The Charlie Kirk Show - 'Transhumanism' and the Coming Cyborg Reset with James Poulos
Aired: 2021-11-20
Duration: 42:28


=== America Fest Phoenix Dates (02:55) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, everybody.
[00:00:00]  Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, what is transhumanism?
[00:00:03]  What does it mean to lose your humanity and become a cyborg?
[00:00:06]  That's right.
[00:00:07]  We go there on this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:00:09]  James Poulis from the American Mind and the wonderful Claremont Institute joins us today for that conversation.
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[00:01:32]  James Poulos is here.
[00:01:34]  Buckle up everybody.
[00:01:35]  Here we go.
[00:01:36]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:01:38]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
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[00:01:43]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House.
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[00:01:48]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:49]  His spirit is love of this country.
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[00:02:37]  Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk show.
[00:02:40]  I'm super excited for this episode.
[00:02:41]  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.

=== Secure Your Online Activity (16:05) ===

[00:02:55]  It was just so interesting to me.
[00:02:57]  It's dr James Poulos.
[00:02:59]  I hope I did okay with that pronunciation.
[00:03:01]  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]  And so let me just first kind of start with James.
[00:03:15]  If you could introduce yourself to the audience and also introduce to our audience, what is transhumanism?
[00:03:23]  Hey there.
[00:03:23]  So it's great to be with you.
[00:03:24]  Thanks for having me on.
[00:03:26]  The best way to think about transhumanism, I would say, is in the following way.
[00:03:31]  Once upon a time, technology was firmly on America's side.
[00:03:36]  The electric age was very good to us.
[00:03:39]  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]  Europe did pretty poorly during that time.
[00:03:59]  Everyone's empires fell apart.
[00:04:01]  Massive world wars, genocide, disillusionment, loss of religious faith, really just kind of a wipeout of that civilization.
[00:04:08]  It's just still barely trying to hang on in some ways.
[00:04:11]  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]  You know, of course, we thought we created these technologies.
[00:04:21]  They're super powerful.
[00:04:22]  We have a huge head start on everyone else.
[00:04:24]  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]  And that's not what these machines did.
[00:04:39]  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]  And so once that happened, there was this real kind of head check.
[00:04:57]  Suddenly everyone had a smartphone and this technology wasn't just cumulative.
[00:05:01]  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]  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]  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]  And so what effect are these technologies having on who we are as human beings?
[00:05:28]  And I think the effect's very profound.
[00:05:30]  You got basically two camps of people.
[00:05:33]  You can go too far in either direction.
[00:05:35]  I think some people think digital technology is basically a curse.
[00:05:39]  And then other people think, no, it's our humanity that's a curse.
[00:05:42]  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]  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]  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]  And, you know, I think increasingly we just see it out there every day growing.
[00:06:29]  Many Americans don't know what to do about it.
[00:06:31]  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]  It's not too late.
[00:06:43]  It can be done.
[00:06:43]  And I look forward to talking about that.
[00:06:45]  Yeah, that's really profound.
[00:06:47]  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]  It's this movement where these people in Silicon Valley want to try and integrate computers or technology actually into humans.
[00:07:04]  You could start to see this with Neuralink, with Elon Musk, and many other movements, and that technology is only accelerating.
[00:07:11]  You saw that with Facebook, which is no longer Facebook.
[00:07:14]  It's now called Meta.
[00:07:15]  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]  I don't think even I have a good grasp on.
[00:07:24]  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]  Talk about the implications of where this technological movement is heading, which is the destruction of the human species.
[00:07:41]  Yeah, that's a trajectory.
[00:07:43]  You can see it in the language, the rhetoric around the great reset.
[00:07:46]  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]  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]  And it's still informal.
[00:08:20]  These things don't have a name.
[00:08:22]  You can't sort of flex on people by showing that you have a higher social credit score than them.
[00:08:26]  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.
[00:08:47]  They understand where things are going.
[00:08:49]  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]  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]  It's at odds with our constitutionally guaranteed form of government.
[00:09:23]  And those in charge don't particularly seem to care.
[00:09:25]  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]  Basically, they've said, well, the financial system that we created has fallen apart.
