What does it mean to lose your humanity and become a cyborg? That s right, we go there on this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show with James Poulis from The American Mind and the Claremont Institute.
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00:01:50.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
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00:02:41.000I I listened to the American MIND podcast which is phenomenal from the Claremont Institute, and I was listening a couple weeks ago and I was texting Connor in the midst of the episode and I said we have to have this guy on.
00:02:59.000I hope I did okay with that pronunciation.
00:03:01.000He's the co-founder and executive editor of the American mind at the Claremont Institute and author of the new book Human Forever and the digital politics of The Spiritual War.
00:03:12.000And so let me just first kind of start with James.
00:03:15.000If you could introduce yourself to the audience and also introduce to our audience, what is transhumanism?
00:03:39.000The telegraph, the spread of the incandescent bulb, radio, television, really the time when America became the world's leading power, the superpower that was so powerful, not just in terms of military might, but also in culture, in mass communications and all the ways that that shapes people's inner and outer lives.
00:03:57.000Europe did pretty poorly during that time.
00:04:22.000We have a huge head start on everyone else.
00:04:24.000And so they're really just going to fulfill or consummate America's role as the most important country in the world, the country that can sort of turn the world into something that's American in its essence and its civilization.
00:04:38.000And that's not what these machines did.
00:04:39.000You know, the elites, the folks in charge were really shocked by the way people used these technologies to put opinions on the internet that they didn't like and ultimately to elect a president that they didn't like very much.
00:04:54.000And so once that happened, there was this real kind of head check.
00:04:57.000Suddenly everyone had a smartphone and this technology wasn't just cumulative.
00:05:01.000It wasn't just a progressive addition to the technological advancement of the past, but was really something fundamentally different, a new medium, a new form of technology.
00:05:10.000And the way that it's reshaped our inner and outer lives, our senses, our sensibilities, maybe even our souls, has already been super profound.
00:05:17.000People are now sort of realizing that every day as they look at the news that's coming out on a regular basis around the clock.
00:05:24.000And so what effect are these technologies having on who we are as human beings?
00:05:28.000And I think the effect's very profound.
00:05:30.000You got basically two camps of people.
00:05:33.000You can go too far in either direction.
00:05:35.000I think some people think digital technology is basically a curse.
00:05:39.000And then other people think, no, it's our humanity that's a curse.
00:05:42.000And it's digital technology, which will finally give us the ability to kind of transcend our humanity or turn ourselves into cyborgs, more powerful, more pure, more enlightened than any human being.
00:05:54.000We can finally escape everything that's wrong with humans, all the things that are flawed about us, things that we can't trust, things that make it hard work.
00:06:01.000And so this effort to kind of shake free of the hard work of being human and to shake free of the idea that our human being is a gift and instead to embrace digital technology as the thing that's going to a sort of machine that will allow us to shatter our the bounds of our humanity and kind of escape into a paradise of a of a higher level That's really the spirit that's animating transhumanism.
00:06:26.000And, you know, I think increasingly we just see it out there every day growing.
00:06:29.000Many Americans don't know what to do about it.
00:06:31.000They feel like they're too far behind or it's too late to really take control back, take control of our technologies and put them to properly human ends, protect our way of life, protect our form of government.
00:07:15.000Now, let me just start with something that I think our audience would be able to understand because there's a lot of technology behind this.
00:07:21.000I don't think even I have a good grasp on.
00:07:24.000But is it conceivable that if we do nothing in 20 years, we will be mostly cyborgs or plugged into an alternative universe and not the real world?
00:07:33.000Talk about the implications of where this technological movement is heading, which is the destruction of the human species.
00:07:43.000You can see it in the language, the rhetoric around the great reset.
00:07:46.000You can see it in the way that a social credit system has already developed in the U.S. You know, we already have the major corporations and the government, including the part of the government where citizens cannot replace these individuals by voting on whether or not they should remain in office.
00:08:04.000Tremendous unity of the institutions under federal purview, creating a social system on the internet wherein, if you say the right things and do the right things, you won't get a check from the government, but you will get social credit points, basically.
00:08:22.000You can't sort of flex on people by showing that you have a higher social credit score than them.
00:08:26.000But already, if you have kids and they're on TikTok or if you're just really hungry for the memes, you can just go on there and see that the Zoomers who understand what's going on are already making sort of meme videos, mocking folks like John Cena for saying that Taiwan is a part of China, making fun of him for having an infinite social credit score.
00:08:47.000They understand where things are going.
