, you know, what I was thinking about Joe Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal strategy, right? So for people who don't know, US had been in a war in Afghanistan for like decades, and then Biden said, enough, we're just gonna, let's just take them out. And basic and left and then everything went nuts and everybody was running to the airport and it was this whole big horrible scene with Taliban and and and the people who helped America and all that. It was just awful. And it's like, I don't know. I honestly, I've got so, I've got very little training in Middle East withdrawal strategies, whether you bring planes or boats. Do you tell the enemy you're gonna do it? Do you not? Do

• 26:06Speaker 00

  you bring generals? And I just, I just don't know about that. Not only do I not know about that, but I don't even know whose story about what is happening there is true. And I don't even know where they get their information from. It's like, something happens, right? Something happens in Israel, say, some bomb happens and then some other bomb happens and then Netanyahu says this and then Biden says that. And it's like, it could be anything. I don't mean like false flag crazy attacks or whatever, but it could be that, you know, Netanyahu says, whoever's in charge there now, says they want to go and bulldoze the West Bank, but they don't really want to. They're saying that so they get votes and

• 26:50Speaker 00

  support of some horrible faction in the Knesset that wants to do that. And they've already called Biden before they announced that. And they say, look, I'm gonna say this. I want you to say we're not allowed to do it or you'll pull support. Okay? All right, we'll do that. You know, so they set this thing up and then you report on it and then I read about it and the Times, oh, look, Netanyahu's really bad. Thank God we've got Biden holding him down. It may be that, it may not be that. I'm not there. I don't know. And frankly, what I think about this does not matter. It doesn't matter. Instead, if I took all that time that that I'm spending trying to understand these giant issues that that are operating at a scale and behind closed doors that I have no access to, if

• 27:33Speaker 00

  I rolled up my sleeves and helped my neighbor figure out how the old lady's gonna get her food now that she broke her friggin' hip and no one else is going down there to deal with it. Or the the people who just moved in, who's got a differently abled child who needs community support, you know, all of these things that we could be doing for each other in our communities with all that time we want to spend screaming about shit on Twitter. If we spent that time helping other people in our communities, it would relieve the central governments and the state governments of so much stress. You know, you you don't need as much welfare. You don't need as much planning. You don't need as many programs

• 28:14Speaker 00

  when you have neighbors taking care of neighbors. You don't need as much climate change remediation. If people are doing less crazy stuff, if they're sharing lawn mowers rather than everyone buying their own lawnmower, if they're if they're playing with each other and doing local entertainment rather than flying around the world to do all sorts of crazy stuff. It's like if you engage locally with the people around you and actually help real people, which I got to do now, we got flooded terribly in the last hurricane Ida. When you do that, you don't need as much FEMA, you know, it's like federal emergency management money. You don't need as much of that stuff. And it's it's easy. Become less dependent

• 28:54Speaker 00

  on central government, central news, national stories and all that, and and and more more self sufficient. And it's it's more sustainable. It's more resilient. It's less brittle. And it makes you less enemies. I mean, I'm side by side with Trumpies, digging people out of the mud, having a discussion where I'm saying, this is what's going to start happening a lot. They're saying, don't be crazy. This happens once every 10,000 years. I mean, let's see, let's, you know, but we're actually talking about it arm in arm, handing buckets to each other rather than through Twitter.

• 29:33Shane Parrish?

  There's sort of three thoughts I have out of that. One, one is a question, I guess, about why we think what we think about foreign policy matters. Is it just because we have access to platforms now?

• 29:46Speaker 00

  I think we always cared about these foreign matters, but we weren't as immersed in them. And we weren't expected to have something to say about them. At least Walter Cronkite was like, he was this journalist guy. He went all the way over there and saw the war and talked to the soldiers and they had people talking to the generals. And then this whole sort of news agency kind of went, ah, this is really awful. And, and, and their approach to it did seep out to America, but there were others. There was NBC News, there was ABC News, there was, you know, the New York Times, there was a lot.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  And, but yeah, Cronkite might've had influence, but yes, it was a different media environment, but one in which we weren't being trained to respond in a moment to moment way to every ebb and flow in the news, to everything that was happening. That's not just the internet. I remember I wrote this piece back when, when, um, remember Britney Spears? I mean, there's the current story with her now, but I remember there was this moment when she had some kind of a breakdown and like shaved her head and they took her to the hospital and all. And all the news channels had it, everyone had it, you know, even the tiny little TMZ kind of news channels, whatever they were.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  But I saw this picture from far of her mansion. And there, and I counted, and this is just in what I could count, there were 20 different satellite dishes around her house, 20 satellite dishes beaming the thing, you know, those vans that the news people use. And I was thinking, could that story have been covered with just three satellite dishes? Would three live satellite feeds of the ambulance outside Britney's house be enough to somehow feed the news, the global news media? And then what if we took the other?

