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May 30, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
38:18
The Future of Technology with James Poulos | The TRUTH Podcast #29
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I often describe the great divide in American political and cultural life today.
As not being so much between the right and left, whatever those terms mean right now anyway, between Republicans and Democrats.
but between the rise of a new managerial class and the everyday citizen.
And I think that this is a an age old debate, an age old power struggle that surfaces every so often.
The American Revolution was fought on the question of whether citizens could be trusted to govern themselves in a constitutional republic.
The old world vision was that they could not, that it would be a mistake to entrust citizens to sort out the most important questions that they faced.
And, you know, we on this side of the Atlantic said that, no, for better or worse, we will trust the everyday citizens to make those decisions for themselves and to own the consequences of making those decisions through a democratic process codified in a constitutional republic.
And so we thought we settled that.
And yet here we are, 250 years later, now Effectively sorting that question out again, debating that question again, through the rise of stakeholder capitalism, through the rise of the great reset, through the rise of a new vision that calls for dissolving the boundaries between the public and private sector,
between nations, increasingly between the online and offline world, to again, settle questions that we may not be comfortable We're good to go.
So anyway, this is what I think is really going on beneath the surface and explains, I think, a lot of the otherwise inexplicable fissures between within the Republican Party, within the Democrat Party, for that matter.
And I think a lot more of it makes sense when you start seeing the actual socio-political cultural divide in terms of The managerial class and the everyday citizen, the great reset and the great uprising, than through the, I think, increasingly boring tropes of modern partisan politics.
So anyway, with that, I'm joined today by somebody who I think is, you know, thinks deeply about This and related issues.
And we're going to have a good conversation with today, James Polis.
I hope I'm saying your last name right, from the Claremont Institute and the editor of The American Mind.
And I just want to welcome you to the podcast and looking forward to our conversation.
Thanks, Vivek.
You're spot on.
It is Polis.
You get a gold star.
It's a great way to start a podcast.
Yeah, that's good.
I can empathize on the gratification of someone saying your last name correctly.
I get it from my first name correctly too.
But regardless, I gave a little bit of a stream of consciousness to kick us off there.
I don't know if you wanted to react to that, but I know you have been thinking about The world in, you know, broadly, at least through similar prisms, and I wanted to give you a chance to respond to my little reflection there, and then we'll get into a discussion that'll probably be far-reaching from AI to the future of currency to the future of the Distinctions between the online and offline world.
But let me hear your reaction.
Sure.
I'm looking forward to, of course, diving into all that stuff.
But as you intimated, it all starts with this kind of foundation of trust among citizens.
Citizens who commit to one another to apply their habits and Their mores, really, you know, the habits of the heart, as the great Tocqueville scholar and sociologist Robert Bell called them, to the task of self-government.
When that trust is gone, and this, you know, this comes out of Tocqueville, but it's all over the place too, you know, friendly critics and hostile critics of democracy recognize that when that trust erodes, when the sort of spiritual basis, the basis of the heart erodes when it comes to that trust, Then we can fall,
you know, very quickly into structures of governance, ways of life that are just fundamentally inimical to America from its birth right up, I think, to the present day, worse than all.
And so, you know, that's been a core part of what the Claremont Institute has been all about since 1979 when it was founded, understanding in the sense of political philosophy how to maintain the structures that we've inherited in a way that doesn't steamroll or sideline that kind of citizen trust and in fact relies on it to deliver outcomes that are still, you know, the envy of at least a huge portion of the world.
There's another publication called Return.
It's at return.life.
I'm the founder there.
And we like to say that return is where tech aligns.
I know alignment has become sort of a crazy word right now that's being contested in tech spaces.
But alignment, you know, really for us means alignment in the sense that you're describing.
Aligns the long-standing habits and mores of the American people.
That have been put to the test and have been proven out to be a true sound guarantor, a bridge between that kind of spiritual robustness that I described and the kind of, you know, just good government outcomes that we all are hurting for these days.
Talk a bit more about that.
I'm actually interested in alignment there.
I think that's where the action is.
Say what you more mean by that.
Yeah, that is where the action is.
What you're hearing out of a lot of Silicon Valley, you know, there are a couple of sort of cults vying for people's attention or allegiance right now.
You got effective altruists, I guess, you know, SBF kind of blew up some of that a little bit.
