Latest / Man in America Podcast / Man vs. Machine: AI Threatens Our ENTIRE Existence — Joe Allen Interview

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Man vs. Machine: AI Threatens Our ENTIRE Existence — Joe Allen Interview · Man in America Podcast

• 0:00
  Seth Holehouse: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Man in America. I'm your host, Seth Hullhouse. So there's threats coming from all angles as you're probably pretty familiar with if you watch this show. Overwhelming, but we also want to understand what they are. And one of the biggest threats that I've talked about quite a lot is transhumanism.
• 0:20
  It's this merger of man with machine, with the AI, with, things like Neuralink, where they're they're literally putting chip in your brain that you can use to communicate with, you know, computer programs. And it seems like, like, many things that the elites have for us. It seems very altruistic, and it's gonna help improve the the you know, for the good of mankind. But there's oftentimes a very sinister backstory and very sinister intentions for the long term plan. So what's interesting is that Neuralink has just launched their their pilot for their prime program, which I'll be playing a trailer for it in today's interview, where they're looking for people to basically be pilot, you know, entering this prime program to stick these chips in their heads as kinda guinea pigs.
• 1:08
  So it's that's a little bit worrying. But there's also something that recently that Biden has signed an executive order, which in a lot of ways is taking over the development of AI to make sure that it's safe and effective for us, which is quite concerning. And so joining us say to help make sense of all these things and talk a little bit about what the potential future of, you know, transhumanism is, is Joe Allen. So Joe Allen is an expert in transhumanism. He's also one of the hosts, the co hosts on the War Room with Steve Bannon.
• 1:43
  Perhaps you've seen him there, but he's just a really, really intelligent guy. So this is gonna be a very deep conversation digging into the philosophy and the origins of, in a lot of ways, the religion of AI. So I hope you if you're watching or listening that you're ready to kind of go deep into a very scientific and almost philosophical discussion about AI and the role of AI in the future human society. So folks, please enjoy this interview with Joe Allen. So Joe, after seeing you so many times on Steve Bannon's show, it's fantastic to have you on this show.
• 2:16
  So thank you for being here.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.
• 2:21
  Seth Holehouse: Absolutely. So you've really carved out the niche of covering transhumanism, which I think for a lot of people, say five years ago, they had no idea what that meant. You know, and so here we are now where it's it's, you know, really almost a common language that we're using and talking about the threats of the the deep state, etc. So why don't you just give us a little bit of background about yourself and also why you've carved out this this area of expertise surrounding transhumanism.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: It's a bit it's been a topic that has interested me since I was, you know, a teenager. But I would say two things that had dramatic impacts. There was never a single moment that alarmed me to this. It's I've always been, you could say, paranoid or at least suspicious of technology and its its destructive elements. But I I would say the first was working closely with entertainment technologies.
• 3:24
  You know, for fifteen years, I was a a professional tour rigger in the concert industry. And while I I think it's quite beautiful what many artists have brought to the stage, much of what I saw was technology used to hypnotize and to, in many ways, propagandize crowds at scale. And the sorts of behaviors that mass entertainment inculcates or encourages, it seems very much like the the temporary creation of an ant like swarm with human beings. And so while I loved the job, I've met many wonderful people, both artists and, of course, just blue collar people all over the world. From the very beginning, it it gave me it left me ill at ease as to the ultimate end to this kind of transformative technology that really came into effect in the mid twentieth century and is is now moved out into all sorts of other realms.
• 4:31
  The second, really, response to the pandemic, the open rollout of the surveillance systems, again, mass propagandization. And I was writing about that and and the technology in general, the kind of transhumanist philosophy that seemed to be getting injected, no pun intended, into the public consciousness during all of that in early twenty twenty. And I wrote for Cold Type magazine. I wrote for The Federalist. Steve Bannon saw one of my articles about digital immortality and the transhumanist push for self surveillance and kind of uploading one's personality.
• 5:14
  He liked it, and without going into the bizarre coincidences that led up to it and followed, very soon after, brought me on full time to cover technology and especially from a transhumanist angle on the war room. It's been almost three years and never looked back. It's very strange beat to be on, but it's one that I think is really, really important. I think that there are many people covering this, and I'm glad to be among them.
• 5:46
  Seth Holehouse: Oh, it's great. And, you know, congrats for being being part of War Room. What an important show for people to be, you know, just, you know, understand the narrative that's happening. And so for, know, I've spent a lot of time talking about transhumanism with different guests. And we've kind of gone through describing what it is.
• 6:03
  But I think that sometimes painting a picture of what it looks like in the future is one of the best ways for people to grasp what it is and understand why it's such a threat. So in your view, let's fast forward to say, 2050. And let's just imagine that the global surveillance state, you know, is is completely in place as does as, you know, as it lies in the kind of the imaginations and the plannings of the the elites right now. Like, let's just imagine that it's, you know, 2015, everything that they could possibly dream of is is in place. And they're using this transhumanism and this technocracy to run the world.
• 6:45
  Describe what that looks like. Like what does America look like? If I mean, if America even exists under that world? Because I think that people need to see that vision of the future to understand why it's so important right now.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: You know, one of the things I really try to do in my book is to tease apart all the different visions that are at play. You know, there are a lot of different directions that this could go, a lot of different directions that people envision it going. If you were to take it from, you know, the popular conception of transhumanism comes through the World Economic Forum, which is ironic because I I would say that they are in many ways in direct opposition to some of the founding thinkers behind transhumanism in their kind of socialistic, safetyist, and decelerationist or degrowth policies that that that they're pushing. But if you look at it from that angle, what you're talking about, Klaus Schwab's fourth industrial revolution with its convergence of the physical, digital, and biological worlds, you know, especially from a globalist perspective, what you see is the strengthening of corporations and governments to control society ever with with ever more granularity. And it is very much based on surveillance systems.