00:08:49.000They understand that colleges, education system, Hollywood banking system, every component of these pillars of civil society are all sort of circling the wagons, consolidating authority and try to usher people into what I'm calling a cyborg vivarium.
00:09:08.000It's like a domed enclosure, really, where people who have merged with their technology are cultivated and reordered on digital terms.
00:09:18.000It's at odds with our constitutionally guaranteed form of government.
00:09:23.000And those in charge don't particularly seem to care.
00:09:25.000I mean, I think the best, most generous interpretation you can put on it is if you look at some of the really best bankers in the West, like BlackRock people, and you look at the reports that they've been issuing internally and externally.
00:09:38.000Basically, they've said, well, the financial system that we created has fallen apart.
00:09:43.000It's not sufficient to propel the economic growth that we need to maintain sort of our position in the world.
00:09:49.000So we really just need to kind of junk it and start over.
00:09:52.000And so the COVID pandemic is the perfect opportunity in their estimation to just kind of flush the system.
00:09:58.000Now, in a representative democracy, if a system that's put in place by a leadership class starts failing and the elites don't really take credit for that, well, you vote them out and replace them.
00:10:10.000And what's different here is those in charge in the West, with their talk of the American-led Western rules-based international order, that's a mouthful.
00:10:18.000But basically, what it means is a transition to a system where representative Republican form of government goes away and where people are moved pretty quickly away from a world in which they have freedom of movement, freedom of consumption, freedom of association, things that Americans have long taken for granted and have long cherished too.
00:10:36.000It's a part and parcel of our real world lives.
00:10:39.000And move people out of that into a world where, as the World Economic Forum meme goes, in the future, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
00:10:47.000A future where your carbon emissions are sort of levied against you, a future where you live in the pod and eat the bugs, as the kids like to say.
00:10:57.000And so, if Americans want to stop this, if we want to preserve our way of life and our form of government in a digital age, what Americans need to do is they need to understand that right now they can get their hands on the basic, most powerful digital technology that they need in order to start telling databases what to do.
00:11:14.000Tell, you know, the hash is kind of the way that the techies talk about it.
00:11:20.000You know, Bitcoin is hyped up as a way of sort of making money fast and getting your friends rich.
00:11:24.000And, you know, I'm not here to say that any of that's necessarily bad stuff, but it might be necessary.
00:11:28.000It's not sufficient to giving ordinary Americans the ability to really get their hands dirty, get their hands, get their hands on the wheel of technology.
00:11:47.000That's where you can find my book, Human Forever, which is fresh off the presses at a time when most major publishers are looking at six to seven-month delays in publication due to supply chain issues with paper stocks.
00:12:02.000And for all the craziness and all the justified anxiety that people feel about their control over their lives and their freedom slipping away, it's not over yet.
00:12:11.000And we shouldn't look on our community as a curse.
00:12:13.000We should remember that we have real capabilities and real ingenuity and that together we can take control of these technologies back and use them to defend our humanity and increase our flourishing.
00:12:28.000Did you know that if you shop at Nike, they turn around and give your hard-earned dollars to pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and the Population Council?
00:12:37.000Did you know that Airbnb gave $500,000 to the Marxist BLM incorporated organization?
00:12:44.000Your first vote is at the ballot box, but that isn't enough to defend our traditional Judeo-Christian values.
00:12:52.000Left-wing corporations are subverting our nation and our republic by taking money from conservative customers and giving it to radical organizations that support abortion, gun control, and critical race theory.
00:13:06.000You have another vote, a second vote at the checkout line, which is why there's a massively important organization called Second Vote that comes in.
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00:14:54.000Yeah, so I'm not seeing a lot of movement, though, for this politically, because that's what this is going to take, right?
00:15:00.000This is going to take hopefully the government coming together and saying we want to control technology and not have technology control us, that our humanity is precious, and that we are not going to be succumbed to a group of oligarchs and hoodies that want to program our entire life and to control our patterns of behavior and then with it destroy who we really are.
00:15:26.000And this should be a non-political issue, but instead we're talking about naming U.S. Navy ships after Harvey Milk or whatever his name is.
00:15:39.000And all these other really kind of superfluous type things.
00:15:43.000Are you seeing any sort of political momentum?
00:15:45.000Because I'm afraid, James, that by the time people realize what's really going on here, it's going to be too late.
00:15:53.000Well, there is some momentum, but it's complicated.
00:15:55.000I mean, you look at the folks on the left and what's going on with wokeness right now.