You got the AI safety people, a lot of talk about AI ethics.
And really, I think what these different factions all have in common is they're seeking to apply what kind of masquerades as a rational approach to controlling and containing and channeling technological development.
But when you look under the surface, what you see is that it's really more of like a worship instinct, what Norbert Wiener, the godfather of cybernetics, called gadget worshiping.
This idea that there's something so wrong with human beings that we tried monarchy and that didn't work.
We tried aristocracy and that didn't work either.
So we tried oligarchy, just like big business being charged.
No, that was also a failure.
Well, okay.
So how about democracy?
Like, oh, no, you can't trust the people.
Okay.
And then we even tried social media for a minute there and that gave us Donald Trump.
So that's gotta be bad.
So what are you falling back on?
What are you trying to reestablish sovereign authority on what basis?
And, you know, there's this kind of wokeness that has bubbled up to that level where people say, like, well, you know, as long as we have the right kind of, you know, almost secular priests telling the machines who not to offend today and sort of who deserves more respect today than someone else...
Then that'll be fine.
You have some other folks in tech who are like, well, maybe we don't want full-blown wokeness, but as long as we are in control of advancing the technology, then probably some amount of wokeness is fine.
Those two things, I think, converge onto the same destination.
Wokeness ultimately can't really function right unless it has a woke supercomputer to do real-time calculations about social justice and social credit and handing out almost like Micropayments instead of microaggressions for every time someone does the right thing or the wrong thing.
And then on the tech side, you know, a willingness to kind of give in to a very, very irrational sort of worship of technology.
Oh, it'll transform us, you know, it'll solve all of our human problems.
Politics, you know, we try politics, that doesn't work.
And I think both of those instincts, you know, underlie a vision of the world, a vision of our humanity, and ultimately a vision of the cosmos that is just out of step.
Even in 2023, out of step with most Americans, out of step with our spiritual heritage.
And one that, you know, technology advances.
Our fortunes go up and down.
But we've been here before.
We've been at a place where people say like, well, it's the factory that's going to save us.
Or like, Well, it's electricity that's going to save us.
Or no, no, no, no, no.
If you just become an expert at reading books, you know, literacy, print is going to save us.
These are all media.
Marshall McLuhan ran through this.
Media change over time.
One replaces the next.
Some rise, some fall.
Some become obsolete.
And yes, technology can become this concentrated force that seems really alien and frightened to us.
But at the end of the day, it's human pride.
It's human arrogance.
It's the pride that comes before a fall.
And when we try to offload or outsource all of our very human challenges onto Rude Goldberg machines, we know that it's not going to work.
We've had thousands of years to try that experiment out.
This time, even though digital is wild and crazy and strikes people as something fundamentally new, which it is to a degree, it's still going to have the same outcomes.
You know, it's interesting.
I think we're going to get along more than I expected.
I think that you have like a deep skepticism of the techno-utopianism that sort of pervades Silicon Valley culture.
Fair to say.
Well, sure.
Yeah, I'm deeply skeptic of all utopias.
You know, they're called nowhere for a reason.
Well, I mean, like, where are you on God?
Definitely, definitely pro.
You know, I think that Christianity...
I mean, like, it just seems like everything we're saying is like circling around the real thing, like, right?
Yeah, that's right.
So, I mean, what is sovereign, right?
I mean, like, we can go to the ultimate sovereign, but let's pause on the around the rim, right?
We don't need to go right to the bottom of the hoop yet, because I think that's right over the target.
But, you know, while we're still circling the target...
Do you remember this guy put out this tweet, Sam Altman, a few days ago?
Did you read this?
Everyone was going nuts over it.
Let me just pull it up here.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, I know who he is.
Some people are obsessed with AI safety.
I'm sort of obsessed with making myself safe from Sam Altman, so I may not have read the tweet that's in question.
No, no, no.
It was...
Yeah, I'll read it to you.
There was something about it that, like, Annoyed the heck out of me.
But on the face of it, there's nothing that's objectionable about it, right?
So here's how it goes.
Okay.
This is in the form of a tweet.
And it has like, like to capture the ethos of it, like it's the way it starts is the first letter is not a capitalized letter.
So it's just starting mid, it's got a certain vibe to it.
