Joe Allen has become a mainstay on our War Room screens over the last few years, his understanding of how technology is negatively affecting our lives and his analysis of how we push back is second to none.
The rise of AI, nano technology, genetic experimentation, biometric payment systems, digital ID and digital currencies are all new technologies that are creeping into our everyday lives.
Who controls them? What is their purpose? Do we have a choice to opt out? How are governments planning on using these to control their citizens?
Joe answers all of these questions as he takes us into a new reality that is marching towards artificial general intelligence.
Joe Allen is the is Transhumanism editor at War Room: Pandemic.
He is a fellow primate who wonders why we ever came down from the trees!
Joe studied religion and science at the University of Tennessee and Boston University and writes about ethnic identity, transhuman hubris, and the eternal spiritual quest.
His work has appeared in The Federalist, ColdType, The American Thinker, The National Pulse, This View of Life, The American Spectator, IBCSR: Science on Religion, Disinformation, and elsewhere.
Follow Joe at....
Substack: https://joebot.substack.com/
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/JOEBOTxyz
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JOEBOTxyz?s=20
War Room: http://warroom.org/
Interview recorded 12.4.23
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20
To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more...
https://heartsofoak.org/connect/
Please subscribe, like and share!
Transcript
[0:22] Joe Allen, thank you so much for joining us on Hearts of Oak today.
Peter, very glad to be here. Thank you very much.
Not all. I know many of our viewers will have seen you regularly on War Room as a transhuman editor.
What does it take to be a transhuman editor? How did that end up? You've being in the War Room. Tell us about that.
You know, well, transhumanist or transhuman, although I would say this, Peter, that I think transhuman editor might be most accurate now.
Part of the gig obviously is a 24-7 screen time. So I think that my cyborg status is pretty much solidified at this point.
You know, Steve reached out to me just a little over a year ago, just like two years ago, And I'd written an article about the transhumanist quest, to upload for the Federalist. And I'd been writing a series of articles about technology that dipped into transhumanism quite a bit.
He got a hold of that article about transhumanists and their desire to upload their souls and liked it.
And it was quite odd. I don't wanna get too long into the story, but a friend of mine who had tipped me off to the War Room some year or so prior to that.
[1:49] He had tipped me off to the War Room.
I watched it. I watched an interview with Steve on PBS.
It was this long, uncut interview with Lester Holt. And I was like, man, I've got to get a hold of this guy, Steve Bannon.
And, but the way it works, you don't just call up Steve Bannon.
And no one I knew had his contact.
So I just put it out of my mind.
I roamed across the country during the pandemic, ended up in Montana.
And that same friend about a year later tells me that Steve gave me a shout out on the war room. And I thought, what?
And it wasn't two weeks or three weeks after that that I checked my Twitter DMs, which I never ever did at the time. It was a different handle.
[2:34] And there was Cameron, the producer, asking if I would come on the show.
And so, but it was already too late.
Got back to him, went on the show. Steve asked me if I'd like to join the war room that day.
And here I am.
It's always interesting who connects you, to me. It was just Miller giving credit to who connected me with Steve.
What Steve does with the War Room is phenomenal and he is a machine in terms of production, in terms of knowledge, in terms of what he pushes out.
Yeah, love watching you on that. I think you're on Charlie Kirk recently as well, a few days ago.
I mean, yeah, that's right.
Absolutely brilliant. But if we, you can, for the viewers, you can obviously find you at JoeBotXYZ on the GETTR and on Twitter. Obviously, he has his Substack account. All the links are in the description. And that's just JoeBot.Substack.com you can find there and sign up to his regular wisdom. But I probably, Joe, when I think of transhumanism. I think the most powerful men in the world, Sleepy Joe, Supreme Court judges, don't know who women are, Elon Musk. And I'm thinking maybe transhumanism would be an improvement.
[3:57] You know, I wouldn't deny that. In many ways, I think that if the world was run by a Satanist cabal, at least they would have a plan. So yeah, it's interesting. Probably the most famous proponent of transhumanism, at least in elite circles, is Klaus Schwab. And I think people just, they really dismiss Schwab oftentimes because he tends to speak, and he and his co-author write in vacant corporate platitudes for the most part. But I do think that he's smart enough to know which way the wind's blowing. And the wind is definitely blowing in the direction of holding up technology as the highest power.
And so really, I think his fourth industrial revolution in 2016 was in many ways a kind, of clarion call to the world that this is the way we are going.
And some of it is him looking around the scene and evaluating it.
Some of it is his own enthusiasm. He has this really strange, naïve enthusiasm for transhumanist technologies.
[5:16] That represents a really, really important moment in Western history and perhaps world history because of the open declaration that technology will be the way forward, not political ideology, and in their view, certainly not religious ideology, but technology.
[5:38] Well, let's maybe delve into the most relevant transhumanist technologies.
You've got a number of things will be on people's radar, nanotechnology, you look at mRNA and that ability, your digital ID, I guess, world governments, institutions tracking us, monitoring us, you could chat, GBT has a lot of headlines recently.