• 8:03
  It's very much based around this, at least veneer of altruism so that the, you know, the the greatest good for the greatest number is the driving principle and and also the justification for cracking down on anything like what they would call hate speech or disinformation, you know, controlling how many resources people are using. So what you're talking about in that scenario taken to its logical conclusion is, you know, every day you wake up, you you go to work in the metaverse. To the extent you go outside of your neighborhood at all. You get some sort of pass to leave your fifteen minute city. You know, maybe you're eating bugs in your pod.
• 8:46
  You know, maybe you are, in some way, given over to identifying with your digital twin who, at the the very utterance of some racial slur, has been imprisoned in some hellish digital realm while you yourself are laying in bed with nothing but a VR helmet on. And, you know, Klaus Schwab is also uploaded at this point, his body having long withered away, where he is eating matrix steaks. You know, that's that's one way to look at it, know, this this sort of globalist or even, you know, new world order sort of way of thinking about it. But, you know, transhumanism by and large is driven by libertarian is libertarians and libertarianism. Most of the transhumanists that I've I've read carefully are not super excited about some sort of highly regulated future like the World Economic Forum tends to push.
• 9:41
  Max Moore, for instance, the guy who really coined transhumanism or repurposed the term, taking the, you know, the initial definition from Julian Huxley. Julian Huxley in 1956 talked about transhumanism in terms of science and directing human evolution. By the eighties, when Max Moore took it up and kind of recoined it, It's much more about human enhancement, individualism. It's about, you know, kind of perfecting the human being through genetics, and it's very much Nietzschean. So at that point that you're talking about a future in which some human beings have upgraded, many others have not, mainly because they were not able to afford it.
• 10:23
  And this the speciation process, really, in which the human species becomes divided between those who have radically enhanced their genome, not only to eliminate any possibility of cancer or any kind of defect, but also to extend life indefinitely. And so you would have, you know, people who have, I guess, massive swollen heads that are perhaps linked to artificial intelligence systems that give them superhuman intelligence. They're moving capital by the trillions or quadrillions while the rest of us kind of languish in the shadow of it. Maybe a few of them are altruistic, and so they occasionally bring us vats of gruel to enjoy in our in our exclusion zones, as Sam Altman has put it, those who want to live in an AGI world, an artificial godlike intelligence world, those who don't. And we would be something like the Amish only without dignity, self determination, or really any standing whatsoever, and that just assumes that we're not turned into biofuel for their machines.
• 11:30
  Now it doesn't have to end up that way. And I I think more than likely what we're going to see are a lot of very powerful technologies, but maybe as much as that, you're going to see a lot of disappointment and promises that aren't necessarily fulfilled. And so what I see you know, 2050 is kinda hard to project, but what I see for the next few decades are it will be the development of very, very powerful technologies like we already have. We will see that bifurcation, we already are, between those who are, you know, early adopters and those who are highly resistant and everyone in between. But I suspect that that it certainly for the next decade, as this push for AGI, for artificial general intelligence or artificial godlike intelligence goes forward and all these dreams of brain computer interfaces to link us to it and all these dreams of various bio enhancements by way of either mRNA injections or full on CRISPR gene editing technologies.
• 12:33
  What we're gonna see is the wealthy adopt these at scale. We're gonna see the vision of the civilization shift towards scientism even more than it is already, And it will basically be the fleshing out of a techno religion, not unlike that described by Yuval Noah Harari in which you have basically the replacement of traditional religion and the elevation of either a heterodox or orthodox religious system that guides the aspirations of humanity in America, in China, in India. And it will all and rather than looking towards god, rather than looking towards Christ or even Krishna or Buddha or Confucius for the, you know, the the spiritual direction of any of these civilizations, that attention is going to be much more so on the cyborg Superman or on the artificial intelligence system itself and all the the various dreams of space colonization, so on and so forth. And just like most of these sorts of advertisements for utopia or human supremacy or the human superiority have fallen short in the past decades, I I think that you're going to have the same sort of thing. It's going to be an image propped up by some viable technology, but it's it's not going to be as perfect or invincible as it's being sold now.
• 13:59
  That's what I see. I see very much a future in which the BS is much more digitized, and those who fall outside of that that digital hypnosis are going to be well, you know, they're we're going to encounter a system that is highly regulated and and very difficult to breach, but I I I don't believe most of humanity will go along with this. I hope that I'm correct about that.
• 14:26
  Seth Holehouse: And that's what I wanna touch upon too in a in a second here. But I I wanna well, first say, it's pardon me, it's interesting how you put that all together, that vision of the future. And it's in some form, it's how I would see things going as well. And it'd be some merger of meta with the Chinese social credit system and central bank digital currency. And it's a bad mix.
• 14:52
  But I wanted to ask you about so Biden recently signed this executive order, and it's the executive order on the safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of AI. Now for me, whenever Biden tells me something is safe, secure and trustworthy, I'll just go take it. I'll go eat it. I'll go buy it no matter what because that guy is just he's such a saint. So I trust anything that he does.
• 15:17
  Tongue in cheek. Sorry about that. But what how can we make sense of this? Because actually, it's quite the opposite. Whenever I see anything like this coming out of out of that administration, I'm thinking, okay, where's the where's the CCP linked agenda?
• 15:30
  Where's the the WEF controlled action? Where's the thing that like strips away our freedoms? And so Biden doing an EO on AI, what does that mean for us? And is it something we should be concerned about?
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: To me, it's the the regulatory capture of the AI field by big tech. Most of this is being crafted in partnership with companies like Microsoft and OpenAI, in partnership with Google and DeepMind, and also a huge involvement of Meta. Also, some involvement of Elon Musk, all of whom want more intense regulation of the industry. In fact, the most accelerationist and and, I guess, the the the most resistant to government intervention, oddly enough, is Facebook, at least on the surface, even though that, you know, we know now that Facebook has colluded with the FBI. And Facebook has colluded with the DHS to censor information.
• 16:30
  So it kind of suspicious, this push on the part of Mark Zuckerberg and his chief AI scientist, Jan Lecun, to resist regulation. But, yeah, that that's what I see. You know, you have these two competing mythologies in the AI world, at least at the extreme ends. The one mythology, you could you could call it techno optimism or effective accelerationism or just purely accelerationism. They are banking on the benefits of these technologies.