Here is an alternative path for society.
Ignore the culture war.
Ignore the attention war.
Make safe AGI. Make fusion.
Make people smarter and healthier.
Make 20 other things of that magnitude.
Start radical growth, inclusivity, and optimism.
Expand throughout the universe.
And then like, you know, other like, you know, like anti-woke Silicon Valley types or like sort of, you know, negatively disposed to woke Silicon Valley types, like type in little replies to that and like not in complete sentences without punctuation or capitalization, but we'll say things like, this is the way.
And it's like, you know, sort of a...
Sort of a religiosity behind this pro-growth vision.
Like, can't we all just agree on things like fusion and AI and inclusivity and optimism and growth and expansion through the universe?
I think a little bit of the go to Mars cult.
I'm actually pro going to Mars.
I think it's like an underappreciated opportunity, but sort of the religiosity around it.
It irks me in a way that I suspect might irk you too, based on what you've said so far.
But like, what's your reaction to that?
Actually, this is a useful conversation to sort of get to the bottom of what was annoying me about that tweet.
Yeah, you know, my reaction is anathema.
You know, this is that all religions are not created equal.
And this is a religion that really jumps off from Stuart Brand saying we are as gods and we better get used to it or better get good at it.
We are not as gods.
And there's no shortcut to approaching the divine, nor can you engineer something that's going to get you there instead of doing the hard spiritual labor, which oftentimes characteristically takes a lifetime of ups and downs and having to have real beginner's mind and thinking of yourself as the first among sinners in order to be sufficiently humble to even begin to approach God.
So there's that at a first cut.
I mean, for a guy like this to say, hey, let's avoid the culture war.
As far as I know, last time I checked, he's an investor in one of these biomed companies.
I think it's called Conception, where the idea is you won't need a female human being in order to...
Create a living human person.
So that's, you know, that is a nuclear option in the culture war right off the bat.
So he has no credibility on that front.
And then this other stuff, you know, you're right.
These are liturgical utterances on the level of trying to, you know, ape God of like, let there be light.
Let consciousness fill the universe.
Let us create new forms of energy.
Is there anything wrong with fusion energy?
Not necessarily.
You know, I mean, a lot of people have this kind of fearful, worshipful attitude toward technology.
And in a certain sense, you know, these things are just lamps.
They emit light or heat.
They've got power source...
You know, so you wouldn't worship a lamp, would you?
And, you know, and then you go back to...
Or maybe you would.
Well, this is the thing, right?
This is the thing is you go back to, you know, when it first became possible to illuminate cities at night.
It was a tremendous transformation of everyday life with massive...
And guess what?
Americans are a little bit soft and have taken the upside of technological advancement a little bit for granted.
Electricity coming to America?
On balance, a pretty good thing.
And electricity coming to Europe, that was the beginning of the total suicide of European civilization.
Don't shoot the messenger here.
Europe isn't quite dead, but it is uncanny how Paris got lights at night.
And from there, it was like a speed run to apocalypse.
Why was that?
Actually, I'm not familiar with what you're describing.
I'm intrigued.
Yeah, well, I mean, look at, you know, what happens in the late 19th and 20th centuries in the US versus what happened in Europe.
And those, the same level, same speed of technological advancement, two totally different outcomes, right?
Right.
One was America rises as this globe straddling power where there's unprecedented prosperity and I got that and unity.
Right.
And then you look at the same period of time with the same kind of technological advancement in Europe.
And what you get is the first and second Balkan Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, all the sort of crazy civil wars that spin out of that Russian Revolution, Russian Civil War.
Communism almost overthrowing the German government in the 1920s.
And then you just segue right into World War II. You've got all the sort of sub-civil wars that spring out of that.
Civil strife in France and the Balkans.
In Russia, again, partisan warfare.
Obviously, the Holocaust.
A total mess.
And the Europeans come out of this transformative experience of electricity, radio, television, really feeling like if we don't clamp down on this stuff, then we might just go right back to that horrible experience.
And so I think you look at the EU today with regard to technology, and their attitude generally is, we might not be the best innovators in the world, but gosh darn it, we're going to be the very best regulators in the world.
We're going to beat everyone to market with the full dress regulations.
We're going to find people not shying away from any of that stuff.