00:15:59.000And say what you will about wokeness, at least it reflects the realization that we are not going to be in control of our destiny if we allow or actively encourage our digital devices and entities to take control of our destiny for us.
00:16:15.000The wokies are convinced that the only way that we're going to make it is if you install sort of a woke commissar, a woke priest at the top of every technological and governmental institution.
00:16:26.000I think that that's a mistake because I think they've got their ethics wrong, but at least they're sort of increasingly aware of what the stakes are.
00:16:33.000And so there is kind of a big movement for a sort of return to virtue across America right now that's being aroused by the effects of digital technology on our lives and the way that those technologies are sort of sweeping away a lot of default or normy expectations about how life works.
00:16:52.000So for folks who do not think the wokeness is the answer, and I mean, I think if you look at the way that the institutions are responding, on the one hand, the wokies are willing to accept the cyborg vivarium if it means that they're in charge.
00:17:08.000And for the folks trying to put the cyborg vivarium together, they're willing to accept wokeness as long as they remain in charge.
00:17:13.000So there's some affinity there, but there's also a lot of tension.
00:17:16.000And I think that attempt to fuse those two things, the wokeies and the techies into one system, is something that's just not going to go down with Americans.
00:17:25.000It's incompatible with our civilization.
00:17:28.000And so the political stakes are increasing and also the political attention is increasing.
00:17:33.000At the federal government level right now, it's difficult.
00:17:36.000I mean, you got guys like Senator Toomey out there who are really interested in sort of the future of crypto and how that's going to interface with the federal government.
00:17:42.000But you got guys like SEC had Gary Gensler out there.
00:17:46.000A lot of people thought, oh, he actually knows a thing about Bitcoin.
00:17:59.000So if the feds aren't going to be able to deliver what I refer to really as a Second Amendment for Compute, protecting the rights of Americans to do things like purchase and own and operate high-powered GPUs, mine things like Bitcoin, tell the databases what to do.
00:18:14.000If the feds aren't able to deliver in time on that, it's got to go down to the states.
00:18:17.000And, you know, there are some states who are working on this kind of stuff right now, whether it's Wyoming or Florida or Texas or a few others.
00:18:27.000You do not need to be living in Mountain View, California, working for Google in order to understand the basics of how this stuff works and in order to restore political control over how they work and the role that they play in our lives.
00:18:41.000But we've got Senate candidates too who are coming out of tech world and understand in a good sense what the opportunities and what the stakes are.
00:18:49.000And I'm looking forward to doing what I can and to inspiring others to do what they can to really accelerate the political response to these challenges.
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00:20:35.000So one of the things you mentioned in the American My podcast, which I thought was how trans as kind of the victim group or whatever has moved up to the type of group you are not allowed to criticize.
00:20:48.000And then you made the connection between the transgender movement and the potential transhumanist movement that we need to be accepting of people changing their gender because they might have to change other things in the future.
00:21:02.000Can you make that argument and lay that out?
00:21:05.000And then it was either you or your colleague that made the connection to the helicopter pilot and kind of the exoskeleton type issue.
00:21:15.000I don't know if you remember that part of the conversation, but if you're willing to go there, that's a third thing I'd love to have you touch on.
00:21:21.000So, you know, I won't get too far into the weeds here, but if you look at sort of the character type, who's really doubling down on the transsexual option as a way of achieving some kind of intended perfection in their lives, it just so happens that there are a lot of alpha males out there, older guys, who seem to have a special predilection in this regard relative to other identity groups.
00:21:50.000And so one of them is really a telecommunications genius.
00:21:55.000This individual is more or less responsible for American satellite policy and co-founded Sirius XM Radio, a real sort of virtuoso of The technology of communications, licensed helicopter pilot, someone who spent many years as really a high-powered man and then just got to a point where they decided to flip the switch.
00:22:23.000I mean, you look at what's going on among younger people, among sort of young girls who bizarrely for in a time when ostensibly what they had been messaged so hard was that the future is female, seem totally afraid of becoming women and face puberty as a sort of crisis.
00:22:40.000And so, this is a huge kind of social contagion where the puberty blockers are being rained down on these poor poor kids whose parents can't really explain to them how they can live well in a digital age.
00:22:53.000So, you look at how it is that the transsexual option is becoming something that more and more people are reaching for and how commensurate with that, it's really moved up to the top of the prestige stack.
00:23:05.000On the woke flag has a trans stripe on it now, and trans as the catchphrase, the buzz term, has already lifted up to a level where it's kind of this spiritual category more than a physical category.