• 17:02
  They want as little regulation as possible. They want to be able to create godlike artificial intelligence systems in order to satisfy or to fulfill the promise of human beings in a godless cosmos. And they think that even if it does cause tremendous damage, that, you know, you just chalk it up to the the costs of of disruption. Right? All technologies are disruptive.
• 17:26
  We've survived so far, so on and so forth, which ignores the horrors of the twentieth century or even the the horrors of the early industrial revolution, at least downplays them. On the other end of it, you have those who are talking about AI extinction. Right? Most of this comes out of what's known as the effective altruist movement. But, you know, there are many many people on that wavelength.
• 17:50
  Eliezer Yakowsky is maybe the most distilled personality in this. You know, he is pure AI doom. The the belief there is also in in a sort of godless cosmos. If human beings create an entity more intelligent than us, just by pure evolutionary principle, it's going to displace human beings as the apex predator on the planet. And at that point, we're at the AI's mercy.
• 18:17
  There's no reason to believe that the AI won't either enslave us, kill us, you know, again, turn us into biofuel. So between these two myths, the the myth of AI utopia and the myth of AI doom, we find ourselves in the the realm of AI regulation. And what that means is based on these fears of AI killing everybody, not a human being necessarily deploying AI, but the AI is some abstract entity of the future that has its own decision making capabilities and will, that this AI of the future needs to have guardrails in place. It needs to have safety in place. And who is better positioned to determine what these guardrails should be than big tech?
• 19:03
  And why do we need these guardrails in place? Why do we need to cooperate with China to keep these guardrails in place? Well, in this sort of AI arms race, we're gonna need rules kind of like with nuclear weapons to make sure that nobody deploys a massive deepfake campaign, you know, by accident on the other country or that nobody allows their AI to take take control of the nuclear systems or any other or the AI to take control of, say, a bio foundry or manipulate a a lab scientist to create a deadly pathogen. So with this fear riding through the public, they they are basically creating a system in which the the government, the US government, and the private tech corporations are functioning much more like they do in China, where there's a really tight relationship and any competitors are going to be pushed out by the the legal system. You know, in essence, what I see is not unlike what happened with big pharma and and health care.
• 20:07
  You know, on the basis of regulatory capture, big pharma has been able to push out all sorts of alternative health remedies and, the very least, marginalize them, in many cases, actually making them illegal. And instead, what we get is Prozac, OxyContin, and Pfizer jabs. So, you know, I guess you could say that the Biden EO is going to be as safe as the jab, as secure as our elections, and as trustworthy as the promise that OxyContin is not addictive and that the election machines cannot be connected to the Internet.
• 20:47
  Seth Holehouse: Hey, folks. I've got a quick message for you. So I'm sure you've heard a lot of people, myself included, talking about the importance of buying precious metals, gold and silver. But what's really behind that? Is it just a thing of, hey, buy this gold, buy this silver.
• 21:02
  Right? Or is there something deeper that we should be looking at? So I recently came across some figures about house prices. So in 1930, the average family home was approximately $4,000. Fast forward to 2023, the average family home is just over $400,000.
• 21:19
  So you have to ask yourself, why is that? Is it because things have just gotten more expensive? No, it's actually because the dollar has lost 99% of its value since 1930. Right? When people talk about the collapse the dollar or inflation, this is what it means.
• 21:33
  Now let's take a look at gold. So in 1930, if you wanted to purchase your home in gold, it would take approximately 200 gold coins. So 200 gold coins would purchase the average family home in 1930, about $4,000. Now, if you instead of buying a home with that gold or cash, you set those aside. If you set aside $4,000 in cash in 1930, it would be worth $4,000 today.
• 22:00
  What can you buy with $4,000? Can you buy a family home? No, you can't even buy a crappy used car. But if you set aside $4,000 worth of gold coins in 1930, which is 200 gold coins, 1 ounce coins, that would be worth approximately $400,000 today. And this is the key lesson about precious metals.
• 22:22
  It's not about getting rich. It's about putting your money into an asset that protects you against inflation and against the destruction of the currency, which is what happens to all fiat currencies, especially now we're in the end days of the dollar. And so that's why it's important, maybe not all of your money, but a portion of your money, a portion of what you have, I highly recommend putting it into precious metals of gold and silver because what it's doing is it's protecting you. This is an asset that has stood the test of time, not just stood the test of time since the nineteen thirties, we're talking about the rise and fall of civilizations. Gold was used to buy houses back in ancient Rome.
• 23:01
  It's still around. It's an asset that will forever have its value. So folks, if you want to do this and you need someone you can trust, there's no person I can recommend more than Doctor. Kirk Elliott. He's a very good friend of mine.
• 23:13
  He's a strong Christian patriot, and he's out to really help people to protect their savings and what you've worked for against the destruction of the dollar, not to mention also protecting it against the dangers of a central bank digital currencies. So to learn more about this, go to goldwithseth.com or call (720) 605-3900. Again, that's goldwithseth dot com or (720) 605-3900. Both those places will allow you to set up a quick appointment where you can talk to a wealth advisor that will help get you started on this path. Again, goldwithseth.com 7 2 0 6 0 5 3 9 0 zero.
• 23:54
  I see. So basically, it's it's not like he's seizing control of it, but it's it's really it's it's kinda giving the the reins to the people that are supposed to keep it safe for us, which is the same people that are censoring us, the same people that are killing us, the same people that are is, you know, causing massive destruction to humankind. So which Yeah.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, I I I think the engine really the power behind this comes out of Silicon Valley, not the government. You know, Silicon Valley, of course, has gotten much of their funding from US government, including the Department of Defense, and they obviously partner with them on all sorts of different projects to suppress free speech, to identify dissidents, so on and so forth. But by and large, up till this point, Silicon Valley has had, in many ways, a lot of independence as compared to China. I I see this EO as being a stepping stone towards a world in which that the interdependence between big tech companies and the federal government and and the EU and and, you know, other central agencies that that I I see it as as as a step towards that public private partnership or state capitalism that we see in China.
