How Billionaires Are Preparing For Doomsday - Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist, futurist, writer and documentarian. The world's richest people are preparing for the end. They're buying up farming land and below-ground bunkers in New Zealand. What catastrophe is it that they think is about to happen? And what happens if technology creates a techno-hell instead of a techno-utopia? Expect to learn what happens when you're invited to brief billionaires on the future downfall of the earth, whether having your own sovereign nation at sea is a realistic idea, whether it's possible to live in an underground missile silo with an indoor infinity pool, what mindset is driving this techno-paranoia and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount & free shipping on the best Ketone Drink at https://ketone-iq.com/ (use code MW10) Extra Stuff: Buy Survival Of The Richest - https://amzn.to/3XzAdRq Follow Douglas on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rushkoff Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #prepper #doomsday #technology - 00:00 Intro 00:56 How Billionaires Are Preparing Now for Doomsday 08:26 What Introduced Douglas to this Subject? 16:31 The Possibilities of Seasteading 26:33 Society’s Knee-jerk Reaction of Totalitarianism 31:46 The Parts of Preparation that Billionaires Struggle with 37:59 Desire for a Better, More Enjoyable Future 51:28 How Individuals & Society Can Improve 1:01:07 Where to Find Douglas - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Any of them that are land-based, we can go take them over. There's more of us. I think these are very penetrable. The ones that are totally locked away, their agriculture systems are totally self-contained. Have you ever seen somebody doing vertical farming at home? You get a bad batch. Just take it out and go build another one. You can't do that when you're locked away. What do you do? You go out with a crew, with a couple of guys with machine guns to run and find some more sterile topsoil. But of course, you've got the nuclear fallout and the zombies and the killer bees and whatever it is out there that you're supposed to be hiding from.

• 0:34Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me, kind of an inevitability. I've had a lot of conversations on the show about existential risk, talking about the work of people like Toby Ord and Nick Bostrom. Are we going to get turned into gray goo or a big bunch of paperclips? You know, this small background risk of a gamma burst destroying us all? Or is the polar, the polar ends going to flip? And then all of the technology is going to fall out? It seems unsurprising to me that the people that have the absolute most resources on the planet, who are exposed to this kind of thinking, who are probably technologists in one form or another, techno-utopians, would take that, run with it and think, I essentially have an unlimited number of resources. How can I try and insulate myself from this problem?

• 1:18Chris Williamson?

  That, to me, doesn't seem very surprising at all.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  No, but I wonder what the order of events really is. Is it, oh, I've got all these resources, so I have a lot of stuff that's at risk and I want to spend a lot of my energy protecting myself? Or is it, I've achieved my great wealth and all my technological monopolies and stuff by treating other people and places as if the world is already ending? So I really like to have some evidence that the world is ending so I can justify having essentially used a bomb shelter mentality all along.

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  How would you say millionaires have treated the world as if it was already ending? Billionaires have treated the world as if it was already ending from before now?

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, there's so many examples. Like one I just heard was on. A piece that Cory Doctorow, a friend of mine, wrote about Epson printers. And apparently, they make a certain Epson printer is pre-programmed to brick itself after a certain number of pages. And he interviewed the company to find out why, and they justified that there's a tiny little sponge somewhere in this printer that absorbs the loose dust. And after however many, five or 10,000 pages, they believe that that little sponge might be filled up and some of the dust might sprinkle out onto the filing cabinet or the piece of paper under which you give, where you put the printer.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  And to prevent that disaster from happening, and because you can't replace that two-cent sponge, I mean, my God, that would be an impossible feat of administration, they will save us all by bricking the printer and forcing you to throw it into a waste pile somewhere, you know, a big toxic waste pile that some Brazilian children pick at to find the renewable, you know, rare earth metals in it, and then send some other children to get the rare earth metals out of a mine to build a new printer for you. Now, the guy at Epson who makes that decision is not stupid. He knows, I am contributing to climate change, I'm contributing to the end of the world

• 3:32Speaker 00

  by doing this, but I'm going to make enough margin selling an extra few printers that I'm going to be able to distance myself from the reality I'm creating by earning money in this way. So this series of decisions that are made, or the guy, the guy I spoke to at one of those food camps, who was one of the guys who put the algorithms in the social media feeds that addict teenagers to, you know, clicking and whatever and worrying about themselves, doesn't let his kids touch this stuff. He's got a private, you know, organic farm with a goat share. His kid goes to a Rudolph Steiner school and is not allowed to touch anything. So he's already got a kind of organic farm bunker in the middle of nowhere and behaving

• 4:17Speaker 00

  as if everyone else's kids are the ones who are being left behind. So if you've got an apocalypse coming, you can kind of say, okay, that's why. I'm doing it this way.

• 4:28Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Okay. So you're saying that a, a large apocalypse justifies this sort of zero sum, me and mine versus fuck everybody else. That sort of mentality is, is born out of that.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  On the one hand, yeah. And I guess on the other hand, what I'm looking at is this, just a sort of uh, innate techno geek nerd. And I share it sometimes too. Fear of women and nature and unpredictable stuff. And a lot of us who got involved in tech from the very beginning liked it because it kind of creates a bit of order. I remember when I was with Timothy Leary, when he was reading Media Lab, the book by Stuart Brand about Nicholas Negroponte's, oh, MIT's got this big thing called Media Lab. It was really the first place where they were building all the, you know, computers, the first place to look at digital. Marvin Minsky was there and AI and, and Stuart Brand wrote this book about

• 5:26Speaker 00

  the, the Media Lab. And I was with Timothy Leary when he was reading it and he's circling everything with flare pens. And I'm thinking, oh, he loves all this talk about the digital future and anti aliasing and, and, and robot consciousness and all. And when he's done with the book, he goes, blah, and he throws it across the room like it's his, and he goes, first up, only 2% of the names in the index are women. That's how you know they've got a problem. Then he said, and second, these guys are trying to recreate the womb. They, their mothers were unable to anticipate their every need. And now they want to build this, this technological bubble where they can sit and have algorithms and robots, you know, bring to them what they want before they even know they want it. And so there's that kind of fantasy that goes along with the perfect tech solution that,

• 6:11Speaker 00

  that again, an apocalypse is a really good justification for, for wanting to, to build that private, uh, you know, private sanctuary.

• 6:22Chris Williamson?

