James Polis, editor of The American Mind and founder of The Claremont Institute, joins me in this episode to talk about why trust in government is eroding, and why technology is to blame. We talk about the role of technology in our political system, and how it affects our ability to trust one another, and the role that technology plays in shaping our political systems, and in particular, the role it plays in eroding the trust that citizens have in one another. We also talk about AI, AI, the future of currency, and AI's role in the digital world, and much more. We also discuss the role technology is playing in our politics, and what it means for us to be a democracy. And, of course, we have a special guest on the show today: James Polis. Thanks to our sponsor, VaynerSpeakers! Thanks also to our patron, for sponsoring this episode. If you like what you hear, please give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to our new podcast, Rate/subscribe in iTunes, and tell a friend about what you think of the podcast! We'll be looking out for the next episode, and we'll post it on the next one on the App Store or Google Play. Thank you so much for supporting the podcast, and share it with your friends and family! Timestamps: 5:00 - What's your thoughts on the podcast? 6:30 - What do you think about it? 7:15 - What does it mean to you think it's great? 8: 9:40 - How does it matter? 10: What does your opinion of it's better than it matters? 11:10 - What would you like it matters to you? 13:00 15:00 -- What's a good thing? 16: What are you looking forward to do more? 17:30 -- What s your favorite part of the episode? 18:00 | How do you have a better idea of the future? 19: What's better? 21:40 -- What is your favorite piece of advice for me? 22: Is it better than that you're going to be the most important? 23: What s a good idea? 25:00 + 6:00 & 15:30 26:40 27:15 -- How can you help me build a better experience?
Transcript
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00:00:02.000I often describe the great divide in American political and cultural life today.
00:00:29.000As not being so much between the right and left, whatever those terms mean right now anyway, between Republicans and Democrats.
00:00:38.000but between the rise of a new managerial class and the everyday citizen.
00:00:45.000And I think that this is a an age old debate, an age old power struggle that surfaces every so often.
00:00:54.000The American Revolution was fought on the question of whether citizens could be trusted to govern themselves in a constitutional republic.
00:01:03.000The old world vision was that they could not, that it would be a mistake to entrust citizens to sort out the most important questions that they faced.
00:01:14.000And, you know, we on this side of the Atlantic said that, no, for better or worse, we will trust the everyday citizens to make those decisions for themselves and to own the consequences of making those decisions through a democratic process codified in a constitutional republic.
00:01:31.000And yet here we are, 250 years later, now Effectively sorting that question out again, debating that question again, through the rise of stakeholder capitalism, through the rise of the great reset, through the rise of a new vision that calls for dissolving the boundaries between the public and private sector,
00:01:50.000between nations, increasingly between the online and offline world, to again, settle questions that we may not be comfortable We're good to go.
00:02:21.000So anyway, this is what I think is really going on beneath the surface and explains, I think, a lot of the otherwise inexplicable fissures between within the Republican Party, within the Democrat Party, for that matter.
00:02:34.000And I think a lot more of it makes sense when you start seeing the actual socio-political cultural divide in terms of The managerial class and the everyday citizen, the great reset and the great uprising, than through the, I think, increasingly boring tropes of modern partisan politics.
00:02:53.000So anyway, with that, I'm joined today by somebody who I think is, you know, thinks deeply about This and related issues.
00:03:02.000And we're going to have a good conversation with today, James Polis.
00:03:05.000I hope I'm saying your last name right, from the Claremont Institute and the editor of The American Mind.
00:03:13.000And I just want to welcome you to the podcast and looking forward to our conversation.
00:03:23.000I can empathize on the gratification of someone saying your last name correctly.
00:03:30.000I get it from my first name correctly too.
00:03:32.000But regardless, I gave a little bit of a stream of consciousness to kick us off there.
00:03:41.000I don't know if you wanted to react to that, but I know you have been thinking about The world in, you know, broadly, at least through similar prisms, and I wanted to give you a chance to respond to my little reflection there, and then we'll get into a discussion that'll probably be far-reaching from AI to the future of currency to the future of the Distinctions between the online and offline world.
00:04:08.000I'm looking forward to, of course, diving into all that stuff.