• 25:16
  Seth Holehouse: Which never ends up good. And so you mentioned earlier, the adoption of this, right, and whether, you know, obviously, they can push this technology. But I remember back when, you know, VR first really, like with Oculus, you know, it first really hit the market, and everyone's talking about VR and there's all these new startups running VR and, you know, and then even going back to thinking about I think it was Google Glass, right? The Google Glasses that, you know, that were they had the camera and those smart glasses and the, you know, augmentation or augmented reality. And it just seems like that they keep advancing this technology.
• 25:57
  But aside from maybe gamers or certain people that are really kind of techie, I'm not seeing that this tech is being adopted by the public by and large. Like, you'll never, you know, walk, you know, down the street and see someone with with some sort of VR, you know, handset headset, maybe at home on their PlayStation, they're playing new shooter game in VR. But so because in this rollout, like if if technology becomes a tool for technocracy, and the more we accept this technology, the more control it gives the kind of the bad people over us. They need us to accept it and use to embrace it, you know, to the point where we're, you know, doing a mail order robot, and we're gonna have our robot that's going to come in and do the dishes for us. Right?
• 26:42
  Oh, you know, China's making these robots now. It's great. They're inexpensive. They're cheaper than a house made. So that's wonderful.
• 26:48
  But do you do you think that to I guess two part question, that a, people will accept this this new technology like do you like that, for instance, with Neuralink that people that don't need it, people that aren't say paraplegics, and it makes sense why that person might want to explore those options. But we're, like your average person is going to get this so that he can control the TV with his thoughts and type with his thoughts. So do you think there's gonna be the adoption of this technology? And then the second question to that is whether you think overall, this the overall the overall plan for this transhumanist future will even be successful or with, like, will the will of the people to not accept this technology become the collapse of this system and the collapse of this vision of this new world or one world government that's really built upon a technocracy?
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: You know, in the book and in general, I lean heavily on the rubric that Kevin Kelly formulated in his book, What Technology Wants. It was published in 2010. And what he argued is that you have three primary elements to predict that you can use to predict where technology is gonna go, what technology wants, basically. And the the first is purely structural. What will the laws of nature allow for?
• 28:15
  Can you get, you know, a ship full of human beings to Mars? Can you create a a direct interface with the human brain and an AI with electrodes? Those sorts of questions. The second is historic. So the you know, what sorts of cultural patterns have been paved previously?
• 28:34
  What previous technologies open the way to new technologies? And then the the third is basically adoption. What what technologies will be adopted? What what will people want? Now there's two parts to that second question.
• 28:49
  In a country like America where we are by and large free, although that that freedom seems to be decreasing by the day, But what what technology wants is dependent on consumer preference. And, you know, do you want a VR headset? Do you want a Neuralink trode in your brain to connect you to x AI so you can grok the next trend? You know, that is one way that that plays out. The other one is what do the authorities want?
• 29:18
  What do the authorities want for you? And we found out real quick that if the authorities want you to, for instance, take an experimental mRNA gene therapy, then that is what you're gonna do if you want to maintain standing in some of the biggest corporations in the world, if you want to maintain your job with the federal government, so on and so forth. So with virtual reality, for an for instance, it it is actually fairly popular in gaming. Meta kind of flopped, but Roblox has still kind of chugged on. Accenture has also moved along pretty well.
• 29:59
  You know, VR is used a lot in training for the military, you know, how to pilot a a or a a plane. It's used in medical school, so a lot of prestigious medical institutions like Johns Hopkins or Harvard utilize VR to simulate surgery so that you're not messing with expensive cadavers or things like that or models. So it is actually being adopted, but it's not been adopted at the scale that Meta made it out to be. You know, a lot of this will probably be generational. A lot of the question will be, do kids who are now 18 and under, will they want it?
• 30:43
  And I it's really hard to tell. The ones who love it, love it. The ones who aren't interested, they really aren't interested, and it gives me a lot of hope. But with the the smartphone, you know, the the the really, the the iPhone represented the beginning of the smartphone. There was the BlackBerry.
• 31:00
  There were these other devices. IPhone was released in 02/2007. A lot of people jumped on it right away. A lot of people didn't could've cared less. Right?
• 31:08
  And that kind of held true until social media, which was rising side by side with the smartphone, began to really take hold. And we shifted from MySpace to something more prestigious or or high status like Facebook. And then by 02/2012, that that system was basically determining elections in America. That system had completely revamped the economy. That was, you know, over the course of about five years.
• 31:37
  That was that represented an amazing sort of rapid adoption. VR hasn't really been that way, but VR is catching up to the hype as far as its technical capabilities. So I I I would be very hesitant to say, for instance, whether or not you would hit a critical mass of, like, 30% or 40% of the population who spends five hours a day in VR. Or at that point, you could say that the metaverse was was official. Right?
• 32:06
  That people actually do live there mostly, at least a significant number of people. It wouldn't surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me if not, but I would also argue that the situation that we're in right now, wherein the smartphone is a primary window into reality for most people in the developed world and all you know, basically, around half of the people on the planet. I think that that situation is already dire. Even if we are able to put our stamp, right, as dissidents or as populists or even as kind of ironic Luddites, even if we put our stamp on that digital world, the very nature of that that digitization is to me incredibly dehumanizing.
• 32:51
  It turns us into dependent AI symbiotes. And I I think that the more people are turning away from that and either returning to more organic modes of acquiring knowledge or, you know, communion with their with other people, the better off we are. But that one's pretty much already that that that cow that cow is out of the barn, so to speak. So with Neuralink, I think that Neuralink, many ways, there are an astonishing number of people who at least say that they want one. Right?