  Ah, it's kind of like permanently existing in a science fiction novel that has probably inspired a ton of the work that you've done. Talk to me about, talk to me about what spending time with Timothy Leary was like.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Always, it was great and a little bit horrible at the same time. You know, being with Timothy Leary was kind of like being on acid.

• 6:44Chris Williamson?

  Kind of like being on acid?

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Or it was being on acid? Sometimes it was being on acid, but sometimes it was just like being on acid. So it was a beautiful zone in some ways, but it was unforgiving. It was like he would, he would play kind of dominant psychologist with you all the time. You know, reflecting back to you, whatever he saw as a, you know, a neurosis or an impediment to whatever you were, you know, just say it, what, God, come on, you know? And it was, geez, just can't you chill?

• 7:20Chris Williamson?

  So the social mores, the sort of typical things that people would be allowed to just let slide, Timothy would decide to point the finger at it and call out the elephant in the room.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Right. So it was, it was sometimes a taxing.

• 7:36Chris Williamson?

  I have some friends, I have some friends that are like that. Yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I get it, you know, no, no, no compromise, especially, you know, and I knew him by the time I knew him, he was already in his 60s and probably thinking, I don't have time for anything, but you know, and if you, and if he did treat you like that, it's because he considered you a friend, you know, someone who would come in, a lot of times famous people would come into the house like an Oliver Stone or Eliza Minnelli or someone and do stuff that was obviously kind of, of silly or egotistical or something. And he wouldn't say anything till they were gone because he didn't see, also because they're high status people, you don't just tell Oliver Stone, I don't want to do your frigging ayahuasca that you brought in from South America in a bottle. I don't know what that is, you know, it was, it was sort of that.

• 8:24Chris Williamson?

  Funny. Okay. So when it comes to billionaires and how they've been preparing, I mean, I've seen an absolute ton of articles over the last five years, I would say mostly. The farmland that's being purchased in middle America, New Zealand seems to be one of the most popular places, sea steading, these opportunities for people to air gap themselves from society in one form or another. Obviously we've potentially got, you know, multi-planetary species not a million years away from now happening. How did you get introduced to thinking about this seriously?

• 9:03Speaker 00

  And I don't know if seriously is the right word, but certainly thinking about it was this talk that I was supposed to give to some wealthy tech investors. They hired me, like they hire people like us, basically. They think, understand something about the future because we said something they didn't understand once. They go, oh, that must be a futurist. So they hired me to do a talk about the digital future out in the middle of the desert. You know, it's a big money thing. So I went, you know, I subsidized my, my thinking with whatever that is, these, these kind of hired intellectual dominatrix sessions.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Let's bring in an anarcho syndicalist to punish us for our wealth.

• 9:44Chris Williamson?

  I love the, I love the idea of you, of you, you standing there, full leather outfit with a whip and everything, but it's a what, instead of you hitting anyone, it's just you gesturing with a whiteboard behind you. I could see that.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, really. No, my PhD is my whip, right?

• 9:59Speaker 00

  But they, so I'm not there to do this thing. And instead of bringing me to do the talk or miking me up, they bring these five guys into the green room and they sit around this little table and start peppering me with all these questions about the future. And, you know, when it started out, the regular binary tech investor questions, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, virtual reality, augmented reality, you know, and I'm not the person to ask that either. I would have said Betamax instead of VHS, you know, I would have said CompuServe instead of AOL. I'm always wrong because I picked the better thing, not the one that's going to win, right? MySpace, whatever. MySpace gives us more, it's better. It gives us more, you can do it, pick our own backgrounds, you know, or HTML, I would have said, you know, just I don't need frigging, you know, WordPress. So I'm always wrong

• 10:42Speaker 00

  with that. I'm right about the big picture, but always wrong about which company to bet on. But anyway, so they're doing that with me. And then finally, one of the guys says, so Alaska or New Zealand. And then the rest of the thing, rest of the time was them peppering me with questions and asking me about, you know, how to, how to survive. And I was, I was really shocked and started really asking them more questions than they were asking me. Like, all right, so how are you going to deal with, you know, germs and where are you going to get your water? And are you going to have your own freshwater supply? Are you going to be depending on underground water that's being contaminated by whatever happened in the outside world? How are you going to guard yourselves? And then they said that they hired Navy SEALs to come fly in. And it's interesting because it's always Navy SEALs that say, nobody picks Army Rangers.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  It's like, from my movie experience, I like Army Rangers, especially if you're on the ground. If you're not sea steadying, I want Army guys, right? They're great. Something feels more, I don't know. I like them. I like their, their media image, their movie, their movie image better than Navy SEALs for me. Terms of my protection, but all of them had Navy SEALs. I don't know if they had the same ones, double contracting. All contracted to fly out in like helicopters to come to their thing at a moment's notice.

• 11:52Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so these guys, these, these Navy SEALs or whatever are on hair trigger alert. To be wheels up within 90 minutes if the, if the new, if the nuke alarm goes off or something.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. One of them has people at his plane all the time, ready, you know, if he has to go. Yeah. To one of two or three different locations. Like, jeez. And then, but the thing of that, I asked them was, why do you think your Navy SEALs are going to protect you once the event is what they called it? Once the event happens? You know, your, your, your, your money's going to be worthless at that point, even if it's Bitcoin, right? So why are they not just going to take over? You haven't you like read Machiavelli 101? Like, how do you, how do you take care of your? And they hadn't really considered that. And then they start, what, once they start musing on what they could do? Like, oh, I could be the only one who knows the combination to the safe. You know, where the, where the food is kept.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  It's like, oh, so Navy SEALs have never tried to get secrets out of anyone before? Now it really stumped them. You're right. Or it's like, or they was talking about implants that would be controlling who gets to go where in the compound. And worst case, it could be used for discipline. It's like, oh, right. Navy SEALs are going to really respond well to being disciplined, to the equivalent of shock collars. So it was, uh, uh, it was just ludicrous. So for me, it just showed, uh, the, the sort of almost middle school science fiction logic of, of their scenarios. And then it made me question the sort of the, the visions of all of the tech bros.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  These kind of, you know, whatever they are, these kind of, uh, meta-modern, blue sky, game B. You know, all these, um, theories about kind of rising from the chrysalis of matter is pure consciousness. Or, you know, uh, adapting to this great metaphorical future thing. And I started to see them all in the same bucket as people who were, you know,

• 13:51Speaker 00

  For time, for centuries, afraid of women, afraid of nature, you know, afraid of the unpredictability of real life and actively fantasizing about the opportunity to escape, to level up, and you know, to go, as Peter Thiel would say, from zero to one, or Zuckerberg, to go meta, you know, or Kurzweil, to want to put his brain up in silicon. Everyone wants to go up. And it's like, I don't, it's not a theory of change that I can really take that seriously.

