Name: Douglas Rushkoff discusses the Stock Market & Corporations (from Joe Rogan Experience #346)
Uploaded: 2013-04-06T21:36:32.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Douglas Rushkoff discusses the Stock Market & Corporations (from Joe Rogan Experience #346)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2013-04-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Douglas Rushkoff discusses the Stock Market & Corporations (from Joe Rogan Experience #346)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2013-04-06. Transcript available.

the joe rogan experience all he's doing is playing some really crazy game that
was around before he
was ever born he just got into it and got really good at it yeah the game
itself is bananas just
the stock market itself just the idea that the wealth of of a person can vary
day by day because
of confidence you know confidence computer consumer confidence in a product and
like shift and change
with recall and then you watching these numbers go up and down like what the
are you even talking
about most of the explanations you see you know i watch these business sites
and the market will go
down and they say oh mark it down because of such and such in london and then
it's like by the time
that piece comes out that market's actually back up and they're already
constructing their you know
let's tie market going back up to another random feature you know it's like the
the the explanations
after the fact have so little to do you know with whatever some algorithm
decided it was going to
suddenly ultra fast trade something and and throw the stock up you know it's
like at this point
it's it truly is that's the best place to see humans combating machines is on
the market where
it's like there's human traders competing with these uh programmed algorithms
and the algorithms are
certainly winning the war and if you look at their screens while they're while
they're doing it it is
almost like code like the average person who doesn't understand it doesn't know
what the
the stock market's saying the symbols and the sao and this and that and the
ones and the zeros you
look at all that you have no idea what that is i mean how is that really
different than a computer
code that you're reading i mean that's essentially like a way that uh people
are are are tapping into
this bizarre system i mean it was at one time the sort of the price of
something had to do with
something right it's like there's a factory oh it's the factory went slower
today in the rain the
market will go down on that side it was like right real you know and i think it's
gotten certainly
further and further from whatever is going on in that company or the earnings
or the things you know
it's it's absolutely abstracted to the point now where people don't even invest
in companies
right right you invest in something like when facebook went public people
bought it at like
nine in the morning and like nine ten they're all pissed off that it hasn't
gone up it's like wait
a minute i was supposed to you know triple my wealth triple my wealth it's like
no you don't
you don't make money on the trade you're supposed to make money on when you've
when
you've done it but you know now we've got yeah you know derivatives and
derivatives of derivatives
and derivatives of derivatives of derivatives on there which is just a way of
kind of
shrinking the explain that for people don't know what that means so if you buy
a stock i
mean you know you buy stock and you hope it goes up and then you sell it in the
future
if you'd rather make up that time right now i can sell it in the future right
now right
i can basically sell that future sale because i think that sale is going to be
a good one
now right i can say what if i did that trade i'm going to i'm going to i'm
going to have it now but
when am i trading then i'm trading i'm trading on on an abstraction from what
something's going to be
worth at some moment in the future so it's like i'm trading on the stock over
time
and then someone else will say well i'm going to trade on the abstraction of
that i'm going to trade
on whether or not people think the stock in the future is going to be worth
more next minute than
this minute it's like well what's that so basically what you're doing is you're
buying
the stock over time over time over time over time over time you're creating
these things these
derivatives of whatever the original investment was which is kind of just a
derivative of the
thing right there's the pork belly this derivative of the pork belly
derivatives of the derivatives
derivatives of the derivatives of the derivatives of the derivatives all all
ever tighter ways of
saying what is pork belly going to be worth you know on february 3rd why is
that legal well it's legal
because what it because the economy requires it right we have a kind of money
right that has a clock in
it it's lent into existence and has to be paid back more than got lent out so
our economy needs to expand
by hook or by crook somehow it has to grow in order for it to survive that's
just the way central
currency works they need to find more surface area for the money more ways for
people to buy stuff so
instead of just having there's not enough of a company to buy so now we can bet
on how that
company's going to do in some future now we can bet on that or we can bet on
that right but what we're really
doing is trying to kind of compress all of this time right onto like the head
