YouSaid · the spoken record

Douglas Rushkoff

lines on the record: 72
first: 2021-11-16
most recent: 2021-11-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Really? Isn't it great that we live in the world that Rushkoff predicted where we got over all these tragedies and started just getting along with each other? You know, I'm so much less concerned that they talk about me than that they talk at all. I much prefer to influence their bearing, their comportment than the content. You know, whatever they're saying, I'd rather them be saying it in the way that I try to speak, you know, which is in a loving, open, engaged, responsible way. I want them to engage with each other, feeling responsible for one another. And whether or not they credit me with that, by name, it doesn't matter.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things that don't matter. It really doesn't matter which shirt you're wearing. It's which, you know, get out of the house already.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there can be, you can do the evaluation and then make a choice, but once I make the choice what I've learned now is to stop second guess is to stop going back to decision. You know, what a what a coulda shoulda What about that one? What about that? I chose this one. That's what I chose. I chose the Frocamapa chipo Makanina from, you know, whatever the thing is at Starbucks. I just choose black coffee, but whatever. I chose that one. Oh, I could have got the Decaf Latte Chapaca. Yeah, you could have. You could have. But this is, you're here now. This is your house. This is your car. This is your wife. This is your shirt. You know, that's it. And I feel like it benefits advertisers and certain companies to get people second guessing all their choices. So put them back in decision mode so they buy more stuff. And it's like, you know, you really don't need it. It's really fine. I think we're wasting a lot of time and energy reaching.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I took Est in the seventies. Remember Est, it was like Werner Earhart did this thing. They call it landmark for him now. It was one of the first kind of culty self-help things that came out of California. You know, you do these long seminars and whatever. And like Tony Robbins kind of stuff. And what they said in it that stuck, it's the only thing that I remembered from it was they distinguish between a decision and a choice. And like a decision is the process of I have this decision to make. It's the unresolved thing. The decision is more like the question, the weighing after this decision, but choice is what you autonomously choose to do.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could that possibly be better? In the big sense, could it be, or is it just some business hack? You know, yeah, it's a business hack. So I've got faith that these kinds of A scaled foolishness, these very non-commonsensical approaches to civilizational stewardship will become apparent. So I guess I have faith in a new era of common sense shepherded by young people who get nauseous of everything being done to scale and more interested. I sound like Bannon here, but in subsidiarity and distributism and the commons and local small local business.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Young people's ability to pass through the fame obsessed decades. Into things mattering to them on a local and felt level. You know, I think that there's, I mean, they still do it, obviously, but there's, I feel like there's growing dissatisfaction among them for this influencer culture, that living your life as some sort of an infomercial is not satisfying and that they're going to move on. And as they do, you know, like I was saying before, as they return to a locally scaled level and start looking in their towns and cities for the stuff that excites them, it's going to take such a burden off, you know, this giant planetary brands and all that stuff. I'm optimistic when I see the ports failing in Los Angeles. And the boat getting stuck in the Suez Canal of people saying, you know, Is it really genuinely long term?”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I mean, this sounds so stupid, but it's new to me, so it's true. Breathing is like really important. If you don't breathe, you fall down and die really quickly. But I tend when there's a stressful thing, I've noticed I stop breathing and then it gets worse and worse the less air there is. And then I almost have to remember, oh, right, you breathe a little bit. At least my body feels like it's a little bit better. I feel a little bit armed. But yeah, that's my big one is learning, is breathing and understanding that I don't have to react to everything. That immediate reaction is not necessarily better than a considered response.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Payback for all that, you know, as if, oh, you read my book. So now I owe you the equivalent hours of time that you just spent with my book. And that's tricky because if like a thousand people read a book and that took them four hours each, just four thousand hours I have to find somewhere. And that's, you know, 10 hours a day for more than a year.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I haven't. That's what I'm trying to figure out. The boundary, it's going to have to come from, I'm going to have to develop an underlying assumption that I don't necessarily owe everything to everybody all the time. You know, and right now I kind of feel I do. I feel, I don't know, I kind of feel like I arrived here in this dimension, like with a deficit that I've got to somehow pay back. I don't know if there's other people walking around like that, but it's like, oh, like I didn't pay the price of admission or something. And certainly to the extent which people have bought my books and paid attention, now I owe them I owe the world.