• 14:25Chris Williamson?

  So do you think that some of these guys secretly are hoping, waiting, almost praying for this to happen in a way? Does it justify their worries and concerns? Does it offer them a better kind of life in some ways?

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Well, I think they're impatient for it to happen, partly because they've been raised on Western narrative, you know, on Marvel movies. You gotta have your end game, right? Or it doesn't, what did I pay my money for if I don't get the end game? If I don't get the thing, the moment? Partly it's because they've got a kind of techno-solutionist bias where they're used to just reboot, or, you know, a version two, version three, you know, let's go from web one to web two, let's go from web two to web three. They just want to kind of, that urge to kind of reboot up there. And, and yeah, it's, it's a, a way

• 15:20Speaker 00

  to realize that it's, I mean, I think of Steve Bannon kind of the same way, although for different, very different reasons, you know, tear this thing down. This thing is corrupt. I mean, he's scared of these, he's the one of the only ones who takes all these Thiel and Musk and the technocrats and great reset people. He's the only one who takes them really seriously. And, and, and you hear it, you know, that, oh no, these techno guys and Epstein and, and implants and Gates with nanobots and all, they believe these.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Uh, technological systems are really coming that they're and that we, the people through blood and soil are going to fight that thing. But it's that same that what they share in common is this urge to tear this thing down. You know, when I see Musk, the way Musk relates to Biden and government and all that stuff, it's like, oh, come on, we don't need that. We have a blockchain that or a blue sky or a program and and we could be free to be you and me in a totally different fractal that you, you know, old woke Democrats can't understand. Let's just do it. Pedal to the metal. You know, that's it's sort of that drive.

• 16:30Chris Williamson?

  What about sea steadying? Did you have a look at that? Have you spent much time researching this?

• 16:35Speaker 00

  On the one hand, it'd be kind of fun, you know, let's go to the sea, you know, build my own little raft with solar powered propulsion and and eat fish and grow alfalfa or whatever and and desalinate.

• 16:49Chris Williamson?

  What's alfalfa?

• 16:51Speaker 00

  You know, it's like you put it on salad green or something, I think, whatever.

• 16:55Chris Williamson?

  All right.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  One of those things.

• 16:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I thought it was a type of algae. Okay, cool.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, or you could do algae. That'd be even better. Right? Like blue green algae or or or uh, what's that stuff that people eat? I forgot what it's called now, but there's all those little, yeah, we could make that stuff. I mean, the the the real fantasy, though, is for frictionless community that I can float my sort of hexagonal raft to the nation of my choice and attach to it. And now I'm in this nation of people all on their rafts and we have our own system of government and we approve cloning, but don't approve abortion and we do approve this and that. And these are our rules. We have a blockchain. We have our own currency and all that. And then if this country starts to have a rule or something

• 17:40Speaker 00

  I don't like, get detach my raft and you know, solar power float to that country over there. They got the rules that I want. So it's that it's that idea of of a nation with no skin in the game, with no exit cost. You know, it's like you could change as easily as you could change your cell phone company. You can change your your nation. And I don't think real community works that way. I think you do.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  Gotta be with people who believe stuff you don't like and there's some rules that you disagree with and

• 18:13Chris Williamson?

  Was was part of that not the justification for the way that the United States was put together, though, that you basically do have 50 kind of small countries all put together? Yes, you're sharing a currency and a language, but broadly, it is, you know, you don't like it here, you can move there. What what's the what's wrong with somebody who wants to just up and leave when stuff doesn't go the way they like?

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Oh, any federation is like that. It's certainly fine for my Mastodon servers, you know, you're on one and talking and you're like, I don't want to be on this one. I'm going to go over on that one. But they're all federated so that you can still follow anybody in any one of them. No, I mean, in certainly in a digital realm or in a brand loyalty, it makes total sense as a way of of fostering long term, difficult relationships between people over time. I don't know. I I don't. I don't have a problem with frictionless. If people want to change their town every week and move around, it's just what is it biased toward? So when I look at the plan, when I hear them describing it that you don't

• 19:19Speaker 00

  like this, you'll just float away. It's a free market version of civics. And I I get it. And there's cool things about it. But to me, it betrays what it's all really about. It's I don't like the rules on your country, which they don't, right? We can't just develop tech. I'm not allowed to do all the cloning I want. And there's these regulations about genetic engineering. So I'm going to take my ball, my billion dollars, and go and make my own frigging country out in the middle of the ocean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can't do anything to me. And I have to do it out in the ocean because I don't yet have enough money to get my rocket ship, my Blue Origin up to Mars and terraform that place. But when I can, I will, you know, see ya.

• 20:03Chris Williamson?

  I I understand the place that this comes from, I think, you know, like personal sovereignty, individual agency, all of these things are things that almost everybody that I respect is pushing forward at the moment, you know, it's the anti, the antithesis of the victimhood narrative at the moment, it's taking control and responsibility for the things that you do. I think that's pretty much a universal good.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:26Chris Williamson?

  I also understand what happens when you take that too far and it encourages people to not properly integrate into the local group that's around them, like, you know, you could say, and I see this particularly amongst dads, particularly, particularly amongst wealthy dads that are maybe late 40s to 50s, they have spent a long time building companies and acquiring wealth. And then they get to this stage and there's something about it where they, they seem to kind of say fuck you a little bit to the rest of the world. And it's like a

• 21:06Chris Williamson?

  a retreat in a way, it's more individualistic, it's more atomized, it's, it's like me and my family and fuck everybody and everything else. And I do, I do see this, I do understand what happens if you take that personal sovereignty thing and you roll it forward across many tens of millions of dollars and a lot of resources and a lot of spare time and a family that you don't want to have hurt. I, I understand how, how that can come about.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, or a family you don't even want to be with anymore, for that matter.

• 21:38Chris Williamson?

