Crazy Town. Episode 121: Being Team Human in Crazy Town

Jason Bradford:
I am Jason Bradford.

Asher Miller:
I'm Asher Miller.

Rob Dietz:
And I'm Rob Dietz. Welcome to Crazy Town where I'm not crazy, you're crazy. The whole damn world is crazy.

Asher Miller:
Have you ever had that feeling in your gut when you suddenly realize that the person you're talking with might have a screw or two loose? Well, what about when you are the one others are trying to slowly back away from at the Punch Bowl? The question of who's the real nut often arises for us collapse aware folks living here in Crazy Town, but since Mr. Peanut is no longer returning our phone calls, Rob, Jason and I invited Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist, professor and host of the Team Human Podcast to answer the question. In this far ranging conversation, we discuss why leveling down might be the best strategy for navigating late stage capitalism and bringing ourselves back into the right relationship with each other and the planet.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Welcome to Crazy Town. Here we are with our friend Douglas Rushkoff, who makes the Team Human Podcast, which you should go to immediately after this is over. Teamhuman.fm.

Asher Miller:
I think that was the introduction.

Jason Bradford:
That was beautiful.

Asher Miller:
I don't think we needed to do another introduction.

Douglas Rushkoff:
You're in Crazy Town.

Jason Bradford:
Oh wow. We're going to reuse that one. We're going to loop it.

Asher Miller:
Douglas, we've had you a couple of times already on Crazy Town.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Really? And you welcomed me back. Look at that.

Asher Miller:
And there's a specific reason we wanted to do a mind meld of Team Human and Crazy Town.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah.

Asher Miller:
Because you wrote a piece recently, and I found it greatly reassuring because you wrote, "You are not crazy." And I was like, "Oh, thank God." You were channeling Crazy Town when you wrote that. Because the reason we do Crazy Town is that experience that we have and our listeners I think resonate with, which is you walk around the world, it looks absolutely batshit insane to you, the interactions you have with people make you feel like you're nuts, people treat you like you're nuts oftentimes, but it's actually, the secret is, as far as I know, the world is actually pretty crazy.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah.

Asher Miller:
We're the rational ones. So maybe talk a little bit about what that experience was.

Douglas Rushkoff:
So like 2018, I wrote this piece on Medium that got a lot of buzz about meeting these five billionaires who wanted advice on their bunkers. And it didn't make me a bunker expert or anything, but it was like, oh my God, why are they coming to a media theorist for these sort of apocalyptic visions? And I wrote this piece saying, look, the richest guys among us, the super tech bros, are planning for the end. They've got so little faith in the ability of their technologies to actually solve anything that they're preparing for the event, the end of the world thing. And then that turned into a book and all this stuff. So a bunch of TV shows ended up being developed around the central premise of that book. I mean, I would never get paid for them because it's a nonfiction book and it turns out you don't have to pay or get rights to do a story based on a nonfiction book, only fiction. Oops. I should have just put it as fiction. It would've been fine, but . . .

Jason Bradford:
What shows? What shows?

Douglas Rushkoff:
Oh, Mountain Head used a lot of stuff from it. And this one called Paradise, which is one of these Hulu shows. It's about a post-apocalyptic underground giant city that was created by a tech billionaire. And as I thought would happen, the show is about the relationship of the tech billionaire to the security staff. How do you maintain control of your security when your money is worthless and you're in this bizarre post-apocalyptic afterlife? But it's fine. It's as good as any of these shows. It's a good one as far as the billionaire bunker genre goes. And I mean, I didn't really know about the show, but they invited me to be on the companion podcast. You know how the -

Jason Bradford:
Nice.

Douglas Rushkoff:
The highbrow streaming shows have these companion podcasts that they air after the thing. So I go on and it's with the star of the show's wife is the one who's running the podcast, and they have me on, and the producers told her I was a bunker expert. But then one of the producers is there, the thing, it says, oh, we loved your book. It was so, it really inspired us to do this whole show. So I explained that I'm not really a bunker expert or anything. And then she goes like, "Is this realistic in the way they do the bunker? Could that really happen?" And it's like, that's not my thing. I said, "No. What makes the show important is that the bunker that you're talking about, the city that they've built to go live in after the apocalypse, those cities already exist. It's already happening. This is Prospera in Central America. This is the land that they're buying in whatever Solana, near whatever they call that, a forever city or whatever they call that one. It's Neom in Saudi Arabia."

Asher Miller:
Oh, Saudi Arabia. Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff:
"It's the Seasteading project. It's Sao Paulo today with a very super wealthy city center protected by God knows how many armed guards from the rest of the world."

Asher Miller:
It's what South Africa was like, right? Under apartheid.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Right. Right. And well, other parts are like still. So I explained that these cities exist and then explained about the division of wealth. And I'll say something like, the apocalypse that you're envisioning is actually happening now. That the show is not realistic as science fiction, it's realistic as a metaphor, an allegory for what's happening now. So I explained how in the Soviet Union, when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was a way to privatize a whole bunch of stuff that had been public assets and that in America, it looks like what our government is trying to do is to create the conditions of disaster capitalism so that things could be bought up. So we do tariffs, that puts farmers out of business, and then a sovereign wealth fund could come in and buy the farmland. And she goes, "Oh, well what's a sovereign wealth fund?"

Jason Bradford:
Oh.

