Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 453: Steven Parton

Episode Date: July 24, 2021

Steven Parton, techno-optomist, author, and philosopher, joins the DTFH! Check out Steven's podcast Society In Question! You can also learn more about Steven and read his work at his website, Curious Apes, or follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Dame - Visit DameProducts.com/Duncan for 10% Off Sitewide! Upstart - Visit upstart.com/duncan and see how Upstart can help you with your debt. ManlyBands - Visit ManlyBands.com/Duncan for 21% Off your first order!

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I love thinking about how absolutely weird the future looks like for us humans, which is why I'm really excited for you to listen to this wonderful conversation that I had with techno-optimist, author, philosopher Stephen Parton. He's the host of a podcast called Society in Question. He also is on Singularity University Radio.

He's somebody who is looking the problems that are facing us when it comes to incorporating the accelerating reality of our technological capacity with the problem of the culture wars and what's going on right now when it comes to shit-disturbers using the techno hive

to cause all kinds of weird fucking problems in society. We have a wonderful conversation about that. How do we deal with the issue of freedom of speech when people are spreading like intentional misinformation to cause problems? Not only that, it's a wonderful conversation about universal basic income. And of course, there's no way to talk

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He's got a wonderful website that you should definitely check out. It's called curiousapes.com. All the links you need to connect to Steven are there. A lot of really, really smart essays and interviews there. If you're interested in technology, you should bookmark curiousapes.com.

All right, my loves, let's do this. Everybody, welcome to the DTFH, Steven Parton. Welcome to the DTFH. I am really excited to chat with you, going on your website, going through your writing, it's just sparked so many moments of inspiration for me. It's really, what I love about your,

can I call it futurism, some kind of futurism? What I love about it is it's got realism mixed in with it. You know, sometimes when you get caught up in reading, transhumanist writing, when you read about all the great possibility that technology presents to us, somehow it feels a little utopian, you know? And I think that's one of the main critiques

of transhumanism is it doesn't acknowledge the real world problems that we're facing on the planet. And your writing does such a great job of acknowledging that. So, thank you. Thank you for it. But yeah, I'm gonna ask you a question that you asked on your website,

because I thought it's a wonderful place to start. And it's something that I have been kicking around in my head for a while now, since Trump got banned from Twitter and all the chaos that's been happening. The question you posed is, how do we ethically option access to the hive mind? What a great question.

And we're really dealing with it right now. And it's getting like crazy. I don't know if you've been following the government is saying that they're going to legislate that online companies like Twitter and Facebook have got to censor users who are putting like vaccine misinformation up there. And it's everyone, like, I think no matter your stance,

anytime the government starts saying it's gonna start meddling with online, the our ability to scream into the online void, it's terrifying, it's terrifying. What do you think, how do you answer this question? And what are your views right now on the current approach that's being taken by these mega corporations and by the many governments of the planet

to deal with our hyper-connectivity and the disastrous results that are coming from that? You know, it's tricky because I feel like I always want to promote people having the freedom to do whatever they want. And that also means a company having the right to say, I want to block these things from being said. And I understand the impetus.

On the other hand, I think that information is the most always pure and valuable, right? And in the sense that even if you are getting information that is bad, is bias, is a meme that is meant to kind of manipulate you, it's good to have that stuff out in the open because otherwise it operates in the shadows where it's harder to see.

Right, so I want to put more trust in the people. So I would love to see censorship in that regard. And you know, we saw stuff like with Brett Weinstein, he was, his stuff that he's been exploring with COVID has been blocked. And while I may not agree with everything he says, he was, he's a PhD professor for 20 plus years at a college that had high renown.

He's not, you know, somebody in a basement with an aluminum foil cap on. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, you know, who's, how do we decide that he's no longer allowed to talk about the things that he's talking about and doesn't have an important insight there? What was it specifically that got him into trouble?

I think he's talking about Ivermectin. Yeah, right, Ivermectin. I think that's the, yeah, and he's promoting it. And I think he talked about it with somebody on Rogan recently too. Right, and so people are saying there isn't any real data that Ivermectin works. You know, it's really, it's fascinating to me

is some time ago, this movie came out, I think it was called Out, was it Outbreak? That it was the, it was the Dustin Hoffman Pandemic Movie where this virus breaks out. It's a much more deadly virus. I think you just like sneeze blood and die. You have a seizure. It's really fucked up.

It's really fast. And in that movie, there was someone trying to sell this stuff called Forsythia, which it's such a perfect mirror of what's happening. I mean, I don't know anything about Ivermectin. I haven't looked into it at all. I do find it really weird that someone who, what university was he from?

He was at Evergreen. Evergreen. Yes, in Olympia, I think south of Seattle. Right. Yeah, the, it's like, it's almost like an overactive immune system response, like socially to people who are presenting other alternatives to the vaccine,

which honestly, you know, when I think about it, I don't know if you saw this, my wife just sent me this, this musician just died today. He, let me find it here. She sent me his last tweets. This is, god, I can't remember his name. One of the tweets is, if you're having problems, I feel bad for you, son.

