Douglas Rushkoff (@rushkoff) is an author, teacher, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. He has been named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT.

Douglas' work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice.

Douglas is the author twenty books including bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus and is releasing his new book Team Human based off his podcast.

He has written and hosted three award-winning PBS Frontline documentaries – The Merchants of Cool looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, The Persuaders, about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance, and Digital Nation, about life on the virtual frontier. Most recently, he made Generation Like, an exploration of teens, marketers, and social media.

Douglas is also a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. His novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D, and Aleister & Adolf, are all being developed for the screen. Douglas also served as an Advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture and regularly appears on TV shows from NBC Nightly News and Larry King to the Colbert Report and Bill Maher.

In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover many things, including:
- The reason billionaires are planning for the "inevitable" apocalypse and why that's a big problem
- How broken the US political system is and how we can fix it
- The big issue with the stock market and venture capital and how we can reinvent business for the 21st century
- Why our future is in our hands and what we can do about it
- Which tech giants will get broken up and which will reign
- The problems with social media and plans to fight back
- How regulations affect business and monopolies and where we are headed
- Why people are pushing back against tech and how it impacts our world
- What Google's walkout means for the future of tech
- Why Douglas thinks companies are the key to changing our world
- The reason Douglas is very worried about growing inequality
- Why capital is the only thing that counts today
- How to redesign our education system for the modern era