And I think talking about religion, the Vatican trying to position itself as a major player in understanding how AI should be regulated and used in Europe.
Until recently, that has not really been the tenor of the conversation in the US. It's interesting to see, as you described, whether it's Altman, who's...
Is it today or tomorrow that he's testifying before Congress?
These guys are already coming out, open AI, with like, hey, we should have this regulatory framework and want to make sure that...
It's the same kind of regulatory capture that we've seen take place in other sectors, other industries.
They're moving in the same direction.
And you've got the Wilkies, who are ready to welcome the craziest...
Most post-human technology imaginable, so long as they are the sort of cyborg priests of it all.
So things are changing fast, but the trajectories are impressive.
Let's talk about, you were alluding to conception there, right?
In that last, you know, wokiest of...
Let's talk about that for a second.
So it's the startup that this guy, Altman or whatever, is involved in, you know, investor or otherwise, that...
Wants to conceive, create human conception without the involvement of a female human being at all.
So it's just like an incubation of like the womb.
The external incubation.
Is that what they're doing?
So I think it's a little bit more different than just the exo-wombs, which are making the rounds, at least the photos of them.
A pod to be born, a pod to die, and a pod to live, and in between.
But these guys, they have the money, they have the motive, and this is not just a sort of matter of, well, logic says for them.
There is a spiritual component to it that's very powerful, and it is a desire to become gods.
So what would be the way they go about doing this?
Well, look, I mean, we have news coming out of the UK right now where the first baby with DNA from three individual people has been born.
And the way that you get in is you say, like...
Well, this is a rare disease, and you've got to give this child a chance at living a normal life, and nobody wants to have a child who comes out all messed up.
And so, if the mom has a problem with their mitochondrial DNA, then maybe you find a donor, and you just kind of stick that into the egg as it's It's fertilizing, and this isn't the island of Dr. Moreau here, people.
This is to help the downtrodden and reduce suffering.
It's very utilitarian, and it feels good.
It's sentimental.
And yet, a child with the DNA of three parents.
What does this open the door to?
I think we all know what it opens the door to.
Pull on that string.
Yeah, you pull on the string.
I mean, look, given the posture of a very fast-growing share of our society right now, and it's not just in the US, it's You know, I drove past a billboard in LA. Your feelings are your superpowers.
You know, this is the mentality.
And when that is the mentality, then what you end up with is there is no legitimate basis.
There's no authority to prevent people From radically altering, disfiguring, transforming, mutating their bodies.
This is a mindset in which the body is not sacred.
The given human form is not sacred.
It is a seriously flawed pile of You know, Mary Harrington, who has a great book out now, Feminism Against Progress.
She calls it like the meat Lego mindset where your body is just a sort of agglomeration of parts.
And so, you know, in this world, you can't say like, well, you don't have, you know, we're not going to let you.
You do not have a right to...
To surgically remove your genitals and sculpt some sort of artificial substitute.
You do not have a right to have offspring with five different people's DNA. You do not have a right to re-engineer your body so that you're like a cat girl.
So you have the little ears and the tail and I mean, you know, you do not have the right to multiple limbs.
You do not have the right to...
On and on and on it goes.
Once you breach that dam, all kinds of, you know, as the meme goes, man-made horrors beyond your comprehension will flood it.
And if there is no spiritual backstop that sort of stomps on those temptations before they coil around our hearts, all the law in the world, you know, is not going to be enough.
It's...
It is tempting to say, well, the answer to this is to just really crack down on these things legally.
And would that it were so simple?
Really, I think this is a matter of the human heart, and it's the matter of our shared spirituality and spiritualism.
And if we do not see the human body as an ensouled, created gift, which is sacred, a temple, Uh, then really all bets are off.
And so, uh, I think if we're not talking those terms, then we're, we're just going to be posting a lot of L's as the, uh, the, the, the trans and post-humanists, uh, continue to gather power.
So the conventional wisdom would, would go that if you have a, uh, whatever Blaise Pascal said it well too, right?
Hold the size of God in your heart.
God doesn't fill it.
Something else will instead.
To you, does that make the case for just avoiding law or policymaking as a mechanism here, or do you view that as a necessary but insufficient step?
I think you could make the argument either way, actually.
I'm curious for where you land on that.
Well, I think that there's, you know, if we're trying to run away from law and policy altogether, then we're going to have to run all the way to the monasteries.