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Seventeen of them and like, put one in Rwanda, maybe, you know, one in Iraq, you know, in places where there's actual stuff, places where there's 800,000 people dying in a genocide, you know, in Rwanda.

• 32:09Shane Parrish?

  I mean, the answer to that, though, is like, people generally, I mean, despite what we would state as our preferences when it comes down to it, we care a lot more about what Britney Spears is doing than what's happening in Rwanda.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Yes, but we can still see it with just three satellite dishes. There's still, it would still, it would still have worked. If even if it was the most popular story in the world, it was still a misapplication of precious technology resources. I mean, and this happened, you know, really in the 90s, we shifted news from, in the United States, anyway, news was a requirement to have an FCC television or radio license. You had to do a certain number of hours of news as part of your public affairs obligation. When we took that away, then news was no longer a mandatory obligation. And it turned into, if you're going to keep any news, it's for money, it's for profit.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  That's when you start hearing all the music and all the coverage. That's when, when news became so much more sensationalist. Because now it was part of the, the competitive enterprise rather than the public service mission of these, of these companies.

• 33:20Shane Parrish?

  Going back, just to orient people, I said I sort of had three follow-ups. The second one was around, how would we teach someone to sort out what's relevant from irrelevant? Like, how would you go about teaching somebody how to sort out essential from non-essential information?

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Honestly, I would say only go on social media to socialize and think of it as socializing.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  If you really like it, make it part of your entertainment day, you know, and look at it for that. I mean, it's so funny. People used to joke that on Twitter, ah, you know, I go on Twitter and someone tell me, you know, what they just ate for breakfast or where their favorite pecan pie is located. That's what Twitter is for. Sorry. That's what Twitter is for. It's not for the President of the United States to communicate policy to the American people. That's not where you do it.

• 34:10Shane Parrish?

  Wait, why? Why? Go deeper on that. Why is that not the form for?

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Because the President of the United States has access to real media, like television and newspapers and press conferences and real things.

• 34:23Shane Parrish?

  But that's saying Twitter's not real media, is that?

• 34:25Speaker 00

  No, we contaminated Twitter, the internet. We contaminated the internet. We shouldn't have put banking on the internet either. These were fun places. These were social media. These were play spaces. This is where a guy could pretend he's a girl and a girl could pretend she's a robot. And these were play spaces. You know, they built the internet, yeah, for scientists to be able to communicate with each other. What did the scientists do with it? They ended up telling like fantasy Star Trek episodes and sharing recipes and telling what we used to call blonde jokes and like people did with fax machines. It was not, and it's not even secure for business. That's why all these companies are getting hacked and frozen and ransomwared and all that. It took a network where every node is going,

• 35:10Speaker 00

  hello, who are you? Let's play. Hello, let's play. Let's play. It was that. It was a cultural explosion. And sure, so you've got Blogger and Twitter and Facebook. Oh, look at Grandma. Grandma wants to look at the pictures of Baby Norman. Oh, we want to play a game. Well, let's do a survey. Who likes astrology? I like astrology. Now it's in that same space. Who really has authority over the West Bank? What are you doing? And now everyone, Cousin Louis and this and that, are going to argue on an international platform about who has the ownership of the West Bank? Now let's have our senators and our presidents and prime ministers go down into that bizarre, random public square and delegitimize themselves and the authority they

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Have as our representatives in Washington by going into a generic. No, you want to you go to your district, go home to your district and talk to the people there. You do that live, you know, that's, you know, it's not the three days carriage ride away from DC anymore. You can get hop on a plane and go back and talk to people. Go on your local PBS channel, go on your your cable, go on C-SPAN. You know, you have the platform, the the social media are for people without the platform. So my my advice to the regular listener reader person, the person like me is honestly, go to real media for your information. Go to social media for your play.

