Animal Crossing is Demonic | A Bee Interview With James Poulos
The Claremont Institute's James Poulos talks about how Animal Crossing is destroying your soul and how your smartphone is crossing into the demonic. James Poulos is the Executive Editor of the American Mind, the Claremont Institute's online publication. He is a frequent commentator on technology, the American character, and social scores for Kyle and Ethan. Check out BetterHelp.com/BabylonBee for 10% off Kyle and Ethan start out the interview by playing a few icebreakers with James to get to know him better. Since James speaks about our dystopian future, Kyle and Ethan find out which dystopian movie world he would want to live in. James talks about the spiritual warfare taking place within technology. He gives his thoughts on the new social scores the government will want to use for the population in the near future. Kyle and Ethan find out how difficult it is to keep a high score in our dystopian future. Kyle and Ethan have James explain the Great Reset using Mario characters. In the Subscriber Portion, Kyle and Ethan find out James' thoughts on the best videogames of all time. Ethan finds out about what it's like to be on the Bill Maher show. James gives his thoughts on Edward Snowden and how it affected America. Kyle and Ethan ask the ever great 10 questions and get a great Keanu Reeves story out of James.
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
Hey, you.
Right now, you're probably watching or listening to this on a tiny little device that's like, you know, three, four inches diagonal.
Wait, maybe four or five inches diagonal.
Yeah, you hold it.
Yeah.
Little, yeah.
Glass device, glass screen, you know, all that stuff.
Did you know that that's actually a demon?
Or a demon portal?
A portal to demons or a tool.
And it communicates in ways that angels and demons do.
And it sucks your soul from your body.
You're about to find that out, actually.
So that's what he was talking about this whole time?
I had a tough time.
He was smarter than me.
He was speaking.
He was on a whole different level.
Yeah.
I kept trying to bring it back to my way of thinking.
Mario Brother.
We try to get him to do some kind of simple analogies for our little brains.
So this is James Polis, Claremont Institute.
Smart guy.
We did quiz him on how smart he is, and he failed miserably.
But other than that, he's really smart.
But maybe there's different kinds of intelligence.
Like there's smart, smart, and then there's like Babylon B Podcast Mar.
He just didn't pass that test.
Yeah.
But he's still a smart guy, you know, depending on how we look at it.
Yeah.
And he wrote a book called Human Forever, The Digital Politics of Spiritual War.
And you can go to humanforever.us to sign up for information and get access to that stuff.
My favorite part of the show is we offered him $100 if we could read a quote from his book and he guessed the page number.
It was a nail biter.
There were some really close calls.
Really close calls on there.
On that.
Yeah.
Yeah, you got to watch for that.
So it was a great conversation.
Big tech, what is government trying to do?
Great reset.
Where's all this leading?
Yeah.
We're going to find out.
Let's find out right now.
And it's Polis.
It is Polis, yes.
You nailed it.
I'm not going to lie.
I looked up how Larry King pronounced it.
Oh, man.
All right.
Larry.
All right, Peter.
Larry King.
I figure he's a pro.
What's that like?
What's like talking to Larry King like?
I will say, you know, like before the segment starts, he's like, so James, have you been to the Broad yet?
The what?
The Broad Museum?
The Broad in downtown LA?
It's like, well, Larry, no, it's not open to the public.
It's like, oh, I was there last night.
It's great.
He's flexing.
You haven't?
Totally.
You're not on my level yet, are you?
It's a museum that's not open to the public.
Well, it hadn't like it hadn't opened yet.
So they did their like special preview for the special people.
Yes.
For the global elite.
And Larry had the run of the place.
No, I was not one of them.
That sounds like a museum for bro culture or something.
Broad.
The broad.
Come to the broad museum.
Broad.
Do a couple shots.
They've got like hair gel on display.
Surf forwards.
The first axe.
Yeah.
The body spray.
It took me a minute.
Oh, I thought you meant the weapon, and that still worked.
That's an axe a weapon.
I guess it can be.
The first recreational axe.
The first.
Yeah, that was the moment humanity shifted when we started using axes recreationally.
Right.
It's all downhill from there.
Yeah.
So, you know, we don't know you.
You're just a stranger that walked in off the street.
But it's good to do an icebreaker.
We've learned from, you know, corporate events, business lunches.
You need an icebreaker and everybody gets to know each other.
We also Googled how to have a good conversation.
Yeah.
And it's said to do an icebreaker.
Icebreaker.
Google.
There's still a new best for these things.
I don't know why the ice has to be broken.
That seems like you drown if the ice breaks.
Yeah.
You don't want that.
When you really go across a lake.
How to do anything.
You can rely on Google to tell you what to do.
Such as interviewing people.
Who to be.
Exactly.
How to live.
So if you could live in any fictional dystopian nightmare, which would you choose?
Some examples.
Hunger Games, the 90s Mario movie, The Fifth Element, Demolition Man, Running Man, Total Recall, Wally.
I mean, The Fifth Element was like a utopia when I watched it.
It felt like, I mean, that was like, there was still a sense of like fun and ridiculousness and absurdity.
The fifth element and the Mario movie from the 90s feel almost like the same movie to me.
They have these giant, the Goombas, they're the same things.
Yeah.
Blade Runner.
French director.
They'd run the Fifth Element, which I think, you know, if you want silliness, you go French.
But I think it's 12 Monkeys was probably my favorite dystopian film.
Okay.
12 Monkeys.
But you would want to live.
The question is, you have to live.
You want to live in it.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I would live above ground in 12 Monkeys.
The underground realm was not a cool place to be.
So Bruce Willis is a survivor of, believe it or not, like a pandemic that wipes out most of the population.
You got Bruce Willis mixed up with Fifth Element.
Right.
So he did these two subjects.
He's involved in that one.
Yeah.
He's very bald.
He's not blonde.
That was like the first film where Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt both went from like majority female to majority male fan bases.
Both happened in 12 monkeys.
I don't know.
I mean, he was still doing like moonlighting and like there was this glow.
Die Hard was his first after moonlighting, right?
Am I wrong?
Am I wrong?
I don't know.
It's all blur.
Nakatomi Tower.
I see it all the time.
And it's beautiful.
There was some romance in Die Hard, so I could see, you know.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
All right.
