Speaker 1: It's great to have. Back on the program today, Douglas Rushkoff, who's a media
theorist, professor at CUNY Queens College and also author of the new book Survival of
the Richest Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, which I recently read and very much enjoyed.
Really great having you on today. I appreciate. Speaker 6: It. It's good to see you.
Speaker 1: So the kind of jumping off point of the book is that you are invited by some
billionaires to meet with them. And the meeting sort of goes a little bit differently maybe
than you anticipated where they want advice, not so much about the technology of how to
survive a possible impending mass catastrophic event, but more sort of like socio cultural
and psychological questions about like, how do I prevent my security force from turning
against me and sort of like taking all my food and kind of this type of thing. And one
of the big points you make in the book, which I find interesting, is that these billionaires
are now looking to sort of insulate themselves from the consequences of the very system that
they used to enrich themselves in the first place. Talk first, just kind of generally
about this space that exists, this sort of catastrophe and disaster planning space. And
is it only billionaires or is it also like the millionaires that are into this? Give
us a sense of the lay of the land. Speaker 6: Well, it's interesting. I mean.
These guys. In some ways, these guys give a bad name to preppers everywhere. You know,
I've had a lot of preppers since doing this book, and real preppers are generally involved
in strengthening their communities. They understand that when you have community resilience, when
you've got local farms, when you've supported that, you're going to everyone's going to
do better. And these guys are not are not preppers in that sense. They've got such a
go it alone, you know, self-sovereign individual, you know, extreme libertarian understanding
of technology and money and identity that they with or without catastrophe, they want
a private island. They want a little seasteading raft of their own. They want their own country,
own government, you know, their own social network, their own virtual womb. You know
that kid that can care for them. So, oddly enough, I started to look at their disaster
prep and catastrophe mindset more as a way of justifying what they've been doing all
along. You know, there's there's I just read a piece by Cory Doctorow about Epson printers
and how Epson makes a printer that bricks itself after it prints out a certain number
of pages. It just bricks itself. And there's no really good reason for it except that they
want to sell another printer. You know, and they justify it that, oh, well, the parts
are going to be worn out by then. So we, we spare the user the hassle of having a broken
printer and we don't lock it, you know. But there is a guy right there and I'm assuming
it's a guy. There's a guy at Epson Printers somewhere thinking, well, yes, this means
I'm going to have to send more kids into the mines in Africa to get the rare earth metals
to make another printer. And yes, we're going to have to take that existing printer and
just chuck it onto a landfill where it's going to leach toxic chemicals. And yes, I am actually
shortening the amount of time between now and whatever catastrophic climate event takes
down our civilization. But the margin I'm making selling these extra printers must be
making me enough money so I can get my kid to a Rudolf Steiner school and get a goat
share and live in a private farm somewhere and be insulated from this that I can stay
that much ahead. And that's really what it's always been. These guys with an exit strategy
mentality needing to stay just one or two steps ahead of the rest of the investors so
they can get out with their carpet bag before the thing comes down. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in the book you referred to it the mindset, which I think incorporates
some some of these ideas that you're talking about here. You know, one of the things that
I I've read is, you know, the prepper, the sort of like normal preppers and then the
billionaires you're talking about here and then like everybody else, whatever. Some of
the advice I've read kind of is summarized as follows, which is, listen, it makes sense
to plan for like a 10 to 14 day cataclysm of some kind food, water, maybe electricity
with a generator, you know, that makes sense. Beyond that. It is so truly difficult to really
set yourself up to survive what we might call long term in such an event that it's not even
really worth thinking about. That is increasingly something I am reading from a lot of these
books. Speaker 6: But when you say that, yeah, the
implication of that and that's what the implication of that is, that means that becoming a billionaire,
even without the catastrophe, is not the way to make yourself the most safe and resilient
overall. Speaker 1: Exactly. Exactly. And so I guess
what is it that the billionaires think that doesn't apply to them because of the amount
of money that they have? Speaker 6: It's that the billionaires are
aware that they've spent the last ten or 20 years of their lives externalizing so much
harm to the rest of the world that they are afraid of it coming back at them like karma.
You know, most of these guys, they are unconscious tech bro billionaires. For the first ten or
20 years. And then they go down to Burning Man and do some ayahuasca and realize, Oh
my God, the planet is crying out to me. She's dying. You know, they have the same realization.
But then on the G5 back to San Jose, they're like, okay, now how do I protect myself from
her? Like the angry girlfriend that you haven't called in a long time. The planet, you know,
is coming for revenge. Speaker 1: So the question that I found really
interesting from the book, which I already mentioned, is this idea of I can do everything
right as a billionaire with every resource available to me. But if we really get to a
cataclysm, my security team might just turn against me and be like, Let's kill this one
guy and we can keep all the food and we can survive. You talk in the book about, well,
the way to preempt that is probably to, for the years leading up to this event, build
relationships and cooperate and, you know, make it so that they would see you as one
of them, so to speak, and not try to do that. Is that really are they satisfied with that
advice? Speaker 6: No, because they understand what
that advice is, is really a Trojan horse to try to break down their mentality. Right.
