Open Source Reality | Radical World

Jose Leal:

Welcome to the Radical World Podcast. My name is Jose Leal, and today's guest is Douglas Rushkoff. He's not a guest. We're just having a conversation. He's still in his place. I'm in mine. And we're on opposite sides of the country, if I recall correctly. You're in New York?

Douglas Rushkoff:

Hastings on Hudson, New York.

Jose Leal:

And I'm in Menlo Park, California. So the two extremes of, of the country. A real pleasure to have you here, Douglas, because I've been following a lot of what you've written over the years the work you've been doing with being human. And the message that you're throwing out really resonates with, with the work we've been doing. So, really excited to have you here and have a conversation about this stuff.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Thanks.

Jose Leal:

Did you want to introduce yourself a little bit about what you've been up to and, and why you're famous and why people love you and why people adore to have you on their podcast?

Douglas Rushkoff:

Aw. Yeah, I guess I'm a really, I'm a reformed theater director. I was a, I was a theater director who was getting fed up with the, the, the kind of the elitism and, and enclosed endedness of theater in the 1980s. And just as I was really getting fed up with that, the, the beginnings of the internet were percolating. And I saw in the internet a new very kind of interactive participatory form of theater emerging, that now people were going, rather than just looking at the image on their monitor, they were going to have their hands in there. You know, to me, digital meant the digits. We're going to get our hands back onto the dashboard of reality creation together and, and explore and go. So I wrote a couple of the first books on this thing that was coming, and even the first one actually got canceled by Bantam, because they thought the internet would be over by 1993 when the book was supposed to come out. Right? So it came out with Harper in 94. And then I then I, I, I came up with this kind of way of understanding the way media was moving called media Virus and Viral Media. So that kind of put me on the map as like, oh, this guy kind of sees what's happening. And then I started to write books saying, we have to make the internet and these technologies kind of pro-human, pro culture procreative rather than, you know, giving them to businesses just to extract value from people. And that kind of kept me going for the last 20 years, you know, and I, as I, you know, wrote books like Throwing rocks at the Google bus, and survival of the richest about the kind of tech bro mindset and this, this addiction to exponential growth. And along the way, I also wrote a couple of books, like one that that's still out there called Team Human, really explaining the alternative that human beings are not in competition with each other. That's not even what Darwin said. That what we are are the, the most collaborative, communicative species, and that species survival really depends on their ability to, to work together rather than compete against each other. So, I'm out in the world really just trying to make the argument that humans deserve a place in this world, in this digital future, and that we can have and, and do have access to the rules and codes and programs by which we live. Don't accept them at face value. Get in there and re-engineer them in ways that serve you and other people.

Jose Leal:

Awesome. Awesome. I just two points of connection. One I did drama, but not in the acting side. I was stage manager, set design. All of that kind of stuff. And would've loved to stayed in that world, but, but it wasn't a place where I felt comfortable. Too many drama people. Too much.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Well, yeah, I was a director.

Jose Leal:

So much drama, as they say,

Douglas Rushkoff:

I feel terrible to say this in public. I was a director, and part of what I wanted to get out of it was I felt that so many of the actors really were in it for psychotherapy rather than for the script, you know? So they were working out their demons and God bless, you know, but it's like, oh, I could have, I could have been a therapist and made three times the money. Yeah.

Jose Leal:

And the second connection is the, the year you published your internet book. Six months later I launched the first website that we did, which wound up getting acquired by a major player in, in Canada. So, you know, we were working in that space very much at the same time, and different, with different perspectives, obviously. Right. You, you talk about this lack of humans in our system and lack of humanity really, and, and systems. And we look at that actually it was Matt, who you met a few minutes ago who coined the fiat system because it's not just fiat money, but really we've got a whole system based on control, centralized control, right. And for us, the biggest part of that is centralized control within organizations, right? This mentality that we need to, to control the company, that the company and the people need to be controlled. That's the only way the organization's actually going to work. We think there's a different way. And, and you decided that today we talk about open source reality. And we call that a, a radical lens, which is to be able to see that the human needs that are underneath all of this are, are really there. And they're the drivers behind what we desire. And that the, the reason that we're not satisfied, that we're not happy is that we have a, a need that isn't being met, that we're not addressing, that we're not paying attention to in, in the world of work, but also in our society at large. And so it's that, that we're, we've been talking about. So what do you see, like when you, when you talk about open source reality, what, what, what are you talking about?

