The RegenNarration Podcast
The RegenNarration podcast features the stories of a generation that is changing the story, enabling the regeneration of life on this planet. It’s ad-free, freely available and entirely listener-supported. You'll hear from high profile and grass-roots leaders from around Australia and the world, on how they're changing the stories we live by, and the systems we create in their mold. Along with often very personal tales of how they themselves are changing, in the places they call home. With award-winning host, Anthony James.
The RegenNarration Podcast
229. Moving from Figure to Ground: With Douglas Rushkoff, ‘live in New York’
When we were in New York recently, I dropped by to visit Douglas Rushkoff at his Queens College office. For those who don’t recall Douglas from his previous times on this podcast, he’s a media professor, documentary-maker, host of the Team Human podcast, and best-selling author of 20 books - including the updated edition of Program or Be Programmed, out now, with particular additions around AI. There’s a launch party for that tonight if you happen to be in or near NY. Douglas is also one of the pioneering forces behind the internet. So when he tells me in this conversation that he’s starting to believe that the whole narrative of the internet is bull shit, it feels big.
We actually sat down over lunch initially, but hadn’t talked long before Douglas suggested we press record on it – that others might be interested in this too. So this one’s a little different. Going out on both our podcasts. Less interview, more conversation. On our respective lives and work, their latest surprising turns, magic, perspective and possibility, and yes, this journey of ours across the US this year. Including the light all that might shine on the US elections. It wound up feeling like a fun and profound tonic for the week ahead, and this high stakes time generally.
For those who’ve listened to this on Team Human already, you’ll find a tad lighter edit here, with a little more of the personal stuff left in, in case that’s of interest to you.
This episode has chapter markers and a transcript (available on most apps now too). The transcript is AI generated and imperfect, but hopefully provides greater access for those who need or like to read.
Recorded 9 October 2024 (inc. subway snippets; intro recorded in Baltimore).
Title slide: Douglas & AJ after recording (pic: Josh Chapdelaine).
See more photos on the website, and for more from behind the scenes, become a subscribing member via the links below.
Music:
Green Shoots, by The Nomadics.
Regeneration, by Amelia Barden, from Regenerating Australia.
The RegenNarration playlist, music chosen by guests (thanks to Josie Symons).
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It's a shame, but I'm starting to believe that the whole narrative of the internet is just bullshit. I've got so many friends upset about the way Palestine or Israel is being portrayed, or the way climate is getting distorted, or the way a TV show distorts Kamala or apologizes for her or for Trump, it's like on a certain - not to turn away from reality,
AJ:G'day Anthony James here for The RegenNarration. Entirely supported by listeners like you. So thanks a lot, old mate James Tonson, for becoming the newest subscribing member, joining a great community including an incredible bunch of people who were the very first subscribers and are still on board after three years now. A nd I'm not just talking about my wife, son and mum. Thanks also to Susie Bate, Nelson Cheng, Adam Curcio and Josie Simons for your enormous support. I'm just so humbled by your generosity, loyalty and commitment to this. Thank you deeply. If you've spent a while thinking about joining too, please do, by just heading to the website via the show notes regennarration. com forward slash support. Thanks as always.
AJ:When we were in New York recently, I dropped by to visit Douglas Rushkoff at his Queen's College office. For those who don't recall Douglas from his previous times on this podcast, he's a media professor, documentary maker, host of the Team Human podcast and best-selling author of 20 books, including the updated edition of Program or Be Programmed out now with particular additions around AI. There's a launch party for that tonight too, if you happen to be in New York. Douglas is also one of the pioneering forces behind the internet, so when he tells me in this conversation that he's starting to believe that the whole narrative of the internet is bullshit, it feels big. We actually sat down over lunch initially but hadn't talked long before Douglas suggested we press record on it - that others might be interested in this too.
AJ:So this one's a little different. Going out on both our podcasts, less interview, more conversation. On our respective lives and work, their latest surprising turns, magic, perspective and possibility. A nd, yes, this journey of ours across the US this year, including the light all that might shine on the US elections. I t wound up feeling to me like a fun and profound tonic for the week ahead and this high stakes time generally. For those who've listened to this on Team Human already, you'll find a tad lighter edit here with a little more of the personal stuff left in, in case that's of interest to you.
Douglas:So welcome. You know there's so much. There's so much to talk about. I've been doing these events in New York, partly inspired, I suppose, by the psychedelic underground that are so much about doom right, and I've been on a few panels that really, where the majority of the panelists believe it is really all over and the best we can do, like I've been quoting this Jewish poem called the Unetana Tokev the best we can do is have compassion for each other as the Titanic sinks, which is fine, and if the Titanic is sinking, I'd rather have compassion for each other. But you spend time with indigenous people who have experienced the regeneration of things many a time before and they're, while not less concerned about what we're doing, they're entirely more sanguine about the long-term fate of the human soul through this right.
AJ:Oh, there's so many layers to that, douglas, yes, I've heard these things from them. And when you learn in Australia that they moved through 130 metres of sea level change on the northwest coast so I'm from the west side at one point in history and they have the stories for that, the memory for that. But the take home was the context at the time. The way they set up was fluid, pardon the pun. So you could do that, you could move, you were able to shift, you prioritised moving as the context called for it.
AJ:What we've set up for ourselves is something much more demanding of the earth that this is where we want to. But, helene, because I was in Georgia at the time and it was pretty full on even there when you want to ask nature to work around you, particularly when the demands you put on nature make more volatile the systems that it's feeling to play out, you're asking a lot. So, yes, there are these and yes, they've got those stories and yes, they feel more perspective, let's say, with that. But they're still in cities. So you build cities next to the water and then you're all upset that you're all going to get washed up.
Douglas:If you were just walking around with goats and children and tents and things, you'd be like oh there's a lot of water here, let's go back over there and you can move around. So there's that. And yes, if mass migration could be handled as the Koch brothers even are looking to make money on the mass migration from the coast and that would make sense that way. But there seems to be a different level of human-created system change that has rendered the environments more brittle.
