The Charlie Kirk Show - 'Transhumanism' and the Coming Cyborg Reset with James Poulos

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody. 0.85

00:00:00.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, what is transhumanism? 0.85

00:00:03.000 What does it mean to lose your humanity and become a cyborg? 0.73

00:00:06.000 That's right.

00:00:07.000 We go there on this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:09.000 James Poulis from the American Mind and the wonderful Claremont Institute joins us today for that conversation.

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00:01:32.000 James Poulos is here.

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00:02:37.000 Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk show.

00:02:40.000 I'm super excited for this episode.

00:02:41.000 I 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.

00:02:55.000 It was just so interesting to me.

00:02:57.000 It's dr James Poulos.

00:02:59.000 I hope I did okay with that pronunciation.

00:03:01.000 He'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.

00:03:12.000 And so let me just first kind of start with James.

00:03:15.000 If you could introduce yourself to the audience and also introduce to our audience, what is transhumanism?

00:03:23.000 Hey there.

00:03:23.000 So it's great to be with you.

00:03:24.000 Thanks for having me on.

00:03:26.000 The best way to think about transhumanism, I would say, is in the following way.

00:03:31.000 Once upon a time, technology was firmly on America's side.

00:03:36.000 The electric age was very good to us.

00:03:39.000 The 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.

00:03:57.000 Europe did pretty poorly during that time.

00:03:59.000 Everyone's empires fell apart.

00:04:01.000 Massive world wars, genocide, disillusionment, loss of religious faith, really just kind of a wipeout of that civilization.

00:04:08.000 It's just still barely trying to hang on in some ways.

00:04:11.000 And so there was this big sense of optimism and triumphalism around the internet when it came into being in the United States.

00:04:18.000 You know, of course, we thought we created these technologies.

00:04:21.000 They're super powerful.

00:04:22.000 We have a huge head start on everyone else.

00:04:24.000 And 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.

00:04:38.000 And that's not what these machines did.

00:04:39.000 You 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.

00:04:54.000 And so once that happened, there was this real kind of head check.

00:04:57.000 Suddenly everyone had a smartphone and this technology wasn't just cumulative.

00:05:01.000 It 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.

00:05:10.000 And the way that it's reshaped our inner and outer lives, our senses, our sensibilities, maybe even our souls, has already been super profound.

00:05:17.000 People 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.

00:05:24.000 And so what effect are these technologies having on who we are as human beings?

00:05:28.000 And I think the effect's very profound.

00:05:30.000 You got basically two camps of people.

00:05:33.000 You can go too far in either direction.

00:05:35.000 I think some people think digital technology is basically a curse.

00:05:39.000 And then other people think, no, it's our humanity that's a curse.

00:05:42.000 And 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.

00:05:54.000 We 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.

00:06:01.000 And 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.

00:06:26.000 And, you know, I think increasingly we just see it out there every day growing.

00:06:29.000 Many Americans don't know what to do about it.

00:06:31.000 They 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.

00:06:42.000 It's not too late.

00:06:43.000 It can be done.

00:06:43.000 And I look forward to talking about that.

00:06:45.000 Yeah, that's really profound.

00:06:47.000 And so I just want to make sure everyone understands what transhumanism is in the sense of how it applies to them.

00:06:53.000 It's this movement where these people in Silicon Valley want to try and integrate computers or technology actually into humans.

00:07:04.000 You could start to see this with Neuralink, with Elon Musk, and many other movements, and that technology is only accelerating.

00:07:11.000 You saw that with Facebook, which is no longer Facebook.

00:07:14.000 It's now called Meta.

00:07:15.000 Now, 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.

00:07:21.000 I don't think even I have a good grasp on.

00:07:24.000 But 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?

00:07:33.000 Talk about the implications of where this technological movement is heading, which is the destruction of the human species.

00:07:41.000 Yeah, that's a trajectory.

00:07:43.000 You can see it in the language, the rhetoric around the great reset.

00:07:46.000 You 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.

00:08:04.000 Tremendous 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.

00:08:19.000 And it's still informal.

00:08:20.000 These things don't have a name.

00:08:22.000 You can't sort of flex on people by showing that you have a higher social credit score than them. 0.63

00:08:26.000 But 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. 0.90

00:08:47.000 They understand where things are going. 0.89

00:08:49.000 They 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.

00:09:08.000 It's like a domed enclosure, really, where people who have merged with their technology are cultivated and reordered on digital terms.