You know, not that there's anything wrong with that.
I think, in fact, you know, pairing monasteries with a technology like Bitcoin will yield incredibly grounding and salvific things in this world as so many institutions exist.
Gotta say, you know, things are crumbling.
People know it.
They see the financial figures.
They see the rot.
They see the incompetence.
They see the corruption.
People are looking for a place to seek shelter.
And that's important.
And that should not be underestimated.
At the same time, We do still have the opportunity and perhaps even the duty to try to get the...
You know, people talk about runaway technology.
We have a certain kind of runaway legalism in this country as well.
And there's a chance to get it under control now.
And here's what I'm talking about.
Really, it's almost, you know, a third rail, as they used to say, you know, the sort of electrical railing in America is the Civil Rights Act.
Nobody wants to talk about how the Civil Rights Act is bad.
Nobody wants to talk about how some civil rights are different from others.
There's real pressure to not touch that.
I don't think you've heard me very much then.
Well, you know, I mean, I'm painting with a broad brush here.
And, you know, you and others are starting to break the seal.
And that's important.
But it's going to be a lift.
And so how do you sort of, you know, how do you reign that back in to the point where it's not, you know, well, I feel aggrieved.
I hate you.
I want more power for myself.
I'm going to assert that I fit within this unfolding progressive understanding of civil rights.
And so you're going to give me power and control over your children, perhaps, and yourself, and how you live and breathe and act and speak, all in the name of civil rights.
How do you sort of make sure that that doesn't come to eat our Constitution, what's left of it?
And I think, you know, when it comes to technology, which is a big test for this, you know, there are going to be efforts to say, well, you know, I identify as a cyborg and I demand my civil rights.
I've produced 10 billion nanobots and these are robots of my creation and they're sentient and you can interact with them.
So they have civil rights.
They have personhood.
How do you prevent that from blowing up in that way and really eating our system?
Well, I think what is needed is a digital rights amendment.
If you can't get it at the federal level right now, we can do it at the state level.
Legislators are beginning to understand that there's a fork in the road here.
Down one path makes EU regulations seem like child's play.
It's going to be Americans can't have high-powered GPUs.
Americans can't mine Bitcoin.
Americans can't use cryptocurrencies.
Americans have to use CBDCs.
There are no parental rights for preventing your children from being trans by doctors or regulators or just busy bodies.
Just down the line, government will decide how much technology is going to be integrated into your life.
It's going to be a lot, but you're not going to be able to control any of it.
There isn't going to be any independence to how you put technology to use in ways that actually strengthen our humanity, strengthen what's left to our foreign government, strengthen our way of life.
Down the other road is actually trusting, going back to citizen trust, trusting the American people to use fundamental technologies to build those good things, those fruitful things on a digital foundation.
If they're not able to do that, look, Americans used to be very confident, very comfortable with their technology.
They felt masterful.
They felt competent.
They weren't afraid to roll their sleeves up, put their hands directly on their tech and put it to good use, to fruitful use, to healthy use.
That has started to fall apart.
We are now in an era where many Americans look at technology either as an escape, a place to numb out and escape what's happening to the world, or as this kind of threatening alien presence that they don't understand and feel like they have no ability to command.
Both of those things are incredibly dangerous.
Both of them are a fundamental break, I think, with American civilization and how it has understood and approached technology.
And the reality is that, you know, all of these high-tech things, whether they're entertainment or tools, they are dual-use technologies.
They are weapons of war at this point.
We know from the Internet that there is, you know, there's psychological warfare going on, propaganda war going on.
Clandestine conflicts, financial conflicts, there is a digital world war going on right now.
And we don't always get to see what's going on under that surface.
Sometimes it's nefarious, sometimes it's not.
Evil people appear at all levels of society.
It shouldn't be surprising to see them in government, just like you shouldn't be surprised to see them in your neighborhood.
But the point is, if we do not protect and enshrine the ability of ordinary Americans To, you know, just language straight out of the Second Amendment, to keep and bear fundamental digital technologies, things that they need in order to protect and defend their families, their way of life, their form of government, their citizen trust.
Then they're going to be reduced to slaves.
We are going to be the slaves of the technology that we created thinking that it would make us masters of the world.