But there was no romance.
You're the expert.
You're the college guy.
We're not trying to debunk you here.
No offense to Madeline Stowe, but the romance was not the big draw for 12 monkeys.
I like Brad Pitt in that.
He plays a good crazy guy.
does he does like the one crossed eye for like the entire good job My father's turnip.
Yeah.
All right.
So have you ever written a book?
Yes.
Yes.
Can you explain the synopsis of your book in 60 seconds?
Let's find out.
60 seconds on the clock.
Okay.
So now go.
So the ruling factions who are trying to dictate our every waking moment of life created these machines, these digital machines, like these things, thinking that the machines, because they created them, would perfect their global rule.
And they were very optimistic about it.
And everyone was feeling good.
But the machines, you know, did not care what the ruling factions wanted to happen.
And so ordinary people started to use them to do what they wanted, to say what they had to say and to live how they wanted to live.
And that caused the ruling factions to panic.
And we saw that unfold starting in 2016.
And so now they're trying to reclaim control of the body and reclaim control of us through those machines.
And we can stop them.
Yeah, five seconds.
Five seconds.
Do you want to say anything else?
And we should right now.
Otherwise, we'll lose our humanity forever.
Okay, stop.
What's the name of your book?
Human Forever.
Human Forever.
He didn't say.
Did you say the name of your book?
The name of the book is Human Forever.
The subtitle of the book is The Spiritual Politics of Digital War.
Okay, and this is a non-fiction book or a dystopian book?
I'm sorry.
See, I'm already the digital politics of spiritual war.
It sounded like you were describing like a dystopian fiction.
Maybe that's because we were just playing dystopian stuff.
A lot of the book is about how utopia and dystopia are both intermingled.
Well, they're intermingled.
They are mistakes.
They are traps into which we fall.
And sometimes people want us to fall into those traps.
They don't want us to think about reality.
They don't want us to remember reality as we've lived it from generation to generation.
They want to break that continuity and insert themselves into our lives that way.
So they don't want history.
They want fiction?
Yeah, they want fantasy.
I mean, fantasy was what ruled when TV was the most powerful communications technology.
What happened on screen was more important than what happened off screen.
And it was all about if you can dream it, you can do it.
And imagine, you know, there's no heaven and like all that sort of John Lennon, Walt Disney, George Lucas stuff.
It ruled the world.
And now it doesn't because we have a more powerful form of communications technology.
And so, you know, I think that's one reason why so many people right now are freaking out and confused and questioning their identity and floundering and filled with resentment.
Because the people in charge sort of created this system that they thought would do its bidding and it's not doing their bidding.
And so now they're trying to grab everything at once.
You sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Do I really?
Yeah.
Like a conservative right-wing extremist.
See, well, the interesting thing is that we, oh, wow.
We know that these things are not conspiracy theories because they're happening in plain sight.
I mean, you can see that there's like a social credit system that is being developed right now, like through the government and through the corporations.
What would you say is the social credit score of me versus Kyle right now at the interview in the interview at this point?
Well, you call me a domestic terrorist.
Your score is going down.
Wouldn't that make you a number, though?
Because we want to keep score throughout the interview.
So being a good citizen and Kyle a number.
You have failed to mask the irony in your accusation.
And so that makes you more sus.
What is the social?
Is it like an, what's the scale?
How negative do you earn points?
Do you go negative?
How far negative can you go?
I mean, you can be incarcerated.
It can go to negative infinity, I think.
So is that where I'm starting at?
That's the lower bound.
Yes.
In virtue of being a Babylon B person, you're going to have to be able to do that.
Kyle's score is negative infinity.
Kyle's negative infinity is my score at?
Well, you're at negative infinity plus one.
Okay.
All right.
I'm winning.
Okay.
Okay, now we know you're smart.
You know, you go to college and stuff and write books, but just to prove you're smart, we need to do a quick quiz just to make sure that you actually are smart.
We don't want people.
Lying.
Yeah.
So just quick, we answer these fast.
Okay.
We don't want to waste much of time.
People's time is important.
What starts with E and ends with E, but only has one letter in it?
Envelope.
I. Envelope.
I. Envelope.
Come on.
It has one letter in it.
Okay.
Kyle, go ahead.
Oh, man.
Three favorite things about Willard Fillmore.
Go.
The name is obviously number one.
Number two is no one remembers his middle name, not even myself.
And number three, he was like a know-nothing?
Was he a member of the know-nothing party?
This is how knowledge-destroying Willard Fillmore is.
No one remembers his middle name.
It's a trick question.
He's like the lead singer of Foreigner.
Everyone knows he exists, but no one knows his name.
His name is Millard Fillmore.
Yeah.
Willard.
Millard.
Millard.
Willard Fillmore is a fictional character played by Norm McDonnell.
That's right.
All right.
So I'm losing.
My score is going to be middle very quickly.
If I drink, I die.
If I eat, I'm fine.
What am I?
A chia pet.
Fire.
Is that a yes?
No, fire.
No, fire.
That's not like a fire.
You're like, fire answer, bro.
Fire answer, bro.
You're not reflecting well on the Claremont Institute at this point.
How many six inch by six inch books can you put in a two foot by two foot container so that it's not empty anymore?
All of them.
One.
Because once you put it in there, it's not empty.
All right.
So you talk about, I hope the rest of the interview is just this.
We talk about spiritual warfare, kind of.
So I looked up the most influential spiritual warfare film there is.
In 2016, Pureflix film, Heaven's War.
Who played Senator Baker?
John Travolta.
Close.
Joe Estevez.
That is close.
Had a J at the beginning.
You didn't get any of them, right?
That's it.
That's it.
Oh, we had another question to quiz on how smart you are.
Without reaching for your phone, how much is Bitcoin worth this very moment?
Yeah.
Look at a couple different flavors of Bitcoin.
I think that BTC is somewhere at about 400.
Who can look it up?
We need the results.
Maybe high 300s right now.
You got to be specific, man.
Come on, you're the expert.
$385.42.
I don't think he knows what he's talking about.
I'm getting sweaty.
Are you looking?
$50,530.61.
What?
That's the one I'm looking at.
What does it say?
$50,000.
BTC is $50,398.
I'm not a mathematician.
You were close.
You were off by only $50,000.