00:04:10.000But as you intimated, it all starts with this kind of foundation of trust among citizens.
00:04:18.000Citizens who commit to one another to apply their habits and Their mores, really, you know, the habits of the heart, as the great Tocqueville scholar and sociologist Robert Bell called them, to the task of self-government.
00:04:36.000When that trust is gone, and this, you know, this comes out of Tocqueville, but it's all over the place too, you know, friendly critics and hostile critics of democracy recognize that when that trust erodes, when the sort of spiritual basis, the basis of the heart erodes when it comes to that trust, Then we can fall,
00:04:52.000you know, very quickly into structures of governance, ways of life that are just fundamentally inimical to America from its birth right up, I think, to the present day, worse than all.
00:05:07.000And so, you know, that's been a core part of what the Claremont Institute has been all about since 1979 when it was founded, understanding in the sense of political philosophy how to maintain the structures that we've inherited in a way that doesn't steamroll or sideline that kind of citizen trust and in fact relies on it to deliver outcomes that are still, you know, the envy of at least a huge portion of the world.
00:05:31.000There's another publication called Return.
00:05:36.000And we like to say that return is where tech aligns.
00:05:38.000I know alignment has become sort of a crazy word right now that's being contested in tech spaces.
00:05:44.000But alignment, you know, really for us means alignment in the sense that you're describing.
00:05:47.000Aligns the long-standing habits and mores of the American people.
00:05:50.000That have been put to the test and have been proven out to be a true sound guarantor, a bridge between that kind of spiritual robustness that I described and the kind of, you know, just good government outcomes that we all are hurting for these days.
00:06:17.000What you're hearing out of a lot of Silicon Valley, you know, there are a couple of sort of cults vying for people's attention or allegiance right now.
00:06:25.000You got effective altruists, I guess, you know, SBF kind of blew up some of that a little bit.
00:06:31.000You got the AI safety people, a lot of talk about AI ethics.
00:06:36.000And really, I think what these different factions all have in common is they're seeking to apply what kind of masquerades as a rational approach to controlling and containing and channeling technological development.
00:06:52.000But when you look under the surface, what you see is that it's really more of like a worship instinct, what Norbert Wiener, the godfather of cybernetics, called gadget worshiping.
00:07:04.000This idea that there's something so wrong with human beings that we tried monarchy and that didn't work.
00:07:10.000We tried aristocracy and that didn't work either.
00:07:12.000So we tried oligarchy, just like big business being charged.
00:07:27.000What are you trying to reestablish sovereign authority on what basis?
00:07:32.000And, you know, there's this kind of wokeness that has bubbled up to that level where people say, like, well, you know, as long as we have the right kind of, you know, almost secular priests telling the machines who not to offend today and sort of who deserves more respect today than someone else...
00:07:54.000You have some other folks in tech who are like, well, maybe we don't want full-blown wokeness, but as long as we are in control of advancing the technology, then probably some amount of wokeness is fine.
00:08:04.000Those two things, I think, converge onto the same destination.
00:08:08.000Wokeness ultimately can't really function right unless it has a woke supercomputer to do real-time calculations about social justice and social credit and handing out almost like Micropayments instead of microaggressions for every time someone does the right thing or the wrong thing.
00:08:24.000And then on the tech side, you know, a willingness to kind of give in to a very, very irrational sort of worship of technology.
00:08:31.000Oh, it'll transform us, you know, it'll solve all of our human problems.
00:08:35.000Politics, you know, we try politics, that doesn't work.
00:08:38.000And I think both of those instincts, you know, underlie a vision of the world, a vision of our humanity, and ultimately a vision of the cosmos that is just out of step.
00:08:47.000Even in 2023, out of step with most Americans, out of step with our spiritual heritage.
00:08:54.000And one that, you know, technology advances.
00:09:26.000It's the pride that comes before a fall.
00:09:28.000And when we try to offload or outsource all of our very human challenges onto Rude Goldberg machines, we know that it's not going to work.
00:09:38.000We've had thousands of years to try that experiment out.
00:09:41.000This time, even though digital is wild and crazy and strikes people as something fundamentally new, which it is to a degree, it's still going to have the same outcomes.