Douglas Rushkoff:
And as I'm describing a sovereign wealth fund, which is basically if you live in a nation that has a resource curse, meaning that you've got something like oil that you make money from, you've got no motivation to educate your people because you're making all the money from that. And then what do you do with all the money that you've made? If you don't give it out to the people, you create a sovereign wealth fund and then invest in productive assets.

Asher Miller:
Or cryptocurrencies.

Douglas Rushkoff:
And then she was like, "Really?" And I kept going back and almost having to explain the roots of capital - And the more I explained, the more I did, her eyes got wider and wider and I realized I sounded like a conspiracy theorist.

Jason Bradford:
Yes.

Douglas Rushkoff:
What do you mean sovereign wealth fund? Disaster capitalism intentionally crashing the U.S. economy so that they could buy our ports with money.

Asher Miller:
It's like you're talking about the Freemasons or something.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yes. Private equity or any of these things that are completely normal, they are Crazy Town. So I went through it and I just realized there's no way I can tell the basic simple story here without sounding crazy because of how crazy it's become.

Asher Miller:
So her eyes were bugging out, not because she's like, oh my God. She was learning stuff and realizing the things you were saying were true. Her eyes were bugging out because she's like, oh shit, now I'm with a crazy person and I need to -

Douglas Rushkoff:
I don't know.

Jason Bradford:
Or she's unsure.

Douglas Rushkoff:
I don't know whether she was humoring me the way that Art Bell used to humor people when they talked about their UFO experiences. He'd say, "Oh really?" And, "What did they look like? Wow, that must've been scary." I couldn't tell if she was like - Because - it's good entertainment to have a guy. I have no idea. But my sense was she was thinking, who the fuck did they book here?

Asher Miller:
Right. Yeah. You are supposed to be a bunker expert. You're supposed to talk about the depth of the concrete that gets poured. How wide is it?

Douglas Rushkoff:
Exactly.

Jason Bradford:
I think all of us on this program have had similar experiences. And I've had so many that I came up with a term for it. I call that a tilting. So pinball machines, You're playing - This is old people used to play pinball machines. I dunno if it happens anymore, but there's these things -

Douglas Rushkoff:
Oh yeah.

Jason Bradford:
Okay. And if you were too violent to the machine trying to move it back and forth, the machine would say, you off balanced me and I can no longer play with you. It basically shuts down. Well, because you're cheating. It didn't want you to be -

Asher Miller:
A cheater.

Jason Bradford:
And so I feel like what happens is that you just jostle their mind too much. Too much activity happens too fast that they're unfamiliar with and now they're not sure because you've gotten so far with them. They're like, yes, okay, okay, okay. And then suddenly you push a little too hard on the brain and tilt mode occurs and you get that look. It's a classic look and I think it's kind of an uncertainty like where am I now? What's going on? What's true? Is this person okay?

Asher Miller:
They slowly back away from you like Homer Simpson into the bush, right? Just slowly try to move away from you.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah. It's the state that happens what they used to call the Gruen Transfer. When you walk into a shopping mall, the traditional shopping mall, people's eyes glaze over and their jaws drop. And that was the intent of the mall was to sort of overwhelm you and put you in a passive childlike state where you then wander aimlessly and forget what you were there for.

Asher Miller:
You just buy shit. You buy shit you don't need.

Jason Bradford:
Oh my God, there's Abercrombie and Fitch.

Asher Miller:
I need to get myself a Cinnabon.

Jason Bradford:
Haha. A Cinnabon.

Douglas Rushkoff:
It is that they get overwhelmed and then you kind of have to shut off. So that's part of the flood the zone strategy. If you do so many things every day, you have a new outrageous unprecedented thing, then the novelty of each thing, it kind of detaches you, which is why you need people like me, I would think. That's why I ended up doing the PhD was to have history. Where did this come from? Where did money come from? Why does it work like it does. What other monies were there? What's the operating system of our society? What's the software on it? And once you no longer see these things as given conditions of nature but as inventions by people at particular moments in time, the crazy factor goes away. It's just, oh, we built this. We built this thing. It's like we're living in a water park and forgot that you don't have to slide down these things.

Asher Miller:
But doesn't - Okay, this is an interesting question for me, Douglas. So I see the rationale of what you're saying, which is this is in some ways what we are seeing is crazy are the logical outcomes of a system that was created. This is kind of rational in a certain way, what's happening here. But at the same time, there are things - Like is it just that it's capitalism is now put into hyperdrive? And so it seems like the way, for example, the AI companies or tech overlord types are behaving is very similar to what people did in the Gilded Age or whatever. It's all consistent. It's not anything unique or different.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Right.

Asher Miller:
But is it just done on hyperdrive or a much larger scale?

Douglas Rushkoff:
I think there's the difference that they don't believe they have to live in the same world.