It's a rounding error.
That's like government math.
They're going to mint it up.
It's closer than I would have got.
So before we move on to some legit questions, what's the current social credit score?
So you are now at negative Google.
Oh, that's a number.
You could jump up.
Isn't it Google?
Because Google's a real Googleplex.
Yes.
Yes.
The more that you troll me in front of a national audience.
But I went up from infinity the higher.
That's right.
You're going from negative infinity.
Oh, yeah.
So it's good.
Yeah.
That's huge.
I don't know math, but that's huge.
Yeah, I think you're negative half a Google now.
Okay, wow.
So I'm still double, Kyle.
Gosh.
Kyle's going into the Gulags, and I'm, I don't know, going to the better Gulag.
The Google Og.
The Google Og.
All right.
Well, you told us you can talk about big tech, social credit, cancel culture, the great reset, how to stay human, Bitcoin, and your book, Human Forever, the Digital Politics of Spiritual War.
So what do you think?
Is America's future going to be more like The Matrix or Terminator?
What's like the most accurate depiction of the future you think has been shown in fiction?
Yeah, I mean, the Matrix is, of course, an accurate depiction of the present.
So I guess by default, it would have to be Terminator.
Okay.
Yeah.
So robots?
Well, like the, I mean, the main difference between Terminator and now is that most of the robots are invisible.
They fly through the air.
They can be everywhere at the same time.
When 5G kicks in, it's going to be basically like zero latency between like communications between devices.
So, you know, for all of human history up until now, the only kind of entities that could behave that way are like spiritual entities.
And we're now in a situation where we've created these things that can behave in ways that only angels and demons were really able to behave in the past.
A contributing factor to the insanity that is sweeping the world and our nation.
So you mean like phones are like little ghosts in your pocket?
Kind of, yeah.
I mean most of the most of the robots, most of the machines that people interact with every day are invisible to them.
AI?
That does strike me when I watch a dystopian movie.
They'll fight the robot bad guy, and he looks like a human, and they're like, all I have to do is stab his brain.
And I'm like, well, that's not.
He's like, let me get my gun real quick.
Yeah.
Westworld, the original.
Yeah.
The full advantage of computers, it's like this giant network.
That's right.
Demons.
So smartphones are demons, is what we're doing.
Well, no.
I mean, this is the good news is that it's basically just plumbing, basically like invisible plumbing.
And so, you know, the spiritual war that needs to be waged is really one that involves remembering that we have souls and that unlike these disincarnate devices and programs and entities flying through the air almost instantaneously, we are human.
We have souls.
We are incarnate.
And if we forget that, then the insanity will really kick off.
And some of the worst people out there are the ones who deny that we have a soul, think that we can just merge into this kind of cyborg vivarium living space.
And so the technology is not itself, we haven't summoned forth demons.
The demons are already there.
They're going to continue to be there.
And the way of doing battle with them is different than the way of dealing with the fact that we've created these powerful machines.
What ordinary people need is a way to reassert human control over our machines.
And we can talk about how to do that.
So, you know, it's really like plumbing, but some forms of technology are not just tools, they're also weapons.
And it's time for Americans to lay claim to some of those weapons.
We need a Second Amendment for compute.
Americans should be able to freely use these machines, develop databases, value and exchange goods and services electronically, all that kind of stuff.
And that's not what the ruling factions want us to do.
They want to know when we send money back and forth in more than $600 is the current peg.
They want to spend as much money as they can think of, which is an infinite number of dollars.
Like my credit score.
Yes, but basically.
That's right.
And really, they just want to know what we do, what we think, where we are at all times.
That's not America.
It's never been America.
And to be quite honest, it's never been any regime on Earth, even the most horrible.
What are some examples of demons?
Like individual demons.
Well, you mentioned that the demons of today.
Yeah, well, unpack that.
I mean, I think they're like, so if you go back and look at the writings of the Desert Fathers, all of these things that we associate with alien encounters or whatever, when you drill down into those experiences, it turns out that people have basically an impossible time of describing those encounters in a way other than a spiritual encounter.
And all the things that we are accustomed to describing in terms of alien phenomena are things that the Desert Fathers recognize demons and sorcerers, people who are champions.
Pretend I don't know what the Desert Fathers are.
Has that like been fathers or something, but of the desert?
Yeah, so this is like early Christianity, and you get a lot of guys who decide to go full ascetic lifestyle.
Some of them go live at the top of pillars.
Yeah, sort of like individual monks.
Some of them formed into groups.
Some of them went off on their own.
The line one of them used, which I always remember, is, you know, one day he finally like climbed down from his pillar so that he could go down and like mock the world in its vanity.
And so these guys, these guys had some raw experiences.
And I think this is about, you know, 200, 300 years after Christ.
And they wrote a lot of it down.
And they, you know, they complained about things that many people complain about today.
There's like the noonday demon is one demon that they describe.
And that's the one where it's like, you know, you sort of wake up, you do your monk stuff, you run through all your routines, and then like it comes around to like lunchtime and you're just sort of sitting there and you're like questioning and you're feeling bored and time's going by slowly and you're like, what is this even for?
And why am I even doing this?
And like just all that kind of like self-doubt and like sloth and just like, oh, I have that demon.
Right.
I'm absolutely sure.
The noonday demon.
I have the noon demon.
I was thinking the like when nature calls.
But that's that's a different around the time.
Is that a demon?
That I go to the bathroom.
It's demonic.
That's a different.
That's that's that's Taco Bell.
That's what Taco Bell is called.
That's from 3 o'clock a.m. Taco Bell.
You get the noonday demon.
That's right.
The noonday demon comes early.
When you hear that that Taco Bell bell, just go dong at like three in the morning.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fourth meal.
So you talk about staying human.
Is it possible to be a furry and yet stay human?
Pretend I don't know what a furry is.
It's a person that wants to be an animal.
They dress like one.
They're obsessed with their anthropomorphic cartoon animals.
They're aroused by animal people or something.
Maybe.
Some of them.
Many of them.
Some of them.
There's many stripes on the flag.
Many stripes.
So, you know, I have a son who is in middle school.
Is he dressed like a rabbit?
He does not dress like a rabbit.
Fox.
But he does make fun of furries.
He's on a good path.