I said to them at that at that talk, I said, well, the way to make sure your head is security
doesn't kill you in the bunker is pay for his daughter's bat mitzvah today. Right. You
know, and I meant that in some ways as as a little Jewish joke. But they would have
to do more than pay for that one guy's daughter's bat mitzvah. And while you're at it, think
about your workers. And while you're at that, think about the people living in the community
around you. Think about the the if you're a Facebook executive, think about the tent
village right outside corporate headquarters. Who are those people? Right. And how do you
look at them not as a city problem, but as a human problem? You know, not something to
bulldoze out of there, but something to actually address and look at the actual impact of your
company on the world. So if they started thinking that way, then there might not be a catastrophe
for them to hide from at all. Right. But they're attached to it. Yeah, that's partly I mean,
that's really what the book looks at is how to capitalism and the history of technology
and science and this kind of dominator mindset. How do they all combine to create this kind
of colonial vision where all they can do is operate one level above the rest of us? You
know, they kind of go from 0 to 1, as Peter Thiel would say, or go meta, as Zuckerberg
would say. Right. Do derivatives of derivatives as a finance guy would say it's always one
level up. It's what what Stewart Brand said back in the seventies, you know, we are as
gods and we may as well get good at it. And the tech pros have taken that as kind of a
gospel truth. Speaker 1: Is your sense that these folks
you've talked to are more convinced that such a world changing event is coming than other
groups? Or is it simply that they are more focused on using their resources to prepare
themselves for it? Speaker 6: They're more convinced, actually.
And that's you know, it's funny, after I wrote the first article on this book, I've gotten
calls from lots and lots of people in interesting places. And one of them is a giant hedge fund,
which is a a hedge fund that's positioned for global calamity. You know, it's got a
few billion dollars in there. And they showed me their PowerPoint with charts from the World
Bank and the climatologists of this. And like, okay, in the next ten years, these regions
will become unlivable. Ten years after that, these ones will be the only ones that have
fertile soil. This is why we recommend buying land in northern Canada, Siberia, Greenland
and this part of Antarctica. And they're like, Oh my God. And so if they're being pitched,
those kinds of things that we are not pitched and they're so realistic and I suppose probable,
right? Because people with real money do real studies, then. Then I think they are sort
of more aware of it than we are. And I think they understand that they're more causal to
it than we are. We're just eating our food and throwing out some plastic bags occasionally
and feeling guilty that we know the recycling actually uses more energy than it would cost
to make a new plastic bottle or that, you know, we're. But these guys, it's like, oh,
no, you're doing major. You're doing things at scale, you know, and you're doing things
at scale with a business model that looks at all the damage as an externality to your
business. And you're aware that those externalities are growing big enough to. Impact your life
in the lives of your kids. Speaker 1: In the book, you talk about technology
that some see maybe naively as maybe a way out of some of the problems that we've created
for ourselves. You talk a little bit about solar panels and electric vehicles, I think.
And now I'm not sure if I'm if I'm if this is from the book or from articles you've written.
But in any case, you've expressed that you are less optimistic about some of these technologies
being able to kind of meet our energy needs in a truly eco friendly way. I think there's
a lot of legitimacy to that. The carbon footprint of solar panels, which degrade over time.
And then what do we do with them? Rare earth minerals required for electric vehicle batteries.
What do you do with the battery has reached the end of its usable life, etc.. To maybe
I'm naive, but isn't there some degree to which those are problems that can be significantly
improved upon by by engineering and the technology simply improving from where it is today that
will change the scale and actually make those technologies genuinely game changers. Maybe
not the solution, but significantly significant improvements.
Speaker 6: Oh. Moving away from fossil fuels and combustion is a necessary part. Of the
planet. Planetary civilization moving toward sustainability. OC saying Over the next ten
years we're going to convert every car to an electric car and every house to a solar
panel house. In order to get to zero carbon emissions by 2030. Is crazy because the amount
of stuff that we would dig up. In order to do that with the amount of the factories we'd
have to open to build all those cars and do all that stuff and build all those batteries
would destroy us faster than anything else. So that's my volunteer fire alarm that the
volunteer fire department in our town is old tech. That's what we're hearing now. They
they send that alarm and then they check their pagers to see where's the fire? And they go,
It's community, right? You got to love it. You got to love it. And they're volunteers.
It's going to go one more time. They do it twice. Like if people woke up and didn't hear
how many beeps it was to know if they're active. But. The the these are all great. But the
amount of energy we're using now is, you know, a great energy theorist named Nate. Nate Huggins
talks about this. It's like a pulse of energy. We're not using energy in like a huge way.
We're using, like, explosions of energy in order to power these cities. The the the,
you know, hundreds of thousands of years of stored energy that gets burnt in like two
days is is, you know, massive and unsustainable. So we also need to reduce the amount of energy
we use, you know, and that's not. Shockingly hard. You know, we built the American landscape
around the needs of the automobile industry where people have to drive to get to work.