00:23:22.000And I would argue that right now, rather than seeing this as a sex change, which it technically isn't, you can sort of move the parts around, but you're not transforming away your biological sex.
00:23:35.000But what you are doing is you're using technology to so radically intervene in and alter your sort of psychosexual identity that it becomes a demonstration of the first major step, kind of the bleeding edge or the vanguard movement away from the natural limits of our humanity into a transhumanist mode.
00:23:59.000And so, I think the transsexual movement has the outsized influence and attention around it that it does, because people more or less understand, even if they can't quite articulate it clearly, that this is a profound first step into transhumanism.
00:24:15.000And it's just so easy to picture how, maybe not tomorrow, but maybe in a couple of weeks, people might just start hitting the internet and saying, Hey, I identify as a cyborg or I identify as part of a swarm of consciousness.
00:24:28.000I'm imitating our digital devices because they're more powerful and amazing than us humans who suck and have all these limits.
00:24:36.000Like, that's, you know, this is how I've always felt.
00:24:39.000And you need to respect this and you need to honor it.
00:24:41.000And, you know, if you don't, and if you don't have enough people like me on your corporate boards or in government, then you are committing a grave injustice.
00:24:47.000You can just see how this argument is ready to be laid out.
00:24:50.000And I think a lot of people are going to feel as if they have no choice but to kind of give in to that argument.
00:24:55.000And that, you know, that would really begin a process of just trying to lift away as a country, as a regime, as a civilization from, you know, from everything in our past to kind of wipe our memories away and replace them with something radically different, that's radically out of step with all that America is and has been.
00:25:14.000And so in the face of these kind of conflicts, again, many people feel like they're so disoriented, demoralized, they don't really know what to do.
00:25:38.000That's something that God the Father only knows.
00:25:40.000And so there's this very long, long tradition in the West of a consciousness that it is not up to us and it is not our role to sort of choose our own end time, to do elective suicide of the human race in an attempt to become gods.
00:25:55.000And I think ultimately, no matter how good the technology gets, we're not going to become gods.
00:26:07.000And we better look with some real responsibility, but also an understanding of the joy and the gift that we've been given to make sure that we stay this way, no matter how powerful our technology becomes.
00:26:18.000Yeah, I just want to hammer this point home, which was real clarifying for me, that the trans movement, transgender, I'm a man, I'm a woman, is the gateway to transhumanism.
00:26:27.000And so, therefore, it's been given a higher preference in the oppression Olympics hierarchy of what actually matters and what should be deemed as acceptable.
00:26:36.000And this is why the tech people are so incredibly supportive of this.
00:26:41.000And I don't know how much of this they actually realize or how much of this is kind of being driven home by it.
00:26:48.000There's so many different directions I want to go with this, but I guess I'll start with this one, which is the Democrats or the left, I don't mean to overly politicize this, they try to make themselves seem themselves the party of tech.
00:27:02.000And then there is this kind of marriage between the tech, the tech push of trying to destroy humanity and then also the transgender type issue.
00:27:12.000And what we've seen recently, though, is that race has even taken a backseat to trans, where being black is less important than being trans, where I don't like identity politics at all.
00:27:25.000But I guess the positive part of saying that, you know, I'm a black American is at least that is objectively true, right?
00:27:33.000Than saying that I'm a dolphin or a part of a swarm of consciousness, or I'm a man or I'm a woman when you might not be.
00:28:17.000And so talk about what some people can actually do, some actionable steps, especially people that aren't part of the digital age, boomers, if you will.
00:28:25.000Yeah, well, you know, I think it's important to point out that ever since the beginning, you know, technology has an independent formative effect on our senses and our sensibilities, our way of seeing the world.
00:28:36.000It brings things back from the past, patterns of seeing and thinking and doing, just at the same time that it obsolesces other things.
00:28:43.000And so, you know, you go back and look at the oral civilization and how it differs from, you know, civilization when the alphabet came into being, how that differs from the scribal age of the Middle Ages.
00:28:55.000And then again, with the invention of the printing press and then with the invention of electricity and right down the line, all the way to digital.
00:29:02.000So, you know, as important as it is to be wary and to be watchful and mindful and to understand the nature of these effects that our media have on us.
00:29:13.000And it's important to remember that, you know, technology is not neutral, even though it is indifferent to our fates as living beings.
00:29:21.000That doesn't mean that it's in some way even-handed or a neutral arbiter of our fates.