That is an outcome that would be a catastrophe, not just for America, but for the human race.
There's time to avoid it.
Yes, there is risk.
There's always going to be some risk.
But let's face it.
This is implicit in the First and Second Amendments.
We have a freedom of association.
We have a freedom of speech.
We have a freedom to use fundamental weapons for our own protection.
Those things need to be extended into the digital realm.
If America isn't America on the internet, then it's not going to be America in real life for very much longer.
So what would be your proposed digital rights amendment as you would have it?
Yeah, well, I mean, I take the language directly.
It should be the same kind of broad and general language that has served us so well in the Bill of Rights, especially the First and Second Amendments.
I think we do not want to get into the business of government picking winners and losers, as they say.
There's already too much patronage, too much corruption, too much just sort of, you know, really mafioso-style politics happening under the surface and sometimes bursting out into plain view as, you know, the Biden family's dealings.
He's certainly not the only one, but, you know, he's an example.
So we want to keep that language broad.
You know, the right of Americans to keep and bear, fill in the blank with certain technologies shall not be infringed.
And I think the big ones here are high powered GPUs, just raw compute.
Bitcoin, you know, other cryptocurrencies, fine.
Bitcoin is especially important because proof of work is really important.
The ability to establish that kind of citizen trust on the internet in digital space.
Proof of work is the way to get there, in my opinion, but I'm certainly not alone on that.
And now we've got AI coming into view.
Keeping AI bottled up in the hands of a few secretive and super powerful post-humans and their government cronies, this is definitely not...
This is going to not be America.
It's not going to be recognizable as America.
It's going to be projected over our space.
But it's really also going to be a lot of virtual space.
We've got to get away from that.
And in order to get away from it, we just...
Yes, these things are risky.
Yes, weapons in the hands of spiritually corrupt...
And delusional people, yeah, bad things happen, but the same as it ever was.
This is just buy the ticket, take the ride, you're a human being, get used to it.
We have to take those risks and we have to honor the American people.
We have to honor the fact that so much of what people have taken for granted as America is Has been taken away from them, especially since the pandemic, since the lockdowns, since the craziness with Russiagate, which, you know, has just proven to be just basically CIA and State Department, just trying to punish the guy they didn't like for being president.
We got to get beyond all that.
We got to fix that.
We've got to restore trust in government and restore the ability of Americans as citizens to trust themselves.
If they can't put their hands on fundamental technologies and use them to build things that strengthen their way of life, strengthen their humanity, and strengthen our form of government, then you can just kiss this grand experiment.
Fine.
"I'm not going to be a problem." You want to close with your last, you kind of teased me earlier with your pairing monasteries with Bitcoin.
Why don't we wrap with that, which is paint your vision there.
I think that those are two things that you don't historically and traditionally think about going together.
And the reason I am curious about it is I actually do worry in any new realm, just like you see, you're talking about Sam Altman or anyone else earlier, you could substitute, fill in the blank, That you filled with AI, put Bitcoin at the end of it and you could observe a similar religiosity.
So I'm curious for where you're coming from on that illusion you made before we wrap.
Well, yeah, that's right.
I mean, look, you can worship anything.
Technology gives you lots of, you know, bites at the apple if you want to use that loaded language.
And there are some people out there, Bitcoin Maxis, and they're like, we are people of the coin in the way that, you know, some self-styled Judeo-Christians would say, we are people of the book.
And it's like, easy there, tiger, you know, sitting on the mountaintop and waiting to achieve nirvana because number went up.
You know, that's not the kind of spiritual fortitude that we need.
That's trying to check out of life and hoping that the numbers will save you.
Over my shoulder, you'll see this book right here, Human Forever.
The subtitle of that book of mine is The Digital Politics of Spiritual War.
And look, we're in the midst of a spiritual war.
People know it.
We talk about it.
This is why things are so acrimonious on social media.
Because there is a spiritual war.
Technology has advanced to a point where it raises fundamental questions, inescapable questions about who we are and why we are who we are.
Those kinds of questions are theological.
They elicit theological responses.
And people are having different kinds of theological responses.
And that's what all the fuss is about.
So amidst this conflict, a lot of people are feeling like they are destined to lose.
Basically, they're damned that things have gotten to a point where being human sucks, that they don't have the juice to get even like a last few drops of satisfaction wrung out of their bodies.