I think that a lot of the there's this impression that like millennials own online culture still.
And this is not true.
And so, you know, a lot of like younger guys, guys who are like, you know, heading into puberty, sort of like entering into their teenage years, they do not look up to the millennials.
In fact, they just sort of like flip through TikTok all day, just like laughing at these like damaged and insane millennials.
So yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I think that the whole furry thing is like a massive cope for the fact that, you know, we've entered into this cyborg existence and the people in charge are not really in control and no one knows what to do about it.
And they're looking for answers, not like, how do we save the world?
Like, that's obsolete.
They want to know how they can save their souls.
And if they can't get that information, they're just going to continue to spiral and latch on to the most like obscure or obscene or bizarre answers or pretend answers in the hopes of keeping themselves sort of like off balance or distracted enough that they never have to like sit with the fact that they no longer know who they are and that they need to restore their soul to a position of health and vitality in their life.
As a Christian, you know God's always there for you, but sometimes things in this life can feel downright overwhelming and you just need to talk to someone.
That's right.
That's why the online counselors at faithfulcounseling.com are there for you.
Connect with a professional Christian counselor in a safe and private online environment.
It's so convenient.
It is.
And it's nice that you can talk to someone who shares your faith and values.
People that specialize in depression, stress, anxiety, relationships, crisis of faith issues.
You're not going to get that with an atheist counselor.
I'll tell you what.
Right.
And you just have four communication modes: text, chat, phone, and video.
You can start communication under 24 hours.
Desktop, mobile, web, Android.
Man, they got everything.
There's financial aid available for those who qualify.
It's affordable, faith-based.
So check it out.
You can go to faithfulcounseling.com slash Babylon B and you'll get 10% off your first month at that URL.
Yeah, why not get started today?
Go to faithfulcounseling.com slash Babylon B. What was that again?
Oh, that's right.
It was faithfulcounseling.com slash Babylon B. Simply fill out a questionnaire to help them assess your needs and get matched with a counselor that you're going to love.
10% off.
Check it out.
Check it.
Is TikTok good or bad?
Is TikTok good or bad?
It's a tool.
It's a tool.
And it's not that technology is neutral because it's definitely not.
I mean, it has its wants.
It wants interoperability.
It wants all things to be pluggable into each otherable, if I can use a term of art.
Whereas, you know, what human beings want is like incommensurability.
Like, I am me and you are you, and nothing is going to cause those two things to sort of mush into this like super blob that consumes us all.
We want to, you know, we want the integrity of our identity to be intact.
And that is at odds with the kind of technology that we've created.
Now, you know, the answer isn't like blow everything up, like go back to the Stone Age.
Like that's not happening.
So we need to just like sack up, accept that we've created these technologies and figure out how we can restore our sort of competence and control over them.
Because I kind of feel like the structure and format of a particular social network or program actually can shape the way that you think.
Like the way that TikTok is just this very like quick, brief, like, you know, people don't sit down and watch like a two-hour comedy movie anymore where you have this developed plot.
It's like, I want the joke right now.
What's the next one?
This is true.
That's not neutral to me.
Well, no, no.
But tools aren't neutral either.
You know, some tools are weapons.
Some tools work on us in ways that we don't understand.
I mean, part of the, you know, if you want to go deep into the theory on this, so like Marshall McLuhan was like, all right, Marshall McLuhan was like the big media theorist who was famous in the 60s for saying the medium is the message.
And people are like, right on.
More importantly, like into the 70s and 80s, after he stopped being sort of like a celebrity, he did like sort of real theoretical work into like, what is a medium?
What is technology?
What does it mean for us to build things that are not just like, you know, artifacts, but are extensions of our capabilities?
And how do you make sure that we do not sort of jump the track from trying to extend our capabilities into trying to like replace our capabilities?
You know, so like supplementing our human capacities, that can be good.
Supplanting our human capacities with these machines, maybe not so good.
Especially if we're supplanting our own capacities in an effort to escape responsibilities, our responsibility for the world that we've created and the tools that we fill the world with.
So these digital tools are unlike previous tools.
Their organizational form is really like the form of the swarm.
And the swarm behaves in ways that an arsenal of rifles does not behave like a swarm.
A printing press does not behave like a swarm.
And it's the swarmishness of digital technology that is very at odds with our humanity and human organization.
And it creates new challenges for us to figure out how we can control that without turning the tools against ourselves.
So the formative effect of technologies, we created technologies that are taking on the character of environments onto themselves.
And so you can go back through history and see how the printing press didn't just result in books and more content.
Created this kind of like psychological and social environment that altered the way that we thought about everything from like rights to you know justice.
And so every time there's like one of those big transformations in the media environment, it shapes us in ways that we can't necessarily predict or understand without really doing some serious, thoughtful investigation.
And that's, you know, that's what went wrong with like our ruling class or elites or whatever you want to call them is they were working on globalization.
The Cold War was over.
The United States was the sole superpower.
Everything, you know, we were going to connect the world together and everyone's going to hold hands and everyone's going to be friends with each other sort of or something.
And it's going to be great, you guys.
And, you know, here, all you have to do is you have to just take one of these things and John Lennon's world is just going to come streaming out of our machines and we're all going to live happily ever after.
And of course, that's not what happened because they didn't understand the nature of this technology.
They were mapping this sort of, you know, their fantasies really onto the tools that they had created.
And they thought that because they created these tools and they thought they controlled these tools, that the tools would sort of bring their fantasies to life.
And that's not what happened.
You could go back in time to 2004.
Do you kill Mark Zuckerberg?
I don't think that Mark Zuckerberg is the problem.
I mean, it's the form of the technology and the formative effect of the technologies that's the issue.
Facebook gets beaten up on for a lot of reasons.
And I mean, in some ways, it's just laughable.
Like, this is kind of a hybrid thing.
It's like kind of television, but it's kind of digital.
And I think it's like two trying to fit two media together in a way that is fundamentally unstable.
The thing for me about Facebook is like you get rid of Facebook and what comes next, right?
And the people in charge who think they're in charge want Fedbook to be next.
They don't want to get rid of Facebook so that everyone can live more productive human lives in the way that they want to with their friends and like their, you know, their community and like their fellow churchgoers or whatever.
They want to concentrate things still further.