00:29:27.000At the same time, we need to recognize that these creations of ours are not themselves evil, that in many ways they're just plumbing, and that these should not be objects of worship.
00:29:39.000We shouldn't look at our technological advancements, no matter how sort of eye-popping, as things that are better than us or more powerful than us or have a true destiny that is more perfect or complete than ours.
00:29:51.000And I think a lot of what is motivating these kinds of unfortunate cultural trends are people who really just feel like they're being cowed by the technologies around them.
00:30:02.000And they feel as if they have leaders who are totally disinterested in telling them how they can repair and retrieve and sustain a human way of life in the presence of these technologies.
00:30:13.000So, you know, one thing that you can do immediately, you know, aside from checking out my book, you know, you can get the details at humanforever.us and buy it at canonic.xyz.
00:30:23.000You know, it's the most important thing that we can do on a personal level is to maintain our memory, our human memory, to recognize that our memory is special and unique to us, that computers, just because they can recall everything is sort of total recall like in sci-fi, that doesn't mean that their memory works like ours does.
00:30:44.000Our consciousness is not something that can just be represented by a mathematical equation.
00:30:48.000Our minds are not reducible to our brains.
00:30:50.000Our bodies are not reducible to our minds.
00:30:52.000And if we bear that in mind, we will have the kind of presence of mind, the peace of soul, and really the mental and physical health that we need in order to survive this tremendous transition, which it's not in our power to just make all this technology go away.
00:31:08.000I don't think that would necessarily be the right thing to do anyway, even if we could.
00:31:12.000But we got to recover the responsibility to raise our children to be prepared for the responsible use of these technologies.
00:31:20.000I'm a little bit worried that if you totally wall out all digital technology from your kids, they're going to turn 18 and freak out when they finally have access to it.
00:31:28.000So I know that this is difficult for a lot of parents, but really if you can just remind your children, raise them to understand who they are, where they came from, that their ancestors were just as human as they are, that there have been crazy times in the past.
00:31:40.000There are going to be crazy times in the future.
00:31:42.000But if you can prepare them to responsibly use these technologies as they come of age, they're going to have a huge head start.
00:31:48.000In the meantime, don't be afraid of trying to learn about Bitcoin.
00:31:51.000This is a basic foundational technology in the digital age.
00:31:56.000It can be used for ill just like any technology or any tool.
00:31:59.000But it's really something that if you give it just a little bit of time, all the apps, like Canonic that my book is on, that are coming out, it's getting easier and easier to understand and participate in the digital economy on your own terms without being surveilled, without being subject to cancellation or deletion or dogpiling.
00:32:20.000Bitcoin gives you a kind of foundation or a backbone to build enterprises, sources of culture that we can value and that we can exchange and share, things that are memorable so that we can stay who we are and that we can strengthen who we are without trying to set the impossible task of taking over the whole world or trying to set the impossible task of tearing down all these institutions that do threaten our way of life in so many ways.
00:32:51.000And if we plow all of our attention into trying to just chip away at what really is, I think, a crumbling edifice to begin with, we're not going to have the time.
00:33:00.000We're not going to have the resources of the soul to rally together and to build anew on terms that are going to be favorable to us and reward us for being who we are.
00:33:10.000Why would you ever live with aches and pains in your life if you didn't have to?
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00:33:32.000Charlie Kirk here, so many people have had their lives changed by taking Relief Factor, and you could be the next one.
00:33:38.000If you're living with aches and pains, why not give it a try?
00:33:41.000And 70% of the more than half a million people who have tried Relief Factor end up ordering more.
00:33:46.000And that's because it works for them the way it worked for me.
00:35:58.000You got wires underground, all these cables zipping around and pumping these things into people's homes and they get metered the way that the water got metered.
00:36:05.000And it was, you know, it was a utility in that sense.
00:36:08.000That didn't mean that electricity didn't have a profound transformative effect on our senses and our sensibilities.
00:36:13.000I mean, suddenly you went from like having to stumble around in the dark or just go to sleep at night to being able to flood the zone with fake light.
00:36:21.000And that enabled people to start living at night as they did during the day.
00:36:26.000It had massive effects on how we saw the world, how we saw ourselves, how we consumed our time.
00:36:31.000The telegraph, you know, telegraph was just zipping along on these wires and you got telephone poles going across the country or a big cable going under the Atlantic Ocean.
00:36:42.000But again, I mean, Abraham Lincoln, first president to use the telegraph to communicate directly with his generals in the civil war, transformed the nature of warfare.
00:36:50.000The Emancipation Proclamation went out over telegraph.