Douglas Rushkoff:

Well, I mean, let me address a bunch of the things that you were, that you were touching on. I mean, sort of doing it more through example than explanation. So, you know, if, if you have a sort of an open source lens on things you would hear employment say, or when you were talking about, you know, the way people work and all that. And you'd say, well, where did jobs come from? Right? I'm born into a world where you got to get a job in order. Or where did they come from? Or this idea of central, central control and CEOs, you know, king like Monarch, like CEOs in corporations, where did those come from? So, someone like me, as kind of a media historian or a media theorist, I look back and I say, well, if central currency is a medium, the corporation is a medium, the employment is a medium. Where did these come from? Who invented them? Why did they invent them? And, and, and why do we still hold onto them? So if you look back the corporation is relatively new. You know, the corporations based on the chartered monopoly, it was invented in the 11th and 12th century. You know, we went millennia without these things and got a whole lot done. What, what were these for? So I looked back and said, oh, look, you know, when the, when men came back from the Crusades in Europe, they had opened up all these trade routes with all these other parts of the world, and they had seen things around the world that they didn't have in Europe. And one of them that the, the, the Moors had was called the bazaar. You know, the bazaar was this marketplace where people brought their stuff and traded laterally. So to the, the peasants of Europe who only knew how to grow food and deliver it to the Lord. The idea of trading with each other at a market was totally new. So they built the marketplace, they got stuff from far away, and they made stuff at home. They created value. They grew chickens. They made shoes. They, they, you know milled flour. They had all this stuff. They brought it to the market and they traded it with each other. And if they didn't want to barter, they created these little, like almost poker chip like coins that were issued in the morning. They expired at the end of the day, but you could use them just sort of little placeholder IOUs to get all the trade going. People got rich women were taller in medieval England, the marketplace women, than they were at any time until the 1980s. They were working three days a week. They were starting to have fun. They were getting wealthy. They built cathedrals. You know, we think the cathedrals or the Vatican wrote a check. No, it was local wealth from the bottom up. But the problem was, as the people got wealthy and created the new middle class, the aristocracy got poor. So they created two things to prevent the rise of the middle class. One of them was the chartered monopoly, which said, you are not allowed to make shoes anymore. The only one who's allowed to make shoes is, is let's say, I'll let you know, I'll let you do it, or I'll let Matt do it. Matt's the official chartered monopoly of shoes, his Majesty's Royal Shoe company, and Matt is going to own it.

Jose Leal:

He is really happy to hear that.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Yeah. And if you, you were, and if you used to be a, a shoemaker, now Jose, you know, you, you'd have to go work as an employee for Matt. So now, if you were a cobbler, instead of making shoes and selling the value you created, now you worked by the hour for Matt. This is the same moment that they put the clock on the tower in the medieval village to make it look like there's, now you have a technology, it's there. You're born into a world with a clock on the tower, and time is money. And that's how it works. And now passed down to us this punch the clock reality, we all think, well, you need to have a job in order to make money, in order to do something. It's like, no, this was from medieval, you know, medieval Europe. Same with central currency. They made all those little local poker chip monies illegal. And now you had to borrow money from the central Treasury at interest, which means you also have to pay back the interest, which means your economy has to grow. Which means now we're stuck with people like Biden and Kamala saying, oh, well the GDP is going to grow by two or 3% this year. Why does the GDP have to grow? Because in the 11th and 12th century, these dudes invented a money system, a monopoly money system that that requires growth in order to stand still. So the open source reality is being able to look at the rules and systems we take for granted. You know, the idea that this 20th century idea that any movement or company has some middle-aged white guy at the top leading us ends justifies the means to the goal. Who needs a CEO? I mean, till recently, that's why we had two old white men. Were the only ones believably running for president. You know, because it's like, oh, we need one of those. But no, you know, we can or have what? Why can't we have a committee of three presidents? What would that look like instead of one person bearing all this weight? So it's it's all don't have up for grabs.

Jose Leal:

What if we don't have that weight at all? And we allow things to come from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Right. In an organization that's, you know, I've done six startups. When you're in startup mode, everybody's doing everything right. There's hardly a hierarchy in, in a small organization. Right. But then all of a sudden.

Douglas Rushkoff:

A certain point. It works to a point. I mean, you know, I love this kind of holocratic organizations. I'm an, I'm an anarchist. Look at the 12 step program. 12 step program is anarchy. Right? All these little local things, but they've got one book. But what binds a holocratic bottom up organization together are shared values. You've got to really know what is it that we are working towards? You know, what, what, how are we trying to make the world better? What, what are those? If you don't have those, then you do need some dude or duet absolutely. Telling you what to do.