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trying to limit that email's my bad thing. I have no problem with the social media. It's not like, oh, I got to check my thing. I don't have those kind of habits. So it's that. And then sort of deeper overdetermined sense of responsibility for others. I have a habit of not establishing any boundaries at all, which serve me well as an unpopular person before the internet, but doesn't work well as a slightly popular writer in an internet world. You know, people will not, if you don't put up boundaries, people aren't going to put them up for you.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the other hand, a lot of the emails will be like, oh, I'm in high school and they assign me your book team human for a book report. Please tell me, what is your book about? Michael, fuck you, kid. No, you don't. You don't get that. I've decided I'm entitled to food and drink before email. You know, I'm aware and I'm not, you know, all Tim Ferrisy about stuff, but I know that like when someone says something bad or there's more stress in an email, I know it's activating hormones and endocrine systems and all that that need calories and food and water and buffers. There's probably not enough oxygen or hydrogen or molybdenum or whatever it is that I need in my bloodstream to absorb all that.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm trying to break email. much is a hard habit because I get like a thousand of these things a day and what am I supposed to do you know and I'm I feel really guilty if I don't answer them all and I feel like some kind of an asshole that is like oh I get a thousand so I don't have to because they're real human beings who read maybe read something or spent time and and”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very peace order, good government. I love you guys. You know, and there's all these very touching scenes and all that and people crying or whatever. And I'm watching it. And then this woman's like, ugh, we've got to find, we're going to have to find sanitary napkins and pampers for these people Started crying from that. So how does that make you cry? It's the small considerations when people that it's the littlest things that move me the most. The person who will get up in the subway for someone else to sit down, the neighbor who knows, you know, that my wife went in for a surgery and comes, can I bring you a chicken or something? It's that very human scaled acts of kindness, particularly in the face of adversity, you know, that brings it out.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get most emotional now at small acts of kindness, the smallest things. I saw this Broadway show. It must have been over a year ago now because it was pre pandemic called Come From Away. It's about the Canadian Island where a lot of the planes had to land for 9-11. And it's about this town that then sort of takes in. Yeah, they take in all those people who are on the planes and whatever.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honest on a daily basis when my wife and daughter have gone to bed. And it's like, on a daily basis, that's sort of my moment of peace. Peace is particular though, I guess. You know, I feel then or. done. Now there are no more comments, no more drafts. It's to the press. Because I'm writing, I mean, it's what I do. I'm writing all the time. So it's like, oh, shoot, is there another email coming back from that editor on that thing? That for me is peaceful, you know, or after the talk or the panel or the thing, you know, especially if it was a risky one or in front of a new kind of audience.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We make a judgment as to what is signal and what is noise. You know, if you're going to auto-tune James Brown, right, James Brown reaching up for the note or coming down in over the note. No, no, you're going to auto-tune him. He's not reaching. He's on the note. On the note. What have you done? You filed off the soul, the signal in a James Brown recording, the actual signal is his soul reaching up for that note. That's why they call it soul. It's that reaching that we're hearing. That's what makes his interpretation of the song different than Brittany's, different than Ariana's. We auto-tune everybody in our music. We're tending toward auto-tuning everybody in their lives. You know, the metric, and this is all, the metric you put on the wall is the metric that you're going to get. And it may not be an ideal single focus for more than just some provisional fun experiment.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I feel like we're trying to auto-tune ourselves. You know, we're living in a digital media environment where everything is quantized. It's either here or there. You're on this node or that node. And our value system accordingly is to get people either up to the sea or down to the B, but not in that weird squishy place in between. You know, fuzzy logic is about reducing. It's not about maintaining the fuzziness. You know, it's about you're here or you're there. And you need more granularity. Okay, we'll give you a half step. You're here, here, or here. Here, here or here. All right. You don't like that. We'll give you six. We'll give you eights. But you're still always on the mark. And what we do by doing that is.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you want to do is enhance your resilience and your wonder and your ability to tolerate and metabolize a wealth of knowledge experiences, which is what that makes life so much more fun. It's fun and alive. But technology became, all I mean here is technology became that other religion. You know, oh, the blockchain that will solve for, you know, as I went to this conference, they were building a blockchain. They're calling it Project Liberty. And it's going to solve for multiracial liquid democracy. Good luck with that. Good luck with that.