They want to have more control over what you can say and think.
And, you know, and they want to get people to accept a lower standard of living and lower rates of childbirth and lower rates of transportation, a smaller footprint.
You know, they want to shrink you down, put you in the pod, and wean you off of money.
They don't want you to be productive.
They don't want you to hold assets.
They don't want you to accumulate wealth and save it and pass it on to your future generations, to your own progeny.
They want you to farm points in their social credit system.
They want government by Roblox.
And unless we do something about it, it's coming.
Eat bugs and use the metric system.
That's what they want.
And drink decaf.
Yeah.
Drink decaf coffee.
Yeah.
Take your food pill and your jumpsuit.
Soy calf.
It's not good.
This may be related.
In a recent article, you called Animal Crossing a game of pacification and dehumanization.
Why is Animal Crossing?
What is Animal Crossing?
My kids like Animal Crossing.
explain the game.
So, well, you know, animals, it's a, you cross animals out based on social credit scores, not, Not quite.
It's a virtual world.
Okay.
Well, it's a game, yeah.
It's a little town.
It's a little town with populated with little animal cartoon characters.
They're basically furries.
Okay.
What, they're people?
No.
They are hominid animal cartoon characters.
Anthropomorphism.
Anthroporphism.
That's right.
So they walk on two legs and they do things like hoe their garden, like pitch their tent and cook things.
Are there animals that do this?
Yes.
Okay.
And, you know, they have like big heads and like strugger, but there's also rabbits and skunks.
The crossing is like a town, like animal crossing.
No, you can't run any animals over in Animal Crossing.
And so it's sort of like this, this self-contained, you know, vivarium that you can create your little, have you seen that film?
No.
No, it feels like a word you need to whisper.
We talked about this film on Ethereum.
Chandler mentioned it, I think.
Or somebody mentioned it.
Yeah.
That's the one with the suburbs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think Chandler mentioned it.
Anyway, so the big pitch of Animal Crossing is that this is a simpler life where nothing bad happens and you don't need to be sad anymore because you hang out with your little animal friends and you pretend that you live in the village with little animal people.
Okay.
That's it.
That's the whole, that's it.
I just farm and stuff.
You do stuff.
You get like fake fake prizes and do they eat eggs?
I don't know.
They're chickens.
It's weirder to eat eggs if your friend makes the eggs and you can talk to them, right?
Isn't that weirder?
I mean, I've always found it strange when food service companies or restaurants, they anthropomorphize the product and then they make it smiley.
Yeah.
The pigs.
Give me.
Yum, yum.
Right.
Well, Chick-fil-A did it right with the cows.
Yeah.
Because they don't serve.
That's right.
They hacked it.
They hacked the main frame.
So, you know, like, like, Animal Crossing really took off during the pandemic because a lot of people are like, I would not have maintained my mental sanity without the ability to disappear into Animal Crossing.
Yeah, it did, like, have this insane explosion of growth and sales during the pandemic.
And I'm like, are you sure that you maintained your mental health?
So you're just living like an Amish community, but you're animals?
Is that?
I'm still trying to figure it out.
I think that's a, that's a, there's like no, at least, at least for no sexual reproduction.
And I don't think there's any religion either.
Because isn't that often the utopia of, I feel like this is in a lot of movies, especially horror, they try to make horror films where nobody ever asks, is there a god?
Or like they never even think about faith, but they're like dealing with like demonic powers.
Yeah, I know.
So isn't that the fantasy of modern times, like to talk spiritual, but then pretend like there is no spiritual at the same time to have both?
it's pretending it's creating an environment where there appears to be no religion but in fact you know anything with this degree of sophistication and immersion does have a theological sensibility and sort of structure to it and it's just that's a boy Yeah, quote-unquote.
So the person's like, yeah, you're a human, and everybody in the town is a bad.
I'm just walking around an orange field right now.
Yes.
Everybody in the town is an animal.
This is a YouTube video, and there are over 7 million views on this guy.
A kid walking around is a big dude.
Animal Crossing is big.
And you can talk to this little thing.
And then there's like someone wearing a bunny suit, but who isn't a bunny?
So they are furries.
Well, maybe some of them.
So, right.
I mean, like.
So is there a level I can play Animal Crossing and not be demon-possessed?
I mean, I think that if you...
I mean, you play it for like five minutes a day.
I think...
I think that if you went in after a period of prayer and fasting with like a gallon, one of those like 75 hard gallon jugs of holy water, you could probably be fine.
Is it like for a while, but how long?
That's a question for science.
Is it like Roblox?
Are the other animals people from?
They can like visit each other's towns.
So is there other people on there that you're talking about?
Not typically, but yeah.
There's like online features.
Yeah, so I mean like Squid Game, right?
Can we talk about Squid Game?
This is like another sort of show where there's like no God at all.
Right.
And like that's the real horror of the show.
And it's the one element that goes totally unspoken.
I mean, Vivarium is another one where it's like the nightmarishness of the scenario as it's presented is like bad enough as it is.
But the reason why it is that bad is because God is totally missing from the world that it portrays.
And still worse, like even the characters who are like suffering and being tortured and dying have no concept of God themselves that's being presented.
This is mind control and it's bad.
Using only the characters and setting from the Mario Brothers, can you explain to us what the great reset is?
I will try.
Okay, so Mushroom Kingdom.
Right.
So if Bowser and Princess Peach were the same character, like a sort of like gender ambiguous overlord.
Turtle Dragon.
Right.
Who consolidated all of the assets and all of the coins, all of the question mark boxes, all of the coins.
One gentleman.
Sort of like accumulated all of those resources.
And then started redesigning all of the levels in all of the worlds according to a sort of master plan so that Mario and Luigi and Toad and I guess Toadette and friends.
I guess that's kind of how they so that all of those former heroes and heroines became basically Animal Crossing characters.
Oh wait, we're going back to Animal Crossing.
We're going back to Animal Communication.
You jumped out of Mario.
You left the world there.
Well, but that's YouTube.
Yes, I don't know.
Not to just make them all like Koopas or something?
No, Because Koopas?
Yeah, I mean, the Koopas are like the enforcers, like the street enforcers.
So they don't want them going through the levels and getting coins.
No.
They don't want them just walking around a little bit.