  Or you want to gap yourself from everybody, including your ex-wife, right?

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, or your current wife, yeah. But I'll tell you, you know, and I haven't said this before, and I'm, I'm in a lot of discussions about the origins of this. And it's, it's, on the one hand, it is, and traditionally, I kind of blame it on libertarianism and the West Coast, the West Coast kind of libertarianism that dovetailed so perfectly with techno-solutionism. It was John Barlow telling us, you know, the Declaration of Independence of cyberspace, you know, nations of the world, get off here, this is For us, and we didn't realize if you get government away, corporations grow and roam free. So there is that that narrative is is an important one, and I don't minimize it.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  And I still feel like, oh, damn, when Wired came and blew Mondo 2000 out of the water. You know, when when the business guys came and turned the net from our great psychedelic rave space into this fucking techno capitalist nightmare. It's like, wait a minute, this wasn't. Why are you taking all this stuff public? Why are we having IPOs? Why are we after eyeball hours and all? So there's that. But the thing I haven't said, and it's probably too dangerous to say, and I might get canceled and whatever, but

• 22:52Speaker 00

  it's also an almost necessary, or it's an almost inevitable response to Marxism. You know, and Hannah Arendt wrote about this in in The Banality of Evil and in other places, that Marxism, not workers' rights, but Marxism as a kind of a a scientific version of workers' rights has as a kind of an end game, this total equality. It's like, I understand, we don't want anyone to be deathly poor, that they're that they're sick and can't have a, but there's poverty, there's inequality. That's sort of what happens in in a society.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  And this this almost scientific desire to annihilate all forms of inequality is itself provocative to the self sovereign individual, right? So and you could look at it on the on the personal level. If you see, oh, my God, everybody's getting canceled for everything here and there and there and there. And then I think back, you know, there was a girl in middle school, I mean, before sex or anything like that. There was a girl in middle school that my friends convinced, I really had a crush on her. My and and kind of told her, then my friends convinced me, no, no, it's not cool. You'll be going to be hated and not liked and whatever. And I I ditched her for no reason.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  That, you know, I mean, that's as bad as I'm I'm.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  There's all sorts of equivalence of that, that a whole bunch of guys look at a cancellation movement and think, someday it's gonna be me, they're gonna come for me. Or those of us who are involved in social justice understand that the social justice terms that we use in one year may be obsolete in the next year. And the video of us saying the thing that was appropriate in one year then becomes bad word to use the next year, or the year after. So, when people sense that, that there's this moving target that they will never be able to meet, and there's no wiggle room, there's no place for reconciliation, or apology,

• 25:10Speaker 00

  or error, it does, it activates a reverse pull to something, you know, total self-sovereignty, and anti-woke, and fuck them, I'm not, I want anti-woke, I want to use bad words. And you look at a Musk, and it's on that level, it's refreshing. Ah, he's not taking no shit from nobody, he's gonna, you know, call Hillary this, and call AOC that, and ha ha, and he's not afraid, he's like, pre-cancelled. So there's, and there's that energy behind a lot of these escape fantasies, I think, of like, wait a minute, society's getting too woke. So when you hear, like, Jim Rutt, who's a really smart, he's a smart systems theorist,

• 25:53Speaker 00

  he used to be the head of Santa Fe Institute, and he's the main guy behind something called Game B, which is a place, like, where the idea is we're all living in Game A now, which is regular competitive society, but we can elevate and go to Game B, which is the next phase of human existence. And he always talks about the obstacle to it as those woke people, those goddamn woke people. And, so I understand wokeism as an extension of Marxism, and Marxism as...

• 26:23Speaker 00

  A version of Marxism as this trigger for people to then do this other thing.

• 26:28Chris Williamson?

  Ah, okay. So the reason that Jim Rutt.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. The reason that Jim Rutt is saying that the difficulty in moving from game A and descending to game B being the woke movement is not any of the first order effects of wokeism. It's the second order effect of the knee jerk reaction when the pendulum swings back against wokeism, which is hyper individualistic, it's atomized, it's Doomer optimism, it's Elon Musk shitposting his way through AOC, it's QAnon, it's all of this stuff.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Right. Well, he might be, I don't know whether he's a first or second order effect of it, but yeah. I think he's more in the camp of partly game B is to get away from this stuff. I mean, I think he's a first order, he's in the first order effect of it, but.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's tricky and it's because. And again, this is really hard to say because it makes it sound like there's an equivalence and there's not. I don't mean to equate right and left or Trump and AOC or anything like that. There are different degrees. There's way different levels of stuff. I mean, I would way rather, you know, be in AOC's country than, than Trump's country. But there's a, the problem is not just Trump and his cronies. They are the, they are the figures. They are not the ground. They're the images. They're not the atmosphere. It's the atmosphere itself that it's as if the air we breathe has become totalitarian, has become that in this is this extremist thing.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  It's like an accelerant, like we're not breathing air, we're breathing nitrous or something, you know, like nitrous does to an automobile, right? And everything is amplified and accelerated and extreme. And I feel like any political movement, any cultural movement now, on whatever side of the political spectrum it is, ends up, I'm kind of revved up, partly by the digital media environment that we're in and partly by whatever, whatever this thing is going on in, in the air, that there are these currents that are moving things around. And, and then you got guys like.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  You have some wizards out there like Bannon is a wizard, Musk is a wizard that make it look like they're the ones actually doing making these currents, but they're not. They're just seeing them and riding on them. You know, I don't think Trump was, was, did anything. I think Trump was more like Charlie Sheen. You know, there was this kind of standing wave of culture that was happening and he just jumped in it. It was like, ah, you know, so we look at him as the picture, but, but it's not. It was, he just, he just, he just embodied the phenomenon.

• 29:17Chris Williamson?

  It is very interesting to think about this, this knee jerk reaction. That's a model that I think I'm going to try and, try and use as I continue forward. I mean, when you consider the prepping movement's been around for a long time, right? You know, people predicting the end of the world and trying to avoid alien abduction or whatever it might be. And then doomer optimism, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with, is a, that's the middle ground version of this. And then the end game is the billionaires. And I had a look at, there's that company called Vivos. They sell luxury underground apartments in converted Cold War munitions, storage facilities and missile silos. So that's, that's taking it up to absolute extreme.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Swords to plowshares, baby. It's, it's almost biblical, right? Except it's not really plowshares. It's swords to shelters. Yeah. I mean, they sell them. There's a, the ones I like are in Europe. They're called like opidium or something. Those look nice. They have swimming pools and saunas and things, you know, one of these guys.

