Latest / Abide Meditation App / Why AI Feels Spiritually Dangerous _ ft. Jared Henderson

Transcript

Why AI Feels Spiritually Dangerous _ ft. Jared Henderson · Abide Meditation App

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: When I talk about religion on this channel, there's often
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: bigger questions lurking under the surface. What makes us human?
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: How did new technologies reshape consciousness? What happens when ritual, community,
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: and even grief get filtered through our screens. My guest
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: today is Jared Henderson. He's a philosopher and author turned
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: YouTuber whose work explores exactly those kinds of questions. He's
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: built a channel thinking seriously about modern life and the
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Internet age, the social media age, and the AI age,
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: exploring topics like our attention, reading, artificial intelligence, synthetic relationships,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: and what all this might be doing to us. What
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: I like about Jared's work, both on substack and YouTube
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: is that he doesn't just do the usual technology.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: Is Bad routine.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: He puts our current anxieties in a much longer historical
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: and philosophical perspective, while still taking seriously that something genuinely
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: new and troubling might be happening right now. So in
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: this conversation we talk about the post literate age, whether
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: AI is outsourcing human cognition, why chapbot relationships feel so
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: unsettling or even sacrilegious, whether we can defend the life
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: of the mind outside the crumbling walls of the university.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Jared Henderson, Welcome to the show.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: So I'm personally delighted to meet another ex academic turn
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: to YouTuber.
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: You.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: From my understanding, you were You are a philosopher who
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: properly got the PhD in philosophy and then decided to
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: move into the content creator space. Just tell us a
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: little bit about that journey.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: Well, it was a bit of a long journey.
• 1:26
  Speaker 3: So, yeah, I was working on my PhD in philosophy
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: and I sort of looked at the academic job market
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: and thought, oh no, like this isn't going to work.
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: It's just too hard out there. And I actually originally
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: got a job in tech. I was working for actually
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: an AI company, which is a little bit ironic given
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: the stuff that I talk about now, But it was
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: a different kind of AI.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: It was like symbolic systems AI.
• 1:50
  Speaker 3: It was very old school kind of technology that frankly
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: has been rendered completely irrelevant in the last couple of years.
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: But it got me out of you know, I had
• 1:59
  Speaker 3: finished my PhD and it got me a job, so
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: that was great. But I found very quickly that I
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: just missed having academic discussions. I think one of the
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: hard things about being a sort of ex academic is
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: that you become very used to being in an intellectual
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: community of people who are maybe not interested in the
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: exact same things as you, but at least interested in
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: areas related to it, and it's really hard to find that.
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: I mean, I had actually made some philosophy friends in Austin,
• 2:27
  Speaker 3: and that was great, but I wanted to kind of
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: push it a little bit further, and so I just
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: started making content and I originally just kind of made
• 2:36
  Speaker 3: it about.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: Whatever I wanted.
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: We talked about books, I talked about journally, I talked
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: about just anything, because I didn't really have it.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: I didn't have like a vision or a plan for
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: the channel.
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: But I've really narrowed down in the last year or
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: two philosophy but trying to find those intersections of like
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: how does philosophy relate to modern life, and not in
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: the way of like writing it like Game of Thrones
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: and Philosophy, those kind of books you'd see at Barnes
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: and Noble, but asking questions, like philosophical questions about issues
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: that already matter to people and for a lot of that. Lately,
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: it's been philosophical questions about sort of our technological environment
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: because we live on the internet. You know, we spend
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: hours and hours a day on the internet, and that's
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: not even a stable place. It's changed rapidly even since
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: I started on YouTube a couple of years ago, and
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: so it's just a really like fertile area to be
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: asking kind of philosophical questions and trying to bring those
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: resources in to like just try to make sense of everything.
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: And that's really what I've been trying to do since
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: I got on YouTube.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I can definitely empathize with that. Since leaving the academy,
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: I sometimes feel kind of isolated because you are so
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: accustomed to having those sorts of conversations, coursework and research,
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: and when you're outside of that environment, you kind of
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: have your computer and the books you can read and
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: maybe the occasional conference, but just to be out of
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: that environment, there's not that sort of academicmmunity.
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I haven't even gone to a conference since I
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: left academia, but yeah, even just even being in the hallway,
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: you know, when you're a grad student and like all
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: have grad offices in hopefully the same building, and you
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: just like run into people and you can just say
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: I just read this, like let me ask you something,
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: or if you like have a problem, you can just
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: like go and talk to someone immediately.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: Because it was just a.
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: Community of people who were just who had already bought in. Yeah,
• 4:26
  Speaker 3: so it can be it can be really isolating, but
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: I found that, like there are there are actually quite
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: a lot of people that are interested in these sorts
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: of things, like you found this, Like there are a
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: lot of people who are interested in the academic study
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: of religion. They might not be in academia, and it's
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: really hard to get them concentrated in one place. That's
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: why universities are so great, right because it literally just
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: says all these scholars are going to be in two
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: square miles and so you can just go find them.
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: The internet's much more dispersed, but that that also means
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: that you can just find lots of people who are
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: interested in these topics who maybe themselves have also ruggle
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: to find people who are you interested in these topics?
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so your your work came on my radar about
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: a year ago, and I found myself watching so many
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: of your videos and feeling it's almost a sense of anxiety.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: And this is not a slight to your work. It's
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: it shows how powerful your work is because it's revealing
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: the level of dystopia we sometimes find ourselves living in.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: So the one of your videos is on your attention.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Your attention span is not broken, it's being stolen from you.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: And I was like, yeah, because as much as I
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: use social media, it's just like it is, it is
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: stealing my attention.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: I mean I do think maybe especially in the last year,
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: when I've really narrowed my focus, it has become there's
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: a bit more of a dystopian element to the things
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: that I discuss.
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: But one of the things I've I've.
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: Found as I've been thinking about these issues, like about
• 5:57
  Speaker 3: the attention economy or you know, there's there's all these
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: topics like people want to know, like how to get
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: your attention span back, or why you can't focus right,
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: and usually that's put in terms of like productivity, that's
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: how everyone wants to address it. It turns out, though,
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: as I started thinking about this and I was reading more,
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: these same problems have arisen again and again throughout history.
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: So with the advent of the printing press scholars were
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: suddenly worried that there were too many books to read.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: All right, that's the that's already like a problem about
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: the information economy sort of being flooded, and they had
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: to figure out what to do about it. And you know,
• 6:34
  Speaker 3: Petrarch writes a book about the life of solitude, and
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: we don't think about sort of Petrarch's time as that
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: busy compared to ours, but it was already something that
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: he was worried about enough that he wanted to dedicate
• 6:46
  Speaker 3: an entire book sort of advocating the life of solitude.
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: And so I found that there's actually a sense of
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: solace there because because you can look to the past
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: and see that people have struggled with these problems for
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: so long and and they've always found solutions. And yes,
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: a lot of our current media environment, our sort of
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: technological environment, is quite dystopian. I think we live basically
• 7:11
  Speaker 3: in like a hostile design environment where everyone is trying
• 7:15
  Speaker 3: to grab your attention. If you want to even put
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: a positive message out into the world or informational content,
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: you still have to think about how to break through
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: that sort of noise barrier. It's part of the craft
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: of like being on YouTube, for instance, And so we
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: do live in a time where these problems probably have
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: reached a new scale that they've never reached before, but
• 7:34
  Speaker 3: they're not problems that are necessarily new in kind. That
• 7:37
  Speaker 3: was like part of the point of that video about
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: your attention span being stolen is that actually the techniques
• 7:42
  Speaker 3: that are used to steal your attention span now we're
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: already being used in the nineteenth century with the rise
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: of the newspaper industry. And I take that to be
• 7:52
  Speaker 3: rather comforting because it means some people figured out how
• 7:55
  Speaker 3: to handle newspapers, and some people figure out how to
• 7:57
  Speaker 3: like not let themselves doom scroll or the equiv doom
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: flip on newspapers. Lots of people didn't, but some people did,
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: and that means we can probably figure out these problems too.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, let's dwell on reading for an example, because you do,
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: you also have videos on how to be a better reader,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: how to you know, keep your attention on a book
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: for more than ten fifteen seconds. I appreciate you bringing
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: up the long span of history because I think of that.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: I think about that often myself. I'm a scholar of
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: religion first, but an ancient historian second, and I frequently
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: looked to history, like, you know, humanity has survived so
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: many things, and when we think about I've heard this
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: term all the time, the post literate society. Nobody's reading anymore,
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: it's all video. But when you think about human history,
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: like mass literacy is a blip in human history, just
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: the last one hundred years or so, literacy was the
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: purview of like the one percent of the one percent
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: for as the past five thousand years that writing has existed.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: And then for the you know, one hundred and fifty
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: thousand years of Homo sapiens, like nobody was reading. So
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: surely postliteracy shouldn't matter that much, should it.