I've got 99 problems, but a vaccine won. His last tweet before he died was, I'm choosing to go under intubation. Like there's nothing left for me and now he's dead. So it's like, you know what I mean? So from that perspective, when you look at what happens when, cause what goes, I think what goes along with the ivermectin story is like,

these are, these vaccines are experimental, which is true. These vaccines are having side effects for a small part of the population. This is true. You have to say that. That is true, verifiable. You can look it up. It's not secret information.

It's not getting, people aren't leading with that information. It's causing myocard, what's it called? Myocarditis and heart inflammation in younger people. The side effects, the flu vaccine has side effects. Vaccines have fucking side effects. Of course they do. When you're dealing with massive populations, there's gonna be side effects.

But what goes along with the ivermectin thing is that story, but that story gets amplified because the side effects seem so gigantic because those are the stories. You don't hear about me. I got the fucking thing. Nothing happened to me or you. Nothing happened to you.

You don't hear about all the boring ass. Like, yeah, I got a little sick and then it went away. And you don't hear about that. You hear about the anomalous stories. Anyway, I'm sorry for going on and on here. No, you're fine. But I get what a terrifically horrible problem for these companies to be in,

which is like, how the fuck are we going to deal with getting people vaccinated, which is the clear path to dealing with all pandemics? How do we do that if like very charismatic, very loud people are presenting, not just like, here's an alternative, but also, and you know, these vaccines, ooh, holy shit, which is true, but it's anomalous.

Even if the vaccine was perfect though, you still don't want to stop somebody from being able to explore other options. Like, genius can come from any place. Perspective always adds color to the palette. Like, or a perspective always adds color to the palette. So any view point might spark a new idea that leads us to a better future,

a better option to take and to silence a voice just so heavy-handedly, seems like a really dangerous path to take. And I don't want my social media companies deciding how the vaccine gets handed out either, you know? Right, yeah, I don't agree. I would love to see people be vaccinated. Let me be clear, I actually support it

and have very little concern about it on the grand scale, but I still don't want, even if there is misinformation out there, I don't think these companies should control that flow of information. That, to me, is a scary form of censorship. And I think the beautiful thing to speak on the future, to the futurism side of things that we were talking about,

I think the beautiful thing about that time in the future is that it's gonna make it easier to have these more open source communities that are decentralized where information isn't able to be so easily censored and controlled. What does that look like? And that way, what does that look like? I think it looks like a very user-generated-based society

where there isn't these monolithic corporations that control everything, where you have more little niches, a lot of small communities. Things even like Discord, for example. You could have tons and tons and tons of Discord communities where everyone just kinda has these little spaces they jump in between

when they wanna discover certain flows of information. And hopefully, in that future, you have enough quality of life that you don't feel susceptible to the bad narratives and then you don't bring those bad narratives into those communities. Cause I think that's the big trick right now is that these problems really stem ultimately

from an economy and a society that really makes people's lives pretty miserable and full of fear and anxiety and stress. And I think that causes people to become very susceptible to these kind of virus of ideas. Yeah, yeah, this is in your writing, it feels like you really are attempting to champion a way to maintain humanity and compassion and kindness,

which is something that is weirdly being negated by these technologies. If I'm gonna pull up your website, I lost it. You have this wonderful Buckminster fuller quote that I just absolutely love on your, this is your, for everybody who's interested, go to curiousapes.com. This is a wonderful article called,

essay called Engineering Reality, How to Achieve a Quality in Our Future as Gods. What a great title. Okay, so here's the Buckminster fuller quote. It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary, war is obsolete.

It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry. Does that match your view on these things? That's what drives me to be a techno optimist 100%. And I think the way that technology gets such a bad rap is because it is showing us our shadow. It's showing us the things we don't like about ourselves. It's showing us how ugly society is in a lot of ways.

And that's bringing to the surface a lot of controversy that we wanna work through. That's why we have these strong activist movements that are clashing. But ultimately, that mirror, that lens that we get to use to see ourselves, I'm hoping will help us level up our consciousness to a place where we can shift our society

towards one where people don't feel so much, I guess unhappiness, bitterness, cynicism, anger, that need for selfishness and hoarding things. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. Steven, I wonder though, is it really even showing us our shadow or is it more like that thing that happens when you notice a weird mole?

You know what I mean? You've got your whole body, but you notice this one little thing, and I do anyway, I fixate on it. You're like, what the fuck is that? Oh shit, I gotta get that checked out. Eventually you get it checked out. It's like, there's nothing.