And so there are many, many ways to reduce our energy footprint, that of our of our corporations
and that of us as individuals. And it involves a lot of economic rejiggering, too. If you've
got an oil industry that's depending on resource depletion and you've got all these pensioners
who are dependent on the oil industry and are an S&P 500. Our GDP, that's depending
on the growth of companies that are destroying us. You kind of do have to do more then the
physical re-engineering of energy production, but the the code engineering of our economy,
you know, and that's where it gets scary. Speaker 1: Yeah, you mentioned GDP. So again,
I don't remember exactly where you wrote this, but I've read something you wrote about, you
know, criticism of for one case and the sort of stock market is a pyramid scheme I think
was the analogy that that you used. I'm there's this interview I remember at some point Noam
Chomsky gave where he was sort of like confronted. And I use that in scare quotes. He was confronted
about the fact that despite all of his criticisms of all these different types of companies,
his like retirement accounts are invested in the same, you know, kind of index funds
that everybody uses. And his response was something like, well, yeah, I mean, what,
you want me to keep the money under my mattress or something along those lines? Are you, despite
your view on the impossibility of indefinite growth based on GDP growth on a planet with
limited resources, your criticism of for one K, etc. are you invested in the same stuff?
Speaker 6: Some. Yeah. I mean, that was the main thing. I'm in a group called Equitable
Enterprise at Institute for the Future. In there, like in Palo Alto. And they were talking
about all these new models and all this. And that's what I brought up in the first meeting.
I said, What if we all took 50% of our retirement savings and invested them locally or in land
trusts or in other things? And people are like. Well, I won't really. But we've got
to make structural change. I mean, I don't think yeah, I know you got to make structural
change in all that. But what if we, by example, did it and then encouraged everybody else
to take just half of their retirement savings? Let's say we could only they kept saying it
was just such a small measure, saying, what if we could only move a couple of trillion
dollars into local economics, you know, what would that do? It would be massive, a massive
amount of change. So, yeah, one of the main things I'm looking at is how do we and I hate
using words like scale, but how do we make it really easy for people? Instead of selecting
S&P Index Fund to select local index billion small businesses fund how do we invest in
land trusts? You know, you're going to get different kinds of returns. You're going to
end up getting dividend returns and earnings returns rather than the capital gains of selling
some massively. You're not going to get 100 X returns on restoring local businesses, at
least not for that long. You know, you might at the beginning as we recover a local economy.
But, you know, that's what I'm looking at. So I'm looking at lots of them. I mean, I'm
invested in land trusts and there are some local farming things, you know, funds where
you you you lend money to farmers at a low interest rate and get it back. So, you know,
I'm I'm looking at, you know, three and 4% returns as a good thing rather than a bad
thing, you know, and. Just because I earned money doesn't mean I'm allowed to have my
money be worth more later. You know that does it. I can. I'll save up money for my retirement.
But I also then, you know, in addition to wanting to get to, you know, just hold my
money, certainly at the rate of inflation, I want to create a community that will support
me when I'm older. So I'm not entirely dependent on my cash rate to take care of me when I'm
old. And that means engendering a different kind of society. And you walk around Europe,
you see old people there living in the house with their kids there. They're part of the
social fabric. They're out there on the stoop at night playing with the babies and taking
care of the little ones. So the husband and wife can go down to the movies and the teenagers
can make out over there. And these guys, it's like a an interdependent society, you know?
And that's what a social economy is. That's what Marx was talking about, not some big
top down central government organization. He was like, No, no, no. Economics is social.
It's people doing things for one another. And maybe it's not on the ledger. Maybe there's
not a Dow or a blockchain keeping track of whether Grandma took care of the kids or 2
hours. So now someone's going to give her a bath. You know, you don't need to put that
on the blockchain. Speaker 1: Last thing, just because you mentioned
it is the entire crypto thing over. Speaker 6: No. The entire crypto thing is
not over it. It may have gone through. It may have gone through the dot.com bust equivalent
of 1999 2000. And then we'll see. You know, there was there were two possibilities. After
the dot com bust, we kind of got blogger and Friendster and Napster and some interesting
things. But then we also got MySpace and Facebook and Instagram and the lucky ones, one. Right.
And then the kind of pro-social creative ones. I'd be interested to see if the the young
crypto community that I'm still aware of, that the kids who are making nfts for good
reasons not to become millionaires, but to support their art and the kids who are building
daos, you know, daos that help other people make daos in order to figure out the governance
structure of their organization or their community. If those people went out, then crypto could
come back in a positive way. If crypto comes back as you know what it was before, which
is a way for assholes to speculate on, you know, abstract assets, then, you know, all
is lost. Speaker 1: The latest book is Survival of
the Richest Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. We've been speaking with the book's author,
media theorist and professor Douglas Rushkoff. Always great having you on. Really appreciate
it. Speaker 6: I appreciate what you do.