Jason Bradford:
There's a delusion there.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Right. So the Lord of the Manor, they had the upstairs downstairs, and part of what they were doing by being Lords was maintaining the employment of the entire Manor, or the Castle, or the whatever. And they did have relationships of a sort, a sort of social relationship with the underlings, even if they were highly coded. It's based in capitalism, which the real rule of - People think capitalism is about making money. No, no, no, no. Capitalism is a very particular way of making money where someone else does the work and you level up. You are one level above the worker. Someone pays the rent, you are the landlord. Someone does the work, you are the owner. Someone is the owner, you are the shareholder. Someone's the shareholder, you own the dividends. Someone's the dividend holder, you own the stock exchange. Someone is the stock exchange, you own the technology. So you keep leveling up. Peter Thiel says, go from zero to one. Exist one order of magnitude above the people who are doing something. So you keep leveling up. And digital technology kind of did more than just amplify that. Because digital technology is itself leveled up. It's a digital symbol system, an analog of reality, right? It's leveled up. It's an augmented reality with infinite scalability that's not directly connected to down here. So I think the difference with these tech bros versus the Gilded Age is Gilded Age, Rockefeller, Carnegie, whoever, they wanted the approval of the masses and they wanted to feel like they were contributing in some way. They built libraries and hospitals and they did things for legacy because they were still living on the same planet as the others. Macy's made a parade. They want their kids to be liked. These guys don't see that. Their kids are going to be on another planet. They've leveled up. So their abstraction is an existential abstraction rather than just an instrumental.

Jason Bradford:
This reminds me a bit of living in St. Louis. I lived in St. Louis for nine years. And during the Gilded Age, all these mansions were built. What's interesting is those neighborhoods are still there, but nowadays when mansions are built, they're built way out in the county. They're not in the city. And it's because you have now the freeway system. You have the ability to ship anything to your door and you have supermarkets in these now exurban areas that are nice. But back in the day, you had to be in the city to get those high quality goods and services. And like you're saying, Douglas, these sort of neighborhoods of these mansions, they were adjacent to working class neighborhoods because the people had to walk to get to work in these places. And of course back in that day, it wasn't too far of a stretch to drive out in the country and see farms that were growing the food that you ate in those mansions. But we're so disconnected now. I think it is so abstract. They've leveled up so much they don't know about all this or care anymore apparently.

Asher Miller:
But also the technology piece of that is there are some conversations about the biophysical impacts of data centers and AI and all that stuff, but for the most part you could just become utterly divorced about the environmental impacts of what supports the internet and the virtual world that so many of us swim in. So for them, they don't necessarily see those. Not only do they not have to deal with other humans very much, they don't have to actually see that what they're building and growing at ridiculously fast, exponential rates might actually have a limit on them. In fact, they're talking about harnessing the power of the sun in order to keep going. I guess maybe that's a recognition of some limit.

Jason Bradford:
Data centers in space.

Douglas Rushkoff:
That'll be cool.

Rob Dietz:
Sounds like a Muppet show skit, Data Centers in Space.

Douglas Rushkoff:
But I like that better than data centers on Earth.

Asher Miller:
Sure. Except one is physically possible. They're doing it right now. The other is not scalable really.

Douglas Rushkoff:
But if it were . . .

Asher Miller:
If it were . . . Yeah, they're working on it.

Douglas Rushkoff:
I'd rather them do that then drink up all our water and pollute our little children and put other kids in mines to get cobalt.

Jason Bradford:
Well, the thing is, have you heard of the Kessler syndrome? Have you heard of this?

Douglas Rushkoff:
No. It sounds dangerous though.

Jason Bradford:
Okay, we're on the verge of this right now and -

Douglas Rushkoff:
See, this is one of those people talking about weird things. All of our eyes are getting wider now.

Asher Miller:
Douglas is backing up.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Keep going.

Jason Bradford:
You've got to look up the Kessler syndrome. This is legit.

Asher Miller:
Listeners, Douglas is moving away from his microphone.

Jason Bradford:
What it is is that when you get too many satellites in space, all it takes is some little accident. It could be a solar flare knocked some of them out and they no longer have gyroscopes that are working and their electronics fry. And these things require slight control. Sometimes you have to move them, you have to move them out of the way. You have to do a little rocket thing and they kind of move back into higher orbit slightly to keep 'em up there for years. But what happens with the Kessler Syndrome is as soon as you get enough of these failing, there's a cascading reaction. And essentially you have uncontrolled space junk. Because to get rid of one of these satellites, you have to do it carefully. You have to actually get them to fall down and not become space junk. And as soon as you have too much space junk, you can't safely get anything into orbit anymore because your investment is likely going to get whacked by something the size of a quarter flying at 20,000 miles an hour.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah. Didn't you see that movie when George Clooney rescued her, but he wasn't really there, he was just a dream. But all that space junk came flying.

Jason Bradford:
Yes. That's the Kessler Syndrome. So the thing is, we're actually very close to that already.

Asher Miller:
But Elon's got to be worried about that because he's planning on going to Mars. So he must be aware, right?

Douglas Rushkoff:
Well, I'm not aware of it or worried about it. Because what happens? The worst that happens to me is like my GPS goes down.

Jason Bradford:
Weather satellites disappear, these kind of things.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Right. And rich people get poorer.

Jason Bradford:
Yes. And we can't colonize Mars or have an international Space station.

Asher Miller:
I don't know. I don't know what all the satellites there are, but there are a lot of people in the world who rely on their mobile phones to do all kinds of commerce now.

Douglas Rushkoff:
But will it kill - Like will grandma's pacemaker break. Maybe I guess it could. It would be bad. It would be bad. But this is the price you pay. But I've seen, someone show a picture somewhere of they have this thing that can get space debris.

Asher Miller:
Oh, is it the same thing like getting plastic pollution in the ocean?

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah, that kind of thing. They grab errant satellites.

Rob Dietz:
It's like one of those claws you see at the arcade that can pick up a stuffed animal, right? Except it goes up instead of dropping down.

Asher Miller:
It's going to be a large claw then if it's doing that.