[00:09:43]  It's not sufficient to propel the economic growth that we need to maintain sort of our position in the world.
[00:09:49]  So we really just need to kind of junk it and start over.
[00:09:52]  And so the COVID pandemic is the perfect opportunity in their estimation to just kind of flush the system.
[00:09:58]  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]  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]  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]  It's a part and parcel of our real world lives.
[00:10:39]  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]  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]  It's all unfolding very fast.
[00:10:57]  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]  Tell, you know, the hash is kind of the way that the techies talk about it.
[00:11:17]  Tell the hash what to do.
[00:11:19]  And that way is Bitcoin.
[00:11:20]  You know, Bitcoin is hyped up as a way of sort of making money fast and getting your friends rich.
[00:11:24]  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]  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]  You know, Bitcoin is very powerful.
[00:11:36]  You can use it to do a number of things.
[00:11:38]  I'm selling a book on Bitcoin.
[00:11:40]  It's being published to the blockchain.
[00:11:42]  It's being sold for Bitcoin, payable in Bitcoin.
[00:11:45]  That's on canonic.xyz.
[00:11:47]  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]  So it's an exciting moment.
[00:12:02]  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]  And we shouldn't look on our community as a curse.
[00:12:13]  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]  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]  Sinister folks, by the way.
[00:12:37]  Did you know that Airbnb gave $500,000 to the Marxist BLM incorporated organization?
[00:12:44]  Your first vote is at the ballot box, but that isn't enough to defend our traditional Judeo-Christian values.
[00:12:52]  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.
[00:13:06]  You have another vote, a second vote at the checkout line, which is why there's a massively important organization called Second Vote that comes in.
[00:13:14]  I know them very well.
[00:13:15]  I've known them for years, and I'm so honored to partner with them.
[00:13:19]  And the courageous people at Second Vote are exposing corporations for how they spend your money.
[00:13:24]  So check out secondvote.com today.
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[00:13:35]  Their work is arduous, complex, and exhaustive, and it doesn't happen for free.
[00:13:42]  So please support their work so we can defend our future from the woke Marxist mob.
[00:13:48]  So here's what I want you to do: do what I did.
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[00:13:56]  It's $50 a year.
[00:13:57]  I know it costs something, but they have to be able to pay for their research.
[00:14:02]  And the black family, we're amazing people, by the way, have underwritten this effort for quite some time.
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[00:14:34]  Maybe it's like, hey, I don't know if the car I'm buying, are they donating to Planned Parenthood?
[00:14:40]  What about all these companies?
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[00:14:54]  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]  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.
[00:15:26]  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]  Yeah, I guess that's his name.
[00:15:39]  And all these other really kind of superfluous type things.
[00:15:43]  Are you seeing any sort of political momentum?
[00:15:45]  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]  Well, there is some momentum, but it's complicated.
[00:15:55]  I mean, you look at the folks on the left and what's going on with wokeness right now.
[00:15:59]  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.
[00:16:15]  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.
[00:16:26]  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.
[00:16:33]  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.
[00:16:52]  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.
[00:17:08]  And for the folks trying to put the cyborg vivarium together, they're willing to accept wokeness as long as they remain in charge.
[00:17:13]  So there's some affinity there, but there's also a lot of tension.
[00:17:16]  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]  It's incompatible with our civilization.
[00:17:28]  And so the political stakes are increasing and also the political attention is increasing.
[00:17:33]  At the federal government level right now, it's difficult.
[00:17:36]  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]  But you got guys like SEC had Gary Gensler out there.
[00:17:46]  A lot of people thought, oh, he actually knows a thing about Bitcoin.
[00:17:49]  So maybe he'll be good.
[00:17:50]  That's not the way it works, unfortunately.
[00:17:52]  The feds want to turn Bitcoin into just one more asset class that they control in their digitized system.
[00:17:58]  And that's not going to fly either.
[00:17:59]  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]  If the feds aren't able to deliver in time on that, it's got to go down to the states.
[00:18:17]  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]  The consciousness is increasing.
[00:18:25]  People are getting up to speed.
[00:18:27]  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]  So there's still a lot to be done.
[00:18:41]  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]  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.