Jose Leal:

But we hire people whose only purpose is to make money. Right? Yeah. And so they don't have a purpose other than that. Right.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Exactly. And then the company suffers. 'cause One, one of the other topics I was, you know, one of the things I suggested is the topic. I wrote a book for business called Get Back in the Box, and I meant it half facetiously. 'cause The subtitle of the book is Why being good at What you Do is great for business. You know, because there's this sort of that Jack Welch General Electric realization when he found out, oh, I make more money lending someone money to buy a washing machine than I do making a washing machine. So he said, all businesses should sell off their, their competencies and basically become spreadsheets with outsource competencies. And you ended up with all these companies that had nobody in the company that knew the actual business they were in. They treated them generically and no. So when you build a company, I, my organizational model is a mandala where at the center of the mandala are the people who love the thing the most. The, if it's a hotel business, people who love hotel sheets and carpet and cleaning and organ, the nerds of the business go in the middle. And everybody else in the company are serving the nerds at the center of the culture. And when you have one of those cultures, you not only get all the great innovation, but the rest of the world understands that that's the place, that's the place where they really understand bikes or TVs or whatever the, whatever the product is.

Jose Leal:

I love doing what they're doing. They're doing it for the sake of what they're doing. Not simply because it's going to be right.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Not for the extrinsic rewards of money, just the whole word. Even that when you work, you get compensated for the work. Right. I don't want to be compensated for the work. I want to maybe be rewarded for the success, you know, that'd be fine. But, but no, I want intrinsic rewards. I want, when I'm successful, I want to get to move closer and closer to the middle of the company with the other nerds

Jose Leal:

And the word employee. Right. I, I don't want to be employed like a tool that, the tool that we are when we're employees, right? I mean, they're Right. We're simply being used as a tool. Right?

Douglas Rushkoff:

We are. But that's, again, it's legacy. You know? And we could blame the tech bros for it. You know? 'cause They want as few human beings in a company as possible. They are, you're not going to scale if you have employees, we got to replace 'em with programs and get rid of them. Even Uber, it's like their Uber is a, an autonomous vehicle company on, on its way. Right. Waiting to, waiting to get there. Right. But that again, comes from the Middle Ages where the human beings needed to be taken outta the equation. That was the whole point when you had a, a proto factory floor in medieval times. Or, or, or think about Matt's shoe company. Does Matt want skilled shoe makers at his shoe company? No, he doesn't because they're going to want money. They're going to, they're going to have leverage. What he wants is to go to the Home Depot parking lot and get the undocumented alien and bring them in, train them in 10 minutes, how to do one little piece of the labor and then pass the shoe on to the next person so that he can, he can trade them, train them quickly, and fire them and replace them if they want more money. So the whole point of industry has been to remove human beings from the equation, remove the humanity, and well, and still look at it that way.

Jose Leal:

And the, and, and not only the humanity in the sense that we as humans, the second we walk in that door I, I was VP of, of that organization that, that acquired me. And, and I felt it, even though I was in management, I would walk in the door and it was like, I've just lost myself. Right. I've lost myself to whatever it is that's going on in here that has nothing to do with humanity.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Yeah. Right. I always thought about that when I would go, and I know they, they make revolving doors for real reasons because they, you know, it helps keep the cool air in or the cold air out or whatever. But the whole idea that to enter work, you, you actually pass through a gear, you know, it's like, welcome to the machine. Right?

Jose Leal:

Right. You're, you're, it, it's, it's a, it's, I never thought of that, but it's very much a conditioning thing. Thank you for taking the right paces, going the right direction, going. 'cause You go the other way. You can't, we won't allow you to go that direction.

Douglas Rushkoff:

We got to Yeah. And it's interesting, you know, when you talk about bottom up organization, I think about like the, the, the difference between like a European traffic circle and an American traffic light. Right. You know, a traffic circles really work. There's a couple of simple rules. You have to know. You, you, they go counterclockwise. You go to the right, you know, so you go to the right and you yield right of way to the people who are already in the traffic circle. That's the whole thing. Yeah. And once you know that they can do really complex things in America, we can't do that. It requires like cooperation and skill and thought or something. You're going to just have a red or green light. You sit in front of a thing, right. And wait, there might be nobody there. But now you got to sit, you know, it's command and control because we don't trust this sort of bottom up organismic organization to happen.