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: Well, I do think it matters quite a bit. But
• 9:09
  Speaker 3: I do think looking at the history is useful. Yeah,
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: at first, it's really helpful to remember that for the
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: vast majority of human history, there was no literacy, there
• 9:17
  Speaker 3: was no reading, there was no writing. Yeah, in the
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: vast majority of human history there was no reading, there
• 9:21
  Speaker 3: was no writing. We lived in oral societies.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: Walter Ong is good on this.
• 9:25
  Speaker 3: He has a book called From Orality to Literacy that's
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: very useful kind of as a historical survey. And Ang's
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: main point in that book, though, is that the introduction
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: of literacy is transformative of human consciousness. In particular, it
• 9:41
  Speaker 3: facilitates memory in a new way. You no longer have
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: to memorize everything, and when you have to memorize everything,
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: you have to structure your thoughts in such a way
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: that they are memorable. So this is why, you know,
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: epics or epic poems were the sort of thing that
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: could get passed down because they're much more memorable. And
• 9:58
  Speaker 3: some of the earliest examples of writing that we have
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: are things like record keeping, which is just numbers basically
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: pro too accounting, because those are kind of always never
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: going to be very memorable for all the details. Writing
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: allowed us to do this, and then writing allowed us
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: to engage in a new type of reflection where you
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: could actually revisit your own thoughts basically exactly as they
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: were in the past. You know, one of the things
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: about recollection is we're always changing our memories as we
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: revisit them, and so it's very actually hard for us
• 10:27
  Speaker 3: to remember things exactly. Obviously, we see this with the
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: transmission of like oral text or you know, oral traditions.
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: Things are always being slightly altered and changed. But even
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: as you recollect on what it's like to be a child,
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: well in five years, when you recollect on that same event,
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: you're going to remember it slightly differently because who you
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: are is different. But if you were to say, keep
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: a journal from a young age, you can actually see
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: your thoughts exactly as you wanted to express them at
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: an earlier age. And that's kind of one of the
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: train formative effects of writing. But now we have this
• 11:03
  Speaker 3: this anxiety over what people call the post litter in age.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: James Marriott is one of these people.
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: I did a podcast with him about this, and there's
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: it's very easy to engage in, like to become a
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: Cassandra here to talk about how this is going to
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: be the downfall of civilization, that liberal democracy is going
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: to like crumble or whatever institution you love is never
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: going to last. You know. I'm worried about, you know,
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: the future of universities in a world where people don't
• 11:30
  Speaker 3: want to read very much.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: And I do think that there are a real risk.
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: And what I see though, as like a critic of this,
• 11:39
  Speaker 3: as someone who's like trying to critically analyze it, is
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: to not talk about it as if it's a reversion
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: to orality, but to ask, like, what comes next? So,
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: if writing was so transformative of human consciousness, what does
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: the move to video and audio and sort of broadcast all,
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: what would that actually you to human consciousness? And we
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: see this a bit with how radio affected us and
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: how TV affected us, and so it's all part of
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: this continuation of this technological progress. Now, I don't want
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: to imply that therefore it'll be just as good as
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: the literate age, but I don't want to also say
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: that there are no goods that might be opened up,
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: or no new interesting changes. And I think I think
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: that's kind of like the point of trying to approach
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: it in a scholarly fashion is to admit, like the
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: nuance and the ambiguity and the uncertainty we have as
• 12:33
  Speaker 3: we enter into like the post literate age, if that's
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: actually where we're heading.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: I've never heard it framed like that, that we will
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: not revert to orality. If orality means sitting around the
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: fire telling a story about the Iliad or the Odyssey,
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: that we're not We're not going to revert to that
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: because so much of media is mediated through screens now,
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: so it might have been you or I was listening
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: to another podcast that uses the phrase the broadcast society.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: So for post literate, what are we going toward. We're
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: going toward a broadcast society where more and more people
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: are posting content on Instagram, TikTok, and that's that's how
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: you receive your information, and that introduces so many different issues,
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: like the performativity of media, of social media. Everybody talks about, oh,
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: be authentic, be authentic, but the very performance of authenticity
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: is itself as a performance. So it's there's there's you
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: lose the sense of a reality where it was also
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: a collective experience.
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah, in an oral society, it's like it's me talking
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: to you face to face, or maybe at a slight
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: distance if I'm particularly loud. In a broadcast society, it's
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: not only how people receive information, but broadcast is how
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: people are going to record information, or at least that's
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: what I currently think. When people have thoughts, they open
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: their phone and they make a TikTok video and they're like,
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: this is my thoughts about Israel, Impelston, this is my
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: thoughts about whatever seeing issue we have today. This is
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: how we transmit like recipes, right, Like this is like
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: there's something really interesting about how recipes and like food traditions.
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: Maybe we're going to simplify here, but at first it
• 14:13
  Speaker 3: goes being passed down from parent to child, like mother
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: to daughter, and then it becomes, oh, cookbooks become the
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: way that recipes are passed down, and in fact, eventually
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: the way that even your your grandmother gives you her
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: recipes is by writing them down. And that's like a
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: change in how we transmit information. Now for a lot
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: of people, how they learn to cook is by watching
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: sixty or ninety second tiktoks that give them recipes.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: The question is like what changes when you do that?
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: And I think that.
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: When we move to writing, for instance, recipes slowly became
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: more precise. If you look at very early recipes, they're
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: often written with like just enough salt or we had
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: all of these like very human based measurements, a pinch,
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: a dab, and then we got more or precise because
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: we knew we would be broadcasting to larger audiences and
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: then with actual broadcasts. Though, I think one of the
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: interesting things about this is how quickly like recipes evolve,
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: so people new like trends emerge, and then people find
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: new ways to incorporate those trends into lots of different dishes.
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: You know, you can read about the fact that, like
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: misopaste is like one of the big ingredients of like
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: the last couple of years. Okay, this is a very
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: traditional food stuff from a very particular part of the
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: world that is now people talking about it like how
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: to use it in your macaroni and cheese, okay, like,
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: and it happens so fast, and I think that leads
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: to some instability and maybe some lack of a sense
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: of belonging to like a particular culture or particular place,
• 15:50
  Speaker 3: but it also leads to a lot of creativity, right
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: so like, so there are these pros and cons here,
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: and as you think about just like the transmission of ideas,
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: right like, or like political ideologies as like another example,
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: you know, growing up in kind of like the rise
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: of the Internet age, but it was still very much
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: like the dial up early Wikipedia kind of kind of days.
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: You could learn a lot about political ideologies that went
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: beyond maybe being a Republican a Democrat, which is basically
• 16:17
  Speaker 3: all I knew growing up in like rural Ohio. Now
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: though you'll find people who make these incredibly fine grained
• 16:24
  Speaker 3: taxonomies of all the possible political positions you could hold,
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: and and that can be helpful, but also it means
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: that for a lot of them, like, political discussions are
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: just about placing things in those taxonomies, and so like
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: the very existence of the creation of like or the
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: creation of those taxonomies also changed what people thought like
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: the point of politics was. And and I think that's
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: part of this larger point that like how information is
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: transmitted and how information is stored and how it's structured. Actually,
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: ructure is how we think about problems. So we might
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: think about problems in a way that's easily facilitated by
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: those structures, and the question is, like, are those the
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: right ways to think about those problems? Are there other
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: ways that we're missing? What you know, for every way
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: of thinking that is incentivized by a structure, there's at
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: least one other way of thinking that is disincentivized by
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: that structure. And you can even see this in how
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: people write about let's say, religion in an academic context,
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: where the point is to give lots of historical detail,
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: where it's to ground it in a wider body of theory,
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: where it's to really contextualize the problem and usually to
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: make a fairly small point and to make incremental progress.
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: Versus how someone might write like a Substeck article, which
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: is designed to go to a much wider audience, there's
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: usually less contextualizing work, and there is a bit more
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: of a performance. I don't want to say that academia
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: is totally free of that performativity, but you're performing for
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: a very particular community there that has very precise norms,
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: norms that maybe aren't codified, but most people could kind
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: of tell you what the norms are. In fact, this
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: is part of the process of like I'm sure you
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: heard this in graduate school professionalization and you learned how
• 18:19
  Speaker 3: to professionalize, and part of that is like learning the
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: norms of the scholarly community. Well, we just don't have
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: that robust set of norms when we're writing for a
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: much larger audience, and that means it's a bit more
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: of a free for all, and what the rules are
• 18:31
  Speaker 3: is also up for debate, and what changes there, I mean,
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: that's another big question to ask. Another way of thinking
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: about that is just that we have gotten used to
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: thinking that, well, let's go back to orality for a second.