• 30:23Chris Williamson?

  I just want to go there. Do I have to wait until the end of the world? Or is there an opportunity for me to just go now?

• 30:28Speaker 00

  I know. That's the thing. Can't we just go now, but not have to do it underground?

• 30:32Chris Williamson?

  So one of the guys.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. They, they, there was one, you know, one of them, and it's interesting because you, one of them was from a very Christian company called, I forgot what, Rising S Corporation. And they build, they take shipping containers and stick them under the ground originally for people for like tornado shelters and fallout shelters and things like that. Then when the, the rich people got into the apocalypse buzz, they're like, oh, it's a good business. So instead of just putting one, one train car down there, you know, they'll put like 12 shipping containers all networked together and they've got pools, they got heated pools and fake daylight and, and I, I, one of, that was one of the guys I was talking to was doing one of those. And I was like, dude. It's like my neighbor has a pool, not right down there. They have a pool and there's always

• 31:17Speaker 00

  a truck in front of there bringing some other part or gizmo that broke like a heater or a regulator, you know, a thermostat thing. Like, where are you gonna get that? Where's that guy in your plan? Where's all the, you have a 3D printer making the parts for your pool? You know, can they do that yet? Of course not. And he's like, oh, he opened this little Moleskine book. He's like, parts for pool. Like, okay, you really worked this out, buddy.

• 31:45Chris Williamson?

  That's funny. Oh, yeah. So what, looking at what you know about the current approach that the super rich have when it comes to saving themselves from the apocalypse that's coming, what are the most fragile elements of their preparation?

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Security, definitely. You know, they, they, any of them that are land-based, we can go take them over. There's more of us, even if, you know, a thousand of us get shot on our way in. Plus, if we've got motorcycle gangs with Uzis or whatever they have, I think these are very penetrable. These are penetrable. Some of them have farms and shit. So there's that. The ones that are totally locked away, their agriculture systems are totally self-contained. A lot of them have like their topsoil is in these little rubber tubes and then you try to grow. I mean, have you ever seen somebody doing vertical farming at home or whatever? You get a bad batch. It's like you get a bad panel and you just

• 32:47Speaker 00

  take it out and go get some topsoil and build another one. Or you can't do that when you're locked away, you know? Or what do you do? You go out with a, with a crew with a couple of guys with machine guns to run and find some more sterile topsoil. But of course, you got the nuclear fallout and the, you know, zombies and the killer bees and, you know, whatever it is out there that, that you're supposed to be hiding from. So the self-contained universe, the sort of the thing that failed with Biosphere will fail with a lot of these because they think everything's going to regenerate. So those are the, those and, and they're not really sealed from germs. And I mean, COVID got everywhere somehow,

• 33:32Speaker 00

  you know, eventually somebody's bringing something or a bird's gonna poop and, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna catch whatever people have. As I see it, these things are They're so brittle. They're brittle from the get-go. They're a brittle approach to survival. If you talk to a real prepper, and I have, smart preppers, their preparedness plans always involve the communities in which they're embedded. They prep by teaching people in their communities how to prep. They do foraging classes and farming classes and self-defense classes because they realize the only way to be prepared is to be prepared together, not prepared alone. The lone prepper does not survive.

• 34:17Chris Williamson?

  How comfortable or uncomfortable is it for you, spending time around people that have both the desire, means, and resources to be able to enact something like this? I had a conversation a little while ago with a friend, and he mentioned that he'd spoken to someone that's maybe in a similar position to the gentleman that had paid you to go and teach them how to survive the end of the world. And this guy had said, "I'm an apex predator. Apex predators don't need to concern themselves about what happens to their prey." And this guy, as far as my friend was concerned, was like, he meant it. Like, he genuinely believes that he is close to the absolute top of the tree of this entire planet, and that the externalities

• 35:00Chris Williamson?

  are kind of the same as stepping on a bug. And that story struck with me. That was like two years ago that I heard that story. It really struck with me because I think, wow, there's people out there that have that kind of mindset and that have the resources to be able to live the philosophy that that mindset creates.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, that's the mindset that I'm really writing about in my book. I mean, that's really what it's about. You know, most of the people want to know, "Oh, you wrote this, but how do I survive? What are your tips and techniques?" And I'm like, "No, no, I'm kind of trying to undermine." It's called escape fantasies of the tech billionaires. But you're right. It comes from, you know, and that's why I look at really two strains. One is a certain thread of the scientific revolution, you know, which was Francis Bacon. And Francis Bacon was sort of the father of empirical science. And he's credited with saying that the purpose of empirical science, the promise, is that it will allow us to take nature by the forelock, hold her down, and submit her to our will.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  Okay, great. So, science is basically a rape fantasy, right? We're gonna take nature by the hair, hold her down, and have our way with her. And that's what science will let us do. Again, it's that apex predator's understanding. Yes, you are man, you are man, you know? So, we can take, we are in charge of nature. We can dominate nature. And as any truly enlightened person realizes, that's not even the way you get power, much less the way you survive. You don't dominate nature. You learn to work with the patterns of nature, the patterns of your body. You know, some of the stuff that you've talked about too, about the natural cycles of waking and sleeping. And if you learn the patterns, you ride them, and you become strong and healthy and all that,

• 36:45Speaker 00

  as opposed to trying to defeat the patterns of nature with what? With speed and sleeping pills and Prozac? And, you know, because you can't recognize, because you refuse to submit to the day and night, the seasons. Sorry, there's seasons. You can't change them. Go with it, just go with it. It's okay, it's gonna be okay. Sun will come out again. So, there's that. And then, the capitalism is the other one. You know, you talked about externalities. And externalities are built into colonial capitalism. In order for the markets to grow, which they have to grow, because we're on this central currency, interest-bearing, economic operating system. In order for it to grow,

• 37:29Speaker 00

  we gotta take over more places, enslave their people, and extract their resources. And those are externalities. The enslaved people, the pollution. But if we have technology, which is the sort of the latest part of this puzzle, we can build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust. There will be externalities, but those are other people's problems. You know, and if it's too much, if the whole world gets filled up with the exhaust, then, well, then we go. We get Blue Origin, and we go to the next one.

