A defector in California. On the afternoon of May 9th, 1968, a nondescript 76-year-old Russian man, a former low-level Communist Party member, a technician in the People's Commissariat of Machine Tools, a gulag prisoner, and a defector, was paid a visit at his bungalow in San Francisco's South Bay in Mountain View, California. The devil, you see, is in the details. 30 years before, on January 29, 1937, on an otherwise unremarkable day, beyond, that is, overlapping with the third of the three very public Moscow trials, he admitted some 20 seconds of barely audible grumblings at an inopportune time and within earshot of an NKVD officer. His otherwise inconsequential grousing proved decisive, unbeknownst to him, He was placed on a list of socially dangerous elements, right deviationist.
This right deviationist was the particular designation written in the column to the right of his name. On February 9th, 1937, in the middle of the night, he was arrested. Soon, the Gulag camp surrounded him.
Exactly five years later to the day, his confinement ended as abruptly and inexplicably as it began. His sentence had been served, and he was released. He returned to his hometown of Orenburg, and he thought he no longer recognized it.
It didn't occur to him that he could no longer recognize as himself the self that he had once lived there. Unrecognizable, he would defect. Although he had endured five years of arbitrary and pointless cruelty at the hands of his comrade, prosecutors, he found escaping belief much more difficult than scaling the metaphorical iron curtain whose inside was covetously guarded by a line of resolute sentinels, believing that any slippage through the Berlin Wall near the city center meant their death. And it did.
But our defector reduced the number of potential executions not by attempting to escape on foot. Instead, He became cargo. A childhood friend who had become a pilot with Aeroflot, the only Soviet airline, and with flights that carried only cargo. He managed to convince his friend to transport him out of the country.
He was stowed in a wooden crate and loaded into a plane headed for Riga, the capital of Latvia. In an airport hangar, his childhood friend pried open the wooden box where he lain motionless. Now, from a safe distance, he saw the entirety of his existence in a new light.
Whatever he had believed, he believed because not believing meant ceasing to exist. What was best to believe? It depends on what? On the consequences of not believing. But what did the belief guarantee?
Nothing, to be precise. Why nothing? Because one's belief ensured nothing about the belief of others. Their beliefs could suddenly change, or their shared belief might eventually reveal itself as mass delusion.
And no one was safe in a state of collective insanity. This is from your new book, Michael. Yes. And it's very different from the rest of the book.
It is, all of a sudden, we're just in this chapter in... This guy's life and what jumped out at me was a it's very poetic It's beautiful writing but the safe distance he was from he was in a safe distance and now he could see that Whatever he did didn't matter. Yeah, you can believe it. You can profess a belief You can actually believe it or not believe it, but it doesn't guarantee your safety ever right exactly That's that's what I was getting out there and also that the belief in a place like this where where belief is enforced you know it's enforced through a totalitarian means uh you must believe or at least pretend to believe or else you're in trouble and we're there now in america yeah we're really starting yes we are and you're starting to see that it doesn't matter what you believed doesn't matter even if you were on the side the quote right side for a while if you don't travel with them and their belief It changes and it seems to have changed into mass insanity.
So the next line that you stopped at, he seeks asylum in the United States. What is an asylum? It is the place where crazy people go.
The question then is going to be what happens there. So what happens? Well, he moves to Mountain View, California.
So that's the heart of Silicon Valley. Not yet the heart of Silicon Valley, but it will be by the time things get very interesting for him. When those agents are having a knock at his door.
And there's suspense there as to whether they are going to be like the former Cheka. and deal with them accordingly or something else. I don't want to give that away. So why did you write this in StoryFound? Because your book is about digital gulags that are being built.
It's argumentative. It's expository prose. It is speculative. I admit there's speculation in there. It is not fiction.
I thought that... I should have like an interlude of fiction that's just not, you know, that's not really that far from reality. Yeah. And that it would give us the experience of being inside the digital gulag or the gulag archipelago. So explain what that is.
Well, the gulag archipelago is the electronic digital hypermedia version of the gulag, I think. It is going to be a place of mass and total surveillance, a place of where everyone's movements are tracked, traced, recorded, where everything is known. It's an omniscience of sorts.
And there are going to be all kinds of policing ramifications involved. So, first of all, Archipelago is a collection of islands. That's right.