And when people talk about kind of most relevant transhumanist technology, how do you kind of start unpacking that?
[6:12] It can get complicated, but to break it down as simply as possible, two categories have to be distinguished there, one being technocracy, ruled by expert, and in its more modern form, ruled by expert through science and technology.
And then on the other end you have transhumanism itself, which is in some ways separate from that.
They overlap a great deal, but it is ultimately two separate, these are two separate movements.
That Patrick Wood put it best, I'll paraphrase him, as technocracy is to a society, transhumanism is to the individuals within that society.
I think that really does encapsulate the overlap quite a bit.
[7:05] So when you talk about something like digital identification or digital currencies, central bank digital currencies, these I would say fall more under the category of technocracy.
It's more of a way of organizing a society. It's a social structure based on technological systems of control. And on the other side, you've got transhumanism. And this is much more of, I would say, a kind of spiritual quest on the part of the people who are involved.
You could say that it is many decades old. You know, the term transhumanist coined by Julian Huxley, 1956, I've got an essay collection, New Bottles for New Wine, and the opening essay was a lecture in 1956 entitled Transhumanism.
He isn't really talking about technology so much in this though.
He's more talking about how science will transform human beings.
[8:03] He's hinting at technology, but for the most part, he grounds it in science.
And of course, technology by and large emerges from the scientific method and mathematical deduction.
So it fits, but it really wasn't until the 80s or so that you started seeing a lot of people take on this term transhumanism as a description of using technology to transform the human being.
FM 2030 I think was probably the first major figure, but then Max Moore, a philosopher, was probably the one who put the stamp on the term transhumanism in this realm.
So relevant technologies.
I think the most relevant, especially now, artificial intelligence, creating a digital brain. The belief being that artificial intelligence will have limitless memory.
Artificial intelligence will be able to scrape over basically unlimited data, as much data as you can feed into it.
[9:08] And of course, it's going to have better pattern recognition than human beings.
It's going to be able to pick out patterns in that vast amount of data in a way that no human being would be able to.
It's gonna be able to do it at really, really fast speeds, right?
So human brain operates on neurochemical processes, artificial intelligence computers in general, that processing moves at the speed of light.
So there's a religious idea behind it that artificial intelligence is becoming and will become a sort of God to human beings.
How do you merge yourself with that God? How do you reap the benefits and blessings of that God?
Descending from there, you've got robotics.
Which requires artificial intelligence for sophisticated systems of control.
[9:58] You also have brain-computer interfaces, so that could be anything from these screens that we're speaking through, and I think that is a valid interpretation, hence my transhuman editor label. And then you've got the non-invasive brain-computer interfaces, It's kind of skull caps that read the brain in increasingly great detail.
They don't require implants. Some of them, they're planning to roll out, different corporations are planning to roll out sort of AirPod-like brain computer interfaces or small bands that fit on the back of your head used for anything from monitoring employees' mental states to controlling actual computer systems.
Nita Farahany is probably the leading expert on the non-invasive brain computer interface, if your listeners would like to look into it. But then of course you have the implanted brain computer interface.
You got three major corporations working on that.
[11:01] Neuralink, which has yet to get FDA approval. You've got a hole cut out of your skull, chip put in, about 1,024 wires or more if they can get them into the brain, those read the brain, and then allow the human being to project thoughts into a computer system.
At the moment, there's not really any input. They've been able to do muscular movements and other things, but for the most part right now, the technology is only output.
And so any input would have to come in through the traditional method, visual audio.
And then two other corporations though, that are right now implanting their brain computer interfaces in human brains.
You've got Synchron out of Brooklyn.
[11:49] And Synchron is instead of drilling a hole, you send a kind of stent, an electronic stent up the vein into the brain at the jugular.
And it sits within the vein and is able to read the neurons around it.
I don't know what their count is, probably something like six, seven, eight, less than 10 if I'm not mistaken.
But they have implanted them and people who are locked in, who've had strokes, things like that, are basically being experimented on with the intention of Tom Oxley, their CEO, hopes that eventually that technology will be able to be used to throw your emotions to other people.
Kind of hive mind-ish idea.
And then you've got BlackRock Neurotech invested in by Peter Thiel, and they're based out of Utah.
And again, a different sort of technology, the way it works, you get it under the skull on top of the brain. It's a micro electrode array patch that sits on top of the brain.
[12:58] I think that they have around 36 patients that are currently implanted with that technology.
And again, it allows them to operate robotic arms. It allows them to translate their thoughts into text on screen, things like that.
Moving down from there you have the sort of biological, Neurological and biological
[13:22] technologies so the the neurological technologies this kind of feeds into the brain-computer interface is just
[13:30] transcranial stimulation whether it's magnetic or whether it's kind of a a sonogram of, sorry, What's the word I'm looking for? Using sound waves anyway, sorry, I blanked on the very common term.
But you use the stimulation to do various things, change mood, change the ability to concentrate, those sorts of things.
And then, of course, you have the implanted version of them.
There's like 160,000 of those, and those range from everything from eliminating Parkinson's tremors to eliminating depression, oddly enough.