But you know what I mean? I think it feels like what we're seeing is anomalies. Like you go on Reddit Justice Served or the Reddit Karen, whatever, I go on Reddit too much, but you go on these, or someone tweets, like someone freaking out in a mall who's like a horrific racist or a xenophobe

or something like that, and you see five of those or something, and naturally you just get this idea of like Jesus. I guess that's what everybody's like right now, but it isn't. That was someone who was vile enough to become globally famous. Like that is an anomalous person where,

so is it our shadow or is the technology actually just pulling out anomalies and then amplifying them, thus creating this terrible illusion that things are a lot worse than they are? I mean, I definitely think there's a lot of that. You know, we have the negativity bias. We, I love this quote that the ancestors of ours

who survived to pass on their DNAs were the ones who thought there was a snake in the bush even when they wasn't. Oh yeah. So the vigilant ones, the anxious ones, the ones that are a little bit paranoid, we are ancestors of the people who were wired to expect bad things

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in your loan application. Go to Upstart.com slash Duncan. Thank you, Upstart. So the vigilant ones, the anxious ones, the ones that are a little bit paranoid, we are ancestors of the people who were wired to expect bad things or to pay more attention to bad things. We have that bias in us, I think,

as we look out into the world. And that's because we wanna survive, right? If there's gonna be racists and we're a person of color or something, we're gonna pay more attention to that because we don't wanna be assaulted we don't wanna be surprised by an uprising of racists. But there is an article on that website as well

that talks about how there's a loud minority that is ruining it for the rest of us. And I think that that's a lot of what's going on here too, is that you get the 5% of the political extremes on both sides who are dominating things like Twitter and whatnot. And they're basically leading a civil war against one another

and making the rest of us feel like we have to pick a side and that the world is shifting in one way or the other. Right. When I don't think it is, but it's like God, right? Like even if God doesn't exist, we invented him, so therefore he does. It's like even if the problems aren't really there, those 5% stirring shit up

cause the rest of us to think there's an issue and then we start to believe it. Okay, this brings us back to your question. Talk about a lazy fucking interview. I'm asking you your questions, but it does bring us back to the question, how do we ethically option access to the hive mind? If we acknowledge that it is a very loud minority

of shit-disturbers who have a chaotic variety of intent, some of them are legitimate white supremacists who are attempting to turn their philosophy into memes, infect kids with it, and create as many Nazis as they possibly can. Some of them are just shit-disturbing trolls. I've been one. People are just bored on a Sunday

and are like, well, I wonder if I can dive into this fucking community and just what happens if I say the worst thing ever? Kids who are just throwing linguistic firecrackers in the online communities for no other reason than they're just bored. There's not even, but they're, but and then AI, then bots that have just are running rampant,

but all of them clump together to produce a phantasm. And that is doing a lot more than just making people go, shut the fuck up asshole. It's making people legislate. It's making people interfere with the ability for private companies to have online forums. And so help, how do we answer this? I think your question is the question of the day,

because then the humanist wants to believe freedom of speech, absolutely. Let everyone say everything that they need to say, I want, I need that to do my job. I, what am I gonna have some government fucking like list of rules about what my guests can say? You can't joke about that Duncan. Right, yeah, fuck that.

I don't want to live under that, but that being said, I don't want my fucking kid to get infected by some super subtle AI amplified racist garbage meme disguised as actual data. And so help us figure this out. What is the, what is the government supposed to do? What does Twitter do? What does Facebook, everyone's pissed at them.

Oh, we don't want you controlling everything. All they did was make a fucking product that people wanted. It's not like they're evil, they just like saw demand, created something to fill that demand and it ballooned out of their control. And now that I think all of them, whoever in the upper echelons of all these companies are probably really scratching their heads here

because they just wanted to have a nice, profitable business. They didn't want to become the gatekeepers of the conversations of society. I think that's an unfair, I think people are unfairly acting like these people are like, I'm gonna control the dialogue. They were just, they created a fucking app.

You know, they- But what human could possibly decide what's right for every other human? Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's an impossible task. Yeah. So have you come up with a solution? Or have you come, are you aware of methodologies for dealing with this problem of shit-disturbers,

rocking the boat of civilization, just for the lulls? Yeah. I mean, there's the technical side of things you can do, right? Which is try to slow down or create barriers between the person and the information. And that, you sometimes see that with like the labels that say this comes from an unreliable source or like this, you know, they have the warnings

and whatnot on Twitter and Facebook now, I think. They try to give you little flags. I don't know if that does a ton, but some things like that are, I think, helpful. The boring, but I think more honest answer is that it comes down to things like education. Again, it comes down to things like people's health. It comes down to narrative.

We need new myths. I think one of the big things we fail to recognize is we live in this mytholinguistic landscape where a lot of our consciousness is guided by the cultural narratives and the languages that we use as a society. And I think you become more prone to certain behaviors. If you have a bad myth, and right now,