=== Technology Changes Who We Are (13:19) ===

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[00:20:35]  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]  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]  Can you make that argument and lay that out?
[00:21:05]  That was fascinating.
[00:21:05]  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]  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]  Sure.
[00:21:21]  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]  And so one of them is really a telecommunications genius.
[00:21:55]  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]  And so, why is this happening?
[00:22:23]  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]  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.
[00:22:53]  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.
[00:23:05]  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.
[00:23:20]  And so, why is this happening?
[00:23:22]  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.
[00:23:35]  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]  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.
[00:24:15]  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.
[00:24:28]  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]  So, I'm going to identify this way.
[00:24:36]  And guess what?
[00:24:36]  Like, that's, you know, this is how I've always felt.
[00:24:39]  And you need to respect this and you need to honor it.
[00:24:41]  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]  You can just see how this argument is ready to be laid out.
[00:24:50]  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]  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]  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]  It feels like destiny.
[00:25:23]  Well, it's not our destiny.
[00:25:24]  I mean, we were put on this earth to be human beings until further notice.
[00:25:30]  If you go look in the biblical record, Jesus says, I don't even know when the end time is coming.
[00:25:37]  You'll know it when it comes.
[00:25:38]  That's something that God the Father only knows.
[00:25:40]  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]  And I think ultimately, no matter how good the technology gets, we're not going to become gods.
[00:26:00]  And we're not going to become bugs.
[00:26:02]  We're going to be stuck as human beings.
[00:26:04]  So we're humans.
[00:26:06]  We better get used to it.
[00:26:07]  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]  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]  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]  And this is why the tech people are so incredibly supportive of this.
[00:26:41]  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]  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.
[00:27:02]  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.
[00:27:12]  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.
[00:27:25]  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]  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]  Excuse me.
[00:27:42]  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]  And then what can one do about it?
[00:27:52]  And because for me personally, I've become increasingly anti-technology.
[00:27:57]  I have failed miserably at trying to get parents not to give their kids smartphones till they're 18.
[00:28:02]  I think this technology actually changes who we are.
[00:28:05]  It doesn't actually help us to do what we already want to do.
[00:28:08]  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]  That's not true.
[00:28:14]  This technology actually remakes you.
[00:28:17]  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]  What can they do?
[00:28:25]  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]  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]  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]  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]  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]  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]  That doesn't mean that it's in some way even-handed or a neutral arbiter of our fates.
[00:29:27]  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]  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]  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]  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]  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]  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]  Our brains are not computers.
[00:30:44]  Our consciousness is not something that can just be represented by a mathematical equation.
[00:30:48]  Our minds are not reducible to our brains.
[00:30:50]  Our bodies are not reducible to our minds.
[00:30:52]  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]  I don't think that would necessarily be the right thing to do anyway, even if we could.
[00:31:12]  But we got to recover the responsibility to raise our children to be prepared for the responsible use of these technologies.
[00:31:20]  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]  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]  There are going to be crazy times in the future.
[00:31:42]  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]  In the meantime, don't be afraid of trying to learn about Bitcoin.
[00:31:51]  This is a basic foundational technology in the digital age.
[00:31:56]  It can be used for ill just like any technology or any tool.
[00:31:59]  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.