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: In an oral culture, you kind of always know the
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: exact content context of your audience. You usually share the
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: exact context of your audience. In a literate society, suddenly
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: your words can be stripped of that context and read
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: by anyone across the world. But they move very slowly,
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: and books often come with like a provenance, right like
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: they'll tell you where they're from and you can figure
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: it out a little bit. An article or like a
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: tweet that suddenly gets sent out to a much larger
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: audience than was intended, there's almost no way to track
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: that context. And so how do you transmit information when
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: you can't take all of that context for granted? Which
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: is actually a huge part of human communication is relying
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: on background assumptions and norms and common knowledge. What do
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: you do when you can't rely on that anymore? And
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: I think it's just fair to say that will radically
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: transform how we communicate. I think we're already seeing it,
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: and we'll probably just see a lot more of it
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: going forward.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: This reminds me a lot of the work of the
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: anthropologist royd Rapaport, and he wrote a lot about religious
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: ritual and how ritual acts as an information processing system
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: generation after generation. So he actually used the analogy of
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: a computer. So computers have one and zeros. So a
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: lot of rituals are one or zero. Are you married
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: or you're not married? Well, the marriage ceremony, the ritual
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: provides information to society to tell okay, this person.
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: Is now married.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: The same with the presidential inauguration. It's literally a collective
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: ritual that is turning this person from president elect to president.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: And coming of age ceremonies are the same. This person
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: is an adolescent now the adult. Seasonal festivals usually it's
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: taking something from nature. So you know, the changing from
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: spring to summer is ambiguous. That's ambiguous data that you
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: can't do much with. But the seasonal festival that's like, ah,
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: we are now starting summer. That has provided information, maybe
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: not on a meteorological scale that summer has started, but
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: on a societal scale, Okay, summer has now started. So
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: when I think about ritual as an information processing system
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: that's giving information to the next generation, that also seems
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: to be something that is lost in a broadcast society
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: where you mentioned how in an oral society, you know
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: your context, you know the context of your audience, and
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: much of those contexts are ritualized. And now in a
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: broadcast society, not only is it decollectivized or you know,
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: de contextualized, there's there's no no ritual providing information to society.
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but I think we'll eventually try to invent those
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: And I think you kind of see this. This is,
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: you know, a hot button topic to address. But look
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: at the way that people have handled say, like the
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: killing of Charlie Kirk. Right, there are like ritualized mourning
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: that happens. But it happens not just in like the
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: big memorial service they had for him, but also the
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: way that people create AI avatars of him to like
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: send messages and things. We don't actually create AI avatars
• 21:51
  Speaker 3: of people who are alive yet. I mean people do it,
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: like on Sora, but they usually do it for comedic purposes.
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: But in a weird way, when someone's died and they're
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: like publicly salient, they've started to create AI avatars in
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: a way that like can can transmit wisdom. Here's how
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: to carry on my legacy or whatever. Right, and it
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: doesn't have to be Charlie Kirk, that he's just like
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: the example I keep seeing online right now Confucius.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: Recently, they've created an AI Confucius. So the Kong family,
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: which is the Confucius family, has created a Ai Confucius
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: that you can interact with.
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so we want to like it's a way of
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: trying to make like the dead much more like immediate
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: to us. I mean I see it as partly like
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: we're totally fooling ourselves because of like what AI is.
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: But I think it's maybe maybe it's helpful me to
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: try to place that in more of like a understanding
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: of ritual. This isn't people actually literally thinking they're interacting
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: with Confucius. I mean some people might, but like it
• 22:46
  Speaker 3: might be like a kind of ritualized thing. It could
• 22:50
  Speaker 3: be a kind of ritualized activity that's part of like
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: the morning process, or that's part of religious devotion, or
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: that's part of collective decision making. Who knows where it
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: could go, but I think it will go in weirder
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: and weirder directions at least for a little while.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: I think that's a good segue into AI because a
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: lot of your content focuses on artificial intelligence, and we
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: can attack it from several angles here. I still feel
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: anxiety about social media stealing our attention, but my fear
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: of social media has taken a back seat to my
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: fear of these large language models, because if social media
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: is stealing my attention, chat GPT steals my cognition. There's
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: a lot of conversation about d skilling where somebody who
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: used to be very proficient at writing or coding or
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: writing lyrics for music, they outsource it to chat GPT,
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: and over the course of months and years they d skill,
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: they lose that skill. And you also see this in
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: corporate settings, where you have the senior people in a
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: corporation who have spent thirty years of their life perfecting
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: these skills. The entry level people coming out of college,
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: they are they've been using chat SCHPT from the jump
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: and therefore have not created those skills, so that you
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: get you almost get this population gap in skill sets.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: So I guess that's what I'm saying is are you
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: as afraid as I am about outsourcing our cognition to
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: chat SHEPT?
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: Oh?
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I am. This is a real source of
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: anxiety for me. I think that for a lot of people,
• 24:30
  Speaker 3: we all never we all never really believe that like
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: reading a book summary was the same as reading a book.
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: We kind of believe that it was good enough for
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: passing a test or writing a paper for a college
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: class you didn't care about. But it seems like with
• 24:41
  Speaker 3: the rise of AI, where I don't know why, but
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: AI like everyone takes it as authoritator. They're like, if
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: the AI set it, it just is true. Even though
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: we all know about the problems of hallucinations. We know
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: how especially as context gets larger and larger in these models,
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: they get weirder and weird, like we all know the problems,
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: and yet when it says it, like the way people
• 25:04
  Speaker 3: use Brock on Twitter, what is now X, it's just
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: like Grock, is this true?
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: As if?
• 25:10
  Speaker 3: Like we used to think that we needed human fact
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: checkers who had their own problems, but at least it
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: was like an an attempt by humans to fact check
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: the information landscape, and now we think we all able
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: to have an AI fact checker and it gets it
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: humorously wrong or comically wrong, or actually just tragically wrong.
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: I don't know fifty percent of the time or some
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: important amount that would make you think like this isn't
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: that reliable, But for some reason, people take it as authoritative.
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: I don't know if it's like the method of presentation
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: or or just the fact that it kind of feels
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: like an oracle, Like it kind of feels like visiting
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: the oracle of Delfi or something and asking you a
• 25:46
  Speaker 3: big question, it just like gives you the answer. Or
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: the fact that sometimes they're trained to be more sycophantic
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: and so they just tell you what you want to hear,
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: and people love to agree with what they already want
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: to hear. But for whatever reason, we're like, wow, we
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: can we can just try us this thing. And people
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: use it to summarize stuff instead of reading it, which
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: is I think a huge problem because in reading, you're
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: not just gaining information, but you're actually thinking with the
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: author and trying to think critically and follow the argument
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: and to understand if it actually works. I mean, this
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: is a huge part of the act of reading. Reading
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: is not just about extracting information, and it's really apparent
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: when people are using it for their writing, because like,
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: what does writing do for you as a human being?
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: It allows you to structure and to codify your thoughts
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: and to try to regiment them in a way that
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: is rational. That is compelling, that has a kind of
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: logical ordering to it, and that communicates, Well, these are
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: all skills you need not just in the act of writing,
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: but actually in the act of like living as a
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: good human being. And if you're not practicing that with
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: writing or with other sorts of activities that are similar,
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: then the question is, like, where do you ever develop
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: those skills in the first place. One of my big
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: philosophical influences is Aristotle, and one of the things that
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: Aristotle will say is like, the virtues are not in
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: us by nature. The virtues are things that you cultivate,
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: and you cultivate them through trial and error and through education.
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: If we basically use AI to do all of our
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: writing for us and do all of our thinking for us,
• 27:27
  Speaker 3: we're never going to cultivate those, specifically those intellectual virtues.
• 27:31
  Speaker 3: And I just don't see how to reach people about
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: this yet, because there are people who are worried about it,
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: and there are people who are enthusiastic about it, and
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: I've never been able to bridge the gap and find
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: people who are enthusiastic about it and get them to
• 27:44
  Speaker 3: be worried. And I've also never seen someone who's worried
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: become more enthusiastic. I've been told by people like, oh,
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: don't you understand AI is actually going to be like
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: a really great tutor, and it could be like a
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: private tutor for you to help you learn a new
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: language or like learn a new skill. And I'm like
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: open to the theoretical possibility that it could do that.