of a pin so we can bet on that so i
don't have to sit and wait you know 3 000 years for facebook to be worth
something
i can trade on its future worth now but the whole joke of that is people who
are trading that way
they're these computers that are trading faster than them so i put in one of my
super fast crazy
you know derivative trade goldman sachs sees that order coming in on the
computer
they're so close to the exchange they can execute an order before my order even
goes through based on
having seen that i was going to do what i'm going to do so they can literally
trade in my future
right i am in their past now that's that's digital time shifting that's that
sounds like they're
cheating that's like someone like running a quick server and they're local and
then you have like 150
ping exactly that's bullshit i think so with the sort of bullshit the irony of
it is it's gotten so
big right derivative trading is bigger than regular trading now so that the new
york stock exchange
actually just got bought the exchange itself got bought by its derivative
exchange
so it's almost just like the proofs in the pudding it's like the derivative
owns the market
at this point but that's when you get how did anybody allow that how how could
the government
even ever deny how incompetent they are when they allowed that like that alone
to like someone
should just like have a broadcast on national television a you know one of
those town hall sort of
events where you sit down with the the main people that run the country and go
how the
fuck are you allowing this how how if you not fix this why would you ever try
to do anything else
before you fix this when they made the decision they genuinely thought it would
be good for business
but it doesn't it's so in the short term i will never understand where it all
goes the business
people promise them they figure it out before it got really bad oh my god we
figure it out before it
got really bad how much bigger is the derivative economy i don't know exactly i
mean it seemed i was
looking trying to find out what the what the sort of trading was it seemed from
what i could tell like
that 94 of trades are now derivative because they're in because they're because
there's such
bigger volumes oh my god that's insane no one's gonna like you're not gonna buy
you know ten
thousand shares of honeywell today because that's you know you know whatever
sixty thousand dollars
or something but you could buy like ten thousand futures on honeywell because
they're they're really
jeep oh my god that is so crazy 94 of the stuff of trades are we can look at
and i'm scared how many
more is i think it's ultra fast too as a whole other there's sort of two
different two different
realms but yeah it's huge they must all be crazy everyone involved in that must
know that they're
bringing on the matrix they must know that they they're they're the first steps
before the digital
machine takes over they must know they must know that there's no humanity in
that stock market
shit that's chaos well the thing is and and again i don't want digital
technology to get blamed for
this right because the real operating system they're promoting is not the
digital operating system it's the
economic operating system underneath it it's this 13th century central currency
interest bearing debt-based
economy and none of the guys who i thought would get us out you know ev williams
with twitter mark
zuckerberg with facebook the kids from google right they're good each of them
had a real shot even bill
gates at breaking the central economy and and flipping things the other way how
do you not going to do
that not going public not be good not doing it with venture capital saying if i
can if if google can hack
web search if facebook can hack social if twitter can hack everybody why can't
they you know if they're
so busy disintermediating all these different things why doesn't any one of
them yet want to
disintermediate central banking and say no mr chase we don't actually need you
we're going to do our
whole thing through kickstarter say like one of your didn't one of your things
uh yeah yeah that's an
interesting point of view i think they probably would never want to take that
stand because they would
be killed i would imagine there's a lot of money and uh in in them not being
successful with that quest
you know to ensure that they remain in control point at which you know you're
doing paypal okay we're
going to let people do individual transactions that was their their original
model and they were going
to make money on the float and uh then the banks came to them and said uh you're
not allowed to do that
you're not a bank paypal kids you got to be you know registered as a bank or
you're going to have
to be connected to one of us and that's when you know paypal kind of becomes
part of ebay rather than
whatever these crazy guys might have done and i i suppose there's this point
you know where you know
innocently these companies that get bigger and bigger and bigger hoping to do
the right things and then
it's like we're going to we're not going to let you do this if you don't if you
don't play by our rules
but uh i also feel like there's companies that if you if you're willing to go
smaller if you're
willing to let it grow a little bit slower that you can scale up you can become
a big ethical corporation
yeah
you ready to record it's recording oh it is already what the fuck son