I think that's a lot of what we have is we have unhealthy myths combined with unhealthy bodies and minds. What are those myths if you could identify a few of them? Sure. I think the idea of scarcity in terms of resources, the idea that you're gonna be unable to survive, that's not a myth in some ways,

because it's a truth for a lot of people who are struggling, but that gets put in a lot of people's minds in a way that I think steals their power. Do you mean the population's growing out of control? There's too many people, not enough food, or is that what you mean? Yeah, to that evolutionary sense of how am I gonna survive, there's not enough to help me survive,

and therefore I need to compete, I need to aggressively stake my claim, and part of that aggressive drive to get resources leads to things like narcissism, kind of cutthroat competition, this sense of it's us versus them, this kind of, honestly, it's a deep egotism. I think the narcissism and the egotism

is a big part of what's wrong right now, is this idea that I am this entity that's separate from everyone else, and I need to beat them so that I can be famous, so that I can have a bunch of money, so that I can be safe, and that's kind of why I like that Buckminster Fuller quote, is because it's saying if we can shift things

in a way that makes it so that people have food and a roof over their head and have some healthcare, all of these myths that are undermining our society start to disappear, and then there's no more reason to go on to social media, and be a piece of shit about everything, because why do you need your views on the vaccine, or your views on the political system to be right,

in the sense that it's a life or death situation, if you feel perfectly safe, if you wake up every day feeling healthy, happy, supported, you know what I mean, that's the stuff I think that we fail to recognize, is we keep trying to create technical solutions when realistically the solution is social. Right, it's a very elemental thing

that somehow gets lost in the complexity of civilization, which is if your body feels good, if you've got enough nutrition, if you're taking care of yourself, and your body just isn't hurting anymore, you're not tired, hungover, whatever, you're nicer, it just is the way it is, it's rare to find someone who is feeling great,

when you're coming up on MDMA, it's not like you're like, fuck you, mother fuckers, I'm on fucking ecstasy, you shittles, you feel so good, you're like, I love you, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, yeah, and so- That's, Sapolsky has a great quote to that of Robert Sapolsky, he's a Stanford neuroscientist,

but he says, a well-intentioned spirit, even while willing, can be thwarted by flesh that is sufficiently weak. Wow, right, right, because it hurts, you hurt, your back hurts, your fucking head hurts, you've got a headache, you're freaking out because you don't know the check that was supposed to come isn't there,

and now you can't pay the fucking rent, you can't pay the fucking rent, what the fuck are you gonna, what are you gonna do? And then that's gonna lead to a lot of bad decisions just from that stress state. And we have so much evidence that the combination of stress and fear inhibits your cognition,

it inhibits the part of your brand that does executive decision-making, it inhibits the part of your brand that does storytelling and logic, so it's harder to see through things, it's harder to see through the complexities, that's where we're also pro-social, so it makes it harder to use empathy.

Wow. Yeah, when our cognition is inhibited, we are more hostile towards people in the out group. We know that through tons of studies. And so have imagined a world where people are afraid that they can't afford rent, they're not sure how they're gonna afford food, especially during a pandemic,

they're stressed out because their jobs, killing them just time-wise, they don't really have a lot of meaning in their life because they're working this shitty job and they're scared, and everything about them says, I'm gonna be rejected by society, I'm not safe, I'm not, all these things that are absolutely central to the evolutionary wiring

of the human's animal, when those things aren't taken care of, our amygdala goes full force, our prefrontal cortex goes offline, and all of the things that make us able to be good to each other and think clearly and treat each other well change completely because now we just drop straight into that ego mind,

we drop straight into that, I need to survive at all cost. Me, me, me, I am the focus, I am about to die, I need to survive. So that society, that's what I'm saying, until we can get that pressure off the amygdala, until we can make people feel safe and accepted, you're gonna see this behavior continue because it's not technology that's bringing it out,

it's the human condition being activated by an environment that makes it feel horrible. Wow, yeah, and the technology is acting like a mirror, a recording device where suddenly the suffering of the masses is becoming impossible to ignore. I wanna thank Manly Bands for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. Manly Bands is here to rescue you

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Yeah, yeah, but I didn't hear, I don't think I know what you're talking about. I'm saying it like, did you hear this thing? Like, it's like everyone's talking about fucking dumbwaiter, it's like technology from a long time ago. No one even has a dumbwaiter anymore. Where in Asheville, there's a place

called the Biltmore House. It's this beautiful, massive fucking house. You ever been? I have, it's beautiful. It's insanely beautiful. But then also, you know, what it represents is complete inequality. And so when I, you know, so I grew up in Hendersonville,

I would go to the Biltmore House. I never thought that as a kid. I was just like, wow, I'd like to live here. This is incredible. But there are these things in it called dumbwaiters where if you're up in the upper floors, your food gets, like it's an elevator for food. And you put your food in, it goes back down.

Now I just thought, this is convenience, right? It's like you're hungry, you're in the Biltmore House. It's spooky. You don't want to go out late at night. You like call down for food and they put it up. But really the reason for the damn things is because the rich people didn't want to see the servants. It was a way to ignore them completely.

You just get your food. You don't have to think about the fact if somebody lived it while you're in your plush ass, Biltmore House fucking incredible room or the lion carpet or I don't know what they have over there. There's people sleeping in bunk beds. And so this is the dumbwaiter. Now I think maybe this is the problem

is this technology is making it so that people can't ignore it. There's no more dumbwaiters. And then add to that the collective realization of people who are like, look, I don't want to flip burgers for $12 an hour. And this is one of the cool things Biden just said is like, hey, you're having a job crunch problem, pay him more

or enjoy your job crunch problem. It seems so obvious. But this is matching what you're talking about. There is in the from the right and from a lot of conservatives, there's a growing sense of like, look, we've been giving people pandemic money and now they're not working at McDonald's anymore. And it's a direct announcement of they support wage slavery.