AJ:Yeah, it's really interesting that we start here, because so much of the other stuff I hear from Indigenous folk or learn about here at One Degree Removed is a sense, because you talked about with goats and kids hanging around and you could just move the tent and it sounds primitive and who'd want to live like that anyway?
AJ:So maybe we're just paying the price, but there was a sense that they had of these things where they knew they were coming. It's been shown time and time again, like with the big tsunami in 2004, the people in the Andaman Islanders, right in the gun, they knew the native people there knew, and they either went to High Grant or they went out to sea and emerged unscathed. So they knew more than our, you know, advanced quote unquote satellite systems and so forth that this was coming. So, with the connection to nature that these cultures have developed, that holds you in a place where you can sense, perceive more than our machines can, even today. And so what does that infer for how life was? How primitive is that? I don't know that that's primitive.
AJ:That sounds pretty advanced to me and that that's on offer in our human nature. That really interests me.
Douglas:Right, but a very advanced species or individual, who happens to be living on the deck of the Titanic, is only going to be able to influence things so much. There's only so much wisdom about the rainforest you can have before McDonald's and Monsanto or whoever burn it down. This is the thing, isn't it?
AJ:That's true. It's also true that there's a shift going on. It seems to be a flash point, certainly, but far from all doom and gloom. In fact, I've come to feel like that narrative of doom is, you know, and I get down with the best of it.
AJ:But given that I believe now that it's one narrative, it's one part of reality, so I think it's partial and I think it's overplayed. The rest of it, I think, is underplayed and the rest of it is incredible. Regeneration, if I just use that word flippantly, but coming back to our senses, might even say, given the frame we've set up here, it's incredible what you see people doing. And then I feel like and perhaps you feel some of this you get across. I mean, I visit people all around Australia and I've done it all around the States for the last six months or so. You feel like you're across a lot of what's happening that's good, that I'm looking for and what they are connected with. So I become a fay with layers out of stuff that's going on, that's really cool, and then I'll find whole other layers over here or over there that are incredible.
AJ:I go wow, this is way beyond tracking or coordinate. It's the classic mycelial network. You know that's in motion too.
Douglas:It is odd, you know it is, and you can start from almost anywhere and you end up in this kind of same network of people. You know which is interesting, and for me it's like you know, everything happens all at once, of course. So I have these personal changes and liberations and finding different kinds of independence At the same time that I'm working with Richard Metzger, who's got an occult sort of magic revolution underway through alternative media, at the same time that I reconnect with the psychedelic community and music for mushrooms and people doing medical work with psychedelics. At the same time I connect with people doing spiritual work, with psychedelics and ceremony, and that At the same time that I find an overlap of psychedelic climate week in New York, which is the overlap of those two communities and then hang out with the climate community, and then the overlap of climate people with other graphic novelists and filmmakers and music makers.
Douglas:then the music makers over with the psychedelic people and it's like oh my gosh with them. Then those occultists over there, um, along with open-minded scientists, people raising families in different ways, the, the uh, the post-apocalypse school in England where this woman's teaching foraging, and then you say oh. And then you see, just if you don't look at Twitter, if you don't participate with the, literally the doom, the cortisol industry, I like to call it Literally the doom, the cortisol industry.
Douglas:I like to call it, not that we don't need some cortisol, but the cortisol dopamine industry. You don't engage with that. And then you see that and I know it's controversial to even say this, and maybe it's not even true but the coral reef is regenerating.
AJ:Yeah, parts of it. Other parts are dying, so it's not binary. Surprise surprise, yeah, but there are parts regenerating. There are other people who are helping it in some ways too, learning how we can help it. What's been really interesting to me on that level is in the west, on the, on the reef that's on the west coast, that's been withstanding some serious marine heat waves, so there are early signs of nature adapting surprise, surprise again in ways that we didn't think or didn't forecast with our models.
AJ:So it does say don't give up the ghost, right. But it says a lot more too, because what you ran through there as I was listening to you and just marvelling at it, and it is the equivalent of what I'm finding and through other communities like ranching communities I never thought I'd be connected to ranching communities, I know I find the supposedly right-wing communities are just as connected and concerned, because they understand.
Douglas:The ranching communities, understand that feedlots are fucked Right, and they want. You've got to have the cows or the bull, whatever they are, those big things you eat. You got to have them walking around on the grass to smush it down so it goes in the soil, right, you don't want a thousand of them on two feet, but you want animal. And how do you get them? You're gonna milk them. You're gonna eat some. They're gonna.
AJ:It's all part of the story 100, and so what's been really interesting there is that even politically, like in this election, you're like not far away now. I've seen communities, rural communities, vote for. Even my last guest was an independent, a farmer who stood as an independent Because both parties were really not being perceived to fully represent these people, even though on the surface it's conservative and votes Republican. The Democrats had even evacuated. They're not even there anymore, they don't even try, and that opened the window for this guy to go.
AJ:well, I'm just going to stand as an independent and I'm going to speak to people directly and because I'm a farmer, I'll be able to understand and care. And he gets elected and then gets elected again and again and he's going for a fourth term now. So it goes to show even those places that can be written off you know too easily as again binary, blue or red, yeah, that it's so much more. Not only not binary, but the human spirit is alive and well. I have found this over six months crossing rural areas in this country. Even that's been to a surprising level. We didn't expect it to be quite so. But people of all stripes and colors, the human spirit is alive and you wouldn't know it if you lent to where that other part of narrative and reality is Right, but that other part of narrative and reality and this is.
Douglas:It's a shame, but I'm starting to believe that the whole narrative of the internet is just bullshit. Yeah, and that even you know I've got so many friends who get so upset about, um, the way palestine's being portrayed, or the way israel is being portrayed, or the way climate is getting distorted, or the way a tv show distorts kamala, or uh apologizes for her or for Trump. It's like, on a certain, not to turn away from reality, but maybe turning away from that is turning to reality rather than away from it.
AJ:Couldn't agree more. We have well like that independent guy in the Maine state legislature that was too, by the way. His partner has now set up a thing because she became the youngest female state senator in Maine to come back a few years Then she didn't stand again because she wanted to go set up a training organization, help other people stand with this MO to get out and directly meet people and speak to people. And it's gone gangbusters and within a year and a half there are now 38 people who've been through that program that are standing at this federal election, and it just emphasises for me where reality is, or the reality where you can experience our humanness. That is still there and you would be forgiven for thinking that if you watch too much of the TV or got too online in these spaces.
AJ:But or and with that, what's been really interesting to me is to observe shifts in media. So that's right in your wheelhouse, of course. I'm seeing a proliferation of worker-owned co-op media, of even good, old-fashioned local media that's actually going really well and is trusted. So the closer it is to home or the closer it is to the ground, maybe even in New York with Hellgate, for example, there's a whole stack of these proliferating in Australia too, and even in Prince. So what's happening there?
Douglas:Yeah, how does that happen and?
AJ:even in print. So what's happening there? Yeah, how does that happen? But there seems to be something emerging where we can explore a narrative that is grounded, and the stories are there. What do you know?
Douglas:Right, you move from I mean it's been my work lately from figure to ground, yeah, from the subject on the TV to the ground, the environment in which it's happening. It's interesting. It's partly been for me a Jewish intellectual problem, right, because Jews, as perennial foreigners, have never been grounded in the places where they go. So Jews kind of invented ideas and media abstractions to embrace their experience that weren't as grounded as local peoples in place.
Douglas:I mean, they tried, they had the lunar cycle, they had a very temporal thing which is grounding in its own way, but it led to universalism and the enlightenment and all of that stuff and eventually nation states and national mythologies and all which may have had a certain purpose but have overstayed their welcome. So a lot of it has to do, I think, with not just Jews but sort of the intellectual community who've used philosophy and abstraction to help humans negotiate more, you know, more peaceful outcomes, to look and say, okay, there's a limit to that sort of European Union-like understanding of stuff. Or the United Nations, those great goals that people wear that pin, and they're all great goals, the sustainability goals, they're great, but there's a limit to how well that style of thinking can address this ultimately spiritual, organismic priority.
AJ:That's really interesting to hear you say that. I've had some conversations across the country about this, with people, for example, who are organizing the well-being economies movement and you know I come out of a systems thinking lineage too right, and that was of enormous value to me People like you've had on the show, like Nora Bateson, for example, or Rian Eisler.
Douglas:Yes, exactly these folks who are looking at how do we value the caring in an economy and how do we move away from GDP and all that. This is the thing all that.
AJ:Yeah, this is the thing, but a cohort of that and I was on board with it going back a bit was how can then we organize to be in our meta associations and get stronger and more strategic, like it makes a certain sense, but then they've been disappointed again and again, and again yeah, because how do we?
Douglas:I mean, it's the question. I always get it and I never know what to say. I do now but, uh, all right, yeah, that's good idea, but how do we scale it?
AJ:Yes, exactly Do you want to scale it.
Douglas:What if it just works where you're doing it right now and other people can model it? You can talk about it, so other people can try it, but you just don't. What if scale?
AJ:is the actual problem, 100%. And what if you can help people do it in their places, whether it be a food hub or community supported agriculture, whether it be running for office, like what if you just help people in their places do that? So it's interesting. It's like you don't want to. If you were purely ground, you'd never have the perspective that systems, thinking or the philosophical traditions you're talking about, spiritual traditions can offer. So you don't want one or the other in excess. It's like well, my old mentor used to literally call it a dance and try and get as close as you can to in both places at once. So not too grounded, but certainly not too abstract. And it makes me really interested, having listened to a bit of your current experiences through Team Human. You've said that this time in your life, while being perhaps the most painful, has been liberating and there has been a sense of some magic in the air. So I'm really interested to hear, having seen that pattern in people around the place right, how it is playing out for you.
Douglas:These are the best of times. These are the worst of times. You know. The almost the darkest way I could look at it would be my capacity to metabolize my own and other people's and the collective trauma through compassion has increased. So in some ways, I'm processing a whole lot more and carrying a whole lot less. I really used to have a model as a kind of responsible Jewish father male. I really used to have a model as a kind of responsible Jewish father male, following some of the rules that I'm responsible for other people, I'm responsible for this whole fucking thing, and I've really shifted that orientation. No, I'm responsible to everyone, but I'm not really responsible for everyone, and that's been an important shift. But for the most part, I'm learning to live in an entirely new way, with making sort of less kind of Google calendar type commitments into the future and I'm giving myself much more slack to decide things in the moment without letting other people down.
Douglas:But, it's funny, I was with one person having this conversation and I got a sign that I didn't even follow, a sign that it would be okay to cancel everything else in the day in order to spend more time with this person.
Douglas:And I kind of ignored or didn't really see the sign till later and I was like, oh, that was a sign it was. A name of a person came up and that person I had seen 30, 40 years ago and that person had shown up at a moment in my life where I changed plans radically, when that person showed up at a party and ended up being at the Mondo 2000 house overnight in 1991 and experienced things that set me off writing my next three books, because I just had the courage to go okay, I'm going to cancel this really super important interview in order to stay with these people for the rest of this crazy night and see what's happening. And the woman's name came up again in this later conversation that I really wanted to stay in. And then when I was in the car after I had left, I was like the reason that woman's name came up was it was the sign from the weird that I should change the script. And so I'm learning to read the I Ching of the landscape you know what I mean.
Douglas:The omens in a different way and move through life that way. And that's not magical thinking in the DSM-IV, you know it's not a psychological fault.
Douglas:It's letting intuition and pattern recognition play out in the strange ways that they do and sort of moving through life as a spontaneous dance. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that as mentorship for everybody. It's great mentorship for someone like me who has lived chained to an overgrown codependent sense of responsibility to everyone and everything around me. So it's good for me to balance that out with a bit of gregariousness, spontaneity, openness to what's happening. But I'm also redesigning my life to be open to that and to welcome in these possibilities of non-doom. You know, yeah, you know, it sort of goes hand in hand in some ways.
AJ:It does. It does Because there's a wonder and a joy and a similar thread that I see playing out on the ranches, for example, that are regenerating landscapes in sometimes extraordinary ways, Like they defy rational belief. What's happening? And they're doing it with everything from an African bushman sensibility, you know, of connecting with country and walking bare feet through rugged terrain, to, you know, pendulum testing and so forth, or dowsing not even off the land but off a map, but they're going straight to the water, Like it's happening Right.
Douglas:And it's basically saying that some person that you might look at as some right-wing rancher macho dude with a cowboy hat is as weird as the most indigenous seed harvesting sharing lady in India doing biodiverse. You know ancient farming techniques.
AJ:This is why I love it. You find these connections, the human spirit, and in ways that I was, let's say I mean I think East talked about it on your recent episode too, didn't he? I was certainly taught out of, or it was taught out of me, whichever but you find what it is, what those Andaman Islanders were sensing, perhaps some of that, and you think, wow, that's available to me here and now, just right where I am. And then what I see play out is a sensibility that then becomes really well recognised across these ranching communities where things are working right where it's not so hard and stressful and debt-laden and subject to the multinationals and land going to pot, et cetera, is that the pressure is off?
AJ:because, similar to the way you phrased, how you've gone from that burdensome approach to responsibility to a different form of presence to being there for and with, but not thinking you can save the world.
Douglas:Right.
AJ:Let's face it, it's that old colonial viewpoint.
Douglas:I'll come and rescue the joint.
AJ:So what these farmers will commonly say now is that, wow, so I don't have to, I don't even have to regenerate the land. I don't have to. I don't even have to regenerate the land. I just have to have the right frame of mind, the right internal presence, and then go and learn some practical steps.
Douglas:Yes, and there's people out teaching that. Now I forgot who he is Someone I was supposed to have on the show who was out there. They're teaching farmers how to do regenerative agriculture.
AJ:It's coming up everywhere. You know Well exactly the point is, it's not that hard because you basically get nature at your back.
Douglas:Right.
AJ:Instead of going headlong into a confrontation in an unwinnable effort to be in.
Douglas:Congress. So it's about you know, and the way that they sell it to the farmers is how would you like to spend? You know, 80% less on your soil inputs? You know.
AJ:For a start.
Douglas:that's right yeah and be less addicted to Monsanto, you know. And then people will invariably say what do I do about the bugs?
AJ:Indeed, and I had one person say wait five minutes because then the predator will come in for the bugs. And then, when you get the what it's called ecological function kicks in. When you get back over the threshold of degradation we've been in for too long, where you think you need more inputs, then the cycles kick in. I've seen with farmers infestations of disease on plants that will then be corralled and not spread because the the microbiome yeah is now equipped again to do its thing.
AJ:So it's not utopia, but it was even in biggestgest Little Farm. You know the film that screened and almost won an Oscar a bunch of years ago. That was their story of coming from LA to a farm and a whole interesting thing of how that happened too. And they play out on film some of this stuff. They're like they don't want to use chemicals and they're restoring this land that's gone to crap, but then they've got these bugs destroying their cattle and what do they do? And they're trying non-chemical approaches. It's not working, and but then they'll. It'll be something completely left to field that needed to be introduced or reintroduced, and and that works. But then something's. Then the foxes are getting the chickens and we need the owl for the fox, or I can't remember the specifics, but they ended up piecing it together.
AJ:And that's where I come back to that woman, nicole Masters, who says commonly, just wait five minutes, let nature regather its capacity to respond Right, and they see it play out a lot and to enormous effect, and then to come full circle on. You know where we've come from in our conversation, I think. How then does that apply to us If we were just to occasionally wait. Right, or Tyson said it on occasion. Wait for the invitation, just wait five minutes.
Douglas:Right.
AJ:See what bubbles up and see if that appointment you know you really thought you had to make is the one Right.
Douglas:It is that. It's really. That's why I wrote Present Shock back, when so much about it is about time non-management. But it is that it's also the idea that you know, uh-oh, there's no time, so I better slow down.
AJ:Yes, that's right. When you were talking with east about this, I remembered your conversation with jenny odell about chronos, or yeah, yeah and that book continued to reverberate even in australia, and beautifully so, like this just one understanding of time that we've just got so fixated on, and it was so digitally compatible this chronos idea it just works with digital, exactly, but it doesn't work with this human thing.
Douglas:You know, it's the latitude and longitude lines of, and it was so digitally compatible. This Kronos idea it just works with digital, exactly, but it doesn't work with this human thing. You know, it's the latitude and longitude lines of the ocean. It ignores all the waves.
AJ:Yes, oh yes, and if we didn't have waves, we couldn't surf, I know.
Douglas:There we go. The surfer really doesn't care whether he's on 37.91 or 37.92.
AJ:No and the surfer really doesn't want to care about whether he's got an hour to surf or two or three either. So yeah, a good surf is a well, I was just saying good surf is a timeless one A good anything may be a timeless one Right, but a good surfer.
Douglas:Even if it was all like it looked mostly shitty or all shitty, they're happy for the one that they got.
AJ:The waiting is part of the joy, 100%, and that's partly because then, wow, it's all bound up, isn't it? Because I think so much of why we don't want to wait is because we've made things pretty shitty experiences in between our destinations, like that traffic I came through to get here Like we're online at Disneyland.
Douglas:Yes, exactly.
AJ:But what if it didn't have to be that way? And we could well? There was actually a story last night at Reasons to be, Cheerful's fifth anniversary gala right, where there were a couple of women, Asian-American women, who had got together and had a dream that under the Brooklyn Bridge, which apparently had been laid waste for a whole bunch of time, derelict, ignored, everyone turned their back on it because then it becomes a place you don't want to go. This is the classic stuff, isn't it? A place you don't want to go and had a vision that it could and should be under this beautiful bridge and bridges are meant to connect anyway Farmers, markets and kids' playgrounds and festivals and so forth and have gone and made it happen, and their message was like what's in your place that you really? That's a knot in it. You know what would you like to see there and maybe you should mention it to someone.
Douglas:and see what happens. So you were doing this podcast in australia. Yeah, in what town are you in?
AJ:there. Well, I'm based in, well, I have been based in, perth, the only city on the West Coast.
Douglas:Yeah.
AJ:But the podcast started in 2017, but in a way, its essence started in 2018, because a whole bunch of factors converged and that's when we felt strongly as a little trinity of a family my wife and my young son he was four at the time, he's 10 now doing this, with us now traveling the States doing it. But in 2018, we felt like a moment had come. You know, 20, 25 years in sustainable development, work systems, thinking, teaching and postgrad at university. I needed to get to know my country properly and directly and by that stage I knew the people that we've been talking about, some of the ranchers in Australia around the place, and not just Aboriginal communities like you started with, and people of all walks really. But there's a lot of rural terrain, as there is here 97% of the states rural I've recently found out be similar in australia and I needed to get out there and learn about australia in a way I hadn't learned about it through the eyes of the people regenerating were you like a?
AJ:phd in something I was on the cusp because, I was heading up this school and the expectation was that I and what field? Phd, so I'd got a master's of international development and community development. Right, yeah, so this would have been. Then you moved In what field? I had a PhD, so I'd got a Master's of International.
Douglas:Development and Community Development. Right yeah, so this would have been. Then you moved towards, like training people to go join UNESCO and things like that, except I never did.
AJ:See, this is where you take another step back. And what I did after playing music through my 20s when the band ended yes, I love the story. When the band ended, I headed to Latin America and, on theme, I didn't know where I wasn't with an organization. I just had a vague feeling that I had to go there and I would find a place that will be home, where I will be given accommodation and food and I will be theirs. And it didn't pan out easy Like I thought it was one place, I thought it was another place and it wasn't. And I thought why am I even doing this? What am I here for? It seems stupid.
AJ:The third place, and a nod to Fray Bartolome de las Casas in Alta Verapaz, guatemala, that became home for three years, exactly, in fact not only exactly as I had imagined, but not in its detail, but certainly in its generality. But as soon as I got off the bus, I knew, and I just picked a spot off a map. When I was in that down and out space, I said I don't know where I'm going there. There's even a longer story to that. But as soon as I got off the bus in this town, I knew it. And, sure enough, within a few days it was set up and a few years it was home. So then I came home and did this master's, because I thought I need to test what I've observed in the field against the body of knowledge and see if I'm how deluded.
Douglas:I am.
AJ:It's fair to say that by the end of that I learned a lot. I was determined to learn about the way the systems work because I had largely ignored them, feeling quite disenchanted by the world as it was in my 20s, in the 90s, and playing grunge music as I was. But at the end of that degree and bless my university as I was able to cherry pick people to learn from around the country and compile it into one degree, it was a lot of full circle. So the resolutions I'd left Guatemala with and that was actually where we started the conversation that it's not so much about the SDGs, and bless the people who are working on that.
AJ:So let a thousand flowers bloom is still my overarching ethos, but I felt like more of us need to be more grounded. So I went and worked for the local government for a while in a high migrant diversity Aboriginal diversity area in Perth. This was my first stab at it and then that ultimately leads to these experiences we're talking about here. So I wasn't headed for that classic international development realm but I was looking at how can we make it the norm for the human presence in the world to function well. And it was on a trajectory that was plain as day to a bunch of us then, as it was to the ones we learned from further back that it wasn't on a healthy trajectory and we're sort of seeing it play out in that macro way. But wow, are we seeing the substrate, the cultural substrate shift, I think as well, underneath that over that period of time?
Douglas:And I don't think it's in that fake way, nothing against the 60s or the 70s or the 80s or anything, but it doesn't feel like the sort of pyramid scheme of the New Age movement. And you know, getting your 300 hours of yoga and crystals so that you could be a certified teacher versus an expert teacher versus a teacher of teacher and an expert teacher of expert teachers. You know these, these everything turned into some. You know, yuppie, scum, scam, um, or greenwashing, or white liberal westerners feeling good about, uh, the, the marginal impact they're having on systemic trashing of everything.
Douglas:I no longer feel like it's a cop-out when people ask me what's our last best hope against climate change and I say magic. I don't feel like that's a cop-out anymore. I feel like and by saying it deliberately and by validating it, I feel like I make it stronger. You know that the sigil itself is like oh no, rush, cop, he's got phd, he's uh, he's saying magic. Well, what does he mean by magic is the next thing. Oh well, now I'll tell you what I mean by magic. I mean we've got to change that. If everyone in the world decided at this moment that this mattered to them, it would change in a second.
AJ:Oh, it's so interesting to hear your perspective with another generation on me about that longer picture. It resonates with me that observation about how it's different now. And I also think there's something when I see the magic playing out with the people you don't expect, like they're so far from those characterisations and it's so grounded, like I will hear some words that I still balk at, like really Okay, but I'll see the reality on the land that's playing out and know that that led to that Like it's playing out, and know that that led to that, like it's that thinking and that way that led to that. And you know what else I think of? I can't help but think of the Republican contender for president again right now, because if there's anything he's doing, it appears to be an attempt at the sort of magic you're describing.