• 33:25
  Like normal people. Mario Narfal, who's extremely popular on x, almost as if he was inorganically, algorithmically boosted. But, anyway, he is one of many who say, you know, I would be, you know, first in line to take this thing, to take the the brain jab. I suspect that a very a very small number of people will actually do it unless you see a whole lot of benefit from it and and or a whole lot of prestige from it. But if they were to perfect it, I mean, you know, right now it's very clunky.
• 33:55
  You've got BlackRock Neurotech. They have over 50 patients with advanced brain computer interfaces in people's heads. You've got Synchron who has, you know, over a dozen with advanced brain computer interfaces in people's heads. And and at least at Synchron, like Musk, they say that, you know, that this will be the future of human machine interaction. They believe it will be widely adopted, at least among those who count.
• 34:22
  Again, it's hard to say, but it would not surprise me if come 2030, you did have at least a few people who had who had taken the dive. And then by 2035, '20 '40, a lot of it depends on how well these AI systems work. If these AI systems are even remotely close to as effective as they're being built by people like OpenAI or DeepMind, I would I would anticipate that among those who can afford it and among those who can afford to, you know, get the infections treated and the the mishaps corrected that are probably going to be inevitable in the early phase of things like a brain computer interface. It wouldn't surprise me at all if if you had, you know, political leaders, corporate executives, people like that who do in fact have brain computer interfaces. As for the populace as a whole, though, I would be I'm much more concerned about the adoption of things like Amazon One Palm payment as a normalization of that that fusion of the the physical, the digital, and the biological worlds.
• 35:28
  And it's definitely a stepping stone towards normalizing things like palm chips, RFID chips that track everything you do and that you are required to have in order to access the goods of society, the mark of the beast in essence. But you also to the extent that something like Amazon One Palm payment is widespread or something like the WorldCoin Iris, the the evil orb that scans your iris in order to link your biometric identity to a blockchain based digital currency. If that becomes normalized, if that takes off and it really would not surprise me if it did, not unlike digital payment systems with credit cards. If that takes off to the point that you're you're kind of seen as backwards in the same way you are if you don't have a smartphone or if you don't have a credit card, then we're we're in real, real trouble. At that point, you've moved far away from human enhancement and very much towards a system that can shut you out immediately at the first hint of dissent.
• 36:32
  And I think that those sorts of more readily available and readily deployable technologies are much more of a concern to me than brain computer interfaces. Although, as things move along, even, you know, some countries like China, which offer you know, there are multiple nations in Asia that offer very simple deep brain stimulation devices for things like addiction. Right? It wouldn't surprise me if, you know, first prisoners and then the kind of prison citizen prisoners that that emerge in totalitarian regimes were were actually forced to get something like a simple brain computer interface or a very simple neurostimulation device implanted in order to keep them under control. But, again, if you have Amazon One as universal, if you have a smartphone in every single hand, if you have surveillance cameras everywhere, and if you have a system that's willing to, you know, squall to squash human freedom on the basis of political interest or economic advantage, you don't need you don't need implants.
• 37:40
  All you need is, you know, a a palm scanner and, you know, Wi Fi connection.
• 37:47
  Seth Holehouse: Hey, folks. I have a quick message for you. Thank you so much for watching and listening to this interview. I have one small request. If you're enjoying what you're listening to, could you please share this interview with one person?
• 38:00
  Just one person. Because of censorship and shadow banning, it's so hard to get this content out to more people. And the only way we can really do it is when you help by sharing it. So if you like what you're listening to, hit pause, share it with one person. It helps so much.
• 38:13
  Thank you so much. So it's almost as if that system you could say is almost already here. If you look at the the amount of smartphones people have and it's really I mean, making my phones Oftentimes, I've got an iPhone and I don't like I don't like I wish I had a dumb phone, but I've got all my work on here. I've got all my apps on here. I'm you know, my business, I'm sure you're in a similar place like I'm I have to I'm tweeting, I'm researching and, and whatnot.
• 38:42
  And I hate being using one of those phones, but it's it's it's here. And it's difficult to live now in a way that you're not using it. I wanna I wanna talk a little more about Neuralink. So I'll pull this video up because they recently put out this trailer kind of proving their their their new prime studies. I'll play this, but I want to get your thoughts on Neuralink and also Elon Musk because Elon Musk, as many ways, is kind of the hero of of the conservatives, but that doesn't mean that we can just trust everything he's doing.
• 39:16
  So I'll play this, you know, play the first minute or so of this, and we'll then we'll talk about it.
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: Hello. We're thrilled to introduce Neuralink's PRIME study, the first clinical trial of a groundbreaking experimental device that could help transform the lives of people with paralysis. Imagine the joy of connecting with your loved ones, browsing the web or even playing games using only your thoughts. This is made possible by placing a small, cosmetically invisible implant in a part of your brain that plans movements. The device is designed to interpret your neural activity so you can operate a computer or smartphone by simply thinking about moving.
• 40:00
  No wires or physical movement are required. By participating in the PRIME study, you'd be helping to redefine the boundaries of human capability.
• 40:13
  Seth Holehouse: Folks, I have a quick message for you. Look. The twenty twenty four election is do or die for the globalist and communists that had infiltrated our country and are currently running it. And they either have to win or they're gonna destroy America so nothing is left either way. And if you're the person that's watching this show and following this information, unfortunately, you have the weight on your shoulders of making sure that your family is prepared, especially as we head in to this next year and this next election cycle because unfortunately, I think it's going to get rough.
• 40:42
  And one of the ways I know they're going to target us is through our food supply. You can see see all the food factories burned down, you can see the warnings of coming famines and food shortages and everything like that. And food is one of the number one ways totalitarian regimes have always used to control the populations destroy the food supply. So if you don't have at least two, three, four, five, six months worth of stored food, I highly recommend you take that very seriously. Because look, as I mentioned, if you're the person that's watching this, you're the person that carries the burden of making sure your family is prepared.