They don't want them to have memories of progressing through a journey that has a complete Bowser goal.
So who's they in this scenario?
When you're saying they and you go, they.
Who wants to do this Bowser giant cube grab level changing?
Well, so like, you know, look at who presents themselves as being in charge right now.
You know, like that, that class of folks in government, in corporations.
You know, this is not all the answers.
This is not like a figment of someone's fever imagination.
Like they go on TV every day and they get on the internet every day and they stick like warning stickers on content that they don't like.
It's just happening in plain sight.
And this is without even talking about like the World Economic Forum and like all these clowns.
I mean, they're out there and they have a lot of money sloshing around.
All those private foundations, like all these NGOs, they pumped so much money into the system by just spinning it out of thin air and they're using it to terraform our lives.
And the Mario analogy can only take us so far.
But the thing that amazes me about Mario is to this very day, in the Mario games, you can still, they're still bad guys and you can still kill them in order to win.
It's true.
And that is being crushed out of the experience of gaming right now, I would say.
No more killing in game.
And there's still a lot of killing, though.
There's still a lot of killing, but if you look at the pressure that is being applied, they're trying to, I mean, even Facebook, we're going to be a metaverse company.
It means that you can have virtual business meetings and you can sit at a virtual conference table and look like a character from Animal Crossing.
They bought Oculus, and now you can do it.
Oh, yeah.
It's going to be nice when you go to a business meeting and you look like a dragon fairy.
Yeah, so this is a world where there's no place for God.
This is a world where, let's be frank, there's no place for testosterone.
There's no place for sort of like physical strength and vitality.
And that is what the reset is designed to accomplish.
Oh, crap.
We built this system.
It's falling apart.
Our machines are disobeying us.
We need to just round it all up and reprogram it and make sure that we can pacify and domesticate and defang and control the people as much as we want to control the machines.
That's the project.
So don't play Animal Crossing.
Yeah.
All right.
We're ready to play a little game with you here.
We have read your book, every page.
We will read a quote from your book.
For each one, each quote, tell us from memory the exact page number that it's on.
Or answer, that's not from my book, that's from a trashy romance novel.
For each one you answer correctly, you get $100.
That's very generous.
Yeah.
All right.
You ready?
That means I'm going to get them all wrong, right?
I don't know.
Okay.
It's up to you.
Here we go.
Quote, we all became cyborgs.
Unquote.
That's page 33.
18.
Close.
Sorry, it was close.
Pretty close.
Year zero is impossible unless the continuous patrilineal memory of the first generation and its fathers is broken up and zeroed out.
See, now I feel like that's actually page 33.
You can also kind of, if you want to unpack anything you're saying here, feel free.
Because what the heck are you talking about?
Sure.
Oh, it's page 28, by the way.
28.
So he did.
I did.
I guess 33 again.
Oh, it's closer this time.
This one's going to be 32.
Year zero.
I mean, this goes back to like the end of World War II when Nazi Germany was defeated.
Hitler killed himself.
And Hitler killed himself and the bunker, you know, and everyone's just like chewing cyanide capsules and Berlin was just flattened.
And so like, what do you do with Germany at that point?
And so the locals took to calling like, you know, May 45, like year zero.
It's just complete, total reset.
You know, like your religion is toast, your political ideology is toast, your cities, your houses, everything's just been sort of bombed into like a flat zone.
And, you know, if you if you go read like Umberto Echo is one of these guys who was writing about this is sort of like, you know, what is fascism?
They're all these people trying to figure out like what just happened, you know, with fascism.
And so a lot of the theorization that spun out of that time and is unfortunately being continued today in lesser minds with bigger megaphones.
They say like, well, there's this thing called the authoritarian personality.
And so like, if you're too far to the right, that's a mental disorder.
And things that are characteristic of this mental disorder is appreciating things like fathers and heroes who founded your, you know, your civilization or your culture.
That's fascism?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
This is, you know, well, it's the root of fascism.
Yeah.
You know, people who want to continue the passage of memory and narrative from like father to son over the generations.
Like this is.
Also known as patrilineal memory.
Exactly.
This is the seed bed of fascism.
They really do, you know, they really do think this way.
And in the same way that racism is being used to describe anything that, you know, someone wants to attack.
That's happening.
I'm kind of saying we have to erase our connection to history in order to make the great reset happen.
Yes, so that individuals just see themselves as these, you know, sort of floating through space in need of being organized into a swarm.
So a rational person usually would think all the history we have teaches us what not to do and how to learn and how to use all that wisdom from all that time.
This worldview would be naturally we have the ability to be good and you just get rid of all that baggage, forget it.
If we can just start from nothing, that's better.
Yeah.
We can perfect humanity by creating the perfect plan, and the perfect plan is going to arise from having really from seeing yourself as a god.
It's weird to think that you could create the perfect plan if only you could just erase your brain.
Yeah.
It seems like the main thing you'd need is a brain.
Well, if you create machines that are so smart that we don't even understand how they work, then maybe we could just walk around.
All right, next quote, next quote.
Beatrice was on him like a piranha on a corn dog.
Oh, man.
That's the last line of the book.
No, actually, this is from an actual quote from a trashy romance novel.
Man, you could have gotten away from it.
They were so similar.
That was almost 100 bucks.
Easy hundred.
Easy hundo.
All right.
Okay.
This one's a mouthful.
Go, Kyle.
With electric speed and shocking intensity, the queer became systematized, ideologized into queerness, moving relentlessly from the concrete and particular to the abstract and absolute.
Its center of energy, whipping in arcs of sparks from the gay man to the lesbian to the bisexual woman, and by way of the pansexual to the ultimate forerunner of sexualities, a tool of self-transcending Gnostic power, the transsexual and transgender.
Beyond the trans, none can be more truly ethereal, as we all know, than the transhuman.
The trans person is the bearer of the total light of post-human cosmic consciousness.
And it is for this reason that despite their vanishingly small numbers in world population, the trans command a vast and increasing share of communicative and commercial world consciousness.
Page 201.
Actually, that was from a trashy romance novel.
Trashy romance novel.
Oh, man.
I knew it.
You're really close.
176 or 177 would have got you that one.
Oh, man.
So close.
There's a double chance to get that one right.
So in the event that people want to know what that means.