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I thought, oh my God, he must love this thing. You know, Stuart must have written a great book. And he closes it at the end and he flings it across the room, like in horror. And he said only 3% of the people in the index are women. That goes to show you something. And I'm like, what? What does it show? He says, these are all men trying to use technology to recreate the womb. You know, their mothers couldn't anticipate their every little desire. So now they want to build technologies that are going to bring them whatever it is to create a little bubble around themselves and bring them everything they want. And before they even know they want it. And he was really right on a certain level. That's what, you know, with anticipatory algorithms and all that. But it struck me as so sad too that I get it. The world is scary and wet and dark and female and unknown and unpredictable and all that. But you don't want to compensate for that with predictability and insulation.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And becomes this other religion, and it keeps Mohammed tried. Everybody keeps trying Buddha even. Many sects of it became the same. And that's partly because people have this longing to believe in something that, you know, mommy and daddy failed me and this new mommy daddy thing is going to be the thing, you know, is going to be what mommy and daddy really couldn't be. They couldn't anticipate my needs. They couldn't see inside my soul. And right now, oddly enough, I feel like our technologists, they're looking at technology to be that. You know, I had this great experience with Timothy Leary when he had just read, he had just read Media Lab by Stuart Brand. It was the book about Nicholas Negroponte's lab. It just opened at MIT. And we used to just sit and read together. And then he had been reading this book for like two days and circling things and felt to pen.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, they get persecuted, they get a piece of land and they're fighting for survival, and they go, okay, you know, and it all deteriorates and then people become, you know, worshiping at a wall and one God and one God alone and God gave us this piece of land and we're special and all this stuff happens and it's like oh no you became a religion too you know and it wasn't it wasn't Judaism until way late in its career and I feel like you know and Christianity had that too this sort of insight of all right there's all these laws and you're getting ever more granular trying to code reality trying to optimize reality with all this law and it's like you're getting so granular you're never going to get there in the end the law is just kind of training wheels for something more in turn you just got to be nice just be fucking nice you know and the law can support you in that and again then that loses itself too and it becomes about this you know messiah guy”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean it depends. I feel like most religions have these it's almost like most bands they have this period after their emergence when shortly after their emergence where they're trying to really do the right thing you know I mean I know Judaism better than most of the others but you know Judaism really emerged as a system of thought and behavior for the recovering cult addicts of the Egyptian death cults they come out in the desert they're like oh shoot that didn't work what do we do and say okay let's not worry about so much about believing in God and having an idol and all that let's focus on community and law and labor and have a Sabbath and let's try that you know and it kind of worked for a while and then you know eventually”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would think, you know, you would think. And then you look at if they didn't believe in stuff, churches and synagogues and stuff would be such for me such great places to go. I just don't like believing things and worshiping and stuff.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fire fireman from my town who voted for Trump and believes that this won't happen again for another thousand years. And it became funny. He looked at me like, oh my God, you really think the world is ending, don't you, Doug? And I'm like, oh my God, you really think it's not, you know, and it was just, but we drink together. We lift, like you say, we carry sandbags together.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I could talk to the two of them, but if I want to really engage with the manga anime crowd, who knows my kind of manga in anime, the real shit, I got to go online and find the, you know, make a gondam evangelian subgroup, subreddit, you know, and find that there's my others, there's my, that's what the internet is really good at. Or if I've got a rare disease, I mean people always use that example, you know, if I've got a rare disease or a rare handicap or something that there's not other people in my community that really get it, I could engage with those people and they understand what I'm going through in a way that other people don't, but it's not good, as we see on Twitter. It's not good for creating communities of people with diverse perspectives. In order to engage with people that have diverse or diametrically opposed perspectives, you have to be live next to them. When I'm next to the volunteer.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“enough bandwidth to engage with people who are really different from you. Online, it works really better to go find that group of people that you can't find in real life. So I live in Hastings on Hudson, New York, where there's really only two people I would consider legitimate manga anime fans here.