• 37:59Chris Williamson?

  I remember having a conversation ages ago with a astrophysicist that specialized in detecting alien civilizations. So there's SETI, and then there's METI as well. And METI is messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. And there's a lot of big questions being asked around whether METI is even a good idea in the first place. And I asked, what are some of the most likely signs that other civilizations would have? Because some would be underwater, some would be silicon-based, some might have thoughts that take decades to go through, et cetera, et cetera. And he said that global warming, that the

• 38:40Chris Williamson?

  use of any type of energy is inevitably going to cause kick out of pollution into the environment, which has to change the environment. There are only a small number of ways that you can do stuff like smelting, like generating any kind of energy and the externalities that you get from that. And it made me think like, maybe it is the case that we can't techno utopia our way out of this. I have some friends that believe that the solution to the side effects of technology is more technology. I know that you talk about this. But I know increasingly, I'm, I know, kind of a little bit less certain about that.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  I know. And then it's funny, I was talking with Tyson Yonkaporta, who's this really smart Australian indigenous person and scholar. And he says, he thinks that Western civilization is in a state of depression after having seen the movie Avatar.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  Because Avatar is the opposite, right? Avatar is a civilization that is basically expending no energy beyond your sort of what they eat and, and, you know, beyond their metabolism of their bodies, you know, in harmony with nature. And it's this picture of something that we could, I can't imagine how we could, you know, go forward to that. I mean, I was going to say get back to that, but you can't go back ever. But how could we move forward? And I do believe that the

• 40:17Speaker 00

  The most sustainable and most fun society that we could live in would look a bit like a permaculture farm or something, and there would be less tech. I mean, I'm not anti-tech. I love tech and it's been fun. It's been fun, but I love, you know, nature and people and flash and stuff more, you know, and I don't know, I, if, you know, if we could, degrowth is a bad word, I won't say that, if we could sort of unwind.

• 40:54Chris Williamson?

  Simplify.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  A bit. Simplify. Yeah, there's nicer ways of saying it. We would, if we move to a situation where we don't need to, to have the GDP grow every year, where we don't need to do more just for the sake of maintaining the balance sheet, but we only did more that we needed to do more in order to, to feed and clothe and care for other people, we could get rid of a lot of, a lot of unnecessary stuff, you know, all the plastic that we're buying at Walmart and throwing away. And, you know, there's just, I get it, it's good for the economy, that if everyone on the block has a lawnmower, it's better for the economy than if one person has a lawnmower that we all share, but it's a nicer society

• 41:38Speaker 00

  if we have one lawnmower on the block and everyone shares it.

• 41:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so there's the ego, which is the embedded, embedded growth obligation, right? Which is what you're talking about, the GDP needs to continue each year, et cetera.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:49Chris Williamson?

  It feels to me like there's an eco as well, which is an embedded comfort obligation, that humans never want to regress back to a less comfortable type of life than the one that they're in at the moment.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, and but then we got to also then think about how are we defining comfort? You know, I guess it's more comfortable to sit in this Costco chair than on a rock, right? But there's, I don't know, there's, there's comfort.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  There's many kinds of comfort.

• 42:21Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, less comfort would come from not having spinal issues, you know, in your 50s, 60s and 70s because you've not spent a ton of time sat down. It would come from suffering less with diabetes because you were moving around a lot more. But the problem that you have is that what is good for you in the long term often feels difficult in the short term. So you'd switch out the C in eco for comfort for convenience, you know, and embedded convenience obligation. Like, why is it that I should walk to the store to get my 10,000 steps in for today when I can Amazon Prime it and it'll be here by 7pm? Why would I do that? And it takes, I always think about this, we've got a, me and my housemate have got

• 43:00Chris Williamson?

  a cold tub outside, right? Like, we've had to buy a $5,000 piece of kit so that I can find discomfort. I elect to find discomfort and inject it into my daily life because my natural existence is so bereft of anything that looks even remotely difficult, right? I have to go out of my way to try and find podcasts or books that are going to mentally tax me. I have to go out of my way to go into a building which has a selection of handles with weights attached to them because normally I don't have to pick anything up that's heavier than a sandwich. Like, I am having to artificially inseminate so much discomfort into my life because the eco, that embedded convenience obligation continues

• 43:41Chris Williamson?

  to get more and more and more convenient over time. And humans often mistake a convenient or enjoyable experience for a worthwhile one. And until, I don't think that that's fixable. I simply don't think it's fixable. To be able to get humans to look past, this is difficult now but good in the long term. Even if you'd given it to our caveman ancestors, even if you'd gone, within one generation, you can go from rocks and fire and no wheel to all of the stuff that we've got now, even they wouldn't have wanted to go back because it is a race to the bottom of the convenience stem.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  Right, although some civilizations didn't, you know, that lasted a long time in a sort of homeostasis.

• 44:21Chris Williamson?

  Would they have ever got, they wouldn't have ever stepped into that technological advancement and then regressed back, right? They simply wouldn't have made the step forward.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Probably not, right. Right, but of course, because they didn't move into the technological advancement, they got clobbered by colonial civilizations that did, right?

• 44:36Chris Williamson?

  See ya.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  Sorry, if one civilization is putting 50% of its effort into munitions, then the one that's, you know, not putting any into it is gonna get, is gonna get killed pretty fast. No, I hear you, I hear you. And the other thing, you know, is that technology accelerates that process, you know, when Kevin Kelly or any of the, you know, technology theorists talk about tech, they always say technology gives us more choice, gives us choice, but we haven't yet developed the capacity to make wise choices. We make, like you're saying, the convenient, the short-term convenient choice, you know, and then on the other end, again, because of this, this totalitarian environment, on

• 45:17Speaker 00

  the other end of the spectrum, the so-called long-term thinkers are thinking about the civilization of 40 trillion bots spread out through the universe, rather than the 800, whatever, 8 billion people alive today. So they go so far on the other extreme that, wait a minute, what about just sort of medium-long term then? Just the next 500 or 1,000 years, you know, let's look at that.

• 45:43Chris Williamson?

