RUSHKOFF

Rushkoff breaks down why modern money acts like a forever chemical: A toxic, non-decaying asset designed to accumulate at the top of the pyramid rather than support living communities.

Rushkoff traces how central currencies replaced organic, local exchange systems to enforce debt and growth mandates. He exposes how this same extractive logic links legacy finance, crypto grifts, and the current AI token bubble, burning real-world resources to convert living human thought and energy into dead digital symbols.

Learn how we can resist the bullshit economy by shifting toward systems that favor flow, life, and human connection over permanent capital.

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Rushkoff sits down with renowned chef Benjamin Castro of Benjamin's Kitchen to explore the intersection of food, community, and what it means to nourish the human spirit. 

Chef Castro shares his journey, breaking down why food is more than just fuel.

🌍 Your support keeps Team Human alive! Support the show to receive ad-free access to videos, livestream Q&As with Rushkoff, access to the community Discord and more: https://www.patreon.com/teamhuman

🤝 Team Human is proudly supported by Groucho. You can take 50% off your first month by using promo code "teamhuman": https://mygroucho.club/teamhuman

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Are we so focused on saving the world that we’re forgetting how to care for it?  

Rushkoff explores the paralyzing ambient terror of the meta-crisis, polycrisis, and impending societal collapse. Recounting a transformative personal experience sitting at the bedside of a dying relative, Rushkoff re-evaluates the urge to fix everything through abstract strategies and grand interventions.

Instead of treating the future as an engineering problem to solve, what happens if we shift from being agents of change to agents of care? What if our most radical act of resistance isn't another techno-fix or activist bypass, but serving as death doulas for a failing industrial system, and birth doulas for the human-centered world waiting to take its place?  

🌍 Your support keeps Team Human alive! Support the show to receive ad-free access to videos, livestream Q&As with Rushkoff, access to the community Discord and more: https://www.patreon.com/teamhuman

🤝 Team Human is proudly supported by Groucho. You can take 50% off your first month by using promo code "teamhuman": https://mygroucho.club/teamhuman

Download Groucho: 

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Rushkoff sits down with author, podcaster, and scholar Conner Habib (Against Everyone with Conner Habib, Hawk Mountain) for a conversation about what we have to lose before anything can change.

They move from dying-before-you-die and the idea that civilization has not yet begun, into Rudolf Steiner's Ahriman -- the force of cold reduction that wants to convince us we're just biological robots.

🌍 Your support keeps Team Human alive! Support the show to receive ad-free access to videos, livestream Q&As with Rushkoff, access to the community Discord and more: https://www.patreon.com/teamhuman

🤝 Team Human is proudly supported by Groucho. You can take 50% off your first month by using promo code "teamhuman": https://mygroucho.club/teamhuman

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As President of The Atlantic and former Editor-in-Chief of Wired, Nicholas Thompson sits down with Rushkoff to discuss the precarious intersection of artificial intelligence, journalism, and American democracy.

Thompson breaks down how The Atlantic turned its business around using paywall optimization, why they chose to form a partnership with OpenAI instead of solely fighting them in court, and the economic incentives driving AI versus traditional social media.

Together, they explore the dangers of anthropomorphizing tech, the flaws in framing the U.S.–China tech dynamic as a winner-take-all race, and what it takes to protect an independent press.

🌍 Your support keeps Team Human alive! Support the show to receive ad-free access to videos, livestream Q&As with Rushkoff, access to the community Discord and more: https://www.patreon.com/teamhuman

🤝 Team Human is proudly supported by Groucho. You can take 50% off your first month by using promo code "teamhuman": https://mygroucho.club/teamhuman

Download Groucho:

Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/groucho/id6756526142?ct=teamhuman&mt=8

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Rushkoff breaks down the intellectual hubris driving Silicon Valley: Effective Altruism (EA), Longtermism, and AI accelerationism.

From Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX collapse to the tech oligarchs attempting to optimize human presence through code, Rushkoff exposes how treating human lives as simple spreadsheet inputs creates a dangerous ends justify the means worldview.

Drawing on philosophers like Albert Camus, Spinoza, and Martin Buber — and even recent statements from the Pope — Rushkoff argues that true moral action isn't calculated in hypothetical future outcomes, but lived out right now in local, face-to-face human connection.