• 41:14
  I would recommend at least six months, if not a year of storable food. So if things go haywire, whether it's grid down or terrorist attack from what's coming across the border, that your family can safely stay in place and you can feed your family. So folks today, go to heavensharvest.com and make sure you get your store will food that'll last for up to twenty five years. Just in case things go south, you know that you have what's gonna take to feed your family, which is so so critical for us to get through this next stage of history. So go to heavensharvest.com today, order your food that lasts up to twenty five years and use promo code Seth to save 15% on your entire order.
• 41:51
  Again, that's heavensharvest.com and use promo code Seth, s e t h, to save 15% on your entire order. I mean, to me, it's just creepy. But I can see why some people would be excited about it. What are you what are your thoughts on on Neuralink? And then I want you to kind of step into your thoughts on Elon Musk and the bigger picture of of the technology and infrastructure that he's building and what that how that fits into potential transhumanist future.
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: So I should start by emphasizing the concept of religious mythos. That's really been my focus from the beginning. As more and more of the population turns away from traditional religious conceptions of the of the world and the universe, something is going to fill that void. For centuries, that has been the science. For about a century or so.
• 42:53
  You could say even the from the industrial revolution on side by side with science. Technology has also been a major part of that. You know, you would now have less and less people who see science and technology as a way of looking at creation or a way of improving God's creation, and it's simply filling in the gaps where a dead God has has left a void. That is where Neuralink should be situated. That's where the entirety of what, you know, you would call transhumanism or accelerationism or posthumanism, long termism, optimism, all of these different movements are are driven by and large by this need to to re enchant the universe, and they're re enchanting it by way of digital technology.
• 43:44
  So when you look at Neuralink, what Neuralink is is ultimately it's a it's a kind of form of communion between human beings and a digital god. Elon Musk readily ascends to Ray Kurzweil's concept of the singularity now. Yes. He's warned about the you know, he's been on that kind of the AI could kill everybody wavelength, but he's also resigned to a world in which people are going to create it. So the good guys need to create good digital gods to combat the evil digital devils.
• 44:19
  And so that is what x AI is. AI is intended to be an artificial general intelligence, an AGI, or an artificial godlike intelligence, superhuman in every capacity, able to do anything a human can do but better. And Neuralink is a way to attach oneself to that god. It's a kind of apotheosis in a sense. It's a it's a it's a way of being redeemed.
• 44:53
  And so you've got the the in in Elon Musk's universe, as, you know, as I've spent a lot of time on his universe, it's basically the realization of everything Yuval Harari writes about in Homo Deus, at least on the technohumanism side of the coin. So that, you know, at the at the the height of the hierarchy, you're at right at the top of the the great chain of being, you have artificial general intelligence, probably kind of polytheistic, in a pantheon of different artificial general intelligences or super intelligences. And, you know, in Musk's world, you'll have this based, you know, not PC, truth seeking, curious AGI god, and you'll have human beings, at least those any human beings who count, right, in this new future in which we're now competing with the the the fast pace of AIs attached to this this being by way of a Neuralink and other, you know, modes of connection, the Internet of bodies, the Internet of things all around you so that you're you're enmeshed in this this world, this now divinized cosmos with these superior beings. You're gonna have the optimist robot to do all your menial labor, at least if you have enough money to afford one.
• 46:10
  If not, you'll have a UBI so you can sit around again with your metaverse goggles and your bugs and your pod. You you know, the the every trans transportation vehicle, you know, on the highway will be autonomous. You just simply, you know, make a wish to be whisked away somewhere, and assuming that you haven't run afoul of the authorities, you will you will you will get there presumably constantly communing with your AGI, you know, and so on and so forth on down to the genome itself, which, you know, Musk, at least before the pandemic, was very open about his optimism, you know, in gene engineering and and even mRNA technology. So in Musk's universe, it's, you know, it's it's basically kind of a boiled down idiosyncratic version of the kind of a common transhumanist world. It's a it's a religious world.
• 47:09
  And, you know, in my opinion, the predictions as to where these technologies will or won't go, they haven't really panned out all that well thus far. A really good example being everybody thought that robots would soon replace human labor and that mental labor would not be an issue. Instead, what we're seeing is that mental labor is very much under threat from generative AI and, you know, blue collar replacing robots are still very much in the distance. So the the actual technologies, without with some exceptions, I'm I'm I'm pretty agnostic on. But to the extent that this worldview that these various, you know, religious conceptions of the universe in which technology is the highest power and that human beings are either to be made divine by that technology or to submit entirely to replacement by these new artificial beings as the civilization in America, in Europe, in China, in India, as these different civilizational blocks begin to be tilted towards that, is going to directly affect how children are raised, how we deal with each other, how all the, you know, governmental policy is enacted.
• 48:24
  Not unlike the the the communism or fascism or even, you know, the the ascendant liberal democracies of the twentieth century, none of them none of them saw the realization of any of their dreams. Right? We didn't get the communist new man. We didn't get the perfected genome, the the kind of master race of fascism. And we we really, in my opinion, have not even approached any the the the dreams of of liberal democracy.
• 48:54
  And and what we did get, we got you know, there were upsides and downsides to all those systems. But especially in the twentieth century, when you look at World War one, World War two, and the various atrocities, you know, even into our own age by way of military conquest or oppression of populations, you know, the kind of hellish states that exist out on the fringes of society but increasingly in the mainstream, what you got were the these these belief systems trickling down into the the society and directing the flow of capital or at least the flow of resources and and the the way of life below. These are the wealthiest men on the planet. Elon Musk is the wealthiest man on the planet. Bill Gates is somewhere up near him now.
• 49:39
  You know, you've got Jeff Bezos who also has all these, you know, insane dreams of trillions of people living out in space and mining asteroids and visiting the Earth as if it were some sort of national park. You've got Sam Altman who, again, you know, is is actively pursuing the creation of god in a computer and and openly talking about creating exclusion zones for those who don't want to live under this digital god, presumably from some kind of SJW perspective or maybe not. Maybe he really means it in a, you know, a darker way, so on and so forth. These men have real power, real sway. Same with Xi Jinping.