So what's going to get us from the most social points you get from being trans?
Well, what's going to get us from this all-too-human condition that we're in right now to realizing this fantasy land where everyone lives in perfect harmony and all of our responsibilities have been assigned to this sort of machine complex, this borg that we can trust to prevent the dirty, you know, the sinful humans from screwing up, right?
Well, and that is exiting humanity.
That is what we need to do in that schema.
You know, human beings, we can't trust them.
They have bad opinions.
They have bad ideas.
They're dangerous.
They're violent.
They're patriarchal.
They're racist.
They're terrible.
Yeah.
So what do we do?
Well, obviously humanity is the problem.
We need to leave our humanity behind.
We need to process everyone through a sort of system that causes them to recognize that their humanity is what's wrong with us.
Okay.
And so how do you sort of begin that process?
And it's like, well, what are the things that we need to knock down in order to escape from our natural, given, God-given humanity?
And one of the, you know, first thing on the list is the most fundamental distinction between man and woman.
If you can break that, then people start, oh, we can become anything.
We can do anything.
We can think ourselves into being whatever we want to be.
We can be like gods.
And so, you know, just the speed with which we've seen like the sort of gay rights movement get co-opted and turned into this other thing.
And they keep adding stripes to the flag and it keeps getting more and more bizarre.
Even to the point where like, you know, lesbians are now like, you know, too many of us are turning trans.
Like this is bad.
You know, the whole point is to just like women with women and like nothing.
We don't need to go to this like other place.
And they're now conservative.
Well, they're now trans exclusionary, radical reactionary feminists.
Turks.
Yes.
Right.
They are Turks.
So why is this social contagion of transsexualism becoming the thing that has risen to the top of the stack in terms of attention, in terms of prestige, in terms of the push that it's getting from officialdom?
Well, it seems to me pretty obvious that this is because it is really step one.
It's like founding event for a regime that is trying to go into a full transhumanist realm because we got to break.
break the humanity in order for the spark within to merge with the machines.
Guy wants to be a girl.
Next thing you know, we're all getting like robot implants in our face.
Yes.
Okay.
I understand.
Good.
But especially at the elite level, the trajectory of American political theology led inexorably away from the cornerstone of faith mystery that held the division in place.
Jesus Christ.
Trashy romance novel.
Close.
Do you want a second guess?
Not a trashy romance novel.
Correct.
Got a page number for me?
I really wanted to get one.
Can you repeat the question?
But especially at the elite level, the trajectory of American political theology led inexorably away from the cornerstone of faith's mystery that held the division in place.
Jesus Christ.
This is a tough one.
I think that might be the first mention of Jesus in the book.
I did a search.
I did a search.
Yeah.
I did read the literature.
I just wanted you to say inexorably again.
Inexorably.
I did a lot of it.
You showed me, is that correct?
What I did is I did a great reset of my mind, and then I said it correctly after I took all the baggage of the history away of how to not talk right.
You are on the path to being a genderless god.
Yes, I salute you.
See the genderless Ethan gun in a robe.
Yes, Bowser, Princess Bowser.
68.
Sad.
And you're getting farther.
Almost half right.
112.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Then he kissed her like a butterfly kisses the windshield of a Porsche on the Autobahn.
This is violence.
So he kissed her like this.
This is emotional violence.
His face exploded against hers, and there was nothing left.
It's like this the worship song with the sloppy wet kiss.
What is the other one?
Unforeseen kiss.
Like the guy jumping out of a bush and smashing into your face with his lips.
Unforeseen kiss is a creepy.
It's even worse than a sloppy kiss.
I saw a video of a bee inseminating a queen bee in mid-flight.
And in fact, well, here's the point of the story is the force of that encounter causes the male bee to lose his member and to fall out of the sky dead.
Wow.
Yeah.
So, you know, the swarm, the swarm imposes its costs on the men in the system.
That was what I took away from that.
Trashy romance novel.
Give me that 100 bucks.
Oh, he got it.
Okay, he's got 100 bucks.
Put it on the screen.
100 bucks.
Jing.
Okay, finally, announcing to their shocked ruling factions the arrival of the digital catastrophe, Trump voters use the internet along with the ballot box to begin what their rulers instantly and incessantly propagandized, despite incalculable risk to their credibility, as an insurrectionary infowar against our democracy.
That is against their regime.
That's pretty early in the book, I think.
That's got to be like, I'm not going to say page 33, but I might say like more like a page, it's 159.
Eight.
153.
153.
1253.
You're so close at 130.
You were very close, 162.
You get three guesses after.
Oh, sorry.
You get no more guesses.
I almost give you money.
Your social credit score has plummeted.
Mine?
Yes.
I was trying to help you.
Yeah, well, it didn't work.
Where are we at?
Can we get a social credit score score update?
You've risen to one, one, one point.
That's a lot.
Is that like where you don't get executed?
You will be eaten last if you are in the black.
I tried so hard to help this man.
Wait, what is he at?
It's because I showed that I have a soul.
That's right.
Yeah.
So that's negative 33, negative 33.
We've both risen exponentially.
We're doing well.
You're doing well.
But remember, you could be zeroed out at any time.
They caused our epistemological crisis.
They hacked our brains.
Page 10.
Oh, yeah, so close.
Oh, that edge of my seat.
11.
Oh, 11.
Man.
I knew I should have paginated the book to paginated.
Wow.
All right.
And finally.
Let me just, if I may.
Okay, please, you may.
So that's our.
Yeah, you explained that whole Trump voter thing, too.
Yeah.
So this is like the main example of like when the people in charge are like, so the MIT, the MIT Technological Review put out as its first issue after Barack Obama's re-election.
It had Bono's face like filling the entire cover.
And the title in like all caps was How Big Data Will Save Politics.
And it was like, this is amazing.
Like we will use technology to understand how everyone's going to vote and how to convince them to do what we want.
And that's what's going to bring us together as a nation and as a world.
And then a short four years later.
Kind of went the other way on that one.
Kind of went the other way.
And a lot of Americans were like, well, I'm going to use the internet to have my own opinions and to talk to my friends and my neighbors.
And maybe we're all going to conclude that the people in charge don't know what they're doing and don't have our interests at heart and are actually trying to squeeze us out of our way of life and impose a new one on us.