Speaker 4:
Everything in question is scale is the problem. Once it goes -

Rob Dietz:
Well, my level of wonder comes in around why there's so much trust put in all this technology. You guys are well aware, our listeners might not be, but I went to radio silence just now because my computer decided to have a meltdown. We can't even get a laptop to function during the length of a podcast. How are we supposed to put a data center in space?

Douglas Rushkoff:
Dude, it didn't decide you're anthropomorphizing your technology man. It didn't decide to do that. It had no volition.

Rob Dietz:
I thought you were going to say that the bad guys out there made it do that and then I was going to think you were crazy.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Closer. That's more likely. There's a greater chance of that than that the computer decided to do it.

Asher Miller:
I want to get back to this topic of being in a crazy world and how people navigate it.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah. When you take a dollar bill and show it to someone and say, what is this? And they say it's a dollar. Well what's a dollar? And you actually go through with them that this is a piece of paper that has been printed with words that mean nothing on some level. That there's a social construction and that there were many different currencies, and those currencies were outlawed by monarchs who were forcing us to borrow money from a central treasury so they could make interest, they could make money off our need to transact. And money is expensive for no good reason other than enabling the rich. You've got to tell that story really slowly because if you tell it too quickly, it's overwhelming. As Crazy Town citizens, we are slowly pulling back the curtain from the Wizard of Oz and saying, don't look up there, look over here. This guy is actually making that.

Asher Miller:
Just showing the ankles first and then moving up a little bit.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah, exactly. You kind of have to do it slowly and you have to do it in a way that the person discovers these things for themself rather than being told. It has to be a bit Socratic. It's a set of questions. I mean, I was raised in New York, I thought all cities had grid patterns, that they all used streets with numbers and - Why not? I thought that was city. I go to friggin' England when I'm in college and am like, what did they do here? This isn't a city, this is random. This is what? And I was like, oh my God, New York was designed that way. Someone chose - I thought it just somehow it, if you don't know . . . God didn't make that grid. Someone planned it. They wrote it down, they laid it out. Duh. But you don't accept that so many aspects of society have been designed by people. It's not all conspiracy, it's just everything was designed by someone. Language was designed by people. It's all social construction and except what? The feeling you get when you look at another person in the eyes when you hold your baby, when you make love, when you encounter a tree. There's things that are not social construction. And I think the more more we engage with those, the more calibrated we are, and the more ready we are to accept these seeming laws of nature as inventions of humans.

Rob Dietz:
So Douglas, I don't know if you have a user manual say for residents of Crazy Town, but -

Douglas Rushkoff:
Would be my book "Team Human." It was meant literally as that. You'll be better off. It's easier to do with friends. Just don't try to do this alone.

Rob Dietz:
This is the thing. When we're speaking with, say, collapse aware people, it's all fine. Like Jason and Asher can send me all sorts of crazy making topics and I'm on their same worldview, their same wavelength. But occasionally when I have an entry point with somebody who is outside of our worldview, I'm wondering about some tips. So lemme give you an example, okay? So I happened to be taking an airplane flight and we happened to be flying over the desert. And my seat mate was this really nice woman. We were just chatting and she just seemed super friendly. And of course it comes around. She asked me, what do you do? And then I tell her about my job and how I am exploring the limits to growth and how we need to build an economy that respects the limits and stabilizes at a size that doesn't wreck the ecosystems.

Jason Bradford:
Well said.

Rob Dietz:
So her response, and I should say I tried to tell those things in ways that maybe aren't overwhelming like you were suggesting Douglas. And then she turns around and tells me that she's a highly religious person, God said in the Bible that we need to be fruitful and multiply. And when I look out the window here, I don't see any people down there. And then I tried to talk about water a little bit, but then it was just -

Asher Miller:
And do you know what water is?

Rob Dietz:
She clearly thought my worldview, my idea about the scale of the human enterprise was absolutely nuts, and I kind of thought she was sort of off the deep end. And I don't mean because she was religious, I just mean her idea of trying to populate the deserts with as many people as we can. What's the manual out of Team Human for continuing to engage with somebody who is just so far removed from our worldview?

Douglas Rushkoff:
The Team Human answer for that is that for the most part, it doesn't matter what 99% of people believe about the world, what matters is how they behave. It matters if she needs a tool, is she going to go to the Home Depot and buy it or is she going to knock on her neighbor's door and borrow it? If the neighborhood is under threat because of a storm or a flood, is she part of the network of people that knows where the old people live who need to be checked up on? It doesn't matter whether people are on board with the Club of Rome, which I'm now a member, they made me a member, Club of Rome. Talk about limits to growth. It doesn't matter if they understand the carrying capacity of the lived environment because the idea that the planet has limits is much less likely to motivate people to live within its limits then rediscovery of the joy of sharing. The human species, it's part of what made homeless sapiens, homo sapiens, is our ability to share resources. It's so core. So I would have a different conversation with that woman. Yes, you can look at it, oh, isn't it terrible? It's like, or what? Or what? Oh, so we should use less energy or this or that. I prefer to engage with people, even people who I suspect may have vastly different views than I do. I prefer to engage them in conversations that reinforce their most pro-social tendencies. To have a conversation that would make that person want to join a bowling league, or become a den mother, or share an activity with other people.