AJ:I'm just going to say whatever I want to see, and I can imagine for him, having had it work before and work in other contexts too, that he's just there going. Yeah, this is how the world works.
Douglas:That's reality TV, if you really think about what that means. Reality TV, okay. So if I can get it in the TV, I can make it into reality.
AJ:Yeah.
Douglas:It's a sort of updated Norman Vincent Peale, think it grow it, make it happen, you know, win friends and influence. It's all part of that which he was raised on.
AJ:Yes.
Douglas:And it was the first time I had heard it really spoken about out loud was in the second Bush administration, where they were saying something to the effect of oh, yeah, but we don't respond to reality, we make reality.
AJ:You heard that, there you go.
Douglas:It's like oh right, you think it wish it to be true, only they're not doing it in the disciplined way that I would ask us to do it 100%.
AJ:And not only that, but I think there's also another difference. You know, when I said that the farmers have found nature at their back, when they've got in sync with things. I think that's what's on offer for us as well, when you want to actually play with integrity and sense nature's rhythms, not just exploit, Exploit them right.
Douglas:That's the graphic novel I'm doing now. A tech bros take a bunch of mushrooms and try to exploit what they've learned about how mycelia work rather than listen and resonate with it. There we go.
AJ:So what if we've got the offer? I mean if we marvel, you know a certain way, at Trump's success. But what if we've got the wind at our backs, if we can tap in to this, whereas if you're coming from that exploitative way, you'll always be a bit into the wind with that. So what could that?
AJ:do If we tap it well enough to be in the flow I mean again, you talked about this with East, didn't you? We experience it in micro, don't we, with music or with theatre or writing or whatever, and you get in that flow state, as it's commonly called, or you just maybe just get back in that sensory state that is our innate human legacy. Yeah, we see what it does. Then it produces magic, right? So what I was going to say? What could that do? I would say what is that doing? What is happening now?
AJ:When I go back to what I said before about seeing this emerging everywhere, like my serial networks bubbling up well ahead of where I'm ever going to get a grip on, much less organized much less planned, then perhaps it's in motion and if we're still sort of as I even hear some Indigenous folks say to me in recovering their culture and their stories, that it's fledgling again I mean Tyson says, you know it's so fragmented but it's still there.
AJ:But if we're coming at it A for the first time together, in totally different context now to what even they experienced, totally different context now to what even they experienced, and be from a point of I don't fledgling might be over um, selling it too short, but if we've still got a lot of what they call it in football commentary, a lot of upside I say yeah when you've had a poor first half, there's a lot of upside. Yeah, what if we're still in that phase that if we get really good at tapping this stuff, things could turn out in pretty interesting and possibly beautiful ways?
Douglas:Yeah, and worst case, we have a beautiful graceful compassionate ending together, as you always say, and I agree.
AJ:I mean, what else are you going to do? But there's a liberty in the fact that the approach is the same Right and the approach is the same Right. And the approach is joyful and magic, yeah, and creative. I think that's another part of the thrust, isn't it Sort of take the lid off? If something's been bubbling, let it take the lid off. Let it bubble up, because if there's ever a time for that, it's probably now.
Douglas:Yeah, I mean, I do understand the value of conservation and you know so. So we were talking before about, you know, limiting how much we travel yeah you know, if I go just to get a talk, to do money in some faraway place and spend all this jet fuel, I don't even understand this. Oh, you spend 17 more and they offset what you've done yeah, are you doing? That? Who are they giving the seven day? Giving it to a baby goat so it it can flourish while I pollute it? I mean, what are they doing?
AJ:I had a friend say once if you want to give it so a baby goat can do its thing somewhere, just do that right don't think it's offsetting your flight it couldn't be right.
Douglas:It's got. I mean I I just don't believe it, but anyway the idea we were even talking about, because you're here with your family but you're doing a long trip You're doing like a year-long trip through the States in a tent.
Douglas:It sort of justifies the one huge flight from Australia and back idea that well, what if we lived in a world where we decided people are allowed two big trips in their life, that a kid when they graduate high school, or at some point in college they can do a semester in some other place in the world. They get their big like the Mormons. You do your initial trip out there and then, after you retire, when you're old, you get a trip as the wife. What's the place that you really kind of always oh I always wanted to get back to dublin and you can go and see the rocks of your you know king, whoever you know, and see the original kilt of the tartans of whatever you do your one elderly trip as an elder, you know, maybe we could afford that with gas or whatever they fuel. Maybe we could. But it's a matter of sort of reducing the.
Douglas:I think it does involve reducing energy expenditure but, doing it in a way that doesn't feel like self-denial.
AJ:Well, that's right, and that's where the other part of that is like the get to know your own country bit, the amount of times we've heard with the places we've been across the States from people I've never been there. I don't with the places we've been across the states from people. I've never been there. I don't know the places you've gone to and so, by extension, then I've never had the conversations you've had that show me my country in a whole different light than the tv is, for example yeah so I've.
AJ:It's been really interesting to then find ourselves in this position where a number of people here have said and some with tears in their eyes, thank you for reflecting that back to me. That's an understanding of my country I thought was lost. So there's a part of it which is also to say getting grounded grounded, not flying can be super rich just on that level of not being a sacrifice. But I also like Ephra frame in terms of the flying, and it's funny because it sort of it dovetails a bit into our personal experience. In a sense, the States is that place for us of where would we go one more time? Because my wife and I, even before we'd met, had drawn a line under international travel in 2007. So 17 years passports lapsed, had no intention to go again.
AJ:We thought let's leave some atmospheric space, if you will, for the next generations. We've had a good fill. Yeah, there'd be more than one, you know, a music trip to India as well, but then that obviously living in Guatemala time. So we drawn a line under it. But then this call, so this intuitive thing started bubbling up. We let that play out for two years before we actually decided to do this, such as the you know I'm still very humble in the face of having made this decision. I hope it was the right decision. On net, you know it still has big impact. We're hoping slow travelling while we're here and that we're making some kind of contribution. This is what we hope and whatever guided us here. Let's say that that will deliver on why.