And so maybe we'll vote for this other guy.
And, you know, and you watched the New York Times prediction yield from it was 99.999% certain that Hillary Clinton would be elected.
it, you know, over the space of about 45 minutes and it crashed and broke off and went to negative infinity and we got Trump.
Um, that was like, it went all the way down to Kyle's initial level.
Yeah.
Yes.
That was the panic moment for the ruling factions because there's more than one.
So I describe those factions.
You know, ruling class, little Marxist, people get confused.
I want to keep their eye on the ball.
Sometimes I go pull up that thing that they posted like on election day where it's Jeff Clinton at 98% and Trump at 1.8%.
Just to watch, just to look at it.
Imagine isn't that great?
It's like a memory.
Like from Huffington Post on the day of the election.
I'm surprised that it's still something that comes up on a Google search.
So what do you get?
You get the MIT Technological Review instead having a cover that's like, oh, big data is destroying our democracy.
Just because the other guy won.
And so Barack Obama finally trotted out and does an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, the job of the hut of the Atlantic.
And Barack Obama says, like, the internet has created, I'm paraphrasing, an epistemological crisis in America.
We don't know what we know anymore because people are just on the internet, sort of like saying things to each other.
And like, we can't listen.
They can't do that.
They have opinions that are wrong.
And now there's chaos.
And you'd re-elect Donald Trump and bring the world to an end.
Now, to a degree, he's right that digital technology created sort of started to pose these questions.
Questions about like, can you really trust the people in charge?
How much of what you see on television or on screen is propaganda?
How much of what is presented to you as fact is actually just someone, spin doctors or ad people or Hollywood or whoever, just like slinging you what they want you to believe.
So yes, all those kinds of questions.
Doctors were such a big deal in all this.
They fell off in the late 90s with a big resurgence.
If you want to call me baby, just go ahead now.
She did a little barbershop.
Marry him, marry me.
Follow that guy on Twitter.
He posts a lot of cat memes.
Seems like a nice guy.
I ain't got no future or family tree.
It's a fable.
Two-thirds of two princes.
I know what a prince lover does.
One prince is actually working at Taco Bell, and the other one is a real prince.
A real prince.
Yeah.
He doesn't know about real life.
That's right.
It's not late.
So to a degree, yes, but what really happened was an ontological crisis.
That is the dumbest song.
A crisis not of what we know, but of who we are.
And that came about by smart and wealthy people creating technologies that they did not understand and thought that they did understand.
And now it has thrown us into a situation where we have to rediscover, remember, retrieve our understanding and our memory of what it is to be human, soul and all.
We have one more quote.
You ready for the last quote?
I'm ready.
Is it me or you?
You.
It's me.
Okay.
With his broad shoulders and slim waist, he was a yield sign.
Yet she could not.
She couldn't yield.
This is a real quote from Real Buddha.
That's apparently from a romance novel.
The internet says that's what it is.
You just give him the answer.
If it's on the internet, it must be true.
Aha, I got you.
All right.
Trashy romance.
$300.
So you got $200.
$200.
So he gets $200 worth of Babylon B advertising.
Yeah, it's not cash.
It is advertising.
So $200 buys you about a 30 seconds.
Because there's a 30-second ad slot.
30-second ad spot on our pod podcast.
Great.
Which means that we are going to now promote your book.
Ready?
For 30 seconds.
Let me know when we should start.
Hey, Babylon B fans and subscribers, listeners, and viewers.
We have an awesome sponsor for the podcast today.
This is James Polis' book, which is called How to Be Human Forever.
No, it's called Human Forever, the Digital Policy of Spiritual War.
This thing is like, it's almost like skinny cream.
It makes me glow.
My wife, after I read it, she looked at me and she went, who did I marry?
This is a whole new man.
And then we just made out.
It's like a butterfly crashing to a Porsche on the Audubon.
There's no trashy romance quotes in it.
It's like an amazing book.
You can get it now.
You can get it.
You can go to humanforever.us and enter your email to be the first to know when the NFT goes live and when the book is on sale.
We'll give him some free cash.
That's fine.
He owes us like $100 now.
Yeah.
So pick it up.
Human Forever, the Digital Positive Spiritual War.
It's a scorching searching guide to saving our souls from the digital apocalypse.
Check it out.
It is like the protein shake of books.
Okay.
I bought some this protein shake stuff the other day, and it said greatest tasting protein shake in the universe.
On the universe, it's a very bold statement.
You don't even know if there's other civilizations out there.
They've done the research, they've done it for food and drug administration.
The people on the planets in Alpha Centauri.
J-Rob, they're good at protein shakes.
So we're going to move into our subscriber lounge now where James Polis is going to tell us what he really thinks.
What's the final score, though?
The social credit score for the score.
Oh, yeah, we need a final score for both of us.
Well, I'm going to have to check my device here to be absolutely sure.
Yeah.
You have an app for that?
I do.
Yeah.
Social credit.
You like scan us with well, there's good news and bad news.
And the good news and the bad news is that you've both finished at zero.
Okay.
Great reset, baby.
Yours probably not terrible.
Yeah, that's what you want.
You're destined.
We're now ready to be soulless-mind people.
Eating our pill, using the metrics in our jumpstart.
Gods.
See?
You understand?
We've been stuffing to the new regime.
Playing Animal Crossing in our pod forever.
In the future, you'll be zeros and you'll be happy.
And we will be eating bugs.
And it sounds good.
Protein.
Yes.
Well, speaking of zeros, our time is up here.
We're moving on to the subscriber.
Subscriber lounge.
You want to join us at that join button?
Because we got the 10 questions and we're going to talk about other stuff.
If you're on YouTube, mash that join button or go to babylonb.com/slash pause become a subscriber and you can you too can get your credit score.
Where's my join button?
They have to go to YouTube.
Yeah, it's that same.
Peace.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
I do have a Keanu Reef story.
So I was at the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2.
Good for civilization or destroying Western civilization.
Oh man, Bill Maher farted one time or something like that.
I do have one nice thing to say about him, which is enjoying this hard-hitting interview.
Become a Babylon Bee subscriber to hear the rest of this conversation.
Go to BabylonB.com/slash plans for full-length ad-free podcasts.
Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.