Jose Leal:

And traffic circles actually produce less accidents, believe it or not. Yeah. Right. And there's another aspect, I love that you brought that one up because I use that one all the time. Ah. When you get into a, a traffic circle or about to, the first thing you do is you look at people's faces. Are they paying attention to me? Do they know I'm here? Where are they? Are they coming in? Are they going out? What's going on? You have to be in the moment and present with what's happening. You are at a light that people run red lights because you don't have to be engaged. It's just, oh, I wasn't paying attention to light. cause I can just keep going. Right?

Douglas Rushkoff:

But that's the thing.

Jose Leal:

Don't look at anybody in the face,

Douglas Rushkoff:

But then look at anybody's experience of life. It's like, do you go to work in order to dig in and be there? Or do you take a Valium before you even arrive so that you can zone out as much as possible? You know? And it's the same with driving or anything that people are doing. If you're not into what you're doing, then you're going to be attempting to anesthetize yourself and not participate. So if you're doing that, then you have to look at, well, am I in the right job? Am I doing the right thing? Am I in the right relationship? Am I living in the right town? How, how can you maximize the number of times during the day that you try to soak up what's happening rather than try to protect yourself from it.

Jose Leal:

Absolutely. One of the people that you've spoken to I, I guess in the last year or so, wa was Nathan Schneider. And you know, he, he's part of the, the co-op community. We're part of the co-op community. And one of the things that we've explored is, is is where our, our co-ops a good place to start and taking co-ops towards this new future. Part of the issue that we see is that as wonderful as co-ops are, and they do have, as you pointed out about the, the seven step that we have this need for a more democratic organization. But part of that is they're still in the, we have to fight the system. And we're still workers, we're worker owned. Like, you know, it's like we, we, we really don't run a company. We're just workers who happen to have a company. You know, they, they don't allow themselves the agency to say, this is ours, this is, this is as good or better than what they've got. It's almost as if it's a, a diminutive version of a real company.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Yeah. I mean, right now it only works in certain instances. You know, where, where I've seen, you know, worker cooperatives kind of work best is where there's like a boomer owner, CEO who wants to leave the business, their kids don't want it. So then the workers buy it, but they've been there a while. They're familiar with it and they kind of love it. And they have a, a, some dedication to being there. You know, when you, when you have a, it's harder with say a grocery store like Publix, which is kind of a, a co-op, but if you're not thinking you're going to work, I'm going to work there a year or two and then leave. I don't want to worry about governance and all that stuff. You know, so then you kind of need coop networks of cooperatives so you can leave one company in the network and move to another one, be a more of a Mongan style thing. Cause Cooperatives must cooperate with each other. And you create a kind of new matic network of companies that you can move across at least to, to accommodate today's, you know, rapid turnover of, of, of people. But yeah, I mean, worker owned business, this is what, what the pope came up with when he was asked you know, back in whenever that was to comment on Marx. He's like, what, what is the church? What's the church's opinion on, on Marxism? And they basically came back with Distributism, you know, they came two, they had two main principles. One, workers should own the means of production. They should own the factories in which they work, they should own the tools that they're using. And two was this notion of subsidiarity that no business should be bigger than it needs to be in order to do what it needs to do. So if you have Joe's Pizzeria and it's serving its town, and the next town wants pizzeria, you don't expand Joe's to the next town. You help Mary open up her pizzeria there, your network. So maybe you'll buy your cheese together to reduce the price, or you'll have workers be able to go back and forth a little bit so you can help each other out. Because it's, it's better for Joe. Joe loves making pizza. Joe doesn't want to be a manager of a pizza chain. He wants to be a pizza maker and smell the stuff and, and, and see his happy customers. Right. You know, it's very, very different.

Jose Leal:

But in today's world, Joe Joe's dream is to become the CEO and not have to be with the little people, not have to be dealing with the operations. That that's, that's sort of the dream that every

Douglas Rushkoff:

And that's contagious. Yeah. That's all the way up and all the way down. I do this talk when I get invited to a business school, I started to do this maybe 10 years ago. I start my, my conversation, I say would anybody in this room be satisfied making $50 million? No one raises their hand. And I said, but the object of this talk for me is to convince you that having $50 million as your personal wealth goal will lead to a, a, a more fun, more probable and, and, and, and, and more, you know a beneficial company. You know, but most of they want to earn a billion dollars. They want to be Zuck, they want to be Musk. They, they, the idea of only $50 million. Yeah. That's, is like, they fail not enough. Yeah.

Jose Leal:

And, and in the startup world, I'm in the middle of it. Right. Menlo Park Care, I, I can go stone at Facebook. Right. it's, we're, we're so embedded in this view of the world. This lens that everything needs to be about. Competing and growing and becoming, actually becoming disengaged from work.