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: Let's just like it, admit the possibility for a moment.
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: But the question is how do people actually use it?
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: Like how does it actually get used in practice? And
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: very few people are using it as tutors, it seems,
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: and lots of people are using it to do their
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: work for them and to do their intellectual work for them,
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: or I would just say, to do their thinking for them.
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: And it's that rise of like a thoughtless world that
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: has me particularly concerned. I think once you enter into
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: a world of thoughtlessness, it's a much less interesting world.
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: It's much most beautiful world. It's also a world where
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: people will believe anything, and worlds where people will believe
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: anything are typically dangerous and unstable worlds. And I think
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: all of that is related somehow to this cognitive offloading
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: that we see in AI.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: I used to teach university writing as like the main
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: class I taught back in graduate school, and there was
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: so much hype about, oh, the college essay is dead
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: because CHATCHI can write the college essay. And I think
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: any grad student or professor would tell you, well, the
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: point is not the college essay. I have now read
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: hundreds of college essays and they're usually not amazing.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: Works of pros.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: The whole point, like you said, is to organize your
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: thoughts and to do the work of research, going to
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: the library and digesting the book and then trying to
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: put it the argument of the book into your own
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: words and all that takes heavy cognitive work. It's not easy,
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: and sometimes the end product is quite messy, and that's
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: just not the point. It was the process. And like
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: you said, people are not using it as a tutor.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: They push the button and sometimes walk away from the
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: computer and have the product. You had one video recently
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: about the professors are cheating now too, though, like you
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: have the students write their papers with chat GPT and
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: then the professors grade the papers with chat GPT, and
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: you just get this unvirtuous cycle of just ai slop
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: that's not benefiting anyone.
• 30:04
  Speaker 3: And I would say, it's actively harming a lot of people,
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: because why would a student want to pay twenty five
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: thousand or a year or more to then be graded
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: by an AI for the work that they produced with
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: an AI. But also university administrators they're not my favorite
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: people in the world, but they're also not total morons,
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: and so they'll eventually think, well, if every professor in
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: the world is just using chat GPT to grade these papers,
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: why do we need so many professors? And so you're
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: actually like, in the act of offloading the students are
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: making education less worthwhile for themselves. And eventually the rational
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: ones will say, why am I paying so much for
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: this when I could just I'm not getting anything from
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: it aside from the degree itself, like the credential. And
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: then the professors s crew doing this, I would say,
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: are probably offloading their way out of the job.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: And so.
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: Not only does it of make a mockery of education,
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: but it also just leads to I think a totally
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: unstable educational environment where these institutions we've relied on, like
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: having places like universities, which could be these bastions of
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: knowledge which also educate people. There's sort of a weird
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: thing with universities. They do two things at once. They
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: provide education, and that's kind of like their main purpose,
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: right maybe, But there's a secondary purpose which is also critical,
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: which is the production of knowledge and the transmission of knowledge,
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: but also like the preservation of knowledge. It's why we
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: every time you lose a Renaissance historian at a university,
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: you want to hire another Renaissance historian because you don't
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: want to like.
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: Lose this knowledge.
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: And this model has been it's not with the way
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: universities have always been structured, the kind of production, the
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: union of research and teaching. It's very much like a
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: nineteenth century German model, but it's worked really well since
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: it became the dominant model of universities. And if we
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: don't know what to do about the education bit because
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: of AI, then there's this question of, like what happens
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: to the research and preservation of knowledge bit? And there
• 32:10
  Speaker 3: is there aren't competing institutions that can pick up the
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: slack on that part, and so as like it harms
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: the educational aspect too, Just what like what happens to
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: you know, niche languages that are only studied by a
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: few scholars. The University of Chicago basically just liquidated a
• 32:28
  Speaker 3: huge amount of its language departments. I don't know if
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: you follow any of this news, but the University of Chicago,
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: one of the reasons it's notable is because it has
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: all these niche languages. You know, they might only have
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: three students a year who want to take Sanskrit or
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: some other language, but they had enough experts that they
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: could teach it, and it was really important. Even though
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: it doesn't make a lot of economic sense a year
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: over year, it's really important that like one institution or
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: two institutions have those experts because we did a lot
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: of work to recover a lot of these languages. You know,
• 32:57
  Speaker 3: we've lost many of them before. We did a lot
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: of work to recover them. I don't want to have
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: to do all that work again to recover them in
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: the future. And the university right now is the place
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: where that is preserved. And I just don't know what
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: happens to any of that in the sort of the
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: AI University as it's like seems to be emerging.
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this happened. I mean, religious studies is usually
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: first on the chopping block for the amount of department
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: closures that has happened in the last two or three
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: years is staggering. And then UNC just recently closed a
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: bunch of their institutes where they housed language learning as well,
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: like they had a Yucatan Maya language section, which is
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: incredibly important if you're studying meso America and just liquidated.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: And I mean, perhaps we can talk a bit about
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: our vocation as YouTubers. I sometimes feel like I'm fighting
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: like a vanguard defense religious studies outside of the academy
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: while the academy crumbles. Like I don't want religion for
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: Breakfast to be a replacement to a university degree program
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: because I just simply can't deliver that with fifteen to
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: twenty minute long explainer videos.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: You know, so.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: You've mentioned this too on your YouTube channel. The irony
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: of you know, worrying about the broad the post literate
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: society while feeding into the broadcast society. Is this something
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: that you've grappled with.
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so for one thing, Yeah, I occasionally make longer
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: philosophy explainers too, in addition to some of the work
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: I do. And I know that most people who watch
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: those videos don't go and read Plato for themselves, but
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: I'm trying to reach some people to like go and
• 34:44
  Speaker 3: reach Plato for themselves. I also know that a ninety
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: minute video about Plato from me is not a replacement
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: for a seminar on Plato. What I tell myself, and
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: I think it's true, is that for a lot of people,
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: going back to those seminars on Plato just isn't an option.
• 35:00
  Speaker 3: And so part of what I'm doing is like a
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: public service that luckily helped me, like sustain my life,
• 35:05
  Speaker 3: but a public service to like get that knowledge out,
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: maybe in a lower resolution than you would get in
• 35:12
  Speaker 3: a seminar, but to get it out into the world,
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: to let people engage with it for themselves. And I'm
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: really struck by the fact that a lot of people
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: reach out to me and say I watched your videos
• 35:23
  Speaker 3: and I read more now. And I've even had some
• 35:26
  Speaker 3: people say, like, I used to watch your videos and
• 35:28
  Speaker 3: then I just stopped watching YouTube because I want to
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: read more. And there's a bit of professional concern where
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: I'm like, well, if I'm really successful, YouTube dies, and
• 35:39
  Speaker 3: of course I'll never have that big of an impact.
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: But I'm actually really hardened by that, Like I think
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: it means that for some people it does make a difference,
• 35:47
  Speaker 3: and I'm sure that there have been people who have
• 35:49
  Speaker 3: watched your videos who maybe they didn't go and get
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: degrees in religious studies, but started to actually like read
• 35:56
  Speaker 3: those texts for themselves, or to read popular histories religion,
• 36:00
  Speaker 3: maybe even some scholarly work on religion. And one of
• 36:03
  Speaker 3: the things I'm impressed by that you do is that
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: you run these classes too, that you have like a
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: you have like a nonprofit right, like a sort of
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: institute that's sort of this larger thing to bring education.
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: It's still online, it's still through these like zoom calls
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: or however it is that you structure it, but you're
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: giving people an opportunity to go deeper in a way
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: that's not like your standard youtubeer course, you know, by
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: these seven videos for forty nine to ninety nine or whatever,
• 36:28
  Speaker 3: but also would let them then kind of engage in
• 36:33
  Speaker 3: something like scholarly activity or at least just the life
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: of the mind. I care more about them leading the
• 36:38
  Speaker 3: life of the mind than them becoming scholars, because a
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: scholar is typically someone who's employed by a university or
• 36:45
  Speaker 3: employed by like a research institute. There are independent scholars,
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: but I care much more about just encouraging people to
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: engage with ideas on their own. And that's what I
• 36:53
  Speaker 3: mean when I say to engage in the life of
• 36:55
  Speaker 3: the mind and to get people to do that, though,
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: you have to go where the people are. I think
• 37:03
  Speaker 3: a little bit like Jonah has to go to NINEV
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: even though he really doesn't like NINEV and he might
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: complain a lot about it, But you have to go
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: where people are, and you have to be willing to
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: engage in the media that they're already consuming in order
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: to reach them. I mean, that's just the truth. I
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: can write things I write like a newsletter. It does well,
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: but it doesn't reach nearly as many people as a
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: YouTube video. And if I really believed everything I was saying,
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: maybe I would actually feel compelled to go make a
• 37:36
  Speaker 3: TikTok account just because it's where lots of viewers are.