• 36:36Shane Parrish?

  Doesn't social media in a way allow us to filter out people who know what they're talking about from people who don't as well? Because now it gives it gives credible people a platform that they can sort of put their ideas out there and then get feedback on them in a way that was difficult before without running for office or being an elected official or sort of working your way up through the bureaucracy.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  I don't see it. I mean,

• 37:02Shane Parrish?

  Like, isn't it act as a check and balance in a way? Or is that the promise of technology that doesn't fully meet itself?

• 37:08Speaker 00

  You can, if you're really tough skinned, you can post something to the public, knowing there are hundreds of thousands of people and bots on there who are going to use your inquiry to hurt you, that that's their intent, right? To make you feel bad about yourself, to undermine your sense of authority, to get you to join something that's terrible, to militarize you, to make you more cynical. As long as you understand that, right? That the vast majority of people replying to you and looking at you and using the information you're putting out are using it to hurt you, to reduce your autonomy, to make you feel bad about yourself, to create mental illnesses, to distort your perception of reality.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  And as long as you know that, then sure. So, you know, I got I got invited this week to be on Steve Bannon's podcast. While everyone, even the publicist who sent it to me, said, look at this for a laugh. Of course, he won't do it. Part of me was thinking, well, my whole thing, my whole team human motto, everything is find the others, right? And here's one of the others asking me to engage, right? Right. So there was a pros and cons. Of course, I'm going on his podcast adds legitimacy to Marjorie Taylor Greene and everybody else going there. And I'm not going to have control. And he could edit me to say anything he wants. And, you know, is the fact that I went on it going to outweigh anything good that comes about, you know, from, am I really going to

• 38:37Speaker 00

  take him down in like a Jon Stewart way that when Jon Stewart went on Fox and, you know, expose what they are? Can I maybe turn him and help him see how some of what he sees about the Catholic Church and subsidiarity and distributism is good, but his approach is too, is too violent and destructive? Can I, can I get through to him? You know, and so I was debating it in my head. And I thought, maybe I should tweet, should I go, I just got invited to go on Steve Bannon's podcast. Should I do it? And then I realized going and me tweeting that would just create bad. It would just not, because it's not, there's, there's, there's so, such a small percentage

• 39:18Speaker 00

  of people would engage with that in good faith, that it would be too, it's not the forum to have that argument. Luckily, I have friends, I have students, I have faculty, I have a, a world of people I do trust that I could ask about that, that I do not need to ask that question. The only reason to ask that question on Twitter would be to show off. Hey, everybody, I got invited on Steve Bannon. And that means I've arrived. I'm not going to do it. So this way, I can still leverage the fame value of having gotten invited without taking any of the risk of actually going on. So it's, or what? Or I

• 39:57Speaker 00

  want to socially signal that I'm too SJW to go on those bad people's show and look at me. I get some, what is that called? Signaling? I get some of that social signaling value from it. Now these ones are going to love me instead of hate me. And it's like, it's all a fucking game on there. So it's like, no, I don't use it. I, all I use Twitter for is I post links to my articles. That's it. Figuring that people who do follow me on there, I don't want to get in conversations on there. It's just. When the people say the really mean things, or when something is intentionally misconstrued, and then people start piling on without even reading the article that they think they hate,

• 40:40Speaker 00

  because someone has said something totally wrong about it, it feels bad in my body. It makes me not sleep as well. It makes me not right as well. It's not good for my metabolism, my system, my psyche, my soul.

• 40:54Shane Parrish?

  There's definitely a ton of signaling on social media from all sorts of people. I want to sort of go to the third point that I had as we were talking and you were talking about sandbags and sort of being beside your fellow humans in a way. And I think one of the things that we miss with technology is that we get so pigeonholed in a way to get reinforced with what we think, that we don't get exposed to the community in the way that we used to get exposed. And I think part of living a meaningful life is actually that exposure. And that exposure to other people, being a sense of something larger than yourselves, that is a community or a tribe of people that you may or may not agree with, but you're a part of a bigger tribe than just your particular view of the world,

• 41:39Shane Parrish?

  is what we're missing. And I think that that's one of the ways that we learn to empathize with other people and learn to see their view. I'm curious as to your take on that.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  I remember when AOL was just emerging and it had these various kinds of groups so that you could find your tribe of people and be in conversations with them and chat rooms and things like that. They divided it all up into what looked to me like consumer categories. Like, are you a, what's your, are you a car lover? Are you a book reader? Are you a this, are you a that? And I got worried and people kept calling these, oh, those are my online communities. And I was always careful to say, that's not your online community. It's your online affinity group.