🌍 Your support keeps Team Human alive! Support the show to receive ad-free access to videos, livestream Q&As with Rushkoff, access to the community Discord and more: https://www.patreon.com/teamhuman

🤝 Team Human is proudly supported by Groucho. You can take 50% off your first month by using promo code "teamhuman": https://mygroucho.club/teamhuman

Download Groucho:

Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/groucho/id6756526142?ct=teamhuman&mt=8

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trampoline.groucho&utm_source=website&utm_medium=landing&utm_campaign=teamhuman

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We once looked at pictures. Now, pictures are looking back at us. Renowned artist and author Trevor Paglen joins Rushkoff to expose how computer vision, generative AI, and algorithmic feedback loops are fundamentally reformatting human perception, labor, and democracy itself.

What happens to a society when its default assumption becomes that all media is untethered from reality? In this episode of Team Human, Douglas Rushkoff sits down with artist, activist, and geographer Trevor Paglen to discuss his groundbreaking new book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI.

🌍 Your support keeps Team Human alive! Support the show to receive ad-free access to videos, livestream Q&As with Rushkoff, access to the community Discord and more: https://www.patreon.com/teamhuman

🤝 Team Human is proudly supported by Groucho. You can take 50% off your first month by using promo code "teamhuman": https://mygroucho.club/teamhuman

Download Groucho: 

Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/groucho/id6756526142?ct=teamhuman&mt=8

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trampoline.groucho&utm_source=website&utm_medium=landing&utm_campaign=teamhuman

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Sophie Strand (author of The Flowering Wand and The Body Is a Doorway) joins Rushkoff for a conversation about breaking free from the dominant paradigms of our time.

Together, they challenge the Silicon Valley Sky God obsession with scaling up, critique the limitations of institutional think tanks, and dive into how modern systems have systematically stripped us of our foundational skills.

From the intelligence of mycelial networks to practical strategies for becoming "indigestible" and completely useless to AI, Strand offers a somatic framework for navigating civilizational crisis.

🌍 Your support keeps Team Human alive! Support the show to receive ad-free access to videos, livestream Q&As with Rushkoff, access to the community Discord and more: https://www.patreon.com/teamhuman

🤝 Team Human is proudly supported by Groucho. You can take 50% off your first month by using promo code "teamhuman": https://mygroucho.club/teamhuman

Download Groucho:

Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/groucho/id6756526142?ct=teamhuman&mt=8

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trampoline.groucho&utm_source=website&utm_medium=landing&utm_campaign=teamhuman

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Rushkoff breaks down the disturbing cultural shift toward Might Makes Right, a playground philosophy that values raw power, wealth, and violence over morality and mutual aid. 

From the organic, joyful street celebrations of the New York Knicks winning the NBA Finals to the surreal, hyper-industrial gladiatorial spectacle of the UFC erected right on the South Lawn of the White House, Rushkoff explores the stark contrast between human connection and authoritarian propaganda. 

He dives deep into why social Darwinism completely misunderstands the natural world, how nature actually favors cooperation, and why treating life like a prison yard game makes us all weaker. 

🌍 Your support keeps Team Human alive! Support the show to receive ad-free access to videos, livestream Q&As with Rushkoff, access to the community Discord and more: https://www.patreon.com/teamhuman

🤝 Team Human is proudly supported by Groucho. You can take 50% off your first month by using promo code "teamhuman": https://mygroucho.club/teamhuman

Download Groucho: 

Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/groucho/id6756526142?ct=teamhuman&mt=8

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trampoline.groucho&utm_source=website&utm_medium=landing&utm_campaign=teamhuman

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"The most useful framework is that our country’s been invaded. But like all great invasions, it involves new techniques." - Adam McKay

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Adam McKay (Don’t Look Up, The Big Short, Succession) dissects the urgent cultural, political, and planetary moment we are living through.

McKay brings a massive unified theory exploring how our prehistoric evolutionary limits - and the constraints of Dunbar’s Number - are colliding with a collapsing Holocene and modern corporate media systems designed to abstract us from reality.

From Leonardo DiCaprio's ad-libbed line that broke the crew on the set of "Don’t Look Up" to a clear-eyed diagnosis of the macro "Hail Mary" phase of climate adaptation, Rushkoff and McKay chart a path through doomerism. Together, they argue that surviving a post-Holocene world requires breaking the digital illusion, reclaiming pro-social local networks, and finding the holy act of mutual connection on the deck of the Titanic.

🌍 Your support keeps Team Human alive! Support the show to receive ad-free access to videos, livestream Q&As with Rushkoff, access to the community Discord and more: https://www.patreon.com/teamhuman

🤝 Team Human is proudly supported by Groucho. You can take 50% off your first month by using promo code "teamhuman": https://mygroucho.club/teamhuman

Download Groucho: 

Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/groucho/id6756526142?ct=teamhuman&mt=8

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trampoline.groucho&utm_source=website&utm_medium=landing&utm_campaign=teamhuman

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