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's a real difference, you know, and of course the internet is going to want me engaging with other middle aged mini cooper driving people because if the mini cooper is what we have in common, that could be monetized as opposed to people who like sunny days or something. You know, that's like, wait a minute. How do we advertise to them? You know, it's like everything falls into those kind of categories. And the technology is really good. Obviously, it's a database technology, the whole internet. So it's really good at breaking, it's optimized for breaking us down that way. And it's not optimized for the heterogeneous community thing that you're talking about. The heterogeneous community really only works in real life where you have a broad”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember when AOL was just emerging and it had these various kinds of groups so that you could find your tribe of people and be in conversations with them in chat rooms and things like that. They divided it all up into what looked to me like consumer categories. Like are you a, what's your, are you a car lover? Are you a book reader? Are you with this? Are you with that? And I got worried and people kept calling these, oh, those are my online communities. And I was always careful to say, that's not your online community. It's your online affinity group.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get some of that social signaling value from it. Now these ones are going to love me instead of hate me. And it's like, it's all a fucking game on there. So it's like, no, I don't use it. All I use Twitter for is I post links to my articles. That's it. Figuring that people who do follow me on there. I don't want to get in conversations on there. It's just when the people say they're really mean things or when something is intentionally misconstrued and then people start piling on without even reading the article that they think they hate because someone has said something totally wrong about it. It feels bad in my body. It makes me not sleep as well. It makes me not right as well. It's not good for my metabolism, my system, my psyche, my soul.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should I go? I just got invited to go on Steve von Bannon's podcast. Should I do it? And then I realized going and meet tweeting that would just create. It was just not because it's not such a small percentage of people would engage with that in good faith that it would be too, it's not the forum to have that argument. Luckily, I have friends. I have students. I have faculty. I have a world of people I do trust that I could ask about that, that I do not need to ask that question. The only reason to ask that question on Twitter would be to show off. Hey, everybody, I got invited on Steve Benn, and that means I've arrived. I'm not going to do it. So this way I can still leverage the fame value of having gotten invited without taking any of the risk of actually going on. Or what? Or I want to socially signal that I'm too SJW to go on those bad people's show and look at me. I get some, what is that called? Signaling.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a pros and cons. Of course, I'm going on his podcast adds legitimacy to Marjorie Taylor Green and everybody else going there. And I'm not going to have control and he could edit me to say anything he wants. And, you know, is the fact that I went on it going to outweigh anything good that comes about? Am I really going to take him down in like a John Stewart way when John Stewart went on Fox and expose what they are? Can I maybe turn him and help him see how some of what he sees about the Catholic Church and subsidiarity and distributism is good, but his approach is too violent and destructive. Can I get through to him? So I was debating it in my head and I thought maybe I should tweet.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can, if you're really tough skinned, you can post something to the public knowing there are hundreds of thousands of people and bots on there who are going to use your inquiry to hurt you, that that's their intent, right? To make you feel bad about yourself, to undermine your sense of authority, to get you to join something. While everyone, even the publicist who sent it to me, said look at this for a laugh. Of course you won't do it. Part of me was thinking, well, my whole thing, my whole team human motto, everything is fine the others, right? And here's one of the others asking me to engage, right?”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have the platform. These social media are for people without the platform. So my advice to the regular listener, reader, person, the person like me is honestly go to real media for your information. Go to social media for your play.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grandma wants to look at the pictures of baby Norman. Oh, we want to play a game. Oh, let's do a survey. Who likes astrology? I like astrology. Now let's in that same space. Who really has authority over the West Bank? What are you doing? And now everyone, Cousin Louis and this and that are going to argue on an international platform about who has the ownership of the West Bank? Now let's have our senators and our presidents and prime ministers go down into that bizarre random public square and delegitimize themselves and the authority they have as our representatives in Washington by going into a generic no you want to you go to your district go home to your district and talk to the people there you do that live you know that's you know it's not three days carriage ride away from DC anymore you can get hop on a plane and go back and talk to people go on your local PBS channel go on your your cable go on CC”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we contaminated Twitter, the internet we contaminated the internet. We shouldn't have put banking on the internet either. These were fun places. These were social media. These were place bases. This is where a guy could pretend he's a girl and a girl could pretend she's a robot. And these were play spaces. You know, they built the internet, yeah, for scientists to be able to communicate with each other. What did the scientists do with it? They ended up telling like fantasy Star Trek episodes and sharing recipes and telling what we used to call blonde jokes. And like people did with fax machines. It was not, and it's not even secure for business. That's why all these companies are getting hacked and frozen and ransomwared and all that. You took a network where every node is going, hello, who are you? Let's play. Hello, let's play. Let's play. It was that. It was a cultural explosion. And sure, so you've got blogger and Twitter and Facebook. Oh, look at.