00:09:18.000 It's at odds with our constitutionally guaranteed form of government.

00:09:23.000 And those in charge don't particularly seem to care.

00:09:25.000 I 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.

00:09:38.000 Basically, they've said, well, the financial system that we created has fallen apart.

00:09:43.000 It's not sufficient to propel the economic growth that we need to maintain sort of our position in the world.

00:09:49.000 So we really just need to kind of junk it and start over.

00:09:52.000 And so the COVID pandemic is the perfect opportunity in their estimation to just kind of flush the system.

00:09:58.000 Now, 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.

00:10:10.000 And 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.

00:10:18.000 But 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.

00:10:36.000 It's a part and parcel of our real world lives.

00:10:39.000 And 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.

00:10:47.000 A 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.

00:10:56.000 It's all unfolding very fast.

00:10:57.000 And 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.

00:11:14.000 Tell, you know, the hash is kind of the way that the techies talk about it.

00:11:17.000 Tell the hash what to do.

00:11:19.000 And that way is Bitcoin.

00:11:20.000 You know, Bitcoin is hyped up as a way of sort of making money fast and getting your friends rich.

00:11:24.000 And, you know, I'm not here to say that any of that's necessarily bad stuff, but it might be necessary.

00:11:28.000 It'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.

00:11:35.000 You know, Bitcoin is very powerful.

00:11:36.000 You can use it to do a number of things.

00:11:38.000 I'm selling a book on Bitcoin.

00:11:40.000 It's being published to the blockchain.

00:11:42.000 It's being sold for Bitcoin, payable in Bitcoin.

00:11:45.000 That's on canonic.xyz.

00:11:47.000 That'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.

00:12:01.000 So it's an exciting moment.

00:12:02.000 And 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.

00:12:11.000 And we shouldn't look on our community as a curse.

00:12:13.000 We 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.

00:12:28.000 Did 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?

00:12:35.000 Sinister folks, by the way.

00:12:37.000 Did you know that Airbnb gave $500,000 to the Marxist BLM incorporated organization? 0.60

00:12:44.000 Your first vote is at the ballot box, but that isn't enough to defend our traditional Judeo-Christian values. 0.55

00:12:52.000 Left-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.

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00:14:54.000 Yeah, so I'm not seeing a lot of movement, though, for this politically, because that's what this is going to take, right?

00:15:00.000 This 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. 0.56

00:15:26.000 And 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.

00:15:36.000 Yeah, I guess that's his name.

00:15:39.000 And all these other really kind of superfluous type things.

00:15:43.000 Are you seeing any sort of political momentum?

00:15:45.000 Because I'm afraid, James, that by the time people realize what's really going on here, it's going to be too late.

00:15:53.000 Well, there is some momentum, but it's complicated.

00:15:55.000 I mean, you look at the folks on the left and what's going on with wokeness right now.

00:15:59.000 And 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. 0.79

00:16:15.000 The 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. 0.98

00:16:26.000 I 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. 0.99

00:16:33.000 And 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. 0.98

00:16:52.000 So 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. 0.85

00:17:08.000 And for the folks trying to put the cyborg vivarium together, they're willing to accept wokeness as long as they remain in charge. 0.88

00:17:13.000 So there's some affinity there, but there's also a lot of tension.

00:17:16.000 And 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.

00:17:25.000 It's incompatible with our civilization.

00:17:28.000 And so the political stakes are increasing and also the political attention is increasing.

00:17:33.000 At the federal government level right now, it's difficult.

00:17:36.000 I 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.

00:17:42.000 But you got guys like SEC had Gary Gensler out there.

00:17:46.000 A lot of people thought, oh, he actually knows a thing about Bitcoin.

00:17:49.000 So maybe he'll be good.

00:17:50.000 That's not the way it works, unfortunately.

00:17:52.000 The feds want to turn Bitcoin into just one more asset class that they control in their digitized system.

00:17:58.000 And that's not going to fly either.

00:17:59.000 So 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.

00:18:14.000 If the feds aren't able to deliver in time on that, it's got to go down to the states.

00:18:17.000 And, 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.

00:18:23.000 The consciousness is increasing.

00:18:25.000 People are getting up to speed.

00:18:27.000 You 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.

00:18:39.000 So there's still a lot to be done.

00:18:41.000 But 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.

00:18:49.000 And 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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00:20:35.000 So 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.

00:20:48.000 And 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.