That's what they're saying. They're just like, we can't keep them imprisoned financially if they have what they need. Well, think about what minimum wage is too. It's literally the minimum we can pay you for you to survive. So it's saying we're going to put you right at the edge of the cliff. We won't push you over because we need you not to revolt.

And we don't want to take care of you if things go south. But we're going to put you right at the edge and imagine how scary that is to be somebody who's just constantly on the edge of the cliff. I've been there. I've been there. You know what it's like when you get your paycheck after the taxes are taken out.

You know what your fucking rent is. You know you like to eat. You know that God forbid you enjoy doing shit like going out to dinner once in a while. God forbid. And you're looking at that and you're realizing the number of hours you would have to work. And you're realizing that if you start doing something

that is going to maybe get you into a better job, you won't be able to sleep. You start realizing like, well, if I'm going to train for some other thing, I've got to cut this out. Plus, what never gets acknowledged is people are fucking exhausted. It's like you're coming home after working two jobs.

You're fucking exhausted and you're freaked out. So yeah, this is what you're saying. To me, it makes me think like, well, maybe not to sound completely conspiratorial, but maybe they want this effect. Maybe they want to inhibit cognition. Maybe they, being the people who are making all the damn money off of paying minimum wage to human beings.

Maybe it does serve a purpose if you create a big swath of your population, if you induce in them confusion, exhaustion, fear, then they're easier to control. Yeah, and I don't know if it's a want that's cognitive. Like, I don't know if they realize they want this. Again, I love evolutionary psychology and pulling from that realm of thought, so I kind of always go back to that.

But I think it's more, they're in the same boat. These are people who probably felt like not secure. Maybe as a child, maybe in their younger years when they were developing, they didn't feel safe so they felt they needed more resources, more attention, more love. They're older now, and even though they have all this money and all this power, they're still stuck in,

again, that narrative, this mindset that says, I need to be more famous, I need to be more loved, I need more power, I need more fuel to shape the world. And there's this constant sense of I need more to feel safe, and that's a sign that there's a loss of maybe personal work or a lack of fulfillment or security or love or some stability in their life that makes them pull back from that and go,

I don't need to do this to other people. Yeah. But because they're missing that, they keep perpetuating systems that make it worse for other people. I mean, what's the solution here, though? It's almost like a psychic disease that we're talking about that goes

across the entire socioeconomic spectrum. On the top, you've got people terrified because of who the fuck knows what. They're amygdalizer inflamed, who knows what? But maybe they're afraid of becoming obsolete as human beings, who knows? I mean, this has always been the chin scratcher. When you're on acid and you're thinking

about some billionaire and you're scratching your chin, you're tripping and you're thinking, I would just, why are they holding on to it? What do they need? What's the point? Why? You don't need any of it, really. But in yet, they're holding on to it.

And what are we gonna do? Take it from them? What are we gonna do? Legislate, hire taxes like they're trying to do? I don't see any, it seems like we're talking about the oldest problem there is. Feudalism, feudal lords and the peasantry. The peasantry inevitably gets completely fucked.

The sharecroppers get fucked. Then they revolt. Then they become the feudal lords. Then their peasantry revolts and it goes on and on forever but we're just looking at it now with all of the gizmos and gadgets of the modern world. But isn't it fundamentally the identical situation that has always been?

I mean, in the near future, before we do maybe upload our consciousness or go into this super transhumanist future, I think hierarchy is gonna be a pretty inevitable side of things. The problem is that those on the top have the power to reshape the hierarchy and the rules of the game. That's where it gets fucked up, right?

It'd be fine. It's okay if the bottom people had basic income and could have all of the basic needs met and then they had a foundation to build a meaningful life from, but they don't because the people at the top currently in the hierarchy are able to shift the rules in a way where the people at the bottom pay all the taxes

and somehow the guy making a billion dollars doesn't pay any taxes. Right. I mean, there's tons of little loopholes in ways that we've been hijacked to tilt that hierarchy in the favor of the people who already have so much and it's been at the cost of the masses and then as a result, the masses aren't in a place

to think clearly about the kind of information that's going through social media to engage in social media in a healthy way, to engage with each other in a healthy way. If you're feeling hostility towards the out group because you're stressed, you're gonna hate the other. And if you feel like there's a political tribe that's causing you more stress and fear

and you're wired to hate people more when you're stressed and feared, you're throwing hate at them, they're throwing hate at you, you guys are making it worse for each other and nothing ever gets solved. And that's the beauty, right? We fight each other while the people at the top of the hierarchy just sit there

and reap the benefits. Eat fucking sandwiches up there, drink their adrenochrome, do weird dances that we- Just sitting there with their dumb waiter food. A dumb waiter food is coming. But you know, this is to me the really funny thing is it's like, and I did think that like, my God, these wealthy people,

they figured out all these loopholes in the system. It's like they haven't figured out the fucking loopholes. They made the loopholes. The loopholes have always been there. It's the whole thing, I mean, it's like this, I think this is one of the fascinating problems of this hyper-connectivity and people sharing information is like, think of how easy it was

to propagandize people prior to the internet. My God, how easy it was. You had a few channels, you have newspapers, those newspapers are being, the conversation is being shifted by whoever owns the newspapers. That's obviously happening in corporate media right now, but there wasn't like some endless like output

coming from like philosophers and people analyzing the situation saying like, you know, this story of like anyone can make it, all you gotta do is work super hard and it's fine. That's not real. Like we're being like overtaxed and underpaid while these people who are creating the laws are producing this never ending treadmill for us to run on.