=== Theological Wager on Tech (10:07) ===

[00:32:20]  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]  But they're very hard to get rid of.
[00:32:51]  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]  We're not going to have the joy.
[00:33:00]  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]  Why would you ever live with aches and pains in your life if you didn't have to?
[00:33:14]  That's a question that anyone who's considered trying 100% drug-free relief factor should think about.
[00:33:20]  And it's one that I want to ask you yourself.
[00:33:22]  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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[00:33:38]  If you're living with aches and pains, why not give it a try?
[00:33:41]  And 70% of the more than half a million people who have tried Relief Factor end up ordering more.
[00:33:46]  And that's because it works for them the way it worked for me.
[00:33:49]  Isn't it time to get out of pain?
[00:33:50]  Your first step to becoming pain-free just might be to order the three-week quick start for the discounted price of only $19.95.
[00:33:57]  Just go to relieffactor.com.
[00:33:59]  That's relieffactor.com or call 800 for relief to find out more about this offer.
[00:34:04]  Feel the difference.
[00:34:05]  That's relieffactor.com.
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[00:34:08]  Feel the difference.
[00:34:09]  Check it out today.
[00:34:13]  Yeah, there's a lot I agree with that.
[00:34:15]  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]  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]  I mean, if I were given a choice, I just love your answer on this.
[00:34:30]  You'd probably say it's unrealistic.
[00:34:32]  I don't think we have to accept the premise.
[00:34:33]  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]  We just start to divest ourselves from that.
[00:34:43]  And people say, well, Charlie, that's looking backwards.
[00:34:45]  Of course it is.
[00:34:46]  Obviously, it's better that way.
[00:34:48]  You're taking a little bit different approach where you think that these things could be beneficial.
[00:34:53]  And by the way, maybe what I'm saying is totally unrealistic.
[00:34:56]  And you might say, oh, Charlie, that's what the Amish do.
[00:34:58]  What are you going to live off the grid?
[00:34:58]  Well, it actually sounds really nice.
[00:35:00]  And I don't know if I agree.
[00:35:02]  It's like plumbing.
[00:35:03]  I think that these technologies create new behaviors and new ways of actually looking at the world.
[00:35:11]  And again, I could be proven wrong by you and I would open that totally.
[00:35:15]  But at least for me, I turn my phone off for one day a week.
[00:35:18]  It's part of my Shabbos Sabbath at least once a week.
[00:35:21]  I'm not Jewish.
[00:35:22]  It's just, I think Christians have to get better at following the Levitical laws.
[00:35:26]  And they're there to bless us.
[00:35:28]  And I could say that when I do that, I view the world completely differently, totally differently.
[00:35:34]  I have more tenderness towards the world.
[00:35:36]  I think more clearly.
[00:35:37]  And when I have my phone, I feel more bogged down and clouded.
[00:35:40]  So I'd love for you to just respond to whatever you want there.
[00:35:44]  And I would love to be challenged or proven wrong on some of that.
[00:35:48]  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]  I mean, you look at electricity.
[00:35:56]  That was a lot like plumbing.
[00:35:58]  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]  And it was, you know, it was a utility in that sense.
[00:36:08]  That didn't mean that electricity didn't have a profound transformative effect on our senses and our sensibilities.
[00:36:13]  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]  And that enabled people to start living at night as they did during the day.
[00:36:25]  That was a radical transformation.
[00:36:26]  It had massive effects on how we saw the world, how we saw ourselves, how we consumed our time.
[00:36:31]  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]  A lot like plumbing.
[00:36:42]  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]  The Emancipation Proclamation went out over telegraph.
[00:36:52]  That is how it had this kind of kinetic, electric, literally electric effect on Americans when they received it.
[00:36:59]  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]  They don't really understand how formal cause works.
[00:37:26]  They really just think it's all like billiard balls hitting each other.
[00:37:29]  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]  You know, that's a failure of science.
[00:37:44]  And so those threats, those problems are real.
[00:37:47]  And you're definitely right that we do not need these devices in order to live well.
[00:37:53]  If you put your phone in a box for a couple of days, everyone can feel that difference.
[00:37:57]  The irony, though, is a lot of the reason why we're spending so much time on our phones.
[00:38:02]  It does have to do with the technology insofar as the technology is the facilitator.
[00:38:06]  But what are we doing on the phone all day, right?
[00:38:08]  We're interacting with other human beings most of the time.
[00:38:10]  Still to this day, a lot of people really don't get on their phones to interact with robots.
[00:38:14]  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]  And, you know, some people do that and some people do it a lot.
[00:38:22]  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.
[00:38:30]  So, you know, there are these crazy examples.
[00:38:32]  But at the end of the day, most of it is still interacting with people.
[00:38:35]  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]  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]  Every civilization state, China, India, Russia, Israel, U.S., Britain is trying to do stuff, trying to global Britain.
[00:39:06]  What does that mean in a digital age?
[00:39:08]  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]  And that means, you know, theological questions are coming back in a major way.
[00:39:22]  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.
[00:39:29]  The Chinese are obviously doing it, you know, trying to make the bots Taoist in their social credit system.
[00:39:33]  Russia's response to the digital sort of apocalypse, big unveiling, was to build a gigantic military cathedral just outside of Russia.
[00:39:42]  What's the U.S. going to do?
[00:39:43]  Well, there's a civil war.
[00:39:44]  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]  And other countries like Britain are involved in trying to make their own impact.
[00:39:57]  So we've got these big theological questions.
[00:39:59]  You brought up the Amish.
[00:40:00]  I mean, they're making a theological wager on the relationship between human beings and technology.
[00:40:06]  And that's something now that everyone's going to have to do if they're going to make it.
[00:40:09]  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]  It's always been in a certain salutary sense, a pluralistic country.
[00:40:17]  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]  So, you know, I salute you and your willingness to put the phone in the box or whatever.
[00:40:30]  Some people are going to take even more radical approaches.
[00:40:32]  And we need all comers, right?
[00:40:33]  We need, in a digital age, we need people to run the machines.
[00:40:36]  We also need people in monasteries.
[00:40:38]  We also need people running the machines in monasteries.
[00:40:41]  It's going to take all kinds.
[00:40:42]  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]  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]  Life is going to become very uniform.
[00:41:08]  The only thing that's going to be really diverse are our delusions, our fantasies.
[00:41:11]  They want people herded into here.
[00:41:12]  So they feel like, well, yeah, I gave up on reality.
[00:41:15]  I gave up on having kids.
[00:41:16]  I'm sort of the end point of my civilization.
[00:41:19]  But gosh darn it, I can be a flying purple unicorn in the metaverse.
[00:41:24]  And that's how I'm going to go out.
[00:41:26]  That's not good enough for us.
[00:41:28]  You don't have to be Christian to feel this way in America, but it helps.
[00:41:31]  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]  Well, I agree with that.
[00:41:54]  Humanforever.us, also the wonderful Claremont Institute.
[00:41:57]  James, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:41:59]  I really enjoyed this conversation.
[00:42:00]  We're gonna have to do it again soon.
[00:42:01]  So, thank you.
[00:42:02]  Real pleasure.
[00:42:02]  Thanks, Charlie.
[00:42:06]  Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
[00:42:07]  Email us your thoughts as always: freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:42:10]  And we will see you in Phoenix, Arizona at AmericaFest tpusa.com slash AMF EST.
[00:42:20]  God bless you guys.
[00:42:21]  Speak to you soon.
[00:42:24]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.