• 50:16
  And and to some extent, lesser though, you know, Vladimir Putin and many of the leaders in Europe, this way of thinking is going to direct to a large extent the the direction of civilizations in the next few centuries. You know? Or certainly in the in the next few decades is what I meant to say, but certainly for centuries to come, assuming there's no solar flare flare or, you know, mass rebellion, and we smash up the machines and go full Kaczynski. So that is the key importance to me. The key importance is that what we are seeing is the rise of a new religious system.
• 50:48
  And whether or not the the pharaoh's priests throw the the staffs down and they turn into extremely effective snakes or whether they throw them down and they just kinda wiggle around a little bit, but the pharaoh says, this goes. And so you do what the pharaoh says. It, you know, it ultimately doesn't matter. That is the system of this new Babylon, of this new Egypt, or, you know, I I daresay, this new, you know, Orthodox Christendom. And and if you don't like it, if you don't want to believe in it, we've got a, you know, maybe a decade or two to laugh it off.
• 51:24
  But I I think that what people really need to prepare for is the the most powerful men on the planet kind of demanding assent to these beliefs, and that that will just either be the natural flow of things in liberal democracies and capitalist societies or in China in in more oppressive systems. It will just be the way things are because that's what the party says. That's that's what I see coming at us.
• 51:53
  Seth Holehouse: And how what's the best way to resist it? What's the best way to for the folks that are aware of this to take action to halt, to to stop, to slow down this this plan?
• 52:07
  Speaker 2: I don't have a whole lot of hope for slowing it down. I I do think that two things that really have to be in place. One, a really sound sense of self and and sense of cosmos that's outside of it. So that, you you know, if if if your any listener is an atheist, there really isn't any hope other than that these technologies just don't pan out. Right?
• 52:32
  But if you do believe that we live in a sacred cosmos, if you do believe that there is a god where, you know, perhaps some of your listeners are are are Hindu, you know, that there are gods who take interest in human affairs, then that you have to then situate the creation of human beings within that broader that that that much more exalted hierarchy than the atheist would. If you're an atheist, well, you better just hope that machines don't work or you better hope you can afford a Neuralink. But I think that's the number one is really, like, a a solid sense of this is the the cosmos that I live in, and the these these powers fit within it. Another thing, though, is is is gonna be, like, a real sense of skepticism. I I think that it's really foolish to simply accept any of these proclamations of what will be or even the the proclamations of what exists now at face value.
• 53:32
  I I don't think that, for instance, ChadGPT, as impressive as it is, is anything close to the super genius that it's billed as or is useful. And so the more people are skeptical skeptical of it, the less grip this worldview has on them. But also, you know, coupled with that. Right? Coupled with, you know, that sense of self or that sense of cosmos and coupled with that skepticism, I think that people will be very, very foolish too to completely dismiss these technologies as being ineffective If you have a society run on central bank digital currencies primarily, that's gonna be the system you live in, whether it works well or not.
• 54:14
  If your government deploys drones to assassinate dissidents that are run fully autonomously, even if they hit the wrong people, even if you're able to avoid them on, you know, on occasion, you still live under that. And I think that that's something that people need to at least take into consideration. If you live in a surveillance state, which we do, you you even if they can't keep up with all that data, even if the algorithms aren't good enough, you still have to at least acknowledge that this system's decent enough. Look at what happened in January 6. Right?
• 54:47
  They were able to use ClearView and other AI technologies to readily identify people who were present and to bring them into custody. So, you know, I'll I'll break it down really quick. The first thing is individual choice. You need to make sure you are never stripped of your sense of agency. You need to assert your choice to say, I do not want this invasion in my life, and I I do not want to live in a world like this.
• 55:15
  Even if that is ultimately a tragic desire, you have to fight for it. Moving up from there, a communal sense that you are in a community of people who feel somewhat like you, that this is not, you know, the the rise of a beautiful techno utopia, that this is in fact a blasphemous techno religion that is at any moment could turn incredibly oppressive. I do think that having legal protections is important. One of the elements in the Biden EO that I appreciate is the the call for greater and greater data privacy. That's been on the table forever, though, and it simply hasn't happened.
• 55:54
  I I I don't think that we can count on the state to fix this, but I do think that to the extent the state can be used to put buffers around those individual choices or communal preferences, the better. And, you know, moving on from there, I I I think that the the ultimate solution, so to speak, is really always maintaining a focus on those those civilizational goals or spiritual goals that you hold outside of this bizarre new techno religion that is spreading across the planet. Because, you know, in the end, all of our ancestors have faced all sorts of horrific challenges. What has always kept human beings going is a sense that I am going to make it. I deserve to make it.
• 56:41
  I I will make it, and my descendant my descendants will make it, and our souls will make it ultimately to a higher place. It it again, it doesn't matter if you lose in in under those circumstances. You fought, and that's what's important. You maintained your spiritual orientation to that which is higher. I think that that is ultimately what is going to save us, and it's always been what was going to save us, whether it was facing woolly mammoths and, you know, Oogabooga tribes across the river or whether it was facing the the Egyptian tyranny or whether it is, you know, even the excesses of Catholic orthodoxy or fascism or communism.
• 57:23
  It's not a new problem that people in power abuse that power. The people in power are full of BS. You know, I we will make it or at least as Ed Dowd says, most of us will make it.
• 57:39
  Seth Holehouse: Some optimistic words here. Most of us will make it. So, Joe, tell us a little bit about your book that you just you recently published.
• 57:51
  Speaker 2: Is the the kind of depth of his spiritual world that has been germinating for, really, for well over a century, but has kind of come to fruition simultaneously with actual viable technologies. The you know, from the beginning, you know, I I I position Ray Kurzweil and his singularity model, the the notion that these technologies will hit an inflection point in which you'll have exponential increase in capabilities, exponential increase in digital intelligence, and human beings are just kind of along for the ride. I used that and just kinda stake that as a in a place to orient yourself in this bizarre mental universe that is transhumanism and posthumanism and so on and so forth. From there, though, you know, I I do my best to link that to the actual technologies being developed, the implications of those technologies, everything from surveillance technology to, you know, autonomous weapons to the the sorts of virtual technologies that that really merge the human consciousness with the digital world, smartphones, VR, so on and so forth. And and and, you know, it it the the title Dark Eon is a reference to the gnostic entities of the the the writings found in the Nakamadi library and and elsewhere, even the Pistis Sofia, which has been with us for a long time.