Rob Dietz:
Hey, this is Rob. Crazy Town is planning a mailbag episode in which we read and respond to your emails. So if you have a question, an idea for an episode, maybe an insult to hurl at Jason or Asher, or maybe you've got an example of how you navigate the mean streets of Crazy Town, well we'd love to hear from you. So please send us an email to [email protected]. That's [email protected].

Asher Miller:
That's why I actually think that your example, Rob, of a woman who says she's religious might be actually a lot easier to engage with than someone who's anti-human, transhuman, or whatever. Just don't like people, don't believe in community, don't want to have those relationships. I feel like those people are the hardest or harder. The hardest for me actually in terms of finding the others is sometimes you feel like you found the other and you're like 90% aligned with them, and then you discover that there's this 10% thing, and that 10% is just huge. And we see this a lot, I think, in our space when it comes to renewables, for example. You're so aligned. We have a climate crisis. This is a big problem. We have all these issues. You can analyze the predicament a little bit and then you get to, well, technology's going to solve the problem. You know what I mean? Or markets are going to solve the problem, or whatever it is. Human innovation. Once we unleash human innovation, that'll solve the problem. And it's those people that I actually find it the hardest to, that's where I actually feel almost more crazy.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah, well, when we get with our own, right? So I mean it's like since I have been involved with Nate Hagens for 5 or 10 years who's sort of an environmental theorist. He's got a great podcast and stuff of his own, and he was the one who first explained to me that battery electronic vehicles don't solve the problem. That when you look at the whole carbon footprint, and all that, and all this stuff that has to be done to make one, and the energy from the grid, it's like, yeah, there's nothing coming out of the tailpipe, but it doesn't really solve the problem. It's a can kicking at best. Cory Doctorow will say, "Oh, but an improvement. It is better. And you're doing the R and D on things that will be yet better and the amount of percent that it's better is still worth better than the other." And those two perspectives in some ways are irreconcilable, even though they're both yearning for the same thing. And it reminds me of that joke about they find this Jewish guy on a desert island that he's been stuck on for 20 years and he's built two synagogues. And they're like, "Dude, Jaime," whatever, "Why did you build two synagogues?" And he goes, "This is the synagogue I go to, and that's the synagogue I won't set foot in." As if he needs that in order to believe in what he has. So it's a tendency and it's a tendency way more among the left.

Asher Miller:
Totally.

Douglas Rushkoff:
And it's good that we can argue about these things and use our facts, but we can't let it undermine our more fundamental solidarity to get ourselves out of this predicament. And I think, but you guys are in that sort of camp with me, there's sort of the Schumacher camp. We get accused of being malthusians. But the idea that there's nothing wrong with limiting growth. Really, there's not a problem with enjoying the fruits of our labors. And people, again, they don't want to know, they don't want to find out, but the requirement for exponential growth has nothing to do with reality. It has nothing to do with economics. It has only to do with a very particular money system that was invented in the 1100s by monarchs who didn't like that the middle class was getting rich and created a way to make money off other people, which was you are only allowed to transact if you borrow these chips from us and pay us to use them. Stop using those free chips that you've been using to transact and pay for ours. The only way for them to keep paying for our money is for the economy to grow. And that's not required as a condition of nature. It's only required in the very particular monopoly board game that was created to let the rich stay rich for being rich.

Asher Miller:
Well, it's ultimately anti-nature. It's fundamentally unsustainable, right?

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah, which is again, and anytime I talk to a libertarian, I'm like, fine. Free market, as long as we can have free market money, I'll go with your free market capitalism.

Jason Bradford:
The thing I think about a lot is about how many people feel trapped because they live in a way that requires money. Everything nowadays requires money.

Douglas Rushkoff:
You've got to pay rent. You've got to pay tax. You do need money.

Jason Bradford:
But it's kind of a scale problem, right. You need money for everything. I think there definitely was more of an informal economy dominating our past in the United States, and it still dominates in other parts of the world. But I guess the question is, once you make monetary requirements for more and more things, how do you back out of that? Is there a path for people to downscale their needs for money? And what things would you focus on?, and what can we learn from people maybe even in our neighborhoods that don't have money? What do they do?

Asher Miller:
Well, they share resources. That's one thing they do.

Douglas Rushkoff:
What if we take some percent, some share of the stuff that we need to make money to get and do that in a more sharing local way? What if just tools - instead of having all of your own tools that you use, how often do you use your electric drill? I mean, two times a year. What if you have a tool library in your block, or in your library, or somewhere because they have two or three drills. You borrow one for a couple of days and bring it back. It's like, wow, isn't that efficient? Or snowblowers. To have one snowblower on your block rather than every house having to have its own snowblower or lawnmower, whatever it is. That's a really simple way to need less money. Now the problem with that, and whenever I bring that up in a talk, someone always gets up and says, "Well, yeah, what about the lawnmower company? What about the people who have stock in the lawnmower company?" So again, they're thinking that this house of cards will fall down the minute people lose allegiance to consumption as the salvation of America. And it's like, don't worry, it's not going to all happen at once. We're not all going to start borrowing at the same moment unless we're all put out of work by the AI and then we'll start pooling resources pretty darn fast. But what we can do is reduce our dependence on these brittle top-down systems, reduce our requirement for cash, for cash money, and start slowly and steadily replacing some of those things with more commons based networks of sharing. And again, we talk about this and to the people who are not in crazy town, it sounds like socialism. Oh no, socialism or communism, worse, or something.

Jason Bradford:
Anarchism.