00:21:02.000 Can you make that argument and lay that out?

00:21:05.000 That was fascinating.

00:21:05.000 And then it was either you or your colleague that made the connection to the helicopter pilot and kind of the exoskeleton type issue.

00:21:15.000 I 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.

00:21:21.000 Sure.

00:21:21.000 So, 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.

00:21:50.000 And so one of them is really a telecommunications genius. 0.59

00:21:55.000 This 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.

00:22:22.000 And so, why is this happening?

00:22:23.000 I 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.

00:22:40.000 And 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. 0.54

00:22:53.000 So, 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. 0.51

00:23:05.000 On 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. 0.65

00:23:20.000 And so, why is this happening?

00:23:22.000 And 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. 0.53

00:23:35.000 But 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.

00:23:59.000 And 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. 0.81

00:24:15.000 And 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. 0.79

00:24:28.000 I'm imitating our digital devices because they're more powerful and amazing than us humans who suck and have all these limits.

00:24:34.000 So, I'm going to identify this way. 0.94

00:24:36.000 And guess what?

00:24:36.000 Like, that's, you know, this is how I've always felt.

00:24:39.000 And you need to respect this and you need to honor it.

00:24:41.000 And, 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.

00:24:47.000 You can just see how this argument is ready to be laid out.

00:24:50.000 And 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.

00:24:55.000 And 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.

00:25:14.000 And 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.

00:25:22.000 It feels like destiny.

00:25:23.000 Well, it's not our destiny.

00:25:24.000 I mean, we were put on this earth to be human beings until further notice.

00:25:30.000 If you go look in the biblical record, Jesus says, I don't even know when the end time is coming.

00:25:37.000 You'll know it when it comes.

00:25:38.000 That's something that God the Father only knows.

00:25:40.000 And 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.

00:25:55.000 And I think ultimately, no matter how good the technology gets, we're not going to become gods.

00:26:00.000 And we're not going to become bugs.

00:26:02.000 We're going to be stuck as human beings.

00:26:04.000 So we're humans.

00:26:06.000 We better get used to it.

00:26:07.000 And 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.

00:26:18.000 Yeah, 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.

00:26:27.000 And 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.

00:26:36.000 And this is why the tech people are so incredibly supportive of this.

00:26:41.000 And I don't know how much of this they actually realize or how much of this is kind of being driven home by it.

00:26:48.000 There'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. 0.78

00:27:02.000 And 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. 0.68

00:27:12.000 And 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. 0.88

00:27:25.000 But I guess the positive part of saying that, you know, I'm a black American is at least that is objectively true, right?

00:27:33.000 Than 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.

00:27:41.000 Excuse me.

00:27:42.000 So I guess what some of our listeners are trying to then parse through is, you know, where does this lead in the immediate?

00:27:50.000 And then what can one do about it?

00:27:52.000 And because for me personally, I've become increasingly anti-technology.

00:27:57.000 I have failed miserably at trying to get parents not to give their kids smartphones till they're 18.

00:28:02.000 I think this technology actually changes who we are.

00:28:05.000 It doesn't actually help us to do what we already want to do.

00:28:08.000 That's kind of a faulty talking point we hear a lot on the right: like, oh, technology is what you make of it.

00:28:14.000 This technology actually remakes you.

00:28:14.000 That's not true.

00:28:17.000 And 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.

00:28:23.000 What can they do?

00:28:25.000 Yeah, 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.

00:28:36.000 It brings things back from the past, patterns of seeing and thinking and doing, just at the same time that it obsolesces other things.

00:28:43.000 And 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.

00:28:55.000 And 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.

00:29:02.000 So, 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.

00:29:13.000 And it's important to remember that, you know, technology is not neutral, even though it is indifferent to our fates as living beings.

00:29:21.000 That doesn't mean that it's in some way even-handed or a neutral arbiter of our fates.

00:29:27.000 At 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.

00:29:39.000 We 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.

00:29:51.000 And 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.

00:30:02.000 And 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.

00:30:13.000 So, 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.

00:30:23.000 You 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.

00:30:42.000 Our brains are not computers.

00:30:44.000 Our consciousness is not something that can just be represented by a mathematical equation.

00:30:48.000 Our minds are not reducible to our brains.

00:30:50.000 Our bodies are not reducible to our minds.

00:30:52.000 And 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.

00:31:08.000 I don't think that would necessarily be the right thing to do anyway, even if we could.