[14:10] And then I think the most famous and the thing that really captures people's imagination, genetic engineering.
Genetic engineering has been a thing for quite some time. The first real genetic engineering projects come out of Stanford in the 70s.
But with the advent of CRISPR, basically a molecular complex found in E. coli, CRISPR-Cas9, that was really discovered, I would say, 2011. It was kind of a piecemeal discovery process.
[14:42] But now CRISPR is used for all sorts of things. And the advantage of CRISPR is that it allows the geneticist to go in and spot edit the genome. So initially it was to cut out nucleotides in a faulty gene to shut the gene down. But now they're able to actually cut out and insert corrective nucleotides to change the gene, to correct the gene, to heal disease. And the goal going forward for a lot of people, not everyone by any means, but for a lot of people, the goal going forward is to use that to enhance human beings, to give us greater intelligence, to give us greater strength, and you know, whatever else may be desired. Beauty.
Mood, temperament, all those sorts of things. So that hopefully gives your listeners a roadmap, artificial intelligence, robotics.
[15:41] Brain-computer interfacing, neuro-enhancement, and genetic engineering.
Two questions. One, obviously, one argument on this is this is just technological advancement.
This is just humans bettering themselves.
But then another part of that, when you mentioned some of those things, you realize that it is, much of it is very much about the person.
It's not technology at arm's length, but actually people may not have control or the ability to decide yes or no that it will happen because it's on the person as opposed to a phone that you can pick up and set down if you can't actually pick it up and set down because it's part of you.
But what are your, one, that this is just technological advancement, but then the flip other side that maybe humans will not be able to decide whether or not they're part of this.
It's a thorny topic for a lot of reasons. One, a lot of transhumanists argue for a morphological freedom, right? So guys like Max Moore, guys like Zoltan Istvan, they talk about it in terms of freedom.
It's the freedom to be able to alter one's body or use technologies in any way they see fit, even if it puts off the rest of us in normal human society.
[17:03] Then you have the more kind of implicit totalitarianism that you see in the singularity prophecies, right?
So Ray Kurzweil being the most famous, it's just the idea that these technologies have always increased in complexity and effectiveness at an exponential rate.
Then that exponential curve will continue until it reaches basically vertical, basically infinite advancement.
He calls this a singularity at which technology is completely out of human control and the technology is making all the decisions. And he predicts 2045 is the date we'll hit the singularity.
[17:43] And so the implicit totalitarianism there is that not that these guys are creating technologies to control everyone, the idea there, and they never own up to it, but this is definitely there.
The idea is that you're creating a technological system that is inescapable and a technological system that has ultimately the final say in whatever sort of state that human psychology or human society is in.
And so,
even if you don't believe in something like that, even if you don't believe something like that's possible, to the extent that ideology is driving the people making the technologies and is also kind of hypnotizing the public with this technophilia, you end up in a situation where whether the singularity comes or not, whether anything like that happens or not, you have a kind of techno-religion that sees, really the rise of artificial intelligence, nano robotics and genetic engineering as this sort of second coming or the realization of God.
And I really do fear, Peter, that a lot of people are so enamoured by it that the effectiveness of the technology won't be as important as the social and psychological effects.
Now moving over into the more totalitarian, like openly totalitarian end of it.
[19:10] In the West, people really don't talk like that.
Even Klaus Schwab, if you read his writing or really listen to what he's saying outside of the small snippets, and certainly if you listen to Yuval Noah Harari to any length, neither of them are talking about creating a digital dictatorship.
Schwab sounds more like it than Harari. Harari, if you read Harari carefully or even just read him at all, or listen to him carefully or just listen to him at all.
You hear him over and over again, warning that these technologies are a recipe for digital dictatorship, right?
So this idea of hackable humans, yeah, he's very unsentimental and he's very hostile to religion.
He mocks religion a lot, so it's very off-putting.
But what he's talking about is the rise of the scientific paradigm in which human beings, don't have free will.
It's a scientific paradigm that holds that our decision-making process is nothing more than the bubbling up of neurochemical processes, and that with sufficient surveillance technology, your phone being a big one.
[20:19] Sufficient surveillance technology allows governments and corporations to monitor your behaviours and as he would put it, to know you better than you know yourself.
Then they're able to manipulate the population en masse, and they're able to target individuals for direct psychological manipulation.
And because of this belief that free will is an illusion, people won't even realize that they're being manipulated. They will think they're making their own decisions.
Now where you do see a sort of overt application of this, you see it in China.
China has you know, they're they're really it's unclear how advanced their artificial intelligence is, it's unclear how advanced their genetic engineering projects are but they have far fewer ethical constraints on, genetic engineering and they have,
[21:15] basically, no real ethical constraints that I'm aware of on the development of artificial intelligence up to artificial general intelligence now, Really is officially speaking neither do we in the West?
But for China, the real advance they have made in artificial intelligence is in surveillance technology.
And so of course in any major city in China, you've got wall to wall surveillance sensors.