00:12:00.000And then like, you know, other like, you know, like anti-woke Silicon Valley types or like sort of, you know, negatively disposed to woke Silicon Valley types, like type in little replies to that and like not in complete sentences without punctuation or capitalization, but we'll say things like, this is the way.
00:12:43.000I think it's like an underappreciated opportunity, but sort of the religiosity around it.
00:12:49.000It irks me in a way that I suspect might irk you too, based on what you've said so far.
00:12:55.000But like, what's your reaction to that?
00:12:57.000Actually, this is a useful conversation to sort of get to the bottom of what was annoying me about that tweet.
00:13:01.000Yeah, you know, my reaction is anathema.
00:13:05.000You know, this is that all religions are not created equal.
00:13:08.000And this is a religion that really jumps off from Stuart Brand saying we are as gods and we better get used to it or better get good at it.
00:13:14.000And there's no shortcut to approaching the divine, nor can you engineer something that's going to get you there instead of doing the hard spiritual labor, which oftentimes characteristically takes a lifetime of ups and downs and having to have real beginner's mind and thinking of yourself as the first among sinners in order to be sufficiently humble to even begin to approach God.
00:15:48.000And then you look at the same period of time with the same kind of technological advancement in Europe.
00:15:53.000And what you get is the first and second Balkan Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, all the sort of crazy civil wars that spin out of that Russian Revolution, Russian Civil War.
00:16:06.000Communism almost overthrowing the German government in the 1920s.
00:16:11.000And then you just segue right into World War II. You've got all the sort of sub-civil wars that spring out of that.
00:16:18.000Civil strife in France and the Balkans.
00:16:27.000And the Europeans come out of this transformative experience of electricity, radio, television, really feeling like if we don't clamp down on this stuff, then we might just go right back to that horrible experience.
00:16:44.000And so I think you look at the EU today with regard to technology, and their attitude generally is, we might not be the best innovators in the world, but gosh darn it, we're going to be the very best regulators in the world.
00:16:55.000We're going to beat everyone to market with the full dress regulations.
00:17:00.000We're going to find people not shying away from any of that stuff.
00:17:03.000And I think talking about religion, the Vatican trying to position itself as a major player in understanding how AI should be regulated and used in Europe.
00:17:13.000Until recently, that has not really been the tenor of the conversation in the US. It's interesting to see, as you described, whether it's Altman, who's...
00:17:24.000Is it today or tomorrow that he's testifying before Congress?
00:17:28.000These guys are already coming out, open AI, with like, hey, we should have this regulatory framework and want to make sure that...
00:17:34.000It's the same kind of regulatory capture that we've seen take place in other sectors, other industries.
00:18:31.000So I think it's a little bit more different than just the exo-wombs, which are making the rounds, at least the photos of them.
00:18:39.000A pod to be born, a pod to die, and a pod to live, and in between.
00:18:43.000But these guys, they have the money, they have the motive, and this is not just a sort of matter of, well, logic says for them.
00:18:52.000There is a spiritual component to it that's very powerful, and it is a desire to become gods.
00:18:59.000So what would be the way they go about doing this?
00:19:02.000Well, look, I mean, we have news coming out of the UK right now where the first baby with DNA from three individual people has been born.
00:19:11.000And the way that you get in is you say, like...
00:19:13.000Well, this is a rare disease, and you've got to give this child a chance at living a normal life, and nobody wants to have a child who comes out all messed up.
00:19:22.000And so, if the mom has a problem with their mitochondrial DNA, then maybe you find a donor, and you just kind of stick that into the egg as it's It's fertilizing, and this isn't the island of Dr. Moreau here, people.
00:19:36.000This is to help the downtrodden and reduce suffering.
00:19:40.000It's very utilitarian, and it feels good.
00:19:56.000I mean, look, given the posture of a very fast-growing share of our society right now, and it's not just in the US, it's You know, I drove past a billboard in LA. Your feelings are your superpowers.
00:21:22.000To surgically remove your genitals and sculpt some sort of artificial substitute.
00:21:29.000You do not have a right to have offspring with five different people's DNA. You do not have a right to re-engineer your body so that you're like a cat girl.