Douglas Rushkoff:

I know. It's so, I, it's ironic to me because for me, the internet was about this kind of open source disruption. We can reprogram reality the way we want. And these hackers, what they do is they'll, and they're not real hackers, but these, these disruptors, they're happy to disrupt a vertical. I'm going to disrupt books, I'm going to disrupt hotels, I'm going to disrupt taxis. But no one wants to disrupt the underlying landscape of, of venture capital. It's like the first thing they do is they run to daddy at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. Oh, make my IPO happen so I can have a ticker on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange. It's like, that's reactionary, that's conservative. That's not revolutionary. That's conformist. Right. Disrupt the underlying system. You know, that you look at someone like Musk, that's not, if you want to reinvent transportation, you don't electrify cars. You think, how do we move people? Right? You want to reinvent the economy. You don't just do crypto, which is central currency on steroids. Right. Which is the conversion of matter into bits, you know, which is what we've just burned the planet to promote a coin. What you do is you think about, well, what would a distributed a distributed economic system actually look like?

Jose Leal:

One, one of the folks that we work with, and I've seen him posting some things here on the, on the left, is Michael Linton. I don't know if you.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Oh, I know Michael well, yeah. From back in the day. Back in the day, we met in the internet internet society conference with run by, who is it? Christine Maxwell, I think in the late nineties.

Jose Leal:

Yeah. Michael's Michael's part of our broader community.

Douglas Rushkoff:

He is one of the smartest humans walking.

Jose Leal:

Oh, don't say that. He already has a swollen head.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Yeah, I know. But these guys do because they are. That's the problem. There's a few, Alan Kay, you know, talk to one of these guys, and they're just like, oh. They know everything. There

Jose Leal:

There are a lot of brilliant folks doing a lot of good work. The question that I've got and, and is less about where Michael's going with, with the issue of how do we bring new currencies and new ways of doing it, because that's all absolutely necessary. We need to figure out how to do all of that. But before we do that, right it's, it's sort of the conversation that Achtenberg has started to, to realize, because all the technical solutions that everybody's talking about are necessary. We know Yeah. This, that's necessary. The other things necessary. We all know that, but none of them are going to happen from within the current system. They're going to have to emerge from somewhere else. In other words, it has to be a newborn way of doing things that ends up growing to displace, hopefully the current system, but not that the new, that the existing system is actually going to be able to adopt these new things from the top down. It's like saying to the CEO, give up being a CEO, give it all to your people. Not too many CEOs are going to do that. Not too many investors are going to do that. Not too many of anything's going to do that. Right.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Yeah. But I, I would, and maybe think of it like this. There's a lot of people who would be very threatened by the idea of dismantling the current systems in order to have something else happen. So I think we might want to model ourselves more on, say, mycelia, right? How do we grow on and metabolize the existing system in order for it to have a fundamental transformation? So nobody realizes we're like taking it apart. We're not taking, we're not breaking it. We're, we're metabolizing it. And then when you think about how to mushrooms metabolize, how does that work? You know, it's not really through, you know, you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. It's through something else. Right. You know, and, you know, when I look at issues like, you know, climate change or economics and all, I start thinking, and it sounds this is, it gets scary to people. But I, I start to think that our last best hope is magic. And when I say magic, I mean the magic of, you know, actually transforming how we think. Our experience of reality shifts to the point where the 300 people in the business school I'm talking to don't need to make a billion dollars. They're thinking, no, I'd like to make $50 million. Like ROV said, that's probably enough. You know, I'm, I'm, one of the big things I've been asking people to do is, you know, when you need something, consider borrowing it from your neighbor. I've started to do this talk called borrow a drill. Right. You know, like if you got to hang a picture, you don't have a drill. You're going to, normally you go to Home Depot, get a minimum viable product drill and bring it back, and then you're going to use it once and leave it in the garage, and it's never going to work again. Why are we so afraid to knock on Bob's door and say, Bob, can I borrow your drill? It's because then we're going to be in relationship with his neighbor. Then he might want something from you. Then he might want to come over to your barbecue party. You have the next weekend. And the nightmare scenario is that you end up friends with the people on your block sharing stuff. You have one lawnmower on the block rather than seven that you all share. Now, invariably, someone gets up at the end of that, at the end of that talk and says, well, yeah, if you only have one lawnmower on the block that everybody's sharing, what happens to the people who work in the lawnmower company? What happens to their jobs? Well, maybe that's work that doesn't need to be done. They can start working on something else, like comforting people or teaching kids math or walking dogs or, or working less. You know, all of these possibilities open once we fin each other.