And those are more and more starting to incorporate biometric sensors, biometric analysis of video footage or other biometric data, including genetic data.
And so China, I think, represents kind of an overt expression of what we're talking about when transhumanism meets totalitarianism.
And it's very chilling because more and more people at the World Economic Forum, including Klaus Schwab, seem very amenable to the Chinese model.
And more and more, I think, people in America implicitly are embracing something like the the Chinese model.
[22:21] Obviously one of the, just before we want to move on some of the individuals involved, but one of the headlines I think which you reposted was a zero hedge headline, 1st of April.
The headline was unprecedented Chinese genetic experiment may lead to an army of radiation resistant super soldiers.
They talk about Frankenstein like experiments with manipulation of human DNA.
I guess the danger is that somewhere like China, you say it doesn't have restrictions, but also it doesn't have a sense of the individual, where in the West, the individual makes their choices and they can choose yes or no, where in China you don't have that ability. When you have stories like that out of China, it makes you wonder what else is happening, but in a country that doesn't have those controls and doesn't have those personal individualistic controls, then it's frightening where that can go, I guess.
Yeah, I think that is a great example of two things. One, the sort of distracting over sensationalization of what's going on. It was an experiment.
[23:31] It was an experiment on human embryos. Basically, they're fusing, they're injecting or stitching water bear genes into human genes, right?
Of water bears and those tiny little microscopic creatures that I guess look like bears.
They look more like some kind of monstrous doodle bug to me.
But the idea then being that because water bears are resistant to radiation, these resulting humans would also be resistant to radiation.
One of the things that I covered and looked into quite a bit was the creation of human monkey chimeras in China.
[24:09] This was done in partnership with the Salk Institute in California, but the human monkey chimeras, basically a chimera is taking two different types of stem cells, right, two different species or multiple species stem cells and fusing them together to create a sort of hybrid creature. This has been done a lot in mice, but this was, these were human stem cells blended with, I believe it was macaque monkey stem cells and we're chimpanzee, whatever.
And they let them grow until like 30 days, then offed them, right?
Mass abortion basically.
[24:51] And another great example, Ha-Xiang Hui, the Chinese geneticist, in I believe it was 2018 announced that he had created the world's first, at least known, CRISPR babies, a pair of twins whose father was HIV positive.
So he went in and used CRISPR to alter their, it's a gene that is responsible for the enzymes on cellular membranes, a defensive enzyme that would give them
immunity or at least resistance to HIV. He was of course imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party after all of the global ethical outrage.
Many would say and I think it's probably correct that the reason they imprisoned him is mainly because he bragged about it not because he did it. But, anyway, I think that in many ways the, in the same way that killer artificial intelligence is a is a diversion from the real dangers of just minimally powerful artificial intelligence or social control or surveillance.
And in the same way that an implanted brain-computer interface kind of distracts attention away from the real human-machine symbiosis that occurs through our relationship with smartphones and other digital devices.
In that same way, the focus on this idea of horrific mutants,
[26:16] such as a human monkey chimera, or a part human, part water bear nuclear war super soldier, A, it's very unclear whether any of those creatures would ever develop into anything anyway, right?
More than likely, they would just die as the genetic monsters that they are.
But even if that was done, you're talking about a tiny minority of people We'll take another 10 to 20 years to really see what the realization of that means, What's more important? I think is something like the vast experiments done on the human population with mRNA injections, That alone is enough to give us pause. You know, it is terrified about half of us and
[27:02] for very very good reason it has completely hypnotized seemingly the other half of us, which is also extremely alarming.
But I really think that it's the extreme ends of these technologies It's very important to look at them because that tells you where they want it to go, but for the immediate, for right now for the present time. I think that the most important thing to look at is these these more mundane experiments being done on the whole on whole populations such as the mRNA injections such as as human smartphone symbiosis, and such as AIs like the chatbots, the chat GPT.
Well, let's get into it. I want to talk about some of the individuals.
I was saying actually what are the vision guiding these technologies, but the vision comes with the individuals.
And of course, you've got Bezos with Amazon One, Sam Altman, who I actually hadn't come across until you put out the article about the biometric world ID.
Someone like Jeff Bezos, us on the right on the conservative side, or we don't like.
But then you've got Peter Thiel, you've got Elon Musk, and then there's confusion because they're pushed towards some of these technologies. So, I mean, give us a, you've touched on some of the figures, but maybe touch on some of those who are some of the key individuals pushing some of these technologies?
[28:30] You know, since you mentioned them and none of them, none of the ones you've mentioned other than Peter Thiel are open transhumanist and even Peter Thiel now basically says transhumanism is a kind of a past, it's a fad that has passed.
And in some sense he's correct because transhumanism was a very localized school of thought that whose ideas influenced a lot of people.
And now you wouldn't call it transhumanism. You would call it the fourth industrial revolution, or you would call it the internet or you would call it bio-digital convergence, something like that.
So just going across that spectrum and I'll just go from left to right.
You would say, and I don't think that left and right really don't apply here because what you're talking about is an orientation towards a higher power technology and it really does cross the political spectrum.