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the president of the United States has access to real media like television and newspapers and press conferences and real things.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly, I would say only go on social media to socialize and think of it as socializing. If you really like it, make it part of your entertainment day and look at it for that. I mean, it's so funny. People used to joke that on Twitter, ah, you know, I go on Twitter and someone tell me, you know, what they just ate for breakfast or where their favorite pecan pie is located. That's what Twitter is for. Sorry. That's what Twitter is for. It's not for the president of the United States to communicate policy to the American people. That's not where you do it.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but we can still see it with just three satellite dishes. It would still have worked. If even if it was the most popular story in the world, it was still a misapplication of precious technology resources. I mean, and this happened, you know, really in the 90s, we shifted news from in the United States anyway. News was a requirement to have an FCC television or radio license. You had to do a certain number of hours of news as part of your public affairs obligation. When we took that away, then news was no longer a mandatory obligation. And it turned into if you're going to keep any news, it's for money. It's for profit. That's when you start hearing all the music and all the coverage. That's when news became so much more sensationalist. Because now it was part of the competitive enterprise rather than.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had some kind of a breakdown and like shaved her head and they took her to the hospital and all. And all the news channels had it. Everyone had it. You know, even the tiny little TMZ kind of news channels, whatever they were. But I saw this picture from far of her mansion. And I counted, and this is just in what I could count, there were twenty different satellite dishes around her house. Twenty satellite dishes beaming the thing, you know, those vans, the news people use. And I was thinking, could that story have been covered with just three satellite dishes? Would three live satellite feeds of the ambulance outside Britney's house be enough to somehow feed the news, the global news media? And then what if we took the other seventeen of them and like put one in Rwanda maybe, you know, one in Iraq, you know?”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we always cared about these foreign matters, but we weren't as immersed in them, and we weren't expected to have something to say about them. He went all the way over there and saw the war and talked to the soldiers and they had people talking to the generals. And then this whole sort of news agency kind of went, ah, this is really awful. And their approach to it did seep out to America. But there were others. There was NBC News. There was ABC News. There was, you know, the New York Times. There was a lot. And, but yeah, Cronkite might have had influence. But yes, it was a different media environment, but one in which we weren't being trained to respond in a moment-to-moment way to every ebb and flow in the news, to everything that was happening. That's not just the internet. I remember I wrote this piece back when remember Brittany Spears? I mean, there's the current story with her now, but I remember there was this moment when she”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and more self-sufficient. It's more sustainable. It's more resilient. It's less brittle. And it makes you less enemies. I mean, I'm side by side with trumpies digging people out of the mud, having a discussion where I'm saying this is what's going to start happening a lot. They're saying, don't be crazy. This happens once every 10,000 years. I mean, let's see. Let's, you know, but we're actually talking about an arm in arm handing buckets to each other rather than through Twitter.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The central government and the state governments of so much stress. You know, you don't need as much welfare. You don't need as much planning. You don't need as many programs when you have neighbors taking care of neighbors. You don't need as much climate change remediation. If people are doing less crazy stuff, if they're sharing lawnmowers rather than everyone buying their own lawnmower, if they're playing with each other and doing local entertainment rather than flying around the world to do all sorts of crazy stuff, it's like if you engage locally with the people around you and actually help real people, which I got to do now, we got flooded terribly in the last hurricane Ida. When you do that, you don't need as much FEMA. You know, it's like federal emergency management money. You don't need as much of that stuff. And it's easy. Become less dependent on central government, central news, national stories and all that.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“God we've got Biden holding him down. It may be that it may not be that. I'm not there. I don't know. And frankly, what I think about this does not matter. It doesn't matter. Instead, if I took all that time that I'm spending trying to understand these giant issues that are operating at a scale and behind closed doors that I have no access to. If I rolled up my sleeves and helped my neighbor, figured out how the old lady's gonna get her food now that she broke her friggin hip, and no one else is going down there to deal with it, or the people who just moved in who's got a differently abled child who needs community support. You know, all of these things that we could be doing for each other in our communities with all that time we want to spend screaming about shit on Twitter if we spent that time helping other people in our communities. It would relieve.