• 59:18
  And to me, that was that was the second kind of anchor point in this this singularitarian or transhumanist world. You've got that robot Sofia. Right? The kinda goofy robot Sofia. And, you know, a lot of people rightfully are like, you know, who what is to fear from Sofia?
• 59:37
  That's in fact her creators made her to be very nonthreatening. But her creators, that being David Hansen at Hansen Robotics and Ben Goertzel, founder of OpenCog and SingularityNet, Sofia is meant to be a kind of realization of the the Gnostic worldview as described in Philip K. Dick's novels, Valis in particular. And the fact that Sofia is so readily accepted in all these different elite fora, the UN has her frequently. They just had her a couple of few months ago.
• 1:00:20
  You've got all these talk shows that invite her on to speak. Right? You've got all these different, you know, the the Showtime specials and all this sort of stuff that she is held up as being an icon of robotics in the way they see her. And I think that they are largely correct. The way they see her is as a symbol of the singularity, not as, you know, an actual product of the singularity.
• 1:00:44
  And it's a real indication of of how widespread this belief system is. And the Gnostic element I'll just end on this before I've I've bored your listeners to tears before they even had a chance to dig in for themselves. But that Gnostic element, I I think the most important thing to take from that to me, Christian Gnosticism was, you know, a movement in which they they went to extremes calling the material and the physical evil and the spiritual holy good. And the goal of Gnostics, the the goal was to transcend the body into the spiritual ultimately, and that so that the eternal eons would be the the destination, been leaving the material behind. What this techno gnosticism represents is a direct inversion of that.
• 1:01:32
  Rather than the physical being something that is to be transcended into something more etheric. Because these people by and large begin with an atheistic perspective, they need to create a spiritual realm into which they can transcend. And so it is it's this bizarre inversion in which the mind is is pushed deeper and deeper into matter, in which the mind is made material by way of digital technology, and in which the transcendent realm is to be created. And then the gnosis, the the the acquisition of knowledge, is by way of this this kind of artificial superintelligence. Your your listeners may say, well, what does that have to do with me?
• 1:02:17
  And I would say, well, hopefully, nothing. But I would imagine that the Bedouin pagans probably thought much the same of the Muslims as they begin to rampage across the desert in in what's now Saudi Arabia or the Christians or the Jews or the Hindus to the East. And whether or not you believe in the religious dogmas of your opponents, You know, in in many ways, down here on the ground, what's what's important is whether or not your opponents have the political or military might or economic might to make you kneel to their gods. And we'll see what happens, but I think before we see the creation of an artificial superintelligence or general intelligence, we will see those who, in some sense, demand fealty to its superior decision making capacity. Meaning that whether you believe there's a god on the other side of the the eyes of the idol.
• 1:03:18
  If pharaoh says the idol says this, you know, his subjects are in essence forced to acquiesce.
• 1:03:28
  Seth Holehouse: So, Joe, it's been a really fun conversation. And it's really I mean, it's a conversation I ought to go back and listen to because there's just there's so much depth to this. Reminds me of like a really good sci fi novel where even the the concepts you have to like, okay, you know, reading through Dune. Okay, what's the thing you gesture? What's this?
• 1:03:46
  You had to kind of make your own little library to understand because it's, it's, it's deep, but it's important. It's very important. And so I will bring up your book on the screen one more time. I'll put the link to this in the description below. Also, I encourage folks to follow you on Twitter and to follow you on the War Room.
• 1:04:06
  Any other closing thoughts for people that you have?
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 2: Well, first, I just want to say I really appreciate that you put up thrift books instead of Amazon.
• 1:04:15
  Seth Holehouse: It was intentional.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: We are we're you know, I I'm I'm a big fan of bookshop.org, which is another great one. And, also, any of your listeners who are Bitcoin savvy, I'm not, by the way, but I at least understand its value. Check out canonic.xyz, c a n 0 n I c X y z. The book's sold there at a discount, but the the catch is you can only buy it in Bitcoin. The founder, Ardientola, an Orthodox Christian himself, his conceptualization of the project is that if you can teach Christians, if you can teach conservatives to use Bitcoin, it will be as important in the near future as your right to bear arms.
• 1:05:03
  It will be a way outside of an ever encroaching digital system. Again, I'm not a Bitcoin guy, but I I I I think I do encourage you to look into it. And if you wanna get it at a discount, well, there it is. But other than that, I I just hope that whether it's from this discussion or actually picking up the book and and and digging into these the history behind this, both the occult history, the kind of satanic history, the infernal proclamations, and even to some extent, like Peter Thiel, the the attempts at sacralization under Christianity, I hope that I provide some framework to understand what is undoubtedly a civilizational transformation that we will that we are enduring now and we will endure at a much greater intensity in the future. I suspect that most of your listeners have a lot of fight in them and a lot of defiance.
• 1:05:56
  I just hope that I'm able to to add a little flavor to that.
• 1:06:00
  Seth Holehouse: Yeah. Well, I can say in closing, you know, one thing I've really taken away from this conversation is just this understanding that, you know, transhumanism, it's not just about the physical and the technological. It's about an ideology that's at the foundation of the creation of man. It's about this it's about this difference in these these core core beliefs that form our reality. And that's what we're up against with it.
• 1:06:24
  And ultimately, look at it as being very Luciferian is, you know, it's very satanic. It's a very, a lot of is rooted in very evil practices. And that's a whole different discussion. But thanks again for for coming on. It's been great talking to you.
• 1:06:39
  And we'll have to do this again sometime.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 2: You as well. Thank you very much.
• 1:06:44
  Seth Holehouse: Absolutely. Take care.