00:31:12.000 But we got to recover the responsibility to raise our children to be prepared for the responsible use of these technologies.

00:31:20.000 I'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.

00:31:28.000 So 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.

00:31:40.000 There are going to be crazy times in the future.

00:31:42.000 But if you can prepare them to responsibly use these technologies as they come of age, they're going to have a huge head start.

00:31:48.000 In the meantime, don't be afraid of trying to learn about Bitcoin.

00:31:51.000 This is a basic foundational technology in the digital age.

00:31:56.000 It can be used for ill just like any technology or any tool.

00:31:59.000 But 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.

00:32:20.000 Bitcoin 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.

00:32:50.000 But they're very hard to get rid of.

00:32:51.000 And 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.

00:32:59.000 We're not going to have the joy.

00:33:00.000 We'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.

00:33:10.000 Why would you ever live with aches and pains in your life if you didn't have to?

00:33:14.000 That's a question that anyone who's considered trying 100% drug-free relief factor should think about.

00:33:20.000 And it's one that I want to ask you yourself.

00:33:22.000 People frequently seek out other products like CBD supplements to combat pain in their lives, but find that pretty often that either that doesn't work for them or it leads to an undesirable outcome.

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00:34:13.000 Yeah, there's a lot I agree with that.

00:34:15.000 I don't know if I agree with, you might be right, by the way, because you obviously research this more than I do.

00:34:21.000 And this is just more instinct and kind of just looking at the horizon and what I see, how inevitable this is.

00:34:27.000 I mean, if I were given a choice, I just love your answer on this.

00:34:30.000 You'd probably say it's unrealistic.

00:34:32.000 I don't think we have to accept the premise.

00:34:33.000 I think we, I would love to start to see anti-technology zones created where we don't have all these ridiculous smartphones and computers.

00:34:41.000 We just start to divest ourselves from that.

00:34:43.000 And people say, well, Charlie, that's looking backwards.

00:34:45.000 Of course it is.

00:34:46.000 Obviously, it's better that way.

00:34:48.000 You're taking a little bit different approach where you think that these things could be beneficial.

00:34:53.000 And by the way, maybe what I'm saying is totally unrealistic. 1.00

00:34:56.000 And you might say, oh, Charlie, that's what the Amish do. 1.00

00:34:58.000 What are you going to live off the grid? 0.99

00:34:58.000 Well, it actually sounds really nice. 0.99

00:35:00.000 And I don't know if I agree.

00:35:02.000 It's like plumbing.

00:35:03.000 I think that these technologies create new behaviors and new ways of actually looking at the world.

00:35:11.000 And again, I could be proven wrong by you and I would open that totally.

00:35:15.000 But at least for me, I turn my phone off for one day a week.

00:35:18.000 It's part of my Shabbos Sabbath at least once a week. 0.95

00:35:21.000 I'm not Jewish.

00:35:22.000 It's just, I think Christians have to get better at following the Levitical laws.

00:35:26.000 And they're there to bless us.

00:35:28.000 And I could say that when I do that, I view the world completely differently, totally differently.

00:35:34.000 I have more tenderness towards the world.

00:35:36.000 I think more clearly.

00:35:37.000 And when I have my phone, I feel more bogged down and clouded.

00:35:40.000 So I'd love for you to just respond to whatever you want there.

00:35:44.000 And I would love to be challenged or proven wrong on some of that.

00:35:48.000 Yeah, no, I mean, I'm going to try to have it both ways a little bit here, but I think at the end of the day, that's the right attitude.

00:35:54.000 I mean, you look at electricity.

00:35:56.000 That was a lot like plumbing.

00:35:58.000 You 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.

00:36:05.000 And it was, you know, it was a utility in that sense.

00:36:08.000 That didn't mean that electricity didn't have a profound transformative effect on our senses and our sensibilities.

00:36:13.000 I 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.

00:36:21.000 And that enabled people to start living at night as they did during the day.

00:36:25.000 That was a radical transformation.

00:36:26.000 It had massive effects on how we saw the world, how we saw ourselves, how we consumed our time.

00:36:31.000 The 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.

00:36:41.000 A lot like plumbing.

00:36:42.000 But 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.

00:36:50.000 The Emancipation Proclamation went out over telegraph.

00:36:52.000 That is how it had this kind of kinetic, electric, literally electric effect on Americans when they received it.

00:36:59.000 And 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.

00:37:24.000 They don't really understand how formal cause works.