• 42:23Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  And there's a real, there's a difference, you know? And of course, the internet is going to want me engaging with.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Other middle aged Mini Cooper driving people because if the Mini Cooper is what we have in common, that could be monetized as opposed to people who like sunny days or something, you know, that's like, wait a minute, but how do we advertise to them? You know, it's like, everything falls into those kinds of, those kinds of categories. And the technology is really good. Obviously, it's a database technology, the whole internet. So it's really good. It breaking us, it's optimized for breaking us down that way. And it's not optimized for the heterogenous community thing that you're talking about.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  The heterogenous community really only works in real life where you have a broad enough bandwidth to engage with people who are really different from you. Online, it works really better to go find that group of people that you can't find in real life. So I live in Hastings on Hudson, New York, where there's really only two people I would consider legitimate manga anime fans here.

• 43:39Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Right. And I could talk to the two of them, but if I want to really engage with the manga anime crowd, who knows my kind of manga anime, the real shit, I gotta go online and find the, you know, make a Gundam Evangelion subgroup subreddit, you know, and find that. And there's my others. There's my, that's what the internet is really good at. Or if I've got a rare disease, I mean, people always use that example, you know, if I've got a rare disease or a rare handicap or something that there's not other people in my community that really get it, I could engage with those people and they understand what I'm going through in a way that, that other people don't. But, but it's not good as we see on Twitter. It's not good for creating communities of people with diverse perspectives.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  In order to engage with people that have diverse or diametrically opposed perspectives, you have to be live next to them. When I'm next to the volunteer fireman from my town who believed, who voted for Trump and believes that this won't happen again for another thousand years. And it became funny. It became, he looked at me like, oh my God, you really think the world is ending, don't you Doug? And I'm like, oh my God, you really think it's not, you know? And it was just, but we drink together. We, we lift, like you say, we carry sandbags together.

• 44:57Shane Parrish?

  I think at the end of the day, like if you get down to a level where you can see humanity, we all have more in common than we think, right? We all want to be loved. Mentor of mine told me this. We all want to be loved. We all want to be respected. We all want to be listened to. We all want to contribute to something larger than ourselves. And that that avoids sort of political issues. And there's nobody that can really disagree with that. We all want those things. And so if we can offer them to other people, it's a way to connect to them.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  You would think, you know, you would think, and then you look at, if they didn't believe in stuff, churches and synagogues and stuff would be such, for me, such great places to go. I just have like believing things and worshiping and stuff.

• 45:39Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me a little bit about that. What do you think the role of religion and culture has been in sort of curbing human behavior?

• 45:48Speaker 00

  I mean, it depends. I feel like most religions have these, it's almost like most bands. They have this period after their emergence, when, right, shortly after their emergence, where they're trying to really do the right thing. You know, I mean, I know Judaism better than than most of the others. But you know, Judaism really emerged as a, a system of thought and behavior for the recovering cult addicts of the Egyptian death cults. Where they come out in the desert, they're like, oh, shoot, that didn't work. What do we do? And say, okay, let's not worry about so much about believing in God and having an idol and all that.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  Let's focus on community and law and labor and have a Sabbath and let's try that, you know? And it kind of worked for a while. And then, you know, eventually, you know, they get persecuted. They get a piece of land and they're fighting for survival and they go, okay. You know, and it all deteriorates and then people become, you know, worshiping at a wall and one, one God and one God alone. And God gave us this piece of land and we're special. And all this stuff happens and it's like, oh no, you became a religion too, you know? And it wasn't, it wasn't Judaism until way late in its career. And I feel like, you know, and Christianity had that too, this sort of insight of. All right, there's all these laws and you're getting ever more granular, trying to code

• 47:16Speaker 00

  reality, trying to optimize reality with all this law. And it's like, you're getting so granular, you're never going to get there. In the end, the law is just kind of training wheels for something more internal. You've just got to be nice, just be fucking nice, you know, and the law can support you in that. And again, then that loses itself too, and it becomes about this, you know, Messiah guy and, and, and becomes this other religion, and it keeps, Muhammad tried, everybody keeps trying, Buddha even, even, even that, that many sects of it became this thing. And that's partly because people have this longing to believe in something that, you know, mommy and daddy failed me, and, and this new mommy