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About what is happening there is true. And I don't even know where they get their information from. It's like something happens, right? Something happens in Israel, say. Some bomb happens and then some other bomb happens. And then Netanyahu says this, and then Biden says that. And it's like, it could be anything. I don't mean like false flag crazy attacks or whatever, but it could be that, you know, Netanyahu says whoever's in charge there now says they want to go and bulldoze the West Bank, but they don't really want to. They're saying that so they get votes and support of some horrible faction in the Knesset that wants to do that. And they've already called Biden before they announce that and they say, look, I'm going to say this. I want you to say we're not allowed to do it or you'll pull support, okay? All right, we'll do that. So they set this thing up and then you report on it. And then I read about it in the times. Oh, look, Netanyahu's really bad.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't follow a lot of it. I mean, a lot of people were asking me a few weeks ago, you know, what I was thinking about Joe Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal strategy, right? So for people who don't know, the U.S. had been in a war in Afghanistan for like decades, and then Biden said enough, we're just going to just take them out. And basically and left, and then everything went nuts and everybody was running to the airport, and it was this whole big, horrible scene with Taliban and the people who helped America and all that. It was just awful. And it's like, I don't know. Honestly, I've got very little training in Middle East withdrawal strategies, whether you bring planes or boats, do you tell the enemy you're going to do it? Do you not? Do you bring generals? And I just don't know about that. Not only do I not know about that, but I don't even know whose story.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You got to be careful about that. You know, shit happens, right? The Gulf War and bad reporting or whatever name was that said the wrong things about the Gulf War and got us in. That happens. But you want that to happen once a decade, not daily. And you're going to play that game on cable news. If MSNBC and CNN and whatever are going to put on, you know, newscasters who are opining throughout these broadcasts, then they're going to be seen as opinion news.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Once they're doing that, does that story gain more power because the New York Times has slightly misrepresented the real takeaway of an Israel COVID study? Ultimately, yes. Once you start playing that game, you're going to lose to whoever plays that game more ruthlessly. You know, if you're going to be on the side of supposedly factual, evidence-based reality, you've got to stick with that. And it doesn't mean you can't believe in the soul and astrology and everything else that you want to. You know what I mean? I'm not saying you've got to be a staunch atheist, scientist extremist. But, you know, you're reporting, it has to be news that's fit to print. If you're the paper of record and you want to stay the paper.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I mean, the question is, does fake news genuinely derive more traction from each error made by government or major news media? In other words, when there are real gotchas, does it work or would they still, I mean, would it still be that the COVID vaccine put something in you that then five G towers activates? And that's why you can't see it when you look in the vaccine, but once it's in you and they put a spoon on your head and everything's going to get magnetic.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do we do that? Then they hire Bernays or Lipman or public relations people to come up with what's the very best way to do that. The CDC didn't have the very best people, right? They were thinking like a doctor. How does the doctor talk to the patient? What do we have to say? And, you know, what do you do if you miss a dose? And why do you have to take this? Why do you have to take all the antibiotic and all those things that doctors tell you? And they try to treat the American population as the patient, you know, that you can kind of not lie to, but do what you have to manufacture their compliance. And, you know, in this environment, when you have a political faction whose strength Is based on delegitimizing anything to do with organized government. That's a really difficult environment in which to play fast and loose with facts.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This disease it goes all the way back to the first public relations people. It was like Walter Lippmann and Ed Bernays and those folks around World War I. And when they came up with the idea of public relations, basically of in some ways manufacturing consent for certain things using whatever means and stories you have, what they believed was You know, their ideal government was there would be this kind of council of experts and scientists who would be in a big building next to the White House somewhere and they would figure out what is it that we need America to do. And they would say, okay, the scientists go, look, we've only got $30,000 masks and we've got 30 million people. We've got to make Americans give the masks to the hospitals because that's, and we know, that's what's right right now.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT