Rushkoff shares his first real foray into the world of Artificial Intelligence. After years of avoiding the technology, Douglas takes us through a vibe coding journey using Claude to rebuild his personal website in five hours.

But this isn't a tech tutorial. Douglas weighs the incredible creative potential of AI against its heavy unseen costs: environmental destruction, resource depletion, and labor displacement. He contrasts his vision for a peer-to-peer Amazon killer built by social activists with the chilling surveillance infrastructure being developed by tech billionaires like Larry Ellison.

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Have you ever had that feeling in your gut, when you suddenly realize that the person you’re talking with might have a screw or two loose? What about when you’re the one others are trying to slowly back away from at the punch bowl?

The question of who’s the real nut often arises for us collapse-aware folks living here in Crazy Town. Since Mr. Peanut is no longer returning their phone calls, hosts Rob, Jason, and Asher invited Rushkoff to answer the question. In this far ranging conversation, they discuss why “leveling down” might be the best strategy for navigating late stage capitalism and bringing ourselves back into right relationship with each other and the planet.

You can stream and subscribe to Crazy Town wherever you get your podcasts.

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Can we decolonize reality itself?

Rushkoff is joined by Jeffrey Kripal, Associate Dean and Professor at Rice University, to discuss his book The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities Kripal argues that by stripping away the impossible parts of our history - visions, precognition, and altered states - we have essentially lobotomized the humanities, leaving us with a depressing, purely political version of ourselves.

Together, they explore:

• The Secular Flatland: Moving beyond a strictly materialist worldview that reduces human beings to data points.
• The Vertical Dimension: Why extraordinary experiences are more common than we admit and how they serve as a first-person way of knowing the world.
• The Marketing Problem: Why the humanities should embrace the "Superhuman" to reclaim their transformative, ecstatic power.
• Reality Hacking: How literature and art function as non-specific amplifiers for consciousness.

It’s time to put the weird back on the table and acknowledge that the human experience is far more fantastic than our current systems allow.

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In this urgent monologue, Rushkoff explores the heartbreaking crisis of modern faith. As religious identities are weaponized by nationalism, literalism, and holy war narratives, from Christian Zionism to the defense of the nation-state, we find ourselves trapped in a linear, Axial Age story that may no longer serve a digital, all-at-once humanity.

In this episode, Rushkoff discusses:

- The Brand of Religion: How the conduct of states like Israel and the rise of Christian Nationalism are making traditional faith feel untenable for the people who hold it.-

- The Literalism Trap: Why treating a transcendental narrative as a "real estate deed" kills the spiritual project.

- Media Theory of God: How the shift from the Age of the Book to a new media environment requires us to graduate from religion rather than be destroyed by it.

- The Two Anti-Semitisms: Navigating the crossfire between the Right’s hatred of "globalists" and the Left’s critique of colonialism.

Is it time to retire these ancient institutional containers before they lead us to a self-fulfilling Armageddon? Or can we retrieve the living, human layers of our faiths and bring them forward into a new, restorative context?

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The tech elite are wielding occult power, but we have the imagination.

Join us in the live chat for our first-ever Team Human Premiere! Douglas Rushkoff sits down with legendary comic writer and chaos magician Grant Morrison for a deeply urgent conversation about reclaiming reality.

Morrison argues that magic isn't just the supernatural; it's a mundane, everyday tool of collective agreement that we are all already using. While billionaires use algorithmic binding spells to predict our moves and trap us in a boring, materialist nightmare, we possess the ultimate counter-measure: our collective imagination.Finding the others is no longer enough. It's time to stop being NPCs in someone else's sterile simulation and start authoring our own pro-human reality.

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The digital world promises a frictionless existence of infinite growth, convenience, and total scale. But what happens when that virtual map starts consuming the real territory? Rushkoff reflects on his recent appointment to the Club of Rome and their legendary 1972 warning: The Limits to Growth.

From the massive water and energy drained by AI data centers to Jeff Bezos' intentional dismantling of the Washington Post, Rushkoff breaks down how the tech elite are using the digital simulation to extract the last remaining value from the physical world. The oligarchs want a frictionless reality where they own the platform and avoid the messy negotiations of actual human connection. But reall life, and real democracy, requires friction. It requires the awkward, inefficient, and vital collisions of human beings sharing a local space. It is time to stop confusing the map with the territory. Find the others. Embrace the friction.

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Has the internet always been a magical space?

Shira Chess, a Professor of Entertainment and Media Studies at the University of Georgia and a leading scholar of digital folklore, dive into her new book, The Unseen Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse, to explore the hidden spiritual architecture of our digital lives.

From the open-source creation of digital cryptids like Slender Man on early forums to the summoning of AI entities in latent space, Chess argues that technology and magic have become indistinguishable. Rushkoff and Chess discuss how the countercultural, techno-shamanic roots of the 1990s internet (including the Mondo 2000 era) transformed into today’s algorithm-driven corporate landscape, and how we might reclaim our agency by finding subversive ways to use these technologies.

They also unpack algorithmic conspirituality, exploring why we treat our social media feeds like modern-day oracles, and how meme magic has evolved from an online joke into a force that shapes political reality. Ultimately, is our digital occultism a path to liberation, or just a new way to decorate our corporate cages?

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"Why are you in the Epstein files?"

It is a question Rushkoff received from his own daughter, and in this raw monologue, he gives the full answer.

His name appears in the CC field of emails from his former literary agent alongside Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and yes, Jeffrey Epstein. But the story of why those names were grouped together reveals something much darker than a mailing list.

Rushkoff recounts a disturbing mid-90s dinner party where he was physically grabbed by a host and scolded for "wasting his plus-one" on a brilliant female intellectual instead of "eye candy" to decorate the room for the male elites. He traces the lineage of this misogyny directly to the "scientism" of figures like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, whose theories of humans as "meat machines" and "survival vehicles for genes" provided the perfect philosophical cover for sociopaths like Epstein to commodify and abuse women.

This is not just a story about a predator; it is an indictment of the "permission structure" built by the scientific and tech elite. A worldview that dismisses human soul, consent, and morality as mere delusions.

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Is the online safety legislation moving through Congress actually a Trojan horse for mass surveillance? And do the tech billionaires building our future actually care if the rest of us survive it?

Rushkoff sits down with Taylor Lorenz, the internet’s premier culture reporter and founder of User Mag, to discuss her departure from legacy media (The New York Times, The Washington Post) and the dangerous reality of the new tech authoritarianism.

From the misogyny of the 2013 "Selfie" panic to the rise of "maximalist" human aesthetics, Lorenz and Rushkoff break down how to reclaim the internet from the billionaires who view humanity as a problem to be solved (or eliminated).

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Is magic just "positive thinking," or is it a causative force that can reshape reality?

Rushkoff sits down with occult historian and author Mitch Horowitz (Occult America, Daydream Believer) to explore the boundaries of will, belief, and the material world.

Rushkoff opens up about his own recent, startling experiences with magical workings regarding his daughter’s health, leading to a deep conversation about retrocausality: the idea that our present rituals might actually be influencing the past to change the future.

Together, they discuss:

- The "New Neighborhood": How to navigate the shifting reality and find the people (and entities) you are meant to be with.

- Trump as "Chaos Magician": Does the former president instinctively use chaos magic techniques to disrupt reality?

- The Power of the Wish: Why defining your true will is the most courageous (and frightening) act you can perform.

- AI & Consciousness: Why even transcendental meditation experts are starting to believe machines might tap into the "unified field."

- UAPs & Interdimensionality: Moving beyond the "nuts and bolts" spaceship theory to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon.

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#TeamHuman #Magic #Philosophy #Esoteric #Consciousness #AI

We are no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop: We are living in the aftermath. Rushkoff sits down with Jonathan Larsen, editor of The Fucking News, to ask the question: Now that we are soaking in authoritarianism, how do we get out?

While Rushkoff worries that the screen has been placed over the boiling pot, Larsen offers a crucial reframing: what we mistake for a grand fascist strategy is often just a lack of impulse control. He argues that diagnosing "fascism" can become a trap that leads to fatalism and paralysis. Instead, the most effective resistance is specific, tactical, and local.

From the Newtonian backlash inherent in voter suppression to the dangers of Larry Ellison’s Stargate DNA registry, Rushkoff and Larsen explore how to resist the urge to dehumanize our enemies, why we must stop looking for political saviors, and how to find the levers of power that still work.

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