  It's a difficult one, man, it really is. You talked to me about, you had this story about a banker that went to Burning Man and came back and had seen a different side of the world.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's weird, I get, I get invited to these, these things, they always have the word "human" in them, you know, you know, "Festival of the New Humanity" or, you know, "The Next Level of Humans" and the whatever. I got invited to one of them, and I don't know why I finally agreed to go to this one.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  And it was, you know, a thing where they go and you got like, uh, uh, some, some shaman gets paid to come and, and chant a bit and you do guided visualizations. And it's all like hedge fund dudes and bankers and whatever that have like gone to Burning Man, done mushrooms or LSD or ayahuasca for the first time. And then they see the light, right? Oh my God, I'm destroying the planet. And they come back and then they want to like process it with the spiritual people. And the problem is they, they have the insight and then they decide, oh, I should be the leader of the climate change revolution. As if there haven't been people, they don't want to join the existing climate change things.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  I said to one of them who was like, oh, I've got a lead. I'm going to create a new organization that's going to aggregate the this and the that. And I'm like, well, have you heard of Extinction Rebellion or the Sunrise Movement or Nature Conservancy? There's, there's out there. So what? No. And if I haven't heard of them, how good could any of them be? It's like, well, you weren't frigging looking. I'm telling you, this is your first hour as a newly minted climatologist. Maybe you shouldn't run the thing, but you see this all the time, you know, even, um, bless his heart. The owner of the LA Dodgers, uh, or former owner, this guy started something called Unfinished and Project Liberty.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  It's this giant, huge zillion dollar foundation to develop a multi-racial, open democratic blockchain society and has this conference that he's doing in New York in this giant facility and invites everybody. And it's like, you don't have to, but their CEO mentality. So they want to run, they want to be in charge of the whole thing. You know, so there's like all these kind of competing future of humanity efforts out there.

• 48:07Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So you're around the, I mean, to be, I think that not knowing about Extinction Rebellion is a good thing. As far as I can see, they glue themselves to the roads in the UK and stop people from getting to work and don't do very much else at the moment. That seems to be their primary objective.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Well, they were based, trying to be based more on kind of the yellow jackets, you know, citizen councils and all. But I mean, there's problems and not, but you should at least understand that existing territory.

• 48:31Chris Williamson?

  Yes. If you're going to, if you're going to step into a market, you'd usually do some research beforehand. I, I mean, that, the word hubris keeps coming to mind a lot. Like a hell of a long.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  That'd be the one. That'd be the one. Yeah. And that's why, I mean, it's funny, and that's why I, I, I sound like I'm, I don't mean to be an apologist for right or left or anybody, but their, their, their hubris is almost more of a, a psychological problem than, than anything else. You know, it was like, I don't, I, I've read their philosophies and ideas, and I know while there's some problems in certain ones of them, none of them would be that catastrophically dangerous if we weren't like in this frictionless new space of kind of digital media. It's like everything's on ice. You push in a direction and whee.

• 49:23Chris Williamson?

  What do you, what do you mean? Bring, bring that down to earth a little bit for me?

• 49:26Speaker 00

  I feel like ideologies are more, are more dangerous now because they're not tempered by community and the real world. So you build an ideology, you're building it, okay, so Twitter is going to build Blue Sky and we'll have this space. It's not real. It's meta. It's, it's, it's in a different realm. Or because of the way things get accelerated and amplified in, in digital media, someone can say something that, okay, let's take some time to unpack it. But before anybody's even taken a moment to unpack it, it's, the guy's canceled by this group and becomes the Messiah of that group. And it's like,

• 50:08Speaker 00

  no, wait a minute. Let's, let's, let this mature. Let's discuss this idea. Let's, you know, so there's no, I feel like there's no, there's no filter. There's no governor. There's no, there's no way to kind of slow down or metabolize and work on ideas. They just come out like as if they're fully hatched and.

• 50:32Chris Williamson?

  Yes, and I suppose in that environment, good ideas and bad ideas have equal footing under the sun in terms of how quickly they can go viral. In fact, some bad ideas, you know, I know about Extinction Rebellion gluing themselves to the roads. I'm sure

• 50:49Speaker 00

  Well, they didn't glue, but they sat there. But

• 50:51Chris Williamson?

  People in the UK have glued, yeah, people in the UK and in France have glued themselves to the road because the reason for that is that the police have to come over with like anti solvent stuff and they slowly peel their hands off. My point being that there are other things that they've done, right? But what I know about, what my primary exposure to them is them being dickheads in the middle of a motorway in the UK. So it is just as easy for poor philosophies to grab a hold of the internet. In fact, it might even be more because outrage is so clickable. It might make it go even quicker. All right. So given all of this together, how was this informed the way that you move through the

• 51:34Chris Williamson?

  world? Because you've been talking and thinking and writing about technology for quite a while. How are you dealing with the crushing weight of existence itself and not losing your mind being exposed to all of these ideas?

• 51:51Speaker 00

  For me, by trying to slow down, to try to have less hubris myself, to, I mean, I'm on sort of book tour or something now. So I guess I'm talking a bunch, but to sort of talk a little bit less, to adopt the comportment more of a kind of a country doctor, you know, I'm just a local country doctor looking at problems and offering ideas, but not, you know, grandstanding, great solutions, encouraging a multitude of local solutions rather than

• 52:30Speaker 00

  singular giant top down things. It's the, it's the, the hundred million dollar X prize, you know, geo engineered, let's put sulfur particles in the whatever, in that atmosphere. But those are the things that I'm sort of.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  Although all of them are tempting because you just push a button, let's see. I'm trying to engender a multitude of small solutions and give people more faith in there that doing something locally really does count, you know, and trying to resist scale. And for me, it's tricky because if I see scale as the problem, you know, as, in most cases, if scale is the problem, then how do I operate as like a whatever it is that I am, a writer and thinker, not at scale? You know, how do, and, and I don't think, I mean, compared to a lot of people, I don't really have scale. I mean, Gary Vee has scale.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  I'm still, you know, on that, in the Twitterverse, I'm, I'm a 60,000 person, which is nice, but not one of those people. So it's funny, on the one hand, I, it's sweet that I worry about scale, operating at my scale. I'm like, oh no, am I too big? Am I too powerful? You know, it's like, okay, I'm glad that I'm worried about it, but when I look at it objectively, I don't think that that's really my, that's going to be my great problem. But yeah, and to try to get, person to person, you know, every founder that I can convince that it's okay to end up with $50 million instead of $5 billion is a win.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  Why? Why? Because if they don't feel obligated to make five or 10 billion dollars with their company, then they don't have to pivot to something awful and extractive. When you hear now Mark Zuckerberg saying, oh, I really, I'm going to give back 95% of my money I made on Facebook. It's like, well, what if you had made Facebook 95% less manipulative and awful and extractive? You wouldn't have, the world would be, the world would be different now. That kid, that poor kid, plucked out of his freshman year at Harvard, you know, by Peter Thiel or whoever it was, and he transfers parental authority onto this venture capitalist and pivots away from a, I just want to make a platform that's going to help nerds like

