Last Born In The Wilderness

I speak with writer, documentarian, and lecturer Douglas Rushkoff. Douglas has authored numerous best-selling books, including Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, and the yet-to-be released Team Human. Douglas’s lifetime of work has focused primarily on human autonomy in the digital age. We start this episode by discussing Douglas’s widely shared article, published on Medium and picked up by CNBC, Survival of the Richest: The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind. In the article, Douglas describes a situation in which he was invited to a private meeting with several ultra-wealthy men to go over their questions regarding technological trends in cryptocurrency, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence, as well as their deep-seated concerns regarding “The Event”—a reference to the portending threat of abrupt climate change, nuclear war, social unrest, and econom