Jose Leal:

Right. And, and I like to think of it as interdependence. When you tell your story about the drill, I like to tell the story of my friend George, who would always say, whenever I move into a neighborhood, I go around to all my neighbors and ask them for sugar. And, and I don't do it because I need sugar. 'cause I just got sugar from the previous neighbor. But I do it because I want to have to owe them something.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Right. Right. That's why we bring something, when someone moves into the neighborhood and you bring them a plate of brownies. Right, exactly. You're not bringing it because they need their kids to be climbing the walls all night the first night in their new home, and they're already afraid to go to sleep. Right? No. You bring them brownies so that they have to bring you back the plate. Hopefully with something that they put on it, you are weaving them into the fabric of, of interdependency of obligation.

Jose Leal:

Right. And it's my sense that that's not just a good idea. That that's actually how humans work. That it isn't an option that we should be doing this because it's a nice way to, to go about living. No, but that it, we fundamentally broke society when we stop doing that.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Right. It's not just how human society works, it's how life works. Life works. It's how the planet maintains. Its its temperature balance. It's a, a series.

Jose Leal:

Interdependence, it's network. It's homeostasis within a communal relationship. Give and take, give and take. And we find that balance. If you don't give enough and you take too much, that's not good. And vice versa. Right.

Douglas Rushkoff:

But the interesting thing is, in communities, when I talk to people about this, the reluctance is less about giving than about getting, people are afraid to owe. That's the thing. So I why I'm asking people to have courage to ask for help, to ask for someone to help, you know, and then, and, and that's what triggers the, the bottom up accumulation of interdependencies.

Jose Leal:

Absolutely. and Michael says, relationships are sticky. Good and bad. Right? Like the, we can get messed up in relationships and we can really thrive. Right.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Well, you could get codependent instead of interdependent. Right.

Jose Leal:

Exactly.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Mean, to use the, the seventies cycling go, but yeah.

Jose Leal:

So, so, so it sounds like we're on the same page as to where we go from here. Where we are going from here. I don't think it's an option or a question as much as it's what's emerging. And I think people like you are really great years beforehand to see what's emerging before really starts to stick its head outta the ground very high. What, what are you seeing? What you, you, you talk to people around all around the world. You're talking, talking about this and thinking about this. What are you seeing as what's emerging in these organizations and these new ways of, of collaborating this new economy, this new world of media? What, what's happening?

Douglas Rushkoff:

I'm not seeing it in business as much. I'm, I am seeing it in, in smaller businesses. I am seeing like I know a woman who is selling sheepskin and sheep wool that's grown on a farm on one side where she lives. And she has these women who live in a house on the other side who are weaving the stuff. And these other people over there who are, so I, I'm seeing communities create almost, you know, kibbutz like businesses. They're not like all necessarily living together on a kibbutz, but sort of these local, multi, multi factored businesses. It would be the closest thing would be Noam Chomsky used to talk about this an narcos, equalism, you know, these sort of cottage, cottage industries networked together that are creating value to put out to put out things together. I'm seeing that again, very, very bottom up, more than I'm seeing, oh, you know, Cisco has just become holocratic and I'm not.

Jose Leal:

Right. That's not, I'm not that's

Douglas Rushkoff:

Seeing that so much. You know, the, the, the larger companies, even when they have a good CEO who wants to do that, usually they're shareholders. They'll be, they'll be activist shareholders that prevent the company from moving in a long-term value creation direction. It's really hard.

Jose Leal:

So we're working with, with co-ops that are small businesses like you've described, that are doing the type of work that the community needs. Right. They're not doing it because there's like this opportunity to go big. They're doing it because it's something they enjoy doing, taking care of people, building things. You know, cleaning homes, whatever it is, meeting

Douglas Rushkoff:

Needs is like meeting the It's a novel concept. Yeah. Right.

Jose Leal:

But many of those needs are being met by non-community players. So you talk about Uber, right? Like, used to be, my dad was a cab driver when he was young back in Portugal. He lived in the community, he served the community, he drove the community around. That was his thing. He loved it. He got to meet everybody. He was a people person. Yep. Absolutely. Freaking loved it so much. So he wasn't all that home all that long, all that much. But now you've got a guy that works as a gig worker, and you know, let's assume that except for the costs, he gets to keep 50% of, of the, of the markup. Right? And that the other 50 goes over to, to Uber. That's no longer in our community.