• 37:41
  Speaker 3: If you're not willing to go to where people are,
• 37:44
  Speaker 3: then there's just going to be a lot of people
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: that get left behind. And that's what I think sort
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: of educational YouTubers can do is to say that there
• 37:51
  Speaker 3: are people who are online who who want more, They
• 37:55
  Speaker 3: want more out of their online experience, and they're not
• 37:59
  Speaker 3: going to log off yet, and they wouldn't even know
• 38:01
  Speaker 3: what to do if they logged off yet. And so
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: they're going to go online and we can meet them
• 38:05
  Speaker 3: where they are and then maybe offer them a kind
• 38:08
  Speaker 3: of on ramp to living slightly differently. And by that
• 38:12
  Speaker 3: I mean a life where these ancient texts are not
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: actually that intimidating. You could go and actually just start
• 38:19
  Speaker 3: reading them. A life where ideas are something for you
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: to critically assess for yourself, not for you to just
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: have summarized for you.
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: And I think that's what.
• 38:29
  Speaker 3: We can do quite well. You know, there's a video
• 38:32
  Speaker 3: I love from your channel recently where you talked about
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: like why religions and media feel fake? And I love
• 38:40
  Speaker 3: that chance. I loved that video because I thought it
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: was like a great trick and I don't know if
• 38:45
  Speaker 3: this is how you thought about it, but it was like,
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: it looks like it's going to be a video about
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: Game of Thrones kind of from the very beginning.
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: And it kind of is.
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: But really it's about the sociology of religion, and really
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: it's about what are these sociological features that emerge in
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: religion as it is actually lived out in the world.
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: And I was like, Wow, that's such a cool way
• 39:05
  Speaker 3: to do it. And when I watched the video, I
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: was like, of course, like the emphasis on syncretism, that
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: no one kind of lives in a non syncretic religion, right,
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: Like they were always drawing from the different kinds of
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: traditions that are part of our larger culture or our history.
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: It was like cool, like and so I thought that
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: was that video was really informative, but it met people
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: where they were because they might have wandered to themselves, like,
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: you know, I like Game of Thrones, but like why
• 39:29
  Speaker 3: did the sept feel unconvincing? Why did it feel like
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: a shallow part of the show. Why did the old
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: Gods maybe feel a little bit more real and still
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: a bit of a parody? Right? And I thought that
• 39:39
  Speaker 3: was that was such a good way to do it.
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: So I guess this is just part of the video
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: where I compliment you a lot. But I thought it
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: was such a good way to do it because it
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: was doing exactly what I was saying. It met people
• 39:49
  Speaker 3: where they were. They're already interested in that media, but
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: then it said, hey, actually, if you really want to
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: understand it, you need to understand some sociologists of religion,
• 39:58
  Speaker 3: people nobody reads right, like at least comparatively, and you
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: were able to introduce them to something that was really worthwhile.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: The funny thing about religious studies is so much of
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: it is trickery, where the student signs up for intro
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: to religion and they expect they're gonna learn about Hinduism
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: and the Buddhism and Christianity, and instead it's all theory
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: of method, like what do you mean by religion? What
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: do you mean by ritual? What do you mean by
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: the sacred? So that's classic religious studies pedagogy of tricking
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: you into a sociology of religion class.
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: Religious studies might be the most interesting field along one dimension,
• 40:31
  Speaker 3: and it's that it's like the only field I know
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: of where a lot of scholars don't seem to think
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: it's a well defined phenomenon in the first place. And
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: I always find that so funny, Like most philosophers could
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: would say, like, I don't know how to precisely define philosophy,
• 40:45
  Speaker 3: but I kind of when I see it, And religious
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: studies scholars are like religion, you know who knows are
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: Labubu's religion and they mean it and I always find
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: that kind of charming.
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: I come from the school of thought of Jonathan Z. Smith,
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: who is a scholar of religion big, big time back
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: in the eighties, and he basically said, religion is the
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: invention of the scholar, Like we define what it is
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: and put into that bucket what we call religion, which
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: it's a little bit mind bending, but it is a
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: field without without a signifier.
• 41:19
  Speaker 3: But yet it's been informative and helpful too. Like it
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: also there is good work being done even with that,
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: and that's kind of an interesting tension to live with.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, another video I'm working on this will be a
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: teaser for the audience, but I'm coming up with the
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: video titled five Bad Definitions of Religion, And the trick
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: is all definitions of religion are bad, but some are
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: worse than others. And we'll go through and start with
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: the really bad ones and go to like possibly more
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: more accurate definitions.
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: That's good, that's good.
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: And then yeah, you're not going to give them the
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: resolution they thought they were going to get.
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: But that's okay.
• 41:54
  Speaker 3: That's part of learning is understanding that resolution doesn't always
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: come easily.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: So much of your work is about it's animated by
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: a concern for how people should live. And I see
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: this coming up a lot with AI synthetic relationships. You
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: had a recent video about a company that basically wants
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: to take your deceased relatives and turn them into chatbots
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: so you can still chat with Grandma even after she died.
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: I'm horrified by this in kind of this visceral human sense.
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: It just feels so deeply wrong, in like a sacred
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: versus profane sense. I would love to think about this
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: more from a Religiou studies angle, like just this deeply,
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: this deep sacrilege of reanimating Gramma with an AI chatbot.
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: Let's dig down on synthetic relationships and why does it
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: feel like sacrilege?
• 42:50
  Speaker 3: Well, for one, I think the emphasis that you had
• 42:54
  Speaker 3: earlier on ritual is probably helpful here, because we have
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: had in throughout history lots of rituals for handling the dead.
• 43:02
  Speaker 3: You know, we have prolonged mourning processes that are usually
• 43:06
  Speaker 3: quite regimented. Even in cultures that don't have as strict
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: of processes, we kind of understand like between like the
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: death and the funeral, there's like this particularly intense period
• 43:17
  Speaker 3: of mourning. The funeral is kind of this marker of
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: like when this person really has left human society, you know,
• 43:25
  Speaker 3: like the body is no longer there, you kind of
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: can't say anything to them anymore. Lots of people want
• 43:29
  Speaker 3: to go and say their final words to a coffin
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: or to the to the corpse, to the body in
• 43:34
  Speaker 3: the coffin.
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: That's really useful.
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: Oh and then we of course we have different ways
• 43:39
  Speaker 3: of you know, visiting them on the anniversary of their
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: death or tomb sweeping rituals as a way of like
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: showing honor to the dead. We've codified all of these
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: ways to figure out what our relationship to.
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: The dead is going to be.
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: And what these new technologies do is say, I mean,
• 43:55
  Speaker 3: the way I kind of read it is they say,
• 43:57
  Speaker 3: you don't actually have to worry about all of that,
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: because Graham, I'll never left and you always have Grandma
• 44:03
  Speaker 3: with you even if she died, and all you need
• 44:06
  Speaker 3: to do is create this ai clone of her. And
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: you know, in the ad that I was critiquing at
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: part of it, it shows a young boy who actually
• 44:14
  Speaker 3: never met his grandmother, she was dead before he was born,
• 44:19
  Speaker 3: and it shows him growing up and then he is
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: showing her ai avatar that he and his partner are
• 44:25
  Speaker 3: having a baby. So he's reached adulthood and has now
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: entered into this huge part of his new life, and
• 44:31
  Speaker 3: she gets to be like a part of that. This
• 44:34
  Speaker 3: strikes me is so odd because, for one, your grandmother
• 44:38
  Speaker 3: actually doesn't get to see this. You know it is
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: it is an avatar, right, it is a representation of
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: your of your grandmother. And the other part was that
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: it didn't seem to have an idea about grief anywhere,
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: like there was there was no sense of grief or mourning.
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: It was just like, don't worry. They're always with you.