There's every reason for people on the right to want to use these technologies as there is for people on the left.
So.
Bill Gates, though, I think is at least most associated with kind of left-wing thinking, even if he's not really a leftist in any meaningful way.
[29:36] He is probably, he's been the most resistant to publicly espousing transhumanist goals, right? He's more and more moving in that direction, especially with the release of the GPT technology.
But, you know, for him, it's always this sort of latent thing.
He's much more focused on the immediate so far as I can tell and he's also to me the most condemnable of all those individuals because of all the influence that he's wielded to
[30:05] force these technologies on people in a technocratic fashion moving over to Jeff Bezos, you know, There are a lot of reasons that Jeff Bezos has gone under the radar because he is, He like gates. He's not been all that outspoken but just look at three different aspects of his career, four different aspects, sorry, four.
Number one, the entire Amazon structure is technocracy personified, right?
So a fulfillment center is a top-down control structure built off of algorithms and some advanced artificial intelligence that either employs robotics to do the work or it turns humans into kind of human algorithm symbiotes.
So people literally sit around all day on their phones taking direction and they're monitored and artificial intelligence scrapes up that data to figure out how to make the system more efficient.
It is without a doubt, the most effective digital super organism that exists on the planet, or at least among the maybe military grade super organisms are more powerful.
Second, his entire infatuation with going out into outer space and...
[31:22] At one point he was speaking at the National Cathedral. He talked about how maybe in one vision of the future, most people would live in outer space and Earth would remain as a sort of national park for them to visit on occasion, which is utterly inhuman and horrific to most normal people.
But it just basically went without comment. A few people were like, oh my God, that sounds horrible.
This billionaire is talking about putting us on space ghettos and keeping Earth for themselves.
Well, I mean, that's our guy right there, right?
And so the whole thing with Blue Origin with a penis-shaped rocket and the Amazon smile with a penis-shaped smile, I think it does in many ways represent the kind of masculine underpinning of transhumanism in the entire kind of technological endeavor.
But also, he's invested in Altos Labs in conjunction with Yuri Milner.
And Yuri Milner is much more openly transhumanist. He wrote a manifesto, I can't remember the name of it, talking about human life, giving away to Silicon Life.
But Altos Labs is dedicated to human longevity through genetic engineering.
Peter Thiel also involved in this. Obviously Bill Gates involved in this.
Most of these, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google also involved in this.
Very, very, very popular among the billionaires.
[32:41] But as you mentioned, Amazon one. Here you're talking about really this kind of pop beast system, wherein Amazon customers, now Panera Bread customers, also Whole Foods customers using their palm biometrics in order to pay for things and identify themselves.
I think that that is going to be a much more popular way of implementing what Christians would call a beast system because a lot of people fetishistically implant RFID chips for that purpose. That is really unnerving to a lot of people. Whereas if you take that away entirely and just have a biometric scan, it's much more amenable to the general population.
I don't know what the numbers are yet for the customers, but I do know that it's many dozens of stores this is rolled out in so people are using it.
Moving over to the right though, you've got Elon Musk who is everything but an open transhumanist, right?
He he espouses all of the transhumanist values without ever using the term transhumanism It's very very common ploy, right?
So everything from the idea that artificial intelligence will achieve this godlike state to, the only way that human beings will be able to survive in such an environment is to link our brains to it to friendly AIs through an invasive brain computer interface, which he's working on.
[34:04] He's also working on artificial general intelligence with Tesla AI and one would imagine that, he has and will be using Twitter data for the same purpose, right?
He didn't need to buy Twitter for that, just by the way. Twitter has always offered Firehose API for people who want to data mine Twitter.
The only thing that really gives you is 24-7 fire hose access and also access to the DMs other than that a lot of people are training their a eyes on Twitter or have been,
[34:36] interestingly musk has cut that off anyway, and then also you know musk and his obsession with going and living in space This is a recurring theme of transhumanist to get off of Earth and become the sort of multi planetary, species and The creation of the robot optimist would be another great example example, the rollout of autonomous vehicles is another great example. I mean, at that point you've got an infrastructure that controls you as much as you control it or maybe more.
And so it's really interesting this way in which he's captured the hearts of the right, mainly because he's cool, he's funny, and he at the moment is so anti-PC or anti-woke that there is a certain alignment there. And I appreciate all he's done in that direction, but to me, his long-term vision of the future is more important than the short-term favors he might have to offer. And then moving to the farthest right, Peter Thiel, much more openly involved with these different transhumanist movements.
[35:42] What is it called? The Methuselah Foundation, he's invested in heavily. A number of other sort of longevity start-ups he's invested in. He was very interested in Ambrosia, which was, was they've shut down operations now because of threats from the FDA.
But Ambrosia is a process.
They use the process of parabiosis. They would inject young people's blood into older people to give them more vitality. And of course, Peter Thiel founded Palantir.
[36:13] Which even if they're not working on artificial general intelligence, their AI systems are among the most sophisticated in the world.