Douglas Rushkoff:

No. We've taken, we've taken a medium whose, who, whose purpose I thought was to disintermediate things, and we've used it to re mediate relationships and to recentralize them. The thing that people don't realize, or some people do now, is something like Uber is not a complicated piece of technology. Uber is GPS a dating app and cash and a cash register. You put them together. You've got Uber, anyone can write Uber. So in Austin, there's an alternative to Uber that's quite competitive. There's one in New York, I don't know how well it's doing now, but it's a very simple choice. You don't even need the, the kind of global monopoly of a thing. Right. If you know, oh, I'm going to be going to Chicago, what's their local taxi app? And this is the one that takes 5% from the people instead of 50%, or this is the one that the drivers own. Right? This is the co-op, the, the driver owned app that your percent of how much you own is based on how much you've driven. And you got a simple blockchain technology for that. And it's all, you know, turnkey.

Jose Leal:

We're talking, we're actually talking to a group of folks that are doing that here in northern California trying to set up a driver's co-op. In, in California and

Douglas Rushkoff:

Right. The monopolies are mean. You know, the monopolies you take, like Seamless and GrubHub and all that. If you start using a local delivery app for your restaurant, you're going to be banned from ours, and we're going to keep you off the thing. If you have a second app running in your car and Uber finds out that you take, they're going to ban you and fine you. And, and it's scary. Right? Right. It's scary. That's what they

Jose Leal:

The other people, monopolies want monopoly.

Douglas Rushkoff:

They love it. That's the rule. That's good. In business school now, they call it what de defensible outcomes. Right. Which means how to become a monopoly, how to have that one way ratchet towards unification.

Jose Leal:

Right. The blue ocean strategy. Find yourself a place where you're a monopoly, because that's what you can, we can do. I'm having a great time. Are you okay for another few minutes? Yeah. Because I want to ask a couple of more questions. Yeah, yeah. I'll keep it short. So you're, you said you're, you're seeing this in, in small community plays, but you're not seeing it in a big scale. Do you think that small communities still have what it would take to actually influence the mainstream markets? Meaning like the mom and pop shoe store and pizza place, and so on and so forth in local communities banding together through these collaborative ways that you described that, which I wholly agree with, and it's the work that we're doing. Do you think that that still has the potential of influencing not directly fighting, but influencing over time the way that our communities operate?

Douglas Rushkoff:

Well, yeah. I mean, it's going to happen one way or the other, right? We're either going to shift that way because it works better, or we're going to shift that way because we have to. 'cause There's nothing else. You know, the, the, the companies that employ us would prefer we not exist anyway, right? they're working hard to have clawed or, or chat GPT or something, replace us anyway, or a robot or, or anything. So sadly and I think Michael's suggesting this too, is that, that, yeah, the, the, the, the, the only likely way is through more pain. But sometimes, I mean, sometimes people have shift. I'm thinking about, you know individual mind shifts that we know, like how Lyndon Johnson shifted to civil rights, even though it started cynically or Anwar sadat shifted to peace in the Middle East after being, people have sudden mind shift. And I'm just hoping that's, I'm a hope fiend. That, that we could do that on a, on a collective, on a more global level that will just go, oh, this is dumb. You know, let's just take care of each other. Let's move towards a more nurturing society, you know? And, and who knows, you know, as we move towards the possibility of a female archetype in the presidency, we could start to understand you know, nurture over aggression and some of these other more connected ways. You know, we could move from being the needing to be the person singing the melody to being all resonant together. You know, learning as, as it's so simple. I mean, I go, I went, I spoke at a, at a college in South Dakota and the farm, they're all farm kids there, and they all understood about low impact architect agriculture and about not turning the soil and doing, you know, slits and things. Instead, they all are understanding permaculture and how microclimates work, that if you change the way you're dealing with the soil and the water in a small area, you'll start to get rain on your area. I mean, it's like, how the heck did that work? You talk to any indigenous person, they're like, well, duh, what did you think? No. That you need to do geo-engineering on the whole planet to make a difference. Of course, it changes. So as people have those realizations combined with this, people are I mean, alcoholics have to hit bottom usually, you know? And we may be hitting bottom. We may finally be there, and then it means we start doing the 12 steps. Realize you're part of something greater than that. You know, make amends, you know, that's, it's pretty straightforward. What we get to do from the minute we realize we're in this together,

Jose Leal:

Not only are we in this together, the sense that we are not in this together is a fallacy. Right. It's, it, it, we've always been in this together. It, it's not as if it's an option, it's just that we've been told that we're not right. And we believed it. And so we've gone around thinking that I'm by myself. Why is everybody freaking depressed? Why is everybody's running around on, on on drugs? Yep. Because they think they're alone. You know? And people

Douglas Rushkoff:

Have looked, there have been so many different ways of trying to say it. You know, McCluen always talked about figure and ground that people are, are, are transfixed by the figure, and they're not aware of the ground, which means like, you're looking at the thing on the tv, rather than the landscape in which we live, the subject, the nouns, you know, that always get, even climate change or global warming or the thing, they're these singular fixed things. I mean, the un development goals, bless them, they're wonderful. But, you know, as my friend Nora Bateson says, just look, imagine a mother nursing her baby and think about everything that's required for that to happen in a healthy way. And you've got your 12, 12 distinct metric development goals are all built in, you know, that we, we, you know, bless his heart, Jesus kind of kind of set it, you know, I'm a Jew and I'm granular, right? And the Jews were writing Talmud and all these laws you like, okay, if, if the cow goes through the, the fence, but you haven't maintained it, are you responsible? Is the neighbor response, you know, ever more granularity to figure out how do we live ethically together? And Jesus was like, you know, that's really nice, but you may be getting lost in the details. You might just try to, what feels, feel this right here, you know? And maybe Jesus may just help a little bit too. And I, I, I think we need, that's why I'm talking about sort of, you know, mycelial networks over digital networks. It's something else is transmitted organically from person to person. This ability to experience compassion really opens the door to being able to be together. If you don't have an experience of compassion, you, you really won't know how to do it.

Jose Leal:

And I don't think you can experience compassion if you're, there is no interdependence.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Well, right, because then, then it's pity or something else. Yeah. Right. Because they're part of you we're in the field together, you know, I don't want to get too new agey, but we're all part of the same thing, you know?

Jose Leal:

Right. well, I could, I know you had to sort of stop around now and I could talk to you for another hour. You, you mentioned..

Douglas Rushkoff:

Maybe we'll do it again.

Jose Leal:

Yeah. Nora, you mentioned Nora. I'd love to go on team Human, if you, if you want to have that conversation there. You mentioned Nora. I met her last year and, and we had a couple hour conversation which was awesome because I'd often misunderstood where she was coming from. And the way that she speaks is, is somewhat flowery sometimes for me. But it was, it was a great experience. So really,

Douglas Rushkoff:

She's a poet. She's a poet, she's a poet,

Jose Leal:

Last book was really poetry more than anything else. Douglas a real awesome pleasure. And Oh, it's great to be with you.

Douglas Rushkoff:

It's funny. Yeah, I was glad. 'cause I saw it was sort of a businessy thing, and I thought, oh, no, it's going to be one of those. But, but the, the odd thing is, it's funny, I used to get all these business talks, you know, back in the day, back when businesses and the internet, when they were kind of hopeful about doing something with, with humanity. And I found that in the last, partly since Covid, but really the last three or four years, companies are not hiring me to speak nearly as much because really what they're doing is kind of intentionally putting the blinders on. They kind of don't want to hear the message of just get really good at what you do mine in for the passion, find the other humans, restore the culture of your company. They're, it's, and, and in some ways, I'm looking that at that as an optimistic sign that it's like, oh, they've kind of given up. They, they're, they're, they're going to wither on the vine now. Yeah. And it's up to, you know, and even a speaking gig, a $10,000 talk or whatever is an artifact of the bad way of doing things. Right. Any company that's got 10 or $20,000, but throw around,

Jose Leal:

I'm sorry to say, you might be Douglas, but still you're right. Right.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Exactly. It's like, it's like, well, it's kind of like, yeah, it's based on a dis it's, it's exploiting an existing distortion rather than getting into the community. You know, getting $500 for an evening of, of advice and feeling good about your life

Jose Leal:

And maybe getting fed a little bit of food and, and

Douglas Rushkoff:

Of food and comfort and someone patting you on the back.

Jose Leal:

Exactly.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Yeah. Remember.

Jose Leal:

Awesome. Awesome. Absolutely. Awesome. Thank you so much, Douglas.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Thank you. Thank everyone for being there.

Jose Leal:

Yeah, thank you. And, and Michael and, and Hans and everyone else who sent us some messages. We were having such a great conversation. I didn't want to get too distracted. And, and involve the, that change in, in the topic. I want to introduce that we're going to have Frank Egging coming next week. Frank is involved in supporting new organizations and teams towards the journey of, of self-organization and agility. And I, I know of Frank, we've connected a few times, but we've never actually had the chance to, to spend a, a good time as we have now with Douglas. So I'm looking forward to that. Douglas, a real pleasure. Thank you. And we'll see you soon.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Yes, definitely.

Jose Leal:

Cheers.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Take care.