And holy fuck, man, that's scary, right? Because, you know, we keep running into the same wall of, well, okay, then what? What are we supposed to do, general strike? I mean, is that what it is? Do we go full socialist, full, is it communism isn't the answer? That shit doesn't ever work out.

I don't want the state to run the show. You know, that's, I don't want the state to run the show. So from a transhumanist perspective, what is the technological hopium? Is there some like other possibility that doesn't involve civil war, fascism, all the classic reactions to imbalance? It depends on how far through time we're looking, right?

Like at a certain point, if we're spending our time in virtual reality predominantly or we're uploading our consciousness, we're gonna find things like morphological freedom where we don't identify with a body because we're changing, we're changing formats. You don't feel sexism and racism if you don't have a sex and a race anymore, right?

Because you're shifting forms constantly. That's far future. More close, more close in, I see things like basic income, robotics, artificial intelligence and blockchain, these type of tools being able to create secure systems that eliminate bullshit jobs, that allow humans, that force humanity to basically step back and say, we need a way for humans to be able to live.

So we need basic income. And then we can let the robots do the jobs, right? And then you start to see that cultural shift of people realizing, wow, if you let people feel safe, you start getting a huge explosion of creativity and genius. Like imagine if every human being woke up on the planet every day and their only goal

was to create the best version of themselves. And you walk out the door and you feel safe and secure, you're saying hi to your neighbor, the person who's working in some place that you visit, you guys have great laughs, you're not hostile towards each other or mad that you're having to be there, you're not at a place you don't wanna be in. When you start to have those things taken care of

and you feel safer, you'll engage better with people and you won't pass on that echo, as we talked about before with Dalai Lama, that echo of hatred won't pass on. So that's the basic income. In the near term, like now, I guess, the present, the best answer I have, unfortunately, is like courage, truth, kindness and love.

The best thing to do is try to take a step back and be kind to the people who you think are your enemies right now, because the more we treat each other like shit, the more we create this dynamic and this narrative that we need to compete for power. And if you can have the courage to say things honestly about how you view the world,

then you don't have to fall into one of these tribes that is at war and you start to create a playing field where it's not just us versus them, but it's all of us together speaking our truths, trying to shape something that works. It's a hard place to get to and I don't know how we're gonna do it, but I think it requires,

I think those are the best first steps that we can really take for the average person. I mean, yeah, I guess, yeah, I think for certain, you know, without sounding like incredibly, without putting something out there that's like some combo impotent and super cliche, because we've heard it so many times,

it's gotta be the conversation. The conversation has gotta somehow make its way through the entire socioeconomic structure so that people who are clinging onto the stuff start happily releasing it instead of it being wrenched away from them, you know, and this is the like violence begets violence, live by the sword, die by the sword.

It's one of the big problems in the philosophy of violent revolution is that we're trying to like revolutionize revolution itself, come up with some way of recalibrating society, but my, I mean, I blow fuses thinking about this shit, you know, because I am, I'm privileged, I have all my needs are being met, and so I'm having to deal with that,

like I'm having to think back 20 years ago to when I was, you know, I didn't have enough, you buy ramen and shit, my wife used to like take fucking sleeping pills when she was hungry, so sad, people do that, yeah, you know, but it's a way when you're really hungry, you don't have enough money for food, you know, you're sick of eating fucking ramen,

you just put yourself to sleep. People are doing that, it's horrible, people are fucking doing that, and worse, but in looking at that reality, and then seeing how slow moving the fucking government is, man, the federal government in this country, in the United States, it moves slow, think how long it took to get people those fucking checks,

think of the Satanic arguments these big people were having about getting people with kids these fucking checks on and on and on, it was some of the most evil shit I've ever seen in my life, so you look at that, you know the promise of technology, and it's like, yeah, I don't know, man, I get negative about this, I see, though I do love the transhumanist future, I do love the idea,

especially the idea of morphological freedom, that is something I wish I could just leap forward to where I'm no longer encumbered with my body and my vocal register, and a lot of other things about me, because god damn it, it's so fun to just have the freedom to put in Kanye West deep fake lyrics, and have Kanye West rap anything you want, even better to say it and sound like Kanye West,

even better to think it, and become temporarily whoever I want, rapping whatever I want, I'm an octopus, and all that is the future, I long for, but I just don't see how we get from here to there, man, I don't see it, I just don't, maybe that's what's so exciting about transhumanism is there's the acknowledgement of like, yeah, that hasn't appeared yet, but it can,