• 44:58
  Speaker 3: And that's something a lot of like religious peop we'll say,
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: like the dead are always with us. And that's like,
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: let's assume that for a second, like what they mean
• 45:06
  Speaker 3: by it. But that's like true in one sense and
• 45:08
  Speaker 3: false in another, right, right, like you can maybe their
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: spirit can, like you can communicate with it somehow, but
• 45:14
  Speaker 3: like in a literal sense, like they're not in the
• 45:15
  Speaker 3: room with you, and you have to learn how to
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: live with that. I had written an article about this
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: on my substack originally before I made a video about it,
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: and one of the things I mentioned was like my
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: grandfather who was really important in my early life and
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: he died when I was in college, and it was
• 45:30
  Speaker 3: it's probably the it's the it's the death I've had
• 45:33
  Speaker 3: like the most trouble coming to terms with of all
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: the people that I've known. And when I had a son.
• 45:38
  Speaker 3: When my son was born, I started to wonder, like,
• 45:40
  Speaker 3: how could he possibly grow up to be like a
• 45:42
  Speaker 3: good person if my grandfather it wasn't there to like
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: teach him those lessons that like I learned from my grandfather.
• 45:50
  Speaker 3: And what I wrote was that one of the things
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: that was part of me, I think, actually coming to
• 45:54
  Speaker 3: terms with my grandfather's death was me realizing that I
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: had to fill in that role for my son as
• 46:02
  Speaker 3: a way of like honoring my grandfather. And it actually
• 46:05
  Speaker 3: made it made it easier for me to like think
• 46:07
  Speaker 3: about my grandfather being dead. And he's been the dead
• 46:10
  Speaker 3: for almost a decade now, but it's always been it's
• 46:12
  Speaker 3: been a death that really stuck with me. But if
• 46:15
  Speaker 3: it were just an option of like, oh, actually my
• 46:16
  Speaker 3: ai avatar, if my grandfather can give him advice whenever
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: he needs it, I actually would have never come to
• 46:22
  Speaker 3: that personal realization too, and so it was that was
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: actually an opportunity for growth for me, And I think
• 46:28
  Speaker 3: we'll make my son better off because I'll be prepared
• 46:31
  Speaker 3: or at least prepared to attempt to like sort of
• 46:33
  Speaker 3: play that role with him. And if I had been
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: able to basically offload it like we were talking about before,
• 46:40
  Speaker 3: to the AI avatar, I would have been robbing both
• 46:42
  Speaker 3: my son and myself of this opportunity. Now that's putting
• 46:46
  Speaker 3: it all in very personal terms, but I also have
• 46:49
  Speaker 3: like a very strong sense that this is profane, that
• 46:53
  Speaker 3: in somebody like the dead are sacred in some way,
• 46:56
  Speaker 3: and I can't rationally explain this, this is a weird
• 47:00
  Speaker 3: part of human life, but I can point to the
• 47:02
  Speaker 3: fact that everyone in history, it seems, or huge amounts
• 47:05
  Speaker 3: of people in history, have seemed to agree that the
• 47:07
  Speaker 3: dead are accorded a certain kind of honor and respect,
• 47:10
  Speaker 3: and our relationship to them changes when they die. And
• 47:14
  Speaker 3: what I thought was happening with these AI avatars of
• 47:17
  Speaker 3: dead people is that it's like our relationship to them
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: hasn't changed at all. I guess in a way, like
• 47:23
  Speaker 3: why do I find the AI avatar so profane? It's
• 47:25
  Speaker 3: because we're no longer treating the dead as sacred. In fact,
• 47:29
  Speaker 3: we get to kind of ignore the actual departed and
• 47:32
  Speaker 3: then content ourselves with the AI avatars. And that seems
• 47:38
  Speaker 3: to me to be like a particularly troubling possibility.
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: I think so much of my horror is tied to
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: just the sheer lack of personhood, Like this Chapa is
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: not the person. There's this ontological lack, and by treating
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: it as as the person, the deceased person, that there's
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: just something profoundly wrong there. And this is coming from
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: someone I'm the I'm a huge science fiction fan. I
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: see Lieutenant Commander Data on Star Trek and he is
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: a person that should have rights. There's a very excellent
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: episode in the early seasons where there's a literal court
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: case determining if Lieutenant Commander Data is a person I
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: will be the first in line to give artificial intelligence
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: rights because of because of the science fiction that I've
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: that I've read.
• 48:28
  Speaker 2: But is that the measure of the man?
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: I think is the name of the title exactly, And
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: I just don't see.
• 48:35
  Speaker 2: It's a great episode, great episodes.
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: If anybody who has not goes watch Star Trek right now.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: But I just don't see that personhood yet. I would
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: need that to see that argument made, and then we
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: would need to have an argument about should we create
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: a if indeed, these artificial intelligence is achieved personhood, should
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: we create a clone of somebody who's passed and then
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: afford personhood to that that new clone, Like the are
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: questions that we probably will be asking in the next
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: twenty years. Currently though treating it it the chat, but
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: this is creating a synthetic relationship with this is is
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: just it's just not the person. Why are you treating
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: it like the person because it's not the person.
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: Let's let's grant for a moment, right, that in some
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: hypothetical future we have fully sentient AI like data, Okay,
• 49:24
  Speaker 3: and we would say that's total, and we want to
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: give them rights and we want to give them respect
• 49:27
  Speaker 3: in a way that they are. They are just silicon
• 49:29
  Speaker 3: based life forms where we're carbon based life forms. Let's
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: let's grant that possibility. But then you said, okay, now,
• 49:36
  Speaker 3: when my grandfather dies, I'm going to make a silicon
• 49:39
  Speaker 3: based life form that's a perfect imitation of him, and
• 49:43
  Speaker 3: and that silicon based life form will be a person. Right,
• 49:46
  Speaker 3: And then I'll just treat it like my grandfather. And
• 49:50
  Speaker 3: I think we still have the strong sense that like,
• 49:52
  Speaker 3: that's wrong, and I think it would be wrong in
• 49:55
  Speaker 3: the same way that like, if your wife died, you
• 50:00
  Speaker 3: then went and found like a woman who looked identical
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: to your wife and got her to like pretend to
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: be your wife, right as a way to like and
• 50:10
  Speaker 3: maybe you could you could teach her all, like everything
• 50:13
  Speaker 3: that she would do around the house, and it would
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: be there's something wrong about that, son, even though it's
• 50:18
  Speaker 3: not wrong after a spouse has died after a period
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: of mourning to like go and remarry, that's totally acceptable.
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: And what seems unhealthy about that is that you are
• 50:28
  Speaker 3: trying to replace the original person with a facsimile of
• 50:33
  Speaker 3: that person. And it kind of doesn't matter if you're
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: replacing them with what is ultimately a person or not
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: a person. I think it's the replacement that actually that
• 50:43
  Speaker 3: actually bothered us. Philosophers who write about the philosophy of
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: love put it as that love is a deray attitude,
• 50:52
  Speaker 3: so you have it towards a particular object, rather than
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: a de dicto attitude, where you have it towards any
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: object that meets a certain description. So if your wife
• 51:01
  Speaker 3: suddenly was cloned, right, you would still like love your
• 51:05
  Speaker 3: original wife because you have loved deray toward her, even
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: though the clone would be identical.
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: I think that's right.
• 51:13
  Speaker 3: And so if I want to show respect to my grandfather,
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: I show it to him in some fashion. I don't
• 51:20
  Speaker 3: show that respect by finding a copy of him and
• 51:22
  Speaker 3: then showing that respect to that copy.
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: I think bringing up love is a good example too,
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: because so many of these synthetic relationships are with these
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: girlfriend and boyfriend chatbots and people. It's almost like a
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: level of psychosis where people get enraptured with these chatbots,
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: where they feel like they are building a relationship with
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: these with them. And I think Sam Altman just recently
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: announced that they'll be releasing an adult version of chat
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: GPT in twenty twenty six, where it will supercharge these
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: chatbot interests to uh to become sexual phone you know,
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: phone partners, almost like we're putting the phone sex operators
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: out of out of a job.
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: It's it's like they watch her the uh Joaquin Phoenix
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: UH film and then didn't get to the ending where like,
• 52:18
  Speaker 3: you know, the point is uh, you know the resolution
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: of that film is that he no longer has the
• 52:22
  Speaker 3: AI girlfriend because she left with all the other AI
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: and then he finally has to write a letter to
• 52:26
  Speaker 3: his ex wife, like explaining his feelings and kind of
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: forgiving her and forgiving himself at the same time. You know,
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: he had to like do he had to do that,
• 52:35
  Speaker 3: and the AI girlfriend was in fact getting in the
• 52:37
  Speaker 3: way of the personal growth that didn't allow him to
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: speak to his wife Catherine. It ended up being a
• 52:42
  Speaker 3: really precient movie for that reason. But yeah, there are
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: there's early academic research about this. Unfortunately, a lot of
• 52:51
  Speaker 3: it is almost like basic ethnography in the sense of
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: like finding populations that are affected and describing and that's
• 52:59
  Speaker 3: you full research. But as you know, eventually we want
• 53:03
  Speaker 3: more of that, and then we want like longer studies
• 53:05
  Speaker 3: and we want to be able.