AJ:So, there's a bit of that too, but I do like the idea that, if we navigate transitions well, that that might be possible and that, for example, a healthy internet might remain. I could continue to listen to you on a podcast.
Douglas:There's parts that are. You know, it's not that hard to stay away from the platforms that are attempting to create the illusion of a total propaganda environment.
AJ:Yes.
Douglas:You can pick and choose what you see online and the internet just becomes like it's like your telephone. You don't have to talk to those people you don't want to talk to. You know, and it's not even I don't see it ostrich in the sand, I think it's just. I don't have to listen to people who are intentionally coercing me, who are intentionally trying to destabilize and decalibrate me, to make me vulnerable to their fucking bullshit. A hundred percent.
AJ:You said it. It's not that hard when you put your mind to it and maybe get some assistance. So I had a guest come on the podcast, on the Regeneration podcast, who used the metaphor of a media diet to say, yeah, have a bit of junk let's say but imbalance, and be selective and monitor how it affects your health, because it does.
Douglas:It was a good metaphor.
AJ:She set up a thing called the Global News Literacy Network or something to that effect, but it was a good metaphor for it in terms of A it's within your power. B it's not distinct from what you're well, probably at least trying to do with food or other parts of your life. And ultimately, yeah, not that hard. And that's another form of hope too, then, and I guess you know, then I think, about the media outlets I'm seeing coming on, let alone ours and other portals you can trust from a variety of perspectives too. I might add that you can curate a pretty nice diet.
Douglas:And you will find out that the more local the source usually if it's covering local news the more accuracy you'll get. So you can get international news in broad strokes as best as some college graduate in a Rockefeller Center can understand a press release from Bibi Netanyahu. They're going to try. They're going to try, but it's like these are broad. You really think any of us around understand what's actually going on between Israel and the Palestinian?
AJ:Authority or something right now.
Douglas:No, these are these games that they're playing and their public statements versus their private doings, and you can see the bodies and the people dying and it's just like, no, you don't understand, you don't, there's. No, you know you're going to have to also go with a pretty broad stroked brush in your political response which is just less weapons, less violence.
Douglas:Stop, please. There's not much else that I know from here, but locally you can start to get some granularity and it's like well, yeah, are they going to clear-cut that little patch of forestry woods we have downtown? Are they going to put an artificial turf field there? Why do we want that? And who's you know going to fire the superintendent of schools?
AJ:because he did what I thought that's a good thing.
Douglas:You know that where you can actually have a difference in that does ripple out. If it doesn't scale, it ripples.
AJ:It's a mycelial network. Yeah yeah, I've seen enough of it to be convinced and, like I said, I'd come from the other side to organize, you know.
Douglas:Right.
AJ:Yeah, and I've seen enough of it to be convinced that if your interest is in a real shifting culture, this isn't tinkering at the edges. That's not tinkering at the edges. That's the substrate of culture, right? So that's the mycelial network.
Douglas:I know Even Western medicine's finally accepted that acupuncture is real. What is that? It's one tiny little needle in one tiny little place. It's supposed to affect a whole organ system. Yeah, turns out it does right so be that acupuncture needle rather than trying to sledgehammer your way through this thing 100%.
AJ:It's not that hard, so you're.
Douglas:So you're saying now you're on this side, what do you? What do you do to, like, feed your child? How do you? I know you put food, you put food in its mouth, but um, but, but like, how do you? How do you sustain yourself with the podcast? Is that just good?
AJ:question. So yes is the short answer. So the way things have gone like I just thought I'll commit to that year when we went around australia yeah and then assess and halfway through the year we got a bump in listens. I was like, oh, people are tuning in, what do you know? And humble at the time. You know, something like 1500 downloads came out of nowhere.
AJ:It's like whoa, people are listening. And then by the end of the year that had grown a bit more and I got home and people were saying, wow, your podcast still podcast. Still a humble scale, but enough to go. Okay, maybe I'll keep going. And then dad was going through his illness and then a couple of years later, dies.
AJ:I never really got my act together to set up subscription platforms or the like, but, bless to anyone who's listening, I guess this might go out on the regeneration as well. People started to offer money and I would say to them what can I give you for that? And they would say to me are you kidding me? You're already doing it. And then, a few months after that, I did manage to finally set up, you know, a Patreon page and still feared, you know, even four years in, that it would fall flat and be entirely embarrassing. A big launch of a Patreon page and two people jump on and you'd be exposed as no one really cares, you know. But bless, people got on. So it's humble, but it keeps trickling in the right direction and we live. I mean, you said tent right.
AJ:So, we live humbly but we find that rich. The places we go with that tent are pretty cool.
Douglas:Yeah.
AJ:And then you know, we get the motels or, obviously, friends and some ranches we stay at. So it's the human spirit, it's the generosity of people, whether it be their places, whether it be their subscriptions or donations, is college free in Australia. No, but I mean with our kid. He's not quite high school age, so even with high school, we sort of what will we do? I don't know, We'll keep an eye on what turns him on, but, it's fair to say, his learning has exploded.
AJ:Yeah, over this six-year journey, so he should get a full scholarship. Yeah, that's right, but in terms of college it's not as full-on as here. But it's mimicking the model. It's going that way. But that's interesting you should say too, because it's been a while now, since even a lot of the courses that I used to teach, that my mentor used to teach, that other people I really respect used to teach the universities in their neoliberal shifts have been shutting them down.
Douglas:I know and there's less the university education. I hate to say it is less and less useful.
AJ:I hate to say it too. You know, we just started.
Douglas:we're just starting the program. I have a master's program here at Queens College. We just it was Josh's idea we're going to launch a certificate program, postgraduate certificate program, so that people can just come and not worry about degrees and this. You just come and take courses that you want. It's actually we're not offering, in some ways, the main thing that universities pretend to offer, which are these official credential chips. No one really cares about those little official credential chips anymore.