And so when you say it's the Google. archipelago you're saying that that's just that's just one that's just one island yeah there's the emblematic island of the whole archipelago which consists of other uh islands like facebook like instagram like would you include the nsa that's a great question well they funded along with the cia they funded google at the outset so this was an intelligence project to begin with they wanted to use the internet to as a data mining opportunity because of an unprecedented opportunity to mine data. And so they funded some very clever people at Stanford and around Silicon Valley.
And those people became Google, one part of them. And, you know, I'm not. You know, particularly that alarmed about that aspect because DARPA has funded a lot of research.
The Internet itself has, of course, military implications and origins. So the question becomes what becomes of it, I think, you know. So it has that potential, of course, to be authoritarian when it comes from that kind of a basis. So I think there's a couple of things. The left keeps saying.
we're headed towards fascism, we're headed towards fascism. Well, welcome to the party. We've been saying that for a while.
Yeah. But at the same time, they say things like, so let's give the government all our guns. Yes.
So there's this disconnect from what they're saying to what they're saying they want to do. The government is a problem. Let's grow the size of the government. But what's... Frightening to me is that that's where the right has always said, OK, we have to have small government.
I mean, the real classical liberal right. Sure. We have to control the size of the government, but corporations are OK.
Yeah. Corporations are actually more frightening now than any government because the government is restrained by the Constitution. But these as private organizations. They have none of those restrictions.
None of those restrictions. And they're arbitrating our speech rights at this point, our expression. Right.
And what you talked about, in fact, let me see if I can find the exact line that you said. You, I can't find it now. But you talked about how you are, you're just erased.
You're erased. Erased. In the former Soviet Union.
You would disappear. You could be disappeared, as they would call it. You would be disappeared.
You'd be disappeared in the middle of the night. They would come to your house and basically pull you out of your house, and you'd be gone. And nobody would ever know what happened to you.
They would guess, but your children would be left behind, your wife would be left behind, and you'd be gone. And this happened routinely. I mean, Solzhenitsyn talked about it quite prolifically.
Right. But the point is that it's like you didn't even exist. That's right. Because you really didn't want to ask questions or you might face the same fate, and so you were just gone.
Yes, and the thing is, in the Google archipelago, it's not so much corporal. However, it is much easier to delete a piece of data than it is a corporal human being. Yes. So, and it's socially, it's a social death in effect, because if you're deleted digitally, in effect, you're gone. If you are, I mean, everybody knows this.
If you are homeless, you're invisible. Yes. You're an invisible person.
You walk down the streets of any city, especially a city like New York. You're walking down the city. You don't even get eye contact. That's correct.
People don't even look at you. That's right. Even though you're there.
And there's a number of homeless people all around. You're invisible. And one of the biggest problems there is the lack of actual documentation to prove you are somebody. Right.
And also that you have an address or something. Something. That they can send a check to or something. Right.
But if that's all gone, you're basically a non-person. And so we're not talking about scooping you up in the middle of the night. putting you into a gulag or behind a wall right we're talking about in the middle of the night you're just deleted deleted you don't have a bank you don't write credit cards right you don't have the rights of a license maybe perhaps you you are nobody on social media so you're traveling all gone you're traveling to uh london new york uh paris whatever you you know you're relying on digital technology to be able to go to a hotel or to do anything And what if you're just the person in the process because you've been critical of something or you've said something wrong and they have put you on a list of dangerous persons?
Interestingly enough, that language, dangerous persons, is the exact same language that Facebook is using in their policy manuals. The same words as the Soviet Union used. Really? Yes. This is, and I've been saying this for years, what's coming...
We had dinner just the other day with somebody. Yes, it was enjoyable. We were talking about, we were talking to somebody at the table that has a very different viewpoint of China. Yeah. And you and I were both saying, you don't get it.
No. You don't understand the digital world on what's coming. Yeah. And people really think that this is, oh, some sort of sci-fi nightmare. And when you talk about technology, You know, oh, it's Skynet's going to get, well, kind of.
Sort of, yeah. Kind of Skynet, just not a movie kind. It's going to be very quiet.