• 54:57Speaker 00

  me get laid, to this, you know, data, you know, data mining nightmare. Boy, we'd be living, we could be living in a different world. I mean, probably someone else would have done it or would have happened some other way, but.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's scale, it's people being satisfied. It's just so hard. You know, again, it's sort of like your convenience thing. Once you get it, why would you go back? You know, once you have, you know, a million and a half Instagram followers, why would you undo that intentionally?

• 55:34Chris Williamson?

  Well, you also see, I mean, Austin, at the moment, and a lot of the people here are talking about homesteading. They're talking about community housing in one form or another, where they're gonna, them and nine other families and their kids are gonna go and they've got 100 acres of land out in Lockhart. And they're gonna, they've been learning about regenerative farming and they've such and such a certain person's wife is a teacher and this person is a doctor and, you know, we're basically gonna set ourselves up here. And I understand the impetus because there is a direct line to draw from what you've just said there, which is kind of this more simple type of life where you are looking at slowing down. But it doesn't take much of a change in direction for that to

• 56:19Chris Williamson?

  fall into the very individualistic me and mine versus the world mentality that we were just lambasting 10 minutes ago. Like, it's not that far away at all.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  Right. And then you gotta look, I mean, and, and while I certainly appreciate what those families want to do, I wonder, I guess not everyone can do that, right? There's not enough land for everyone to do that. We

• 56:41Chris Williamson?

  And it's expensive. It's very, the only people I know that are doing that are pretty rich.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Right. So they can go and build an eco farm with solar panels and hydroponic blah, blah under the ground and get their alpacas and goats and all the good stuff. Yeah, exactly. It's tricky. It's like the guys I know in the tech world who still go home to their organic farms with the, with the, with the goats and Rudolph Steiner tutors and whatever. Yeah, I, I certainly understand the impetus too, but that's almost a, that's a, a heavy lift. That's a heavy lift and it, it may, it may go against some core simplicity principles. But yeah, I mean, for me, it's just meeting the people where I live, trying to spend, you know, less time online, more time helping.

• 57:27Speaker 00

  You know, not assuming I know what's best for people, but what do they need? Oh, you just, you know, this woman needs a lift every Thursday to get frigging groceries. This kid needs a math tutor, you know? You do, you do what you can and it embeds you in your community in a way that, um, that feeds your, it feeds your heart a lot better than, you know, 60 likes on that tweet. You know, it really does.

• 57:51Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that's what you're doing on an individual level? And what's, what's the fix on a more macro level? Is there anything that can be done? Or are we just along for the ride in the slipstream of billionaires at the moment?

• 58:03Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I think there are things that could be done. One, um, I don't think, and I know this is controversial, but I don't think the billionaires truly have our best interests at heart. A lot of them anyway. I think they, and the ones that do, don't. Uh, the ones that do are diluted. Um, so I think that one, one thing we can do is deflate their power by not using their platforms so much, not buying their stuff so much. You know, I'm now, I'm checking out Mastodon as, you know, the, a new, it's a, uh, alternative kind of Twitter social network place that's a federated non-profit-y thing to see, just because it's like, I don't know if I want to support this kind of troll thing happening

• 58:47Speaker 00

  on, on Twitter and elsewhere. You know, I don't want a Tesla either. You know, and it's not like I know Musk is trying to do good things and, uh, and parts of his personality are, are quite benevolent, but others, it's just brittle. It's a brittle, single point of failure, you know? And I feel like there's, there's some loose screws there that are, that, that may not, uh, that need to be, uh, balanced out with other people doing other things. Um, so yeah, I guess my, my macro solution is for everyone, um, to avail themselves of opportunities to, you know, engage locally, to realize that, you know, we don't all need opinions on every big thing. I remember when, um, my, my example, when, uh,

• 59:30Speaker 00

  Biden was pulling out of Afghanistan. Three or four different journalists came to me to ask me for their articles. What's your opinion of Biden's Afghan withdrawal strategy? And I'm like, I really know nothing about how you withdraw from a war. I just, well, just weigh in. I can't weigh in. I shouldn't weigh in. And everybody's tweeting, oh, this and that and the other. I'm like, how many? What if we just set aside 100,000 of us as the experts in it? Just 100,000. You know, it's like I used to say, you know, every time that Britney Spears would have like a nervous breakdown, there'd be like 100 or 200 camera trucks outside her house. I'm like, couldn't we cover this with five camera trucks and share the feed, you know,

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  and maybe take the other 95 and put them in situations that matter? War zones and learn about other stuff. So there's, there's that. It's like, uh, uh, the, the world, the big things matter, but we can take the weight off a lot of these big things. We can make, um, the, the macro problems less brittle by being more self-sufficient. I don't mean self, but, but community sufficient, locally sufficient as, as places. So yeah, find where does your food come from? How local can you get it? Where's your CSA, your community-supported agriculture group? What's going on in your community? You know, that, that most of us can operate at that level, I think.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  And, you know, have like representatives that work at these, at these more macro levels on our behalf.

• 1:01:05Chris Williamson?

  All right, Douglas, let's bring this one home. Where should people go if they want to check out the stuff that you do online?

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  Um, rushkoff.com is me. Uh, teamhuman.fm is my lovely podcast. Um, and check out this new book, which is not, um, as depressing as it might sound, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, which the real purpose of this book was to be a comedy, to help people laugh. If we can laugh at these guys, um, then they're, the, the whole thing starts to feel less.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  Scary and urgent in that brittle way. And you know what I mean? It's just like, oh, right. I get it. They're just silly. Don't worry about them. They're silly. You know, don't, don't try to be Musk. Let Musk be Musk and you can be you.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  All right, Douglas. Thank you.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze to death. That's what.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.