And they're used to, uh, to really apply real world power through the military and through the security state in general. And so on and on, again, as I mentioned, Peter Thiel was an investor in, originally investor, an investor in Neuralink, now a major backer of BlackRock Neurotech brain computer interfaces. So, you know, across the spectrum, one last thing, actually, if I may, One last thing about Peter Thiel that's also really interesting. Of all those people I just mentioned, he is also explicitly religious in his outlook. And so Peter Thiel is oftentimes written about Christianity and the relationship it has with technology. And maybe the most important essay that I'm aware of personally is an essay that was published at First Things, Christian magazine, the title being Against Edenism.
[37:21] And in that he argues there's no going back to Eden of Genesis, there's only going forward to the city of God in Revelation.
And so Christians need to use these technologies to defend, to bolster and defend their civilizations, to create a sort of kingdom of God on Earth or some approximation of the city of God on earth, and city of heaven on earth.
[37:50] To me, I think that it's a kind of gross perversion of what the Christian doctrine is.
I mean, not that there's any single Christian doctrine.
I know many of your religious listeners might take umbrage with that statement, but the sort of general orientation of Christianity is towards a higher spiritual realm and is at least disinterested in the outcomes of the physical body, this technological obsession is obsessed with physical outcomes. So Thiel is also interested in that way. Aside from funding all these kind of Christian Republican candidates, he also uses Christian mythology in order to push a kind of technocratic or transhumanist point of view.
Can I pick some of the names? The whole chat-GBT thing. I know Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were involved in the beginning and then Microsoft came along and put in billions and seemed to have taken that partially as their own and then the whole letter from 1800 opposing, the move of AI in general. But I mean I'm Gen X so it did take my older son to show me the South Park episode about chatGBT and then I thought I have to get up to get up to speed. But I guess people just see that as
[39:20] helping society, making your life easier. It doesn't seem too invasive. It's just
[39:27] for lazy people, they can use that. And how does that kind of fit in? Because chat GPT has been very much in the media recently.
ChatGPG set off a social atom bomb. It's just really insane.
On the one side you have all these people who have embraced it.
On the war room we've really focused on guys like Hans Monk at Epic Times who is very enthusiastic about it as being a way to break the left.
And then of course Jordan Peterson.
People really got mad at me, but he does sound like a real wiener when he's talking about it being smarter than you are.
Are and oh Elon Musk is going to save us. Sorry for your Jordan Peterson fans but I find him to be very off-putting. Anyway, they talk about it as kind of this god-like entity in some sense. And then on the other side, which is really, really interesting, on the other side you've got guys like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Elon Musk and Yuval Harari and Max Tegmark.
All of them, transhumanist basically, with the exception of maybe Harari.
I know a lot of people would wonder why I would say that, but I don't see him as being a transhumanist in any meaningful way.
Anyway, all of these transhumanists are saying that this represents a profound danger to human civilization. So why would they say that? It's a chatbot.
It's nothing but a chatbot, right?
[40:55] And the real reason, there's two major reasons, right? One, the unexpected capacities that GPT technology, has exhibited, the sort of general knowledge that it's able to put out on the basis of, you know, nothing more than a neural network, right?
Like you're just talking about an artificial brain that exists in a virtual system, but because of its size and the scale of the data it was trained on, it surprised everyone. GPT-3 surprised everyone. GPT-3.5 or chat GPT really surprised everyone as they flooded the public with it and people started having these very, personal interactions with an artificial mind and that was really important before they put on the safety layers people oftentimes say oh AI is just woke, Initially it wasn't just woke before they started putting the safety layers on it. It was actually
[42:03] unbiased hence the enthusiasm that people like Hans Monk and Jordan Peterson had for it and
[42:09] GPT-4 has really stunned people because it's starting to edge towards general intelligence.
And just, I've been speaking about it, but just for any listeners who aren't familiar, artificial narrow intelligence is an AI that can do one single task or one kind of narrow range of tasks, such as play chess or go or play video games or control a microchip production system or to spit out words like chat GPT, right?
Artificial general intelligence is something more human-like in which you have multiple cognitive modules that thinks across all of these domains and oftentimes simultaneously.
Doesn't exist yet, but GPT-4 represented a huge move in that direction.
It was able to translate, for instance, vision into text and make reasonable conclusions about it.
It was able to solve mazes, right? It's a language model, it was able to solve mazes.
And maybe most importantly, it excelled on human testing.
[43:18] So the two most impressive were the GRE verbal test, 99th percentile was its score.
And then you've got the US Biology Olympiad, again, 99th percentile.
And then you had the LSAT and the bar exam, law exams.
And that was 90th percentile and 88th percentile, respectively. So
[43:46] people saw this as this incredible potential. Where is it going to go next?
That's the fear.
Now I personally am quite stunned that people are so enamored by this and that they want to embrace it.
I think the biggest danger that this technology poses is that people like Bill Gates, right?
Because Microsoft backed OpenAI, They're incorporating all of these GPT technologies into their systems.
And so Bill Gates is talking about using it for education. A lot of people are talking about using it for education, meaning that education will become more and more, more than it is now, e-learning, digital learning.