Douglas Rushkoff:
And I would just say, just take the isms away. It's social, it's common.

Jason Bradford:
Well, I've started to think it is maybe village life and still today, I've been to places where most things are not paid for. I've traveled around the world enough to see that. Some Pacific Islands, you go to these places on some of these Pacific Islands and they're making everything out of natural materials. Maybe they've got a metal roof. Maybe they've got a well that has got a hand pump on it in the center, but they're growing all their own food. They know how to weave fibers to make mats that they're sleeping on. And it's incredible. Human beings live most places of the world, most times without all this stuff. But then people say, okay, I need this high tech thing to stay alive. So we create a codependency and an expectation. So it's interesting where people would be willing to go.

Asher Miller:
I actually do feel like there's been a crack opened up. We're talking about money. I think what happened in the great recession and how the banks got bailed out effectively and then profited off of the recovery. And people saw that and they did not receive those same benefits. Led, I think, did lead some people to look at cryptocurrencies, alternate forms of money, trying to get away from those intermediaries. That and COVID, I think, whatever you want to think about the pandemic and all that stuff led people to question the medical system because it didn't feel like it worked for them. And so now you have the MAHA movement and people looking for alternative things. The weird thing there is, so people moving away from some of those, the rentier class kind of solutions does still feel like they're looking for individualistic ways of profit seeking, right? It's not like people ran up to Western Mass to start figuring out how you could do a Berkshire program and have your own local currency. No, they were investing in Bitcoin and then they tried to make a shit ton of money off of it. So the system still finds its way in to get people to be fixated on how they individually can benefit from these alternatives.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Right. Exactly. Crypto really originally emerged at the same time as Occupy as an alternative to Wall Street. Blockchain, peer-to-peer verification, we're going to make our own money. And then the token became more important than the blockchain. And now the token, how are we going to make money off that? Until we see, oh, it is just fucking bullshit. I think in the end it's because Bitcoin was invented to substitute for trust. And we don't want to substitute for trust as a way of moving forward. We want to enable trust.

Jason Bradford:
I trust people that I know in real life. IRL is I guess the term now, which is crazy. If I know somebody IRL enough and I work with them and I see them and I laugh with them, then I trust them. This is something that takes time, but I feel like I want to be with people doing things together to get trust.

Douglas Rushkoff:
But you shall, you shall. But that's why the locals - and Adam Smith wrote about this, that's why local economics should always take precedence over generic global economics. We do have a local advantage. And those local advantages, many of them have been outlawed even by the court. They'll say, oh, well this community, we can't let this community do its own ISP because they have an unfair advantage over us because they live there. It was a legal case. It was just like, Jesus, what the fuck? So yeah, you do that stuff. Again, you're not going to get your iPhone based on a trust network with local people, right? That's assembled and a global thing. So that's what you have the untrusted money for, the enforced money. But I really think 80% of our transactions in the stuff we do could be within those trusted communities.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah. That's the kind of stuff I mentioned focusing on. It'd be interesting to know what people do in different circumstances. I live on a farm, so I grow food, and so I don't have to buy food. I mean, I buy some food, avocados, whatever, citrus.

Asher Miller:
Donuts.

Jason Bradford:
Milk, donuts.

Douglas Rushkoff:
What do you do when it's cold out?

Jason Bradford:
I put on a jacket.

Douglas Rushkoff:
But your food is still growing out there in the cold?

Jason Bradford:
Well you have stuff in a cellar. We still have stuff growing. We have broccoli growing. We have cabbage growing. We have kale growing.

Asher Miller:
We were out picking two days ago. It was a little muddy.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Oh, really?

Rob Dietz:
And to be fair, we're not as cold.

Asher Miller:
We're not under two feet of snow like you, Douglas.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Okay.

Rob Dietz:
Okay, well, so you guys, I've been reading this very little known book called "Privileged Goods" It's written by a guy named Jack Manno. And his whole thesis is, I haven't finished it, so I'm sorry Jack if I'm getting anything wrong. But his thesis seems to be that we privilege goods that can be commoditized. That's kind of jargony. So the example would be in say for kids to have entertainment, the goods that get privileged are things like Barbie dolls and action figures that are easily turned into commodities that you buy and that are made in cheap ways. And then there's, if you step down a level, the goods are things like handcrafted dolls that you might buy at the farmer's market. And you feel like maybe you're getting to that relationship you're talking about a little bit, Jason, if I know the person who made this thing. And then you can step it to another level, which is -

Asher Miller:
Ball of dirt.

Rob Dietz:
Kids just go out and pick up a stick and pretend it's an animal or something. And they're using their imagination in cahoots with nature. So our worldview, we would kind of say, we want people to be in that nature and imagination space much more so than in the Barbie space. And sometimes you go to that mid-space and this book is making the point, the world is really privileging those highly commoditized goods. So how do we undermine that? What kind of resistance do we have to that? And how do we get to where we value playing in nature as much as we're valuing the Barbie doll?

Asher Miller:
The breakdown of that global supply chain will help.

Jason Bradford:
Oh yeah. Complete collapse would help. That would be great.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah. I mean, yeah, really the collapse does assist that.

Asher Miller:
Donald Trump telling people only to get two dolls for their kids. That helps.