• 47:59Speaker 00

  daddy thing is going to be the thing, you know, it's going to be what mommy and daddy really couldn't be. They couldn't anticipate my needs. They couldn't see inside my soul. And right now, oddly enough, I feel like our technologists, they're looking at technology to be that. You know, I had this great experience with Timothy Leary, when he had just read, he had just read Media Lab by Stuart Brand, was the book about Nicholas Negroponte's lab, it just opened at MIT. And, and he, he, you know, we used to just sit and read together. And then he had been reading this book for like, two days and circling things and felt to pen. And then I thought, oh my God, he must love this thing. You know, Stuart must have written a great book. And he closes it at the end, and he flings it

• 48:40Speaker 00

  across the room, like, at horror. And he said, only 3% of the people in the index are women. That goes to show you something. And I'm like, what, what does this show? He says, these are all, these are all men trying to use technology to recreate the womb. You know, their mothers couldn't anticipate their every little desire. So now they want to build technologies that are going to bring them, you know, whatever it is, to create a little bubble around themselves and bring them everything they want. And before they even know they want it. And he was really right on a certain level. That's what, you know, with anticipatory algorithms and all that. But, but it was, it struck me as so sad too, that, that I get it.

• 49:23Speaker 00

  The world is scary and wet and dark and female and unknown and unpredictable and all that. But you don't want to compensate for that with a more, with predictability and insulation. What you want to do is, is enhance your resilience and your wonder and your ability to tolerate and metabolize a wealth of novel experiences, which is what that makes life. It's so much more fun, you know, it's fun and alive. But technology became, all I mean here is technology became that other religion, you know? Oh, the blockchain that will solve for, you know? As I went to this conference, they did, they were building a block two.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  They're calling it Project Liberty and it's going to solve for multi-racial liquid democracy. You know, good luck with that. Good luck with that.

• 50:19Shane Parrish?

  In an email to me before this, you said you were sort of in an anti-business, anti-self optimization mood these days. Why?

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Because I feel like we're trying to auto-tune ourselves. You know, we're living in a digital media environment where everything is quantized. You know, it's either here or there. You're on this, this node or that node. And our value system accordingly is to get people either, you know, up to the C or down to the B, but not in that weird squishy place in between. You know, fuzzy logic is about reducing. It's not about maintaining the fuzziness, you know? It's about you're here or you're there and you've got, you need more granularity? Okay, we'll give you a half step. You're here, here or here, here, here or here. All right, you don't like that? We'll give you six, we'll give you eights, but you're still always on the mark.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  And what we do by doing that is, is. We make a judgment as to what is signal and what is noise. You know, if you're going to auto tune James Brown, right? James Brown reaching up for the note or coming down in over the note. No, no, you're going to auto tune him. He's not reaching, he's on the note, on the note. What have you done? You filed off the soul, the signal in a James Brown recording. The actual signal is the, is his soul reaching up for that note. That's why they call it soul. It's that reaching that we're hearing. That's what makes his interpretation of the song different than Britney's, different than Ariana's. We auto tune everybody in our music. We're, we're tending toward auto tuning everybody in, in their lives.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  You know, the metric, and this is all, the metric you put on the wall is the metric that you're going to get. You know, and it, it may not be an ideal single focus for more than just some provisional fun experiment.

• 52:08Shane Parrish?

  I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you some more personal questions.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  This was pretty personal.

• 52:12Shane Parrish?

  When do you feel the greatest sense of peace in your life?

• 52:14Speaker 00

  Honestly, on a daily basis, when my, when my wife and daughter have gone to bed. And it's like, ah, that's like on a daily basis, that's sort of my, my moment of peace. Peace is particular though, I guess. You know, I feel then, or when anything's been put to bed, you know, like an article or a book is finally approved. Ah, it's done now. There, there are no more comments, no more, no more drafts. It's in, it's to the press, you know, because I'm writing, I mean, that's what I do. I'm writing all the time. So it's like, oh shoot, is there another email coming back from that editor on that thing? That for me is, is, is peaceful, you know, or after, after the talk or the panel or the thing.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  You know, especially if it was a risky one or in front of a new kind of audience.