And these students, the youngest generation is going to develop this human AI relationship that is going to stick with them for life.
And transhumanists oftentimes talk about how in an ideal future, you would have your own kind of personal AI as a type of guardian angel that would teach you about the world and would learn you better than you know yourself, right?
And give you the advice that you need to get through life. You're talking about the most powerful brainwashing technology ever created.
[45:05] And, you know, aside from that, you've got all of these different jobs that are being obliterated, everything from copywriters to editors to lawyers and even doctors and nurses.
So that is, again, you're talking about the digital mediation between humans and all these kind of critical services.
Maybe most importantly, preachers, rabbis, imams, I assume, using these technologies, specifically chat GPT, to create their sermons or to read, you know, to maybe a more autonomous system, just a simpler system to read liturgy.
This is already occurring in like small little points across the planet. It has not yet taken off. But I could definitely foresee a future, especially after all of these children have been brainwashed by this technology, in which as you and I get old and die, literally, we've got a robot standing over us, reading us our last rites, as our, you know, the contents of our consciousness are made manifest through some sort of digital zombie made from all of our data.
I mean, it sounds sci-fi, but barring nuclear war or an EMP, something like that is going to happen in certain societies around the world.
So the big danger I see are those more immediate dangers, the psychological danger and the sociological and economic dangers.
But you've got guys like Eliezer Yudkowsky.
[46:33] Who say that, Nick Bostrom is also a major figure, who says that this represents a move towards an artificial general intelligence that is not aligned to human values, and it's not necessarily aligned to human existence.
And so if the next iteration in GPT-5, or the next iteration in GPT-6, or any of these other AI companies that are working in competition with them, or any of the militaries around the world who are developing other artificial intelligence systems, if any of these create a digital brain that is large enough and fast enough and astute enough, I guess is a way of putting it, then you end up in a situation where you might get a hard takeoff, right? An intelligence explosion, what Nick Bostrom calls a super intelligence.
And if that super intelligence is not aligned to human values or does not regard human existence as being necessary or desirable then it could easily take control of
[47:42] critical infrastructure it could take control of weapon systems It could take control of a biolab or a series of biolabs, Or it could take control of individuals within a society to use any of these critical systems in order to destroy some other people or all of humanity. That's the fear that Eliezer Yudkowsky is talking about and it's entirely based on all of these kind of emergent properties from a chatbot that should just be you know some sort of rote memorization sort of regurgitation of all this knowledge but instead is showing this flexibility.
The fear is that chatbot or maybe it's a robotic system or maybe it's a military simulation system or maybe it's a military control system. It could be any type of AI But if it reaches a super intelligent state, The fear is from their side that it would obliterate some or all of humankind, again I think it's very very important to listen to just for this for the same reason that all the warnings about the atom bomb were were very, very important to listen to.
But in some ways that distracts from the more immediate and certainly attainable goals of rolling out these AIs across the society and using them for social control, for indoctrination and for mass surveillance.
[49:06] I just wanna, I'm looking at time, but just wanted to bring in one final post that you had put up.
This is on your GETTR and this was a YouGov America. I just want to touch on just for a few minutes, because it's interesting to see what the public rise.
It was interesting, actually, YouGov, asking the question, how concerned at all are you about the possibility that AI will not just have a negative effect, but will cause the end of the human race on Earth?
So it was a very hyperbolic question. But on this, you had 19% very concerned, 27% somewhat.
So you've got 46% are concerned, 13% not knowing. So it seemed very evenly split.
Half the people who were asked either were concerned or didn't know what it was about or unconcerned and didn't know.
That was not only the type of question asked, that was intriguing, but the response was also intriguing.
What were your thoughts when you posted this? I think it was back on 5th of April or so when you posted this.
Well, it's obviously is an expression of that open letter
that was put out by the Future of Life Institute calling for a six-month moratorium
[50:19] on any AI above the level of GPT-4. Then, of course, Eliezer Yudkowsky published the now famous, op-ed in Time Magazine saying that's not enough and that all large GPU clusters, all large AI training centres, data centres should be banned.
And if intelligence is aware of a training center working on a massive AI system, a potentially super intelligent system, airstrike should be on the table even at the risk of nuclear war.
So this has flooded the national consciousness here in America and I presume world consciousness across the globe. I've been very provincial of late, so you'd have to tell me.
But I know that just regarding that poll, which is an American poll.
[51:15] This is flooding people's consciousness.
It's always been there, latent consciousness has always been there in science fiction, everything from the Terminator and things like HAL 9000, all these sorts of motifs have always been there.
Now, it represents a distinct possibility in people's minds.
But that 50-50 split that you're seeing there, roughly 50-50, half and half, what's interesting is that give or take 10, 15%, either direction, on a score of issues, that's what you see in the American psyche.
So you saw during COVID, I would say roughly half of the population became, you know, COVIDians and wanted to mask up obsessively.
The other half, even among those who complied, really weren't into it.
And on the extreme end, which I would place myself, were fiercely opposed and furious about it.