00:36:52.000That is how it had this kind of kinetic, electric, literally electric effect on Americans when they received it.
00:36:59.000And so, you know, these technologies, even when, you know, even when we do succeed in kind of putting them in the background or establishing some basic level of human day-to-day control over them, they can be relatively benign or relatively predictable in their workings, but they can still have tremendous outsize effects on us that are not so easy to predict, especially if a lot of scientists today really don't understand Aristotle.
00:37:24.000They don't really understand how formal cause works.
00:37:26.000They really just think it's all like billiard balls hitting each other.
00:37:29.000Judea Pearl has a great book that came out a couple of years ago called The Book of Why, where basically he says, look, if you can't even explain, you have no way of communicating with these machines that you build, sort of like DeepMind and these other advanced AIs, then that's really a breakdown of science.
00:37:43.000You know, that's a failure of science.
00:37:44.000And so those threats, those problems are real.
00:37:47.000And you're definitely right that we do not need these devices in order to live well.
00:37:53.000If you put your phone in a box for a couple of days, everyone can feel that difference.
00:37:57.000The irony, though, is a lot of the reason why we're spending so much time on our phones.
00:38:02.000It does have to do with the technology insofar as the technology is the facilitator.
00:38:06.000But what are we doing on the phone all day, right?
00:38:08.000We're interacting with other human beings most of the time.
00:38:10.000Still to this day, a lot of people really don't get on their phones to interact with robots.
00:38:14.000Yeah, there are these sort of like AI girlfriends or whatever that you can interact with, or they're just these mindless games that you can play.
00:38:20.000And, you know, some people do that and some people do it a lot.
00:38:22.000I mean, I think Candy Crush makes all its money off of sort of like bored Middle East members of the royal family who are willing to drop a million dollars on Candy Crush every year.
00:38:30.000So, you know, there are these crazy examples.
00:38:32.000But at the end of the day, most of it is still interacting with people.
00:38:35.000And I think the reason, one reason why digital technology is so powerful is because it does give you the ability to stay in communication with people who are not in your home, not in your neighborhood, across many time zones away.
00:38:49.000And as the fight over the future of American civilization and our way of life has become nationalized and has kind of pulled in the entire West, it's becoming a global issue.
00:38:59.000Every civilization state, China, India, Russia, Israel, U.S., Britain is trying to do stuff, trying to global Britain.
00:39:08.000Everyone's working on trying to figure out how they can apply their civilization's deepest, most profound resources to the question of how to regain control within their territory over these machines.
00:39:18.000And that means, you know, theological questions are coming back in a major way.
00:39:22.000Any civilization state worth its salt that's trying to figure out this problem is reaching all the way back to the roots of their civilization in a theological sense.
00:39:29.000The Chinese are obviously doing it, you know, trying to make the bots Taoist in their social credit system.
00:39:33.000Russia's response to the digital sort of apocalypse, big unveiling, was to build a gigantic military cathedral just outside of Russia.
00:39:44.000There's a digital civil war going on right now in the U.S. to figure out who's going to be in charge of re-grounding American civilization on a footing for the digital age.
00:39:53.000And other countries like Britain are involved in trying to make their own impact.
00:39:57.000So we've got these big theological questions.
00:40:00.000I mean, they're making a theological wager on the relationship between human beings and technology.
00:40:06.000And that's something now that everyone's going to have to do if they're going to make it.
00:40:09.000It's going to happen in the U.S. and elsewhere and within the U.S. Different groups of people, we've always had different folkways in America.
00:40:14.000It's always been in a certain salutary sense, a pluralistic country.
00:40:17.000Different groups are going to have different approaches, sometimes radically different approaches to how human beings should interface with digital technologies, if at all.
00:40:25.000So, you know, I salute you and your willingness to put the phone in the box or whatever.
00:40:30.000Some people are going to take even more radical approaches.
00:40:42.000And I think one of the most powerful attributes that we have as human beings is to work together in really a diversity of ways, where every individual and every group is kind of tackling the problem of life in fruitfully, fruitfully dynamic and different ways.
00:41:00.000And if the people who are trying to set up the social credit system, the cyborg vivarium have their way, we're going to be flattened out.
00:41:28.000You don't have to be Christian to feel this way in America, but it helps.
00:41:31.000I think every major religion in the world right now is trying to figure out how to reintroduce to people the idea that being human is a gift and that being human is enough to not just live well on our own, but to find a way to kind of to restore our mastery over our machines and have them serve us rather than the other way around.