• 53:05Shane Parrish?

  When do you tend to get emotional?

• 53:07Speaker 00

  I get most emotional now at small acts of kindness. The smallest things. I saw this Broadway show, it must have been over a year ago now, because it was pre pandemic, called Come From Away. It's about the Canadian island where a lot of the planes had to land for nine 11. And it's about this town that then sort of takes in.

• 53:31Shane Parrish?

  In Newfoundland, right?

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, they take in all those people who are on the planes and whatever.

• 53:37Shane Parrish?

  How Canadian of us.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  Very. Peace order, good government. I love you guys. You know, and there's all these very touching scenes and all that, and people crying or whatever. And I'm watching it. And then this woman's like, oh, we've got to find, we're gonna have to find sanitary napkins and pampers for these people. And I started crying from that. So what's, how does that make you cry? It's the small considerations when people do, when they, when they do that. It's the little, it's the littlest things that move me the most. The person who will get up in the subway for someone else to sit down. The, the neighbor who knows, you know, that my wife went in for a surgery and comes, can I bring you a chicken or something?

• 54:22Speaker 00

  It's that, it's that very human scaled, you know, acts of kindness, particularly in the face of adversity, you know, that, that brings it out.

• 54:32Shane Parrish?

  What habits are you trying to break right now?

• 54:34Speaker 00

  I'm trying to break email, which is a hard habit. Cause I get like a thousand of these things a day. And what am I supposed to do? You know, and I'm, I feel really guilty if I don't answer them all. And I feel like some kind of an asshole that is like, oh, I get a thousand, so I don't have to. Because they're real human beings who read, maybe read something or spent time. And, and on the other hand, a lot of the emails will be like, oh, I'm in high school and they assigned me your book, Team Human, for a book report. Please tell me, what is your book about? I'm like, oh, fuck you, kid.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  No, you don't. You don't get that. Um, I've decided I'm entitled to food and drink before email. You know, I'm aware and I'm not, you know, all Tim Ferriss-y about stuff, but I know that like when someone says something bad or there's more stress in an email, I know it's activating hormones and endocrine systems and all that that need calories and, and food and water and buffers. There's probably not enough oxygen or hydrogen or molybdenum or whatever it is that I need in my bloodstream to absorb all that. So I'm, I'm trying to, to limit that. Emails, emails, my, my bad.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  I have no problem with the social media. You know, I mean, it's not like, oh, I gotta check my, my thing. I don't have those kind of, um, those kind of habits. So it's, it's that. And then sort of deeper, deeper, uh, uh, over-determined sense of responsibility for others. I have a habit of not establishing any boundaries at all, which served me well as an unpopular person before the internet, but doesn't work well as a, a slightly popular writer in an internet world. You know, people will not, if you don't put up boundaries, people aren't going to put them up for you.

• 56:36Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about those boundaries that you've put up.

• 56:39Speaker 00

  Well, I haven't. That's what I'm trying to figure out. Um, the, the boundary, it's, it's, it's going to have to come from, I'm going to have to develop a, an underlying assumption that I don't necessarily owe everything to everybody all the time. You know, and right now I kind of feel I do. I feel, I don't know, I kind of feel like I arrived here in this dimension, like with a deficit that I've got to somehow pay back. I don't know if there's other people walking around like that, but it's like, oh, like I didn't pay the price of admission or something. And, and certainly to the extent which like people have bought my books and paid attention, now I owe them, I owe the world.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Payback for all that, you know, as if, oh, you read my book. So now I owe you the equivalent hours of time that you just spent with my book. And that's tricky because if like a thousand people read a book and that took them four hours each, there's 4,000 hours I have to find somewhere. And that's, you know, 10 hours a day for more than a year.

• 57:45Shane Parrish?

  When you're stressed, what's the most important thing for you to keep in mind?

• 57:49Speaker 00

  You know, I mean, this sounds so stupid, but it's, it's new to me. So it's true. Breathing is like really important.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  If you don't breathe, you, you fall down and die really quickly. But I, I tend, when there's a stressful thing, I've noticed I stop breathing. And then it gets worse and worse, the less air there is. And then I almost have to remember, oh, right. You breathe a little bit and at least my body feels like it's a little bit better. I feel a little bit armed. But yeah, that's, that's, um, that's my big one is learning, is, is breathing and understanding that I don't have to react to everything, that, that immediate reaction is not necessarily better than a considered response.