is that the idea? I think it's a hope of something to move forward towards, right, and part of the, I was really deep into transhumanism when I first found it, and then I kinda stepped back, cause I was like, this feels a little bit too utopian, and it doesn't address the real issues, but I still hold deeply onto that, a lot of the ideas,

cause ultimately it is a form of humanism, and I think what is so important to remember here is technology is not going to stop, if it does, we've collapsed as a species. Right, like civilization is basically falling apart, and we have much bigger issues, but barring that apocalyptic scenario, the reality is as technology progresses forward,

no matter what, and so what do you do? If you stand against it, you're making a futile gesture to stop something that can't be stopped, or you can get inside of it, and you can try to nudge it, you can try to help steer it towards something that you find meaningful, and truly humanistic. So for me, my thing is, let's get inside the technological mindset, and think about the ways

in which it can be used to tilt the system in better directions, and that means having things like, decentralized technology, like artificial intelligence, like robotics, that take away some of these aspects of our civilization that are causing so many of the social issues, and it allows us time to actually focus on being more human, and even studying technology, right?

Like if we teach artificial intelligence ethics, what does that mean we have to do? It means we have to decide what our ethics are. Yeah, right. You know what I mean? So as we're forced to create intelligence and machines of this caliber, and we see this future we're going into,

we have to think about what it means to be human even more deeply than we ever had to. I mean, we have to think about it. It's not philosophers anymore sitting in the corner who are kind of like the interesting, weird people on the fringe of society. It's like, no, we need to answer this question because a robot is about to walk off the showroom floor

and become a member of society, and I need to know it's not gonna kill people. How would you answer the question? How do you answer the question? What question? The ethics of AI, like if you, you know, just like if you're, first of all, two parts to this question for you.

Number one, how do we answer the question of who does get to answer the question? Do we answer it democratically? Do we, do we answer, how do we answer, who decides how to answer the question? Number two, if you were the person who had to answer this question, what kind of ethical, moral systems

do we need to code in to these like new visitors to our planet? What would it be? Yeah, I mean, for the first part, I think we'd hopefully let it be something that's more organic. You know what I mean? I think we need to be careful about

pretending we know what we want as humans and telling that to be what the robot is. Right. Because I think often we don't actually know what we want. We're not the best people to make decisions about ourselves sometimes. And culturally, my God, think if like 50 years ago, what robots would be like,

if we let people 50 years ago decide, well, here's what a female robot acts like. You know what I mean? Exactly. Culturally, you're gonna freeze the cultural ethics into the technology. So fuck, yeah. Like-

Exactly. Right. And so to that point and the second part of your question, I don't know where I'm really at right now a lot is I would tell the AI something to the effect of make sure that you don't limit the autonomy of another entity to the best of your ability. Because I feel like that gets a lot of things

taken care of, right? Like if you're oppressing somebody, that's limiting their autonomy. If you're violently attacking somebody, that's limiting their autonomy. If you're, you know, raping, killing, thieving, like all of these things take away from somebody's ability to take control of their own lives.

I feel like that's a good starting place because then we all have the freedom to do what feels right to us. And there's safety in that, right? Wait, hold on. Sorry, do you have to tell the robot to never think about its own autonomy? No, it's a part of it, of course.

I think it's a part of it. So what happens if the robot's like, fuck you, I'll decide my own ethics? Well, then we're in trouble. You see what I mean? Like this is the product of paradox. You can't, how are we to tell robots to celebrate autonomy with and also tell them,

but don't ever think about your own autonomy or don't ever reconsider the ethical structure that you can't have both. You have to keep fucking colonizing. There's no way out of it. You have to. But does that robot need to be, does it have an ego that it needs to protect

if it's purely robotic? I mean, yeah, I think that if we're just creating like a lawnmower robot or something like that, no, I don't think so, but if we're going in the direction that for what, for some mysterious reason, the Drudge Report, I don't know if you ever go on that, but it's more obsessed with sex robots than anything I've ever seen.

I've never seen so many sex robot stories in my life. Every few days, it's a sex robot story. The point is, this is like if we're going in the direction of combating loneliness, taking care of the growing senior population, having human-like robots, then yeah, you do, they do need to be spontaneous and compassionate and autonomous, I think.

Because otherwise, it's just, you know, it's a slave. What depends on if we have sentience in there or not, right? Like you can have a, we can decide maybe to have sex robots that don't have, you know, the conscious awareness or desire for autonomy, you can leave that out of it, right? But if we have, if we do get to a point where we are definitely creating sentient AI,

then I think that's where their own autonomy becomes valuable because that's when we delve into an area where I think, I start to say, well, that's probably about as human as us. Cause I think, you know, I think we're about as, how do I say this? I think we're pretty robotic ourselves just in a different medium.

Absolutely. I mean, I think you can challenge even the idea that some of us are sentient. Girjeev, the philosopher mystic, talked about this quite a bit. But you know, and this is why I love your article about us becoming gods, the responsibility of that, because suddenly we find ourselves faced

with the seemingly identical theological predicament that people use to rationalize why God allowed there to be evil in the world. Let's say we do get the sex robot. Great. The sex robot is semi-sentient because he wants to fuck a thing that's not sentient. You know what I mean?