Douglas Rushkoff:
When I was little, and it seems like a long time ago to your listeners, but it doesn't seem like that long ago to me. When I was little, we did have those toys, those wanted things, GI Joes, which we generally played with when it was raining out, when we couldn't play. And in real life, if we did our homework, our mom would kick us out of the house and say, don't come back till six o'clock and dinner. You weren't allowed to come back. And it was like, so what do you do? You look for frogs, you find a stick, you ride your bike around. What do you do? We were kind of delightfully bored, wandering around, looking for trouble, breaking things.

Jason Bradford:
Did you ever set a fire in a vacant lot? I did.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah.

Jason Bradford:
That scared the bajeebers out of me too.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah. Well, it only got out of control - The only one that ever got out of control for me was behind a 711.

Jason Bradford:
That's so good.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Which was not wise. But everyone survived. Everyone survived. But the dumpster at the 711 is a world of its own. And now we're not selling it well, but -

Jason Bradford:
No, it was great.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Back to the frogs and the sticks and the love, and throw a twig down a stream and follow it like Winnie the Pooh. I don't feel like the highly branded experiences are even that great. My daughter did it when she was three, four years old. She got bored with that stuff. And it was more about imagination and repurposing, toys to other things. The virtual space as a whole, the amount of screen time that kids want - That looks like to be the main parent child thing now is, at least among my friends, they have these kids and they want another hour on the iPad to get to the next level of some game or to do this other flat dimensionless activity. So are you really asking, how do we coax people, young people, offline and into three dimensional three space? And it's really tricky when we live in a society that seems to avoid friction at all costs.

Asher Miller:
We avoid boredom. Yeah.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Bordem, but we avoid friction. The friction of reality, of the unexpected. Who are you going to meet? What's going to happen? How hard is this? You've got to pedal up the hill. Any of these points of friction seem to be things that we've created convenience and desocialized, decentralized landscape to avoid that friction. And that, to me, the friction is the fun. The friction is the potential for everything cool.

Rob Dietz:
Yeah. You can't start a dumpster fire without friction. So that's -

Jason Bradford:
That's right.

Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah. I mean, you shouldn't do that. It was not a good thing. That was a bad thing that happened. But I mean, everyone survived is all I'm saying.

Rob Dietz:
Yeah, no, I do think there's this dichotomy between, say, convenience and comfort, and then the other side of that would be sort of the randomness of the journey, the unexpected thing happening, and even some danger, right? I mean . . . 

Douglas Rushkoff:
A certain kind of danger. You know, there's different dangers in the other extreme, right? There's the danger of suicide, depression, anxiety, social conformity, autoimmune disease - 

Jason Bradford: 
Microplastics, everywhere. 

Douglas Rushkoff:  
Yeah, there's all that. So, yeah, it's a matter of balancing danger not to get too RFK on you. But you know, there is something to be said for letting your kid play in the dirt so they get exposed to the right bacteria that colonize their gut biome, and they end up with a good, strong gut biome that knows how to eat other things, as opposed to sticking a kid in a sterile room with an iPad for the first five years, and they're going to be a sick adult.

Asher Miller:  
I think, to answer your question, Rob, that you asked earlier, is like, how do we take steps towards what we're talking about here? And it feels to me what you talked about leveling up, Douglas, maybe what we need to be doing is thinking about leveling down, you know. Like, maybe that is a framework for thinking about the choices that we're making. So we level down from, you know, experiences that literally are on the internet are virtual to human ones. We put ourselves back into situations where we're trusting our somatic senses, our gut, on things. We level down the things that we can do, and allow ourselves to stay leveled up on things that we just can't replace, you know, like an iPhone. So we're more selective about those things. And then the other thing that you said, Douglas, which I think we can't, you can't stress enough, which is, find the others, you know. We're talking about living in crazy town, what it feels like - I mean, Jason and I had a conversation we recorded a few weeks ago about how insane it feels that we're just rushing towards this AI future, that basically, no matter how you slice it, is bad news. It'll either be successful and we'll lose our jobs, or there'll be an AI bubble and we'll lose our jobs, or, you know, it'll become - we'll get in an AGI situation, and they'll kill us. It's like, there's nothing in there that seems positive.

Douglas Rushkoff:  
There's a good, there is. 

Jason Bradford:  
What? 

Douglas Rushkoff:  
If they do the work - 

Asher Miller:  
What work? 

Douglas Rushkoff:  
And we don't have to have jobs. If they do all that stuff. Like you don't have to be a mortgage actuary, you don't have to be a cubicle thing. You don't have to, you know, line up the Excel.

Asher Miller:  
But some of those things only exist because of capitalism and the complex system that is unsustainable, right? Like, how many of those things do we actually need?

Douglas Rushkoff:  
We may not need any of them, but then the AIs will figure that out. I'm all for the AIs and the robots tilling the fields, adding the numbers and doing it. If they can do it, if they could actually do it. 

Asher Miller:  
They can't do it. 

Jason Bradford:  
Ah, they're not gonna be able to. 

Douglas Rushkoff:  
But if they could, if they could, and it wouldn't require just other jobs for little children in the Congo getting the rare earth metals at gunpoint in order to do that, or other people building nuclear power plants to serve them. I mean, so far, it does not look like labor is being erased. It's just being downscaled. You know, the same as the assembly line downscaled the craftsperson to an assembly line worker. AI seems to be downscaling intellectual people to ditch diggers, which, I mean, you can argue that some ditch digging is noble and fine and all that, but not at gunpoint in the Congo. Not the people who are lined up in the Philippines in digital sweatshops tagging all this data to make it look like AI has retrieved it, and it's not. It's humans. It's humans. These are all mechanical turk devices so far. But that said, I've had a few engagements with AI that have been useful.