Douglas:It's what time are they spending and what value are they getting from that, you know. So we're kind of going to shift to that and just have a program. Oh, you just want to learn stuff? Okay, just come then.
AJ:That's exactly what I did. I did the same thing, and the only reason I haven't gone on with it is because this journey kicked in and we're like, we're mobile and all over the place, but I can feel it coming back, and I've had some chats with people around the states on that level too. I couldn't agree more. It's just let's find the ways that are relevant today. Yeah, to learn that don't put the burden that then makes you captive to the system needing to make the market rate salary or whatever.
AJ:So I've dodged bullets with that. I don't have those massive debts. I got a little bit, but not huge.
Douglas:But I really respect that you were able to do this with a young person. I mean, part of what I'm graduating from now is a very I would say, archaic, but that gives it too much credit an old traditional understanding of how a parent needs to be responsible to their child. I need to be responsible by having a nice suburban home, by having a good high school, by paying for college and all and not really having the guts to do what I would do if I did it over. It's like let's join a kibbutz, yeah, and co-parent with seven or 10 or 20 other couples and play in the dirt and you know the village upbringing.
Douglas:Yeah.
AJ:In a way. I mean it's dispersed, but not entirely. I was going to say it's dispersed village upbringing that our boy Yeshi's getting, but not entirely Entirely. I was going to say it's dispersed village upbringing that our boy Yeshi's getting, but not entirely, because certainly back home a bunch of those, I mean a bunch of these farmers and ranchers, are now besties and we see them regularly and we eat their food, like it's straight from them to us and it's the best you can get. And so his village is a different village to what perhaps we might have expected and it's different.
Douglas:I was telling people about this. I think it was on the show. It was in South Dakota, speaking at a college there, and they're all farm kids and I'm talking about the environment and all Some kid comes up. You know total overalls. You know he works on the farm. He gets to go to college now. And he's like well you know, I know what you're talking about, but you know, like basically don't assume anything because we're a, we're a 100, no till, no till, farm what do you know?
Douglas:it's like oh, so you understand? Yeah, I understand. Regenerative agriculture I'm not gonna turn this. I'm not gonna ruin this topsoil. I'm gonna try to keep it. I want my grandkids to keep it. It's like holy fuck holy fuck this, this, this apparently perhaps even trump voting right wing.
AJ:You know, anti, whatever person is, is still more of an environmentalist than I would even know't. So divided, I wish there were other options and it demonstrates the spirit. It's the understanding of what to do. It diverges perhaps, sure, but the spirit's there. The wish for something better is there and I think the options for better are there. I mean the political options, the ones, the candidates who are going out and just speaking to people, and I guess you know I should also say this marries on to an experience in Australia where our federal parliament completely transformed at the last federal election two years ago, with seven or eight new independent, brilliant women being elected to parliament.
AJ:And it looks like that will continue. It will happen again next year. There will be no majority government and that probably won't happen again for some time, because the genie's out of the bottle. People are like even in again, even in conservative areas, when they get a taste of what actually being heard is like, like, I'll stick with you, thanks yeah, and there are increased majorities right.
Douglas:Well, that's what all the deep canvassing movement here is about. Exactly, you go to someone's door and you listen and you reflect back to them the shared values and they're like oh, we're all in this together. It's interesting your American experience and I suppose Odyssey and Return Home it makes me think a little of like de Tocqueville, that you're sort of journeying through America and seeing us in a way that we maybe can't see ourselves. Is there a book or something at the end of this, do you think?
AJ:Or are you going to stay in real time and podcast your way through life? Oh, douglas, very prescient question. I think there is, but I don't even know if I can do a book. Am I good enough? Can I do this? I've written, but I've never written a book. So I look at you, you know, humbly in that sense, trotting them out well as you do. But yes, I feel it because it feels as much. There are stories, almost, you know, between the ticks on the clock. There are stories between the podcasts and there are threads, and then there's the bit I don't even know what else I've got to say, but there's something else to say, and there's what has been reflected back from people here that I didn't expect, and so I do feel like a still time is next and I will start to write and we'll see what happens.
Douglas:Cool.
AJ:Well, I'll be looking forward to that. Well, look, thanks. Oh, thank you, douglas, for Team Human and great to be around a table with you mate, I know, live, live In New York. Live in New York, I could scarcely believe the words. But yeah, I'm looking forward to reading your new edition of Program or Be Programmed. It's very relevant because it comes up often. Our boy's been reading Cory Doctorow's stuff.
Douglas:Oh yeah.
AJ:And Program or Be Programmed. It's in the zeitgeist, it's just again. It's a great metaphor to use for everything. Yeah, it's nice. So he has imbibed that. So I said to him today I'm going to meet Douglas, so the fact that the new edition is coming out now is brilliant too. So congrats on that.
Douglas:Yeah, and people can buy it anywhere, even in Australia, of course yeah, and I encourage it.
AJ:And your theatre production. Is that still coming along?
Douglas:Not really. I'm starting a film, though.
AJ:That's what you talked about with East.
Douglas:Yeah, kind of a weird one-man movie where I'm going to try to talk the world down off its bad trip. AJ: There we go. DR: yeah. AJ: I like it. DR: I talked myself down off mine. I figure I can apply that skill to everyone.
AJ:That was Douglas Rushkoff, best-selling author, filmmaker and host of the Team Human podcast. I took a walk with Douglas after our conversation, alongside his producer, Josh Chapdelaine, during which we marvelled at the sight of bees and lizards on campus. They'd never seen a single lizard in this bustling urban place before. It is truly bubbling up everywhere. Links in the show notes with more for subscribing members as always in great thanks for making this episode possible. You can join us by heading to the website or the show notes and following the prompts. Thanks, too, for sharing and rating the podcast, and take good care this week. M y name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening.