[52:14] Same thing, basically, basically enthusiasm for the Vax. I don't know of any hard statistics.
Forgive me if I'm a little wrong, but basically you've got this split, a significant enough split that each side has some potential of taking over the federal government and applying their will on the other half.
Well, another really interesting poll that was done by two researchers, led by two researchers from Harvard and I believe Cambridge, if I'm not mistaken, looking at the Americans, and they surveyed asking them, if your child would have a better chance of getting into a top 100 college, Would you be willing to one, edit
the embryo's genes to give it higher intelligence, or to use a polygenic risk score, or the pre-implantation testing, genetic testing, to figure out whether or not the IQ was high enough.
[53:14] To give your infant a better chance of having a high IQ. And so, about a third, and this is roughly the same roughly the same for uneducated or more educated, skewed towards more educated, skewed towards younger, about a third, almost 40% among educated said they would be willing to edit their embryos genome
[53:38] in order to give a higher IQ, just under half, just under 50% for the polygenic risk score.
And what that means is that you conceive the child in vitro, right?
Right the test tube baby from the 1970s you conceive the child in vitro and then you freeze the embryo and what you really do is you you stimulate the ovaries to produce multiple eggs so you end up with around 10 to 15 eggs and you conceive all of these and then you freeze them after taking a sample of the cells you do a polygenic risk or you do genetic testing on all of them and I've described this as being somewhere between a basketball tournament and a spelling bee basically you, one that is deemed to be most likely to be smartest also tallest and certainly devoid of any major, deformities or genetic diseases that one gets picked that one gets implanted either in the mother or as it's become more popular a surrogate and
[54:44] then you have this kind of slow rolling process of eugenics This is already being done.
And one of the major companies is Genomic, what is it, I believe it's Genomic Prediction, if I have the name right.
And that was a startup funded by our boy Sam Altman from OpenAI, and they offer a sophisticated polygenic risk score test that includes IQ.
It doesn't include positive IQ scores, but what it can weed out is the lowest 2% in IQ, or the lowest 2% in height is one of the things they offer, right?
And so you've got this sort of soft eugenics, what's called liberal eugenics by the scholar Nicholas Agar.
But liberal eugenics is not state enforced, it's choice, it's freedom, right?
I have the freedom to eugenicize my child and the next generation.
So looking at those statistics, you see the significant portion of the population that has enthusiasm for it.
And that tracks with a previous poll that was published, I believe, last year from Pew, which found that people, it was like roughly a third, if I'm not mistaken, roughly a third of people would be willing to use genetic engineering
[56:06] to eliminate a disease.
And some other, I believe it was also roughly a third, said that they would be willing to implant a digital device into their child's brain in order to give them increased intelligence.
I'm a little fuzzy, it's been a minute since I've looked at that, but it's significant enough to push this forward.
And you have the possibility of it, right? You have the technological possibility of it.
Some of it just over the horizon, some of it right here.
So going back to the idea, well, is AI going to kill us all?
I think it's you know it represents the the people who are going to want to put a halt to AI and the people who are at least going to want to regulate it or to boycott any corporation working on it those are going to fall into that half that cares right that half is afraid the other half is going to be much more likely to either not care and dismiss it or perhaps be enthusiastic about it with a lot of overlap, but this is kind of I'm not much of a futurist look at any of my track records for girlfriends gambling or elections, but I
[57:21] do think that what you do see is enough social momentum enough acceptance on the part of the population at large large that should these technologies actually be effective, you'll have a significant proportion who will want it. And even if they aren't entirely effective, even if it's just some sort of half-baked version of it, they will be willing to accept and adopt it. And so I don't see this going away at all. Again, barring nuclear war or an EMP, I just don't see it going away, there is a growing enthusiasm for the techno cult we call transhumanism and a growing acceptance of the kind of dictatorial social structure we call technocracy. And I sense that it is a fast-growing religion, and it will continue to impact those of us who want nothing to do with it. We have to learn to deal with it. We have to learn how to resist it effectively and and not just this year and next year, but across generations.
[58:27] Yeah, no, absolutely. Joe, I appreciate you coming on.
I've thoroughly enjoyed watching you on the War Room.
I enjoyed meeting up with you at CPAC.
And just for the viewers that they can find you, this will be going out Monday the 17th, the American Freedom Alliance Conference.
I had the privilege of going to one back in June called Propaganda, and you'll be speaking at the World War III, the early years, 22nd to 23rd of April.
So there are tickets available.
You can go to the website, americanfreedomalliance.org and get a ticket.
If you're over there on the West Coast, then I would really encourage the viewers or listeners to go and make it a trip because you'll thoroughly enjoy it from listening to Steve Bannon, Joe Allen, and everyone else in between. So Joe, thank you for your time today.
Thank you very much, Peter. And just for your listeners, anyone who wants to go, promo code Joe, get a discount.
So I would love to meet anyone who's over in that area. Come on down.
But yeah, Peter, I really, really appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me on.
It was absolute, it was fantastic meeting you in DC. Great time, hope to see you again.