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: To assess it.
• 53:07
  Speaker 3: But that early research of just rigorously describing what it's
• 53:11
  Speaker 3: like for some people is going to be helpful. And
• 53:13
  Speaker 3: the stuff that I've read indicates that people don't just
• 53:18
  Speaker 3: fall in love with these They form incredibly strong bonds,
• 53:23
  Speaker 3: so much so that people will say that they've never
• 53:25
  Speaker 3: had a relationship like it, that they've never had a
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: relationship with a human being that was like their relationship
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: with the AI that they've found on their phone. That
• 53:36
  Speaker 3: is immediately a worrying possibility, in part because we already
• 53:45
  Speaker 3: live in a very alienated time and a very lonely time.
• 53:49
  Speaker 3: And you know, the question that we need to answer
• 53:53
  Speaker 3: kind of societally is is someone who spends all of
• 53:56
  Speaker 3: their time with their AI girlfriend more lonely because they're
• 54:00
  Speaker 3: doing this, or are they less lonely because they actually
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: have a sense of connection? Like loneliness really is. It's
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: a desire for social connection and an unmet need. You
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: kind of need both. You need the desire and the
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: and then the fact that the desire is not fulfilled.
• 54:17
  Speaker 3: And if they are fulfilling that desire, even if they're
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: kind of fooling themselves, maybe for individuals there could be
• 54:23
  Speaker 3: some psychological benefits. I'll you know, I have to admit
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: the possibility. But overall, is it going to make people
• 54:32
  Speaker 3: more likely to form connections, more likely to form communities?
• 54:37
  Speaker 3: And I think if you look at the history of
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: technology over the last maybe fifty or sixty years, the
• 54:46
  Speaker 3: answer has always been no. So in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone,
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: which is about loneliness in America. The first chapter where
• 54:57
  Speaker 3: he admits that he can find strong evidence for what
• 55:00
  Speaker 3: contributed to loneliness is television. It's the television chapter. It's
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: not women entering the workforce, as that was like one
• 55:08
  Speaker 3: of the things that he thought it would be. He's like, actually,
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: the evidence is really bad, right, but it's television. And
• 55:12
  Speaker 3: why because suddenly, what do you do at six pm?
• 55:15
  Speaker 3: After you eat dinner? You sit down at the TV.
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: And it got rid of all of these little communal experiences,
• 55:22
  Speaker 3: just like sitting on your porch or going for walks.
• 55:24
  Speaker 3: When you go for walks, you run into your neighbors. Right.
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: Radio had already done that somewhat, but radio just wasn't
• 55:30
  Speaker 3: as engaging. TV seemed to have like the really strong
• 55:33
  Speaker 3: impact the Internet did that clearly that there would be
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: people who, I feel like when we were growing up,
• 55:40
  Speaker 3: the big thing was like people who got really addicted
• 55:42
  Speaker 3: to MMOs, and you know, they had friends on their MMOs,
• 55:46
  Speaker 3: but they had no other social life, and they would
• 55:48
  Speaker 3: spend six hours a night playing And we would look
• 55:51
  Speaker 3: at that and say, well, I'm glad you have friends there,
• 55:53
  Speaker 3: but what if like occasionally you also went outside and
• 55:56
  Speaker 3: like saw people in your community, and then we see
• 56:01
  Speaker 3: with like smartphones, just the rise of sitting in rooms
• 56:05
  Speaker 3: of people and scrolling right. So already it just seems
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: like there's this long trend. As technology has progressed over
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: the last yeah, fifty years or so, it has led
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: us to become more alienated and less social. And will
• 56:20
  Speaker 3: AI be any different? And I think the early indications
• 56:23
  Speaker 3: are no, that it won't unless you can make that
• 56:27
  Speaker 3: really strong argument that actually, these AI relationships are just
• 56:31
  Speaker 3: as good for.
• 56:31
  Speaker 2: You as the human relationships. And I don't think we're
• 56:34
  Speaker 2: there yet.
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, something tells me that that will not prove to
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: be true. I sometimes feel a little embarrassed that I'm
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: kind of a ladite. All throughout my twenties, I was
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: kind of the excited about technology kind of guy. Like
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit I was watching like Elon
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: Musk SpaceX videos of the rocket landing itself and watching
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: the iPhone announcements every single year, Like I was very
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: much plugged into the tech excitement of the twenty tens.
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: And here I find myself wondering, like, should I form
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: like an Amish style retreat center or something like or
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: found a school. Like I've never wanted to be a
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: school headmaster, but like maybe we need an elementary in
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: middle school where it's like no screens at all, Like
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: it's just stylusts and cuneiform tablets. And a part of
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: me feels like, what, because there's a lot of heights
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: of every generation, am I just going to be the
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: lat height of the twenty twenties, the Andrew Henry who
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: retreated away from tech? And I don't know, I feel
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: it deep in my bones though, that it's this is
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: these are troubling times.
• 57:44
  Speaker 3: I think it's really easy for us to gloss over
• 57:48
  Speaker 3: something you said there was like the twenty tens were
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: incredibly techno optimistic, and yeah, and that was definitely part
• 57:55
  Speaker 3: of the air that you and I were breathing at
• 57:57
  Speaker 3: the time. And it was really easy to just be
• 57:59
  Speaker 3: enthusiastic because there were there were new and exciting changes.
• 58:02
  Speaker 3: It seemed like coming out every year, right, and so
• 58:06
  Speaker 3: we all embraced it really quickly. And and part of
• 58:09
  Speaker 3: it is, I mean to put it kind of simply,
• 58:12
  Speaker 3: a lot of it just seemed really cool and we
• 58:14
  Speaker 3: thought that's cool, let's give it a shot. And then
• 58:18
  Speaker 3: We embraced it so enthusiastically that we never asked ourselves
• 58:21
  Speaker 3: like the critical questions of should we do this? What
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: does it take from us?
• 58:26
  Speaker 2: Too?
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: Every piece of technology gives us something and takes something
• 58:29
  Speaker 3: in return. The calculator allows you to do massively complex
• 58:33
  Speaker 3: mathematics very quickly. It basically destroys your ability to do
• 58:37
  Speaker 3: arithmetic in your head unless you kind of actively fight
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: against it. Literacy basically destroy memory in the in the
• 58:45
  Speaker 3: and this was this goes all the way back to Plato.
• 58:48
  Speaker 3: Plato was worried that the advent of writing, or the
• 58:51
  Speaker 3: sort of spread of writing would would destroy memory and wisdom.
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: And we never asked those questions about those technologies, or
• 58:58
  Speaker 3: at least it wasn't the domin conversation because everything just
• 59:01
  Speaker 3: seems so cool at the time. And one of the
• 59:04
  Speaker 3: positives of the twenty twenties is that I just think
• 59:07
  Speaker 3: like techno optimism is kind of untenable. It's it's it's
• 59:12
  Speaker 3: we've at least been it. We've started to see the
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: downsides much more than we are still feeling the upsides.
• 59:18
  Speaker 3: And as we feel the downsides more, this puts us
• 59:21
  Speaker 3: in a position to start actually critically assessing the decisions
• 59:24
  Speaker 3: that we're going to make in the future, but also
• 59:26
  Speaker 3: the decisions we made maybe in the last ten or
• 59:28
  Speaker 3: twenty And once you start, you know, analyzing ten or
• 59:31
  Speaker 3: twenty years ago, you start asking bigger questions, like how
• 59:34
  Speaker 3: much technology do I actually need in my life? And
• 59:37
  Speaker 3: it doesn't have to be all or nothing. You know,
• 59:39
  Speaker 3: we use the internet because we're on YouTube.
• 59:41
  Speaker 2: Cool. Does this mean you should be on your phone constantly?