Jason Bradford:  
Sure. 

Asher Miller:  
Your AI girlfriend. Is this the reveal? 

Douglas Rushkoff:  
Oh, no. I'm not that. I mean, no, for research. Like doing research on my daughter, the combination of my daughter's autoimmune conditions.  Doing some meta analysis that specialists that she has in different fields haven't had time to do. To look at overlapping relationships, which gene pairs seem to correspond to what things. And I made some perhaps useless but insightful discoveries about what might be going on in her system that's been useful. Sometimes before a particularly knowledgeable or intimidating Team Human guest I'll give the interview questions that I have to a Claude Agent that I've trained with my work. And they'll say, you know, these are good, but you're not asking him about this, this, and that. And he wrote this other book you haven't even mentioned that really ties more into what your theme is here than what you've done. It's found holes for me that, I mean, I'm using it in a more intelligent way than most people, I think. You know, rather than just do my paper for me, but as a thinking partner. It's interesting.

Jason Bradford:  
I think you're absolutely right. I think this is probably some of the best use cases, things like this. As long as you don't use it as such a crutch that you are no longer able to write anymore, you're no longer able to like, think critically. In other words, people can outsource too much to these tools and use them inappropriately. That's what's dangerous.

Asher Miller:  
I don't know. I like the AI slop of videos of Steve Hawking in his chair racing on a NASCAR track. I mean, well, that works for me.

Douglas Rushkoff: 
The other dangerous tendency with AI is to use it to increase your volume of production beyond what you would actually like it to be. Like, as someone who does a podcast and a sort of a sub stacky thing, I feel compelled by the technology and the platforms to produce more than I'm comfortable producing. Doing one show a week is really the most I can do while I do my other work. And they kind of, it seems to, you do better if you do like two or three shows. You can build an audience. You guys do what? One a week, less maybe. 

Jason Bradford:  
Every two weeks. 

Asher Miller:
And they're half as good. So, I mean, our batting rate is great.

Jason Bradford:  
But this is an arms race problem because now you're in a competition. Again, oh - 

Asher Miller:  
I think it's virtuous. 

Jason Bradford:
Stop it.

Asher Miller:
No, we'll just have our AIs listen to the podcast that all the other people are creating and explain it to us.

Jason Bradford:  
There we go. Yes. And then we'll train our avatars to do the actual interviews. And then we'll just, yeah - we'll just -. 

Douglas Rushkoff:  
Then the whole point of the podcast goes away, right? Which was, did you want to be a fly on the wall in a conversation between interesting people?

Asher Miller:  
But we'll get views from all the AI agents watching - 

Jason Bradford:  
That we've hired. 

Asher Miller:  
To take notes.

Jason Bradford:  
The AI agents will watch your AI agents.

Rob Dietz:  
More time for us to dig ditches. 

Jason Bradford:  
But I am very skeptical that in the real world we are going to get agents that are very good. I am very skeptical of that kind of stuff. When I go and I walk.

Douglas Rushkoff:  
There's no agents in the real world.

Jason Bradford:
Well, that's to say, you have to make robots. You have to essentially have agentic type things that are robotic to do the stuff you were talking about, like to replace farm workers or whatever, or to replace - 

Douglas Rushkoff:  
Girlfriends. 

Jason Bradford:  
And replace girlfriends. I don't think it's ever going to be that good. I don't think these things are going to have the skin contact, the gut. biota that creates emotions.

Douglas Rushkoff:  
I understand that you're thinking that permaculture style agriculture may actually require the human hand for the foreseeable future, you know, in terms of turning the soil and planting the seed. That is that our recovery from industrial agriculture will make for a droidless future.

Jason Bradford:  
Yeah, I think that the best thing we can do for the Earth is to actually put people back into - 

Asher Miller:  
Being in a relationship with it. 

Jason Bradford:  
Ecological relationships. 

Douglas Rushkoff:  
I agree. 

Jason Bradford:  
And that it's gonna be the thing that heals us better.

Douglas Rushkoff:  
Yeah, the other thing is, the other argument for that that I've made when people say, oh, I don't want to go farm. I don't want to farm. It's like, look at any retired billionaire, and what are they doing? They're a fucking organic gardener. They're doing handcrafted beer. You know, it's like, all the things that we're saying people should start doing again that we get poo pooed for, are the retirement careers of the ultra wealthy. So they're probably - 

Jason Bradford:  
Or they go to some historic estate in Tuscany and work for a week, you know, pick olives. But the difference is that if you're working on a farm because you need to make wages and you need to, like, you're responsible for helping produce food for hundreds of people, like, at least their salad, that sucks. If you're working on a farm because you're growing food for yourself, that's not that hard as long as you know some skills. If you're as skilled in that as you are with you know your podcasting and your media standing and teaching classes, if you take your level of skill on that and you apply it to actually, like, I know what I'm doing when I'm on a farm and I'm growing food for myself, it's not any more work than a normal human would do. How do you think we got here before the Industrial Revolution?

Asher Miller:  
Exactly. And maybe you don't have to do it all for yourself. You could grow some and share it with neighbors, and they could grow something different and share it with you. And maybe that's life right there.

Melody Travers:  
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app, or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing Crazy Town.