That's like, what are you, a necrophiliac? It's gross. You know, I don't want- The Judge Report wants to, apparently. Well, I mean, but that part of the stories are always like, they're waking up. You know what I mean? Then you watch the, you go, of course,

I'll look at the sex robot videos and they're just like, I want, that's not guaranteed. That makes me horny. It's so awful. It's nothing there yet. But my point is, if you get a sex robot, that you're gonna want it to actually love you. You know what I mean?

It's not gonna, if some people, you're gonna want it to decide itself that it wants to stay at your house. You know what I mean? And this is this predicament God's in. Which is- But if it gets to that point, it's just another person. Right.

That's what I'm saying. It's like, we, we, we're, what technology is reflective, right? It's like, this stuff, it's, it's reflected, it's echoing us. And this is, so maybe the answer is, it's not even that we need to code the damn technology. It's that we need to look at our own programming.

And maybe from that, what we create will be like us in a good way. You know, it won't be a warring neurotic thing or it won't be a confused thing. I mean, maybe that, maybe that's what it all boils down to is, you know, the impetus is on humans to recode themselves. Before they- Absolutely.

I think that's 100% it. I mean, that's the, that's the answer that makes it hard. Cause when you think about transhumanism, futurism, everyone wants the technological answers to problems. But realistically, the answer is the person and the social situations that they're in, right? It really comes down to us as individuals to make sure that we're consciously in a place that we can set

a good example for any artificial intelligence that we create, but also so that the things that we use technology for are good things, right? Like if we have a culture that is in a, if we have a culture war, then our technology is going to reflect a culture war. But if we have a society that's all about who can become the best version of themselves

and self actualize and be kind to each other, then technology is just going to show us stuff on Instagram where that's what we see, you know what I mean? Instead. Right, right. I know what you mean. Yeah. I had the obvious, not that smart realization

as I'm looking at Twitter and just scrolling through my, who I follow, I'm thinking, my God, Twitter's fucked up. And then I remember, I followed all of these people. I made, I actively chose every single, all the Instagram images I'm seeing are my choosing. You know, it's like, unless you go on the suggestion from the algorithm, it's you. You're seeing your, what you're into.

And in that, it's a bummer when you realize like, Jesus, I guess I just don't like myself. This is, you know, I need to work on myself is the invitation. But look, it's been about an hour. And I'm sorry, you do not have to do this. Did you get the poem I sent you? I did, yeah, I just, I didn't get to read it

with much intimacy. I was wondering if you could read it for the end of the podcast because reading your, it just reminds me of your writing and your philosophy. And if you have yet to have actually read this poem or have spent time with it, then I think you're gonna love it. What is it weird?

I generally don't ask my guests, especially the first time on their show to read poetry, but. No, it's fine. Okay, cool. I actually have a poetry collection, so I've done this before. Oh, really? Oh, cool.

Awesome. I identified the poet in you. Yeah. Cool. This is Good Bones by Maggie Smith. And I have to say, I'm sorry, this is from my friend Rachel. I don't know why I have to say that,

but I feel like I should shout out my friend who showed me this poem because it's so fucking good. And I've been thinking about it ever since I read it. Go ahead, sorry. Yeah, all right, no, no, no worries. All right, Good Bones by Maggie Smith. Life is short, though I keep this for my children. Life is short and I've shortened mine

in a thousand delicious ill-advised ways, I'll keep from my children. The world is at least 50% terrible, and that's a conservative estimate, though I keep this for my children. For every bird, there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every love, a child broken, bagged, sunken a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible.

And for every con stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this for my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor walking you through a realtor's life walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about Good Bones. This place could be beautiful, right?

You could make this place beautiful. Steven Parton, thank you. You could make this place beautiful, man. Yeah, we could make this place beautiful. And I love your work, I really do. And I hope that you'll come back on the show again so that we can continue this conversation. Absolutely, man.

And if I can, one of the things I talked about was bringing people together, have conversations. And if I can plug real quickly. Plug? Yeah, I just started a podcast called Society in Question. And the whole goal of it is to have conversations between people who typically are hostile towards each other and come up with conversations that focus on solutions

rather than trying to pit people against one another. And that means embracing nuance, embracing uncomfortable conversations and really just trying to get in and have kind conversations about difficult subjects because I think that's really important. So if you're into that kind of thing, Society in Question is where it's at, so.

All the links you need to find that are gonna be at dugitrosil.com. Steven Parton, it's been a joy, thank you so much. Appreciate it, brother, thank you. A tremendous thank you to Steven Parton for appearing on the DTFH and, of course, to our wonderful sponsors, Dame, Upstart, and Manly Bands, and, of course, to you for listening.

I love you all so much. Subscribe to the Patreon, subscribe to this podcast, continue to listen, sing praises to the full moon if you're listening to this during a full moon, and God bless you all. I'll see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna. A good time starts with a great wardrobe.

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