00:37:26.000 They really just think it's all like billiard balls hitting each other.

00:37:29.000 Judea 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.

00:37:43.000 You know, that's a failure of science.

00:37:44.000 And so those threats, those problems are real.

00:37:47.000 And you're definitely right that we do not need these devices in order to live well.

00:37:53.000 If you put your phone in a box for a couple of days, everyone can feel that difference.

00:37:57.000 The irony, though, is a lot of the reason why we're spending so much time on our phones.

00:38:02.000 It does have to do with the technology insofar as the technology is the facilitator.

00:38:06.000 But what are we doing on the phone all day, right?

00:38:08.000 We're interacting with other human beings most of the time.

00:38:10.000 Still to this day, a lot of people really don't get on their phones to interact with robots.

00:38:14.000 Yeah, 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.

00:38:20.000 And, you know, some people do that and some people do it a lot.

00:38:22.000 I 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. 0.88

00:38:30.000 So, you know, there are these crazy examples. 0.84

00:38:32.000 But at the end of the day, most of it is still interacting with people.

00:38:35.000 And 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.

00:38:49.000 And 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.

00:38:59.000 Every civilization state, China, India, Russia, Israel, U.S., Britain is trying to do stuff, trying to global Britain.

00:39:06.000 What does that mean in a digital age?

00:39:08.000 Everyone'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.

00:39:18.000 And that means, you know, theological questions are coming back in a major way.

00:39:22.000 Any 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. 0.91

00:39:29.000 The Chinese are obviously doing it, you know, trying to make the bots Taoist in their social credit system. 0.82

00:39:33.000 Russia's response to the digital sort of apocalypse, big unveiling, was to build a gigantic military cathedral just outside of Russia. 0.70

00:39:42.000 What's the U.S. going to do?

00:39:43.000 Well, there's a civil war.

00:39:44.000 There'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.

00:39:53.000 And other countries like Britain are involved in trying to make their own impact.

00:39:57.000 So we've got these big theological questions.

00:39:59.000 You brought up the Amish. 0.98

00:40:00.000 I mean, they're making a theological wager on the relationship between human beings and technology. 0.91

00:40:06.000 And that's something now that everyone's going to have to do if they're going to make it.

00:40:09.000 It'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.

00:40:14.000 It's always been in a certain salutary sense, a pluralistic country.

00:40:17.000 Different groups are going to have different approaches, sometimes radically different approaches to how human beings should interface with digital technologies, if at all.

00:40:25.000 So, you know, I salute you and your willingness to put the phone in the box or whatever.

00:40:30.000 Some people are going to take even more radical approaches.

00:40:32.000 And we need all comers, right?

00:40:33.000 We need, in a digital age, we need people to run the machines.

00:40:36.000 We also need people in monasteries.

00:40:38.000 We also need people running the machines in monasteries.

00:40:41.000 It's going to take all kinds.

00:40:42.000 And 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.

00:41:00.000 And 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.

00:41:06.000 Life is going to become very uniform.

00:41:08.000 The only thing that's going to be really diverse are our delusions, our fantasies. 1.00

00:41:11.000 They want people herded into here. 0.95

00:41:12.000 So they feel like, well, yeah, I gave up on reality.

00:41:15.000 I gave up on having kids.

00:41:16.000 I'm sort of the end point of my civilization.

00:41:19.000 But gosh darn it, I can be a flying purple unicorn in the metaverse.

00:41:24.000 And that's how I'm going to go out. 0.91

00:41:26.000 That's not good enough for us.

00:41:28.000 You don't have to be Christian to feel this way in America, but it helps.

00:41:31.000 I 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.

00:41:53.000 Well, I agree with that.

00:41:54.000 Humanforever.us, also the wonderful Claremont Institute.

00:41:57.000 James, thank you so much for joining us.

00:41:59.000 I really enjoyed this conversation.

00:42:00.000 We're gonna have to do it again soon.

00:42:01.000 So, thank you.

00:42:02.000 Real pleasure.

00:42:02.000 Thanks, Charlie.

00:42:06.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

00:42:07.000 Email us your thoughts as always: freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:42:10.000 And we will see you in Phoenix, Arizona at AmericaFest tpusa.com slash AMF EST.

00:42:20.000 God bless you guys.

00:42:21.000 Speak to you soon.

00:42:24.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - November 20, 2021

'Transhumanism' and the Coming Cyborg Reset with James Poulos

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