Suicide is going up.
Depression is going up.
Drug addiction is going up.
Family formation, down.
Child birth, down.
Child rearing, down.
Loneliness, way up.
Isolation, way up.
Lots of recluses.
It's not just South Korea.
It's spreading throughout the West.
And a lot of this was seen by some of our darkest philosophers.
There's a Scandinavian philosopher by the name of Zapf.
He was writing in the 30s, a very depressive guy.
He said he predicted the coming of what he called the last messiah and the sacrament of the last messiah would be human beings now think too much.
We're driving ourselves crazy with our big brains.
The only solution is for us to hear the voice and silence of stop having children, do not be fruitful, do not multiply.
Once the human race dies out, then all of our problems go away.
And, you know, that seems very like overdramatic and very Scandinavian.
But the fact is, like these sentiments are really sinking in.
They're getting spiritual grip on the hearts of the people.
And so people are recognizing that all these things that we've been fussing and fighting over and trying to strive for have really not come to fruition.
They have made lots of big promises by sort of peak America.
Follow your dream.
Follow your passion.
If you can dream it, you can do it.
All those kinds of power, positive thinking.
And it just didn't pan out for a lot of people and they feel like they were sold a bill of goods and in a way that they were.
So what do you do when you have so many millions of people across the West and the U.S., Who really just feel like, you know, check please.
Give me the suicide pod.
Let me go out in a blaze of glory or even just disappear silently.
You know, as Frederick Nietzsche predicted some of this stuff, you know, his kind of cruelly ironic joke was a little poison that makes for a good life and a lot of poison at the end that makes for a good death.
These sentiments are real.
They're sinking in.
How do you counteract them?
What can you offer people?
A way of backing out of the madness and the self-destruction of the world without just putting a bullet through their head.
Well, historically, that's what monasteries were very good at doing.
And they're still very good at doing that right now.
I agree with you on the monastery side.
I was curious about the Bitcoin side.
Yeah, sure.
So, you know, in a digital age, what is the kind of labor of centuries that people who want to withdraw from the world and painstakingly spiritually approach God, what kind of labors can they do fruitfully in a digital age?
Well, I think you look at something like Bitcoin, where it is a powerful protocol.
It is something that does allow you to build trust, but also to build trust.
Institutions, to build algorithmic markets, to build a way of ordinary people to exchange goods and services.
I released this book here on Bitcoin, published it onto Chain, sold it for Bitcoin, a site called Canonic, canonic.xyz.
That's where you can find the book.
And, you know, it's an example.
It's an illustration.
I thought, you know, let's make the medium be the message here.
It could be a book.
It could be other stuff too.
The technology has reached a level of maturity where ordinary people, you know, you can just put in a little work, take on a little risk.
You can do this, too.
You don't need a blue check.
You don't need a PhD.
You don't need to be a Silicon Valley denizen.
You don't need to be a post-human.
And so I see these two forces, you know, converging in a way, where people who are looking to, you know, walk away from our crumbling and corrupt institutional sort of vibarium that they're building around us, and also at the same time looking for spiritual uplift rather than, you know, an untimely death.
We're out of time, so we've got to wrap.
I'm enjoying this too much, but...
Wait, you could have just done it with the monasteries.
I love Bitcoin actually as much as the next guy, but I'm wondering whether you're shoehorning a little bit of that in there when actually most of what you described was the work was already done, actually.
Well, I just say that real quickly.
Pure and simple monasteries, they never go out of style.
I expect them to be around for a long time, God willing.
The big question is, you know, who is going to be the spiritual authority that leads people to use technology in a way that keeps our human beings sacred?
That's a big question.
And if you look to, you know, businessmen, probably not going to be the ones to do it.
Politicians, probably not going to be the ones to do it.
Woke ethicists who want to fundamentally transform down to our intimate being, you know, who we are, not the ones who are going to do it.
So where do you look?
You know, historically, you know, you look to the church, you look to the priests, you look to the monks, you look to holy men.
And I think that's not going to change either.
I appreciate you, man.
You've made me think.
And something tells me we're going to be continuing this conversation for some time to come.
I appreciate you.
Thank you for that.
I love that.
Likewise.
And this is good.
I think you've made a lot of people think.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
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