Yeah, I mean, like, when I was writing this book, I was like, am I crazy or what? And then I would read deeper, and the further up it goes, no, it's worse than I thought. Then I would write more, and I'd read it, and I'd say, am I going off the edge here? Then I'd go deeper, and it's worse than I thought.
And this just has continued. Every single person I know that has done their research, really intelligent people on both sides of the aisle. Everyone who's done their research, they say the same thing. Really? It's worse than I thought it was.
Exactly worse than I thought. Because it's, we're talking, first of all, as you said, it's not corporal. So you, we'd all know. if somebody was out saying we're going to have a bonfire of books we'd all have a problem that's right but maybe yeah maybe something left us yes right um most of us would have a problem we are taught book burning is bad because of the past that's right but just like all of the atrocities in the past It history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
That's right. And this rhymes with book burning. All of a sudden, those books are no longer available. They're no longer on the shelf.
They're there. They've just disappeared. And when you're all digital, things can disappear overnight and they can change. Yes, they can change. I mean, when Google was, you know, I was one of the first adopters of Google Books because I thought, you know, I was doing deep research into 19th century studies.
And I was able to find periodicals that I used to have to go dig in archives, you know, all over England for. And I was able to see this. It was like a cornucopia. I was like, oh, this is wonderful. You know, but then I started thinking, then they want you to recognize that it's theirs.
And effectively. The scary part is what happens to them because they are digital now. Everything is really, it's ephemeral.
It's ephemeral. There's no, and librarians are saying that they're taking out books out of the library that are not acceptable, and they're getting rid of them and replacing them with other books. And we don't even, and then if those books are unavailable physically, we don't know whether they're going to be preserved digitally at all. Right. So, you know, this is the erasure of history, which is a very big.
it's always been a big tool of totalitarians you must erase history parts history history that contradicts what you're after history that is against what you're going for it's really in a way it's fahrenheit uh uh what is it fahrenheit 411 yeah 451 or 451 yeah fahrenheit 451 without the fireman yeah you don't need the fire you don't need the fireman you don't need the fireman And so you don't need the book burning and you don't need Soma because you have digital addiction, as you put it. This is addiction, I'm afraid, and the digital addiction has been very seductive. So it's drawn people into a very seductive space, but to what cost?
That's the question. There's other things to… To, I think, be concerned about that people aren't thinking through. Yeah.
That you're manipulating, the manipulation, you're familiar with Cass Sunstein, I'm sure. Cass Sunstein, you know, is a behavioral scientist and there's nothing wrong with that. but when you start looking at the behaviors and you look for a way to manipulate people, and that's what his book Nudge was about, and he's very much cut from the cloth of Edwin Bernays, who was the father of propaganda. They later changed it to advertising, but only because we saw how propaganda was used, but he was the father of propaganda.
propaganda now is is is an algorithm so it's not a pretty poster it's not a film using rats to make you think people are rats it's just an algorithm and it's it's nudge it's what you make hard to find and what you make easy to find there's a very curious phenomenon that's been going on as well there's there were some groups that claim to be anti-disinformation groups That are in fact the most prolific disinformation groups that exist. Should I say the name of it or should I risk getting killed? No, go ahead. New Knowledge. Newknowledge.com.
I've never heard of it. Okay, what they did, they were the ones who testified to the Senate about the Russian bots, right? Who were supposedly influencing the Trump election, the 2016 election, okay?
In the 2018 election, I think it was Alabama, the guy that was running for... Yeah, I can't remember his name. He had some issues they brought up, right?
But anyway, they created Russian bots and put them on the web in support of him in order to show that he was backed by the Russians. They produced the disinformation itself. I am not familiar with this.
It was in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Even the New York Times admitted this happened. And this group was funded by a billionaire who's a Democratic funder.
I can't remember his name. I don't look at things that way so much. I'm looking at the trends and what's happening.
And this group, New Knowledge, is like this is emblematic of what's going on. It's like they are to disinformation what Google is to information. In fact.
They're screwing it to death. They're creating what they say they are the solution for. It's unbelievable.
If you look at their website, it paints them as like these good guys that are sorting out all the garbage and fake news. And it turns out those who are proclaiming fake news are making it. They're the biggest purveyors.
It's almost the same story of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Those who say that they're standing against hate are their haters. Yeah.
Yeah, and it really reminds me of the Pharisees, you know what I mean, like the