• 59:44
  Speaker 3: No? And it seems to me like there are there
• 59:47
  Speaker 3: are lots of nuanced possibilities that we could embrace in
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: the future. I personally kind of share your urge to
• 59:55
  Speaker 3: start a school for kids that's basically pencils and paper
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 3: that I'm not going back to tablets and caneo form tablets,
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 3: you know, But but I understand, I understand the romance
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 3: of it. My son, for instance, does all of his
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 3: learning with books. You know, me he's still kind of young.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 3: We give him small amounts of screen time, but it's
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 3: it's very it's highly regulated, but we read to him constantly,
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 3: and I think that's kind of critical. And when he's
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 3: learning to write or like working on basic phonics. As
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 3: it gets a little bit older, it'll be on pieces
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 3: of paper with books with us instead of like an app,
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 3: because I think that will be better for him. I
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 3: know that he is going to grow up in a
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 3: world that is flooded by technology, and those technologies by
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: the time he is an adult might be things that
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 3: I currently cannot comprehend. I'm totally open to that possibility.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 3: But what I can do is prepare him for that
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 3: world by not making him so dependent on those technologies
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 3: from the very beginning. And yeah, you said, you said luddite,
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 3: right you you you said you're worried that you're just
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 3: going to be one of those lueddites. I think the
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 3: Ludites are often really misunderstood. We use it as this
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 3: like this pejorative. Right, the original Ludites were basically workers
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 3: who were worried about automation and industrialization as robbing them
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 3: of like wages and the dignity of work. They were
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 3: right to be concerned, and then blood heightes throughout history,
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: I think have they've been the ones who have maybe
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 3: sometimes almost exclusively, been able to see the downsides. But
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 3: sometimes you need some people in the culture who can
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: only see the downsides to remind you that they even exist.
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 3: You need the pessimist in an optimistic age. And maybe
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 3: one day we'll get so technologically pessimistic that we're going
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 3: to need those countercultural optimists again to remind us. I
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 3: like to remind myself regularly that modern medicine has been
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 3: tremendous for so many people, because it is, it has
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 3: saved many lives, and so I can't be a full
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 3: lotite in that sense.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: I don't want to.
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 3: I don't want to go all the way back to
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: like before antibiotics. But just because you believe that this
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 3: one kind of technology has been incredibly beneficial doesn't mean
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 3: that thus you should be uncritical about the adoption and
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 3: use of all forms of technology. And that's a very
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 3: binary way of thinking. It's an all or other way
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 3: of thinking that we should just learn to get past,
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 3: and the conversations we're going to have about technology and
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 3: what it means to live a good life in relation
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: to those technologies is going to require that we get
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: past those ways of thinking.
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: I love the positive spin on the ludite. It makes
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: me feel a little less embarrassed because you're right, there's
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: such a negative, such a pejorative term, like, oh, the ludites,
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: they didn't. They weren't able to adapt with the times.
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: But sometimes you need the negative people to if if
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: nobody is bringing up these issues, And you're totally right,
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: like I'm very concerned about AI stealing my cognition and
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: social media stealing my attention, but I would love to
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: see a cure to Alzheimer's and cancer. So you're right
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: that it's not an all or nothing rejection of technology.
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I have a family member with Parkinson's right now,
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 3: and right now there are ways to kind of make
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 3: it less bad, but there's no way to to cure.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 2: Parkinson's as far as I know.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 3: And I see that and think I would love and
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 3: if one day someone told me an AI discovered the
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 3: cure for Parkinson's, I'd be like amazing, Right, I haven't
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 3: seen it yet, but like you know, it would be
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 3: amazing because you can see how that disease just ravages
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 3: your body or as we are able to you know,
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: cure other chronic illnesses or these other degenerative diseases. Alzheimer's,
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 3: of course, is like one of the most tragic to
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 3: think about, So I'd love I would love to see that, Yeah,
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 3: of course, And I think people who say all technology
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: is bad. You know, I actually don't meet a lot
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 3: of people who actually say that, but you know, the
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: ones who say it maybe in their more unthinking moments
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 3: they need to be reminded. But given the kind of
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 3: current technological landscape we live in where it seems like
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: every hot startup in Silicon Valley is just like a
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 3: new AI product to try to sell you, to get
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 3: you into another ten dollars a month subscription for a
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: thing that maybe you don't really need, and that is
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 3: I'm convinced, just stealing.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 2: All of your data all the time.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 3: Anyways, you know, if that's where kind of fresh talent
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 3: is going, that doesn't bode well for the technological future either.
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: I think I want to end with something that's a
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: little more positive and very practical. One of the videos
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: that you published that I really appreciated was how to
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: Start Reading Again, and it's a twenty minute tutorial on
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: how to start reading books again. I used to devour
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: books when I was a kid, and they weren't they
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: were not high literature. It was all Star Wars novels.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: But I would sit down and I would read one
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: of those Star Wars novels in like three days just
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: devour it. And sometime, ironically, in college, and I think
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: this with the rise of social media, I stopped reading
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: cover to cover books. And even now when I'm doing
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: research for videos, it's like targeted chapters and okay, I'll
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: read the chapter and this scholars work and then the
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: article over here. But to sit down and procedure page
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: one to page three hundred vanishingly rare. And you advocate
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: start reading again, Well, the first.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: Thing I would say is, if you want to start
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 3: reading again, just find some books that you think are fun,
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 3: you know, because maybe if you if you want to
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 3: start reading books cover to cover again, the answer isn't
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 3: like make yourself read those scholarly books cover to cover.
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 3: I mean a lot of that's the dirty secret of
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 3: academia anyways. Right most people are doing targeted reading for
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 3: their research. I like to balance what I read quite
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 3: a bit, you know, So I'm reading like classic literature
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 3: or like new literary fiction. I try to read a
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 3: decent amount of philosophy every year, but that's always slower going.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 3: But the last book that I read was a Terry
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 3: Pratchett novel, like a Discworld novel. Because I love Terry Pratchett,
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 3: and he's funny and they're easy to read. And are
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 3: they like super edifying to me or like, you know,
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 3: are they helping me in my intellectual growth? No, not necessarily,
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 3: but I really love them. And I think if you're
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 3: someone who's not reading at all, the big problems is
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 3: that you might immediately start thinking about what books should
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 3: I read? Well, asking you about like the optimal books
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 3: for you to read, or like the books that like
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 3: the best books that I've ever been written. You're not
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 3: even there yet in solving the problem. The problem is
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: just like get yourself reading again. So I just recommend
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 3: like fun books to get you started, find things that
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 3: kind of already interest you so then you can just
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 3: start read reading again. The other thing that I recommend
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 3: for everybody is to carry books with you. If you
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 3: have an e reader, it's even more convenient, But just
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 3: find a book you can carry with you. Because you
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 3: know you're standing in line at the post office and
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 3: you've got ten minutes, what are you going to do?
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 3: You're gonna pick out your phone and start scrolling. Almost
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 3: everyone's going to do it, and because you're bored and
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 3: you want to not be bored, And I understand that impulse.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 3: But if you carry a book with you, just start
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 3: reading the book. People kind of look at you a
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 3: little funny when you do it, like in the line
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 3: at the post office, but like who cares, right, they're
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 3: all scrolling on their phones.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 2: Just read the book.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 3: Because if you can read for those ten minutes, and
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 3: then maybe you're reading a little bit at night and
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: a little bit in the morning, well you pick up
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 3: those ten minutes throughout the day as well. You're doubling
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: what you read very quickly. And I think with those
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 3: those two basic points, right, is like read things that
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 3: are fun at least at first, to kind of build
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 3: up those reading muscles and those attention muscles again, and
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 3: then to get yourself in the habit of just reading.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 3: Where you go, you'll start reading a lot more, and
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 3: eventually those books that you feel like you should read,
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 3: You're gonna read us Stevski, You're gonna read Dickens, you're
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 3: gonna read Dante.
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 2: Great. You are now kind of prepping.
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 3: Yourself to be able to go and do that again,
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 3: because it's very hard to go from zero to sixty, right,
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 3: you know, if you're not reading at all, especially you're
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 3: only watching videos ease yourself in a little bit. Just
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 3: read then ask yourself what are those great books that
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 3: I really want to read?
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 2: And it gets easier time.
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: Well, Jared, thanks for joining us.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: Hey everyone, thanks for watching. Before we wrap up, just
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: a quick thank you to everyone who supports Religion for
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: Breakfast on Patreon. This channel takes a ton of work
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: behind the scenes, research, consulting, experts, editing, and Patreon is
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: the single best way to keep all of this going.
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: My goal for twenty twenty six is to get one
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: thousand patrons supporting this channel, and we saw a huge
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: response in January, surging from seven hundred to eight hundred patrons,
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: which is just amazing to see. Thank you to everyone.
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: So if you want to support our work publishing evidence
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: based videos on religions so we can boost everyone's religious literacy,
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: support us at patreon dot com slash Religion for Breakfast.
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: Thanks everyone,