• 58:40Shane Parrish?

  What are you most optimistic about?

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Young people's ability to pass through the fame obsessed decades into things mattering to them on a, on a local and felt level. You know, I think that there's, there's, I mean, they still do it obviously, but there's, I feel like there's growing dissatisfaction among them for this, this, you know, influencer culture, you know, that, that, that, that living your life as some sort of an infomercial is not satisfying and that they're, that they're going to move on.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  And as they do, you know, like I was saying before, as they return to a locally scaled level and start looking in their towns and cities for that, the stuff that excites them, it's going to take such a burden off, you know, this giant planetary brands and, and all that stuff, you know? I'm optimistic when I see the ports failing in Los Angeles and the boat getting stuck in the Suez Canal and. Of people saying, you know, is it really genuinely long term cost effective to have slaves in China making all our stuff? You know, we, we fish for shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico.

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  We transport those shrimp all the way to China and Vietnam where they get de-shelled and then put them on other boats and ship them all the way back to us. Could that possibly be better? In the big sense, could it be? Or is it just some business hack? You know, yeah, it's a business hack. So I, I've got faith that these kinds of, of scaled foolishness, these, that these very non commonsensical approaches to, to civilizational stewardship will become apparent. So I guess I have faith in a new era of common sense, shepherded by young people who get nauseous

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  of everything being done to scale and more interested. I sound like Bannon here, but, but in subsidiarity and distributism and the commons and local, small local business.

• 1:01:07Shane Parrish?

  What do you know about decision making that most people miss?

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  I took EST in the seventies. Remember EST? It was like Werner Erhard did this thing. They call it landmark forum now. It was one of the first kind of culty self-help things that came out of California. And, you know, and you do these long seminars and whatever. And like Tony Robbins kind of stuff. And what they said in it that stuck, it's the only thing that I remembered from it was they, they distinguish between a decision and a choice. And I real, that, that, like a decision is the process of, I have this decision to make. It's the unresolved thing. The decision is more like the question, the, the weighing of this decision.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  But choice is what you autonomously choose to do.

• 1:01:56Shane Parrish?

  Without sort of an evaluation or a rigorous process?

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Well, there can be, you can do the evaluation and then make a choice. But once I make the choice, what I've learned now is to stop second guess, is to stop going back to decision. You know, woulda, woulda, coulda, shoulda. What about that one? What about that? I chose this one. This is, oh, it's what I chose. I chose the froca mappa cheapo macanina from, you know, whatever the thing is at Starbucks. You know, I just choose black coffee, but whatever. I chose that one. Oh, I could have got the decaf latte. Yeah, you could have. You could have. But this is, you're here now. This is your house. This is your car. This is your wife.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  This is your shirt. You know, that's it. And I, and I feel like it benefits advertisers and certain companies to get people second guessing all their choices. So put them back in decision mode so they buy more stuff. And it's like, you know, you really don't, you don't need it. You don't, it's, it's really fine. I think we're wasting a lot of time and energy re choosing things that don't matter. It really doesn't matter which shirt you're wearing. It's which, you know, get out of the house already.

• 1:03:19Shane Parrish?

  And final question that I want to end with. What do you want other people to say about you when you're gone?

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  Really? Isn't it great that we live in the world that Rushkoff predicted, where we got over all these tragedies and started just getting along with each other? You know, I'm, I'm so much less concerned that they talk about me than that they talk at all. I, I much, I much prefer to influence their, their bearing, their, their comportment than the content. You know, whatever they're saying, I'd rather them be saying it in the way that I try to speak, you know, which is in a, in a loving, open, engaged, responsible, responsible way.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  I want them to engage with each other, feeling responsible for one another. And whether or not they credit me with that, by, by, by name, it doesn't matter.

• 1:04:21Shane Parrish?

  Thank you so much for taking the time for this engaging conversation, Douglas.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  Thank you, Shane. It's good to meet you.

• 1:04:28Shane Parrish?

  The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnham Street. I'd love to get your advice on how to make this the most valuable podcast you listen to. Email me at [email protected]. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog/podcast. To get a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog/tribe or check out the show notes. Can you do me a small favor? Go online right now and share this episode with one friend who you think would love it. Thanks for listening and learning with us. Till next time.