00:21:44.000So you have the little ears and the tail and I mean, you know, you do not have the right to multiple limbs.
00:21:52.000Once you breach that dam, all kinds of, you know, as the meme goes, man-made horrors beyond your comprehension will flood it.
00:22:01.000And if there is no spiritual backstop that sort of stomps on those temptations before they coil around our hearts, all the law in the world, you know, is not going to be enough.
00:22:25.000Really, I think this is a matter of the human heart, and it's the matter of our shared spirituality and spiritualism.
00:22:31.000And if we do not see the human body as an ensouled, created gift, which is sacred, a temple, Uh, then really all bets are off.
00:22:41.000And so, uh, I think if we're not talking those terms, then we're, we're just going to be posting a lot of L's as the, uh, the, the, the trans and post-humanists, uh, continue to gather power.
00:22:51.000So the conventional wisdom would, would go that if you have a, uh, whatever Blaise Pascal said it well too, right?
00:23:04.000To you, does that make the case for just avoiding law or policymaking as a mechanism here, or do you view that as a necessary but insufficient step?
00:23:13.000I think you could make the argument either way, actually.
00:23:16.000I'm curious for where you land on that.
00:23:18.000Well, I think that there's, you know, if we're trying to run away from law and policy altogether, then we're going to have to run all the way to the monasteries.
00:23:25.000You know, not that there's anything wrong with that.
00:23:28.000I think, in fact, you know, pairing monasteries with a technology like Bitcoin will yield incredibly grounding and salvific things in this world as so many institutions exist.
00:23:40.000Gotta say, you know, things are crumbling.
00:24:15.000Really, it's almost, you know, a third rail, as they used to say, you know, the sort of electrical railing in America is the Civil Rights Act.
00:24:25.000Nobody wants to talk about how the Civil Rights Act is bad.
00:24:28.000Nobody wants to talk about how some civil rights are different from others.
00:24:31.000There's real pressure to not touch that.
00:24:32.000I don't think you've heard me very much then.
00:24:34.000Well, you know, I mean, I'm painting with a broad brush here.
00:24:38.000And, you know, you and others are starting to break the seal.
00:24:54.000I'm going to assert that I fit within this unfolding progressive understanding of civil rights.
00:25:00.000And so you're going to give me power and control over your children, perhaps, and yourself, and how you live and breathe and act and speak, all in the name of civil rights.
00:25:11.000How do you sort of make sure that that doesn't come to eat our Constitution, what's left of it?
00:25:16.000And I think, you know, when it comes to technology, which is a big test for this, you know, there are going to be efforts to say, well, you know, I identify as a cyborg and I demand my civil rights.
00:25:27.000I've produced 10 billion nanobots and these are robots of my creation and they're sentient and you can interact with them.
00:26:09.000There are no parental rights for preventing your children from being trans by doctors or regulators or just busy bodies.
00:26:17.000Just down the line, government will decide how much technology is going to be integrated into your life.
00:26:23.000It's going to be a lot, but you're not going to be able to control any of it.
00:26:26.000There isn't going to be any independence to how you put technology to use in ways that actually strengthen our humanity, strengthen what's left to our foreign government, strengthen our way of life.
00:26:35.000Down the other road is actually trusting, going back to citizen trust, trusting the American people to use fundamental technologies to build those good things, those fruitful things on a digital foundation.
00:26:48.000If they're not able to do that, look, Americans used to be very confident, very comfortable with their technology.
00:26:56.000They weren't afraid to roll their sleeves up, put their hands directly on their tech and put it to good use, to fruitful use, to healthy use.
00:27:03.000We are now in an era where many Americans look at technology either as an escape, a place to numb out and escape what's happening to the world, or as this kind of threatening alien presence that they don't understand and feel like they have no ability to command.
00:27:20.000Both of those things are incredibly dangerous.
00:27:22.000Both of them are a fundamental break, I think, with American civilization and how it has understood and approached technology.
00:27:28.000And the reality is that, you know, all of these high-tech things, whether they're entertainment or tools, they are dual-use technologies.
00:27:36.000They are weapons of war at this point.
00:27:39.000We know from the Internet that there is, you know, there's psychological warfare going on, propaganda war going on.
00:27:46.000Clandestine conflicts, financial conflicts, there is a digital world war going on right now.
00:27:50.000And we don't always get to see what's going on under that surface.
00:27:53.000Sometimes it's nefarious, sometimes it's not.
00:27:55.000Evil people appear at all levels of society.
00:27:57.000It shouldn't be surprising to see them in government, just like you shouldn't be surprised to see them in your neighborhood.
00:28:01.000But the point is, if we do not protect and enshrine the ability of ordinary Americans To, you know, just language straight out of the Second Amendment, to keep and bear fundamental digital technologies, things that they need in order to protect and defend their families, their way of life, their form of government, their citizen trust.
00:28:23.000Then they're going to be reduced to slaves.
00:28:24.000We are going to be the slaves of the technology that we created thinking that it would make us masters of the world.
00:28:29.000That is an outcome that would be a catastrophe, not just for America, but for the human race.
00:28:44.000We have a freedom to use fundamental weapons for our own protection.
00:28:49.000Those things need to be extended into the digital realm.
00:28:52.000If America isn't America on the internet, then it's not going to be America in real life for very much longer.
00:29:00.000So what would be your proposed digital rights amendment as you would have it?
00:29:07.000Yeah, well, I mean, I take the language directly.
00:29:10.000It should be the same kind of broad and general language that has served us so well in the Bill of Rights, especially the First and Second Amendments.
00:29:19.000I think we do not want to get into the business of government picking winners and losers, as they say.
00:29:24.000There's already too much patronage, too much corruption, too much just sort of, you know, really mafioso-style politics happening under the surface and sometimes bursting out into plain view as, you know, the Biden family's dealings.
00:29:36.000He's certainly not the only one, but, you know, he's an example.
00:29:39.000So we want to keep that language broad.
00:29:41.000You know, the right of Americans to keep and bear, fill in the blank with certain technologies shall not be infringed.
00:29:49.000And I think the big ones here are high powered GPUs, just raw compute.
00:29:56.000Bitcoin, you know, other cryptocurrencies, fine.
00:29:59.000Bitcoin is especially important because proof of work is really important.
00:30:02.000The ability to establish that kind of citizen trust on the internet in digital space.
00:30:07.000Proof of work is the way to get there, in my opinion, but I'm certainly not alone on that.
00:30:11.000And now we've got AI coming into view.
00:30:14.000Keeping AI bottled up in the hands of a few secretive and super powerful post-humans and their government cronies, this is definitely not...
00:30:40.000Yes, weapons in the hands of spiritually corrupt...
00:30:44.000And delusional people, yeah, bad things happen, but the same as it ever was.
00:30:50.000This is just buy the ticket, take the ride, you're a human being, get used to it.
00:30:55.000We have to take those risks and we have to honor the American people.
00:30:58.000We have to honor the fact that so much of what people have taken for granted as America is Has been taken away from them, especially since the pandemic, since the lockdowns, since the craziness with Russiagate, which, you know, has just proven to be just basically CIA and State Department, just trying to punish the guy they didn't like for being president.
00:31:18.000We've got to restore trust in government and restore the ability of Americans as citizens to trust themselves.
00:31:25.000If they can't put their hands on fundamental technologies and use them to build things that strengthen their way of life, strengthen their humanity, and strengthen our form of government, then you can just kiss this grand experiment.
00:31:35.000"I'm not going to be a problem." You want to close with your last, you kind of teased me earlier with your pairing monasteries with Bitcoin.
00:31:42.000Why don't we wrap with that, which is paint your vision there.
00:31:45.000I think that those are two things that you don't historically and traditionally think about going together.
00:31:51.000And the reason I am curious about it is I actually do worry in any new realm, just like you see, you're talking about Sam Altman or anyone else earlier, you could substitute, fill in the blank, That you filled with AI, put Bitcoin at the end of it and you could observe a similar religiosity.
00:32:10.000So I'm curious for where you're coming from on that illusion you made before we wrap.
00:32:16.000I mean, look, you can worship anything.
00:32:17.000Technology gives you lots of, you know, bites at the apple if you want to use that loaded language.
00:32:21.000And there are some people out there, Bitcoin Maxis, and they're like, we are people of the coin in the way that, you know, some self-styled Judeo-Christians would say, we are people of the book.
00:32:29.000And it's like, easy there, tiger, you know, sitting on the mountaintop and waiting to achieve nirvana because number went up.
00:32:35.000You know, that's not the kind of spiritual fortitude that we need.
00:32:38.000That's trying to check out of life and hoping that the numbers will save you.
00:32:42.000Over my shoulder, you'll see this book right here, Human Forever.
00:32:46.000The subtitle of that book of mine is The Digital Politics of Spiritual War.
00:32:50.000And look, we're in the midst of a spiritual war.
00:32:59.000Technology has advanced to a point where it raises fundamental questions, inescapable questions about who we are and why we are who we are.
00:33:07.000Those kinds of questions are theological.
00:33:11.000And people are having different kinds of theological responses.
00:33:14.000And that's what all the fuss is about.
00:33:16.000So amidst this conflict, a lot of people are feeling like they are destined to lose.
00:33:21.000Basically, they're damned that things have gotten to a point where being human sucks, that they don't have the juice to get even like a last few drops of satisfaction wrung out of their bodies.
00:33:48.000And a lot of this was seen by some of our darkest philosophers.
00:33:53.000There's a Scandinavian philosopher by the name of Zapf.
00:33:57.000He was writing in the 30s, a very depressive guy.
00:34:01.000He said he predicted the coming of what he called the last messiah and the sacrament of the last messiah would be human beings now think too much.
00:34:09.000We're driving ourselves crazy with our big brains.
00:34:12.000The only solution is for us to hear the voice and silence of stop having children, do not be fruitful, do not multiply.
00:34:21.000Once the human race dies out, then all of our problems go away.
00:34:24.000And, you know, that seems very like overdramatic and very Scandinavian.
00:34:27.000But the fact is, like these sentiments are really sinking in.
00:34:30.000They're getting spiritual grip on the hearts of the people.
00:34:32.000And so people are recognizing that all these things that we've been fussing and fighting over and trying to strive for have really not come to fruition.
00:34:40.000They have made lots of big promises by sort of peak America.
00:34:46.000All those kinds of power, positive thinking.
00:34:49.000And it just didn't pan out for a lot of people and they feel like they were sold a bill of goods and in a way that they were.
00:34:54.000So what do you do when you have so many millions of people across the West and the U.S., Who really just feel like, you know, check please.
00:35:02.000Let me go out in a blaze of glory or even just disappear silently.
00:35:07.000You know, as Frederick Nietzsche predicted some of this stuff, you know, his kind of cruelly ironic joke was a little poison that makes for a good life and a lot of poison at the end that makes for a good death.
00:35:41.000So, you know, in a digital age, what is the kind of labor of centuries that people who want to withdraw from the world and painstakingly spiritually approach God, what kind of labors can they do fruitfully in a digital age?
00:35:54.000Well, I think you look at something like Bitcoin, where it is a powerful protocol.
00:35:58.000It is something that does allow you to build trust, but also to build trust.
00:36:04.000Institutions, to build algorithmic markets, to build a way of ordinary people to exchange goods and services.
00:36:10.000I released this book here on Bitcoin, published it onto Chain, sold it for Bitcoin, a site called Canonic, canonic.xyz.
00:36:39.000And so I see these two forces, you know, converging in a way, where people who are looking to, you know, walk away from our crumbling and corrupt institutional sort of vibarium that they're building around us, and also at the same time looking for spiritual uplift rather than, you know, an untimely death.
00:36:56.000We're out of time, so we've got to wrap.
00:37:02.000Wait, you could have just done it with the monasteries.
00:37:04.000I love Bitcoin actually as much as the next guy, but I'm wondering whether you're shoehorning a little bit of that in there when actually most of what you described was the work was already done, actually.
00:37:15.000Pure and simple monasteries, they never go out of style.
00:37:18.000I expect them to be around for a long time, God willing.
00:37:22.000The big question is, you know, who is going to be the spiritual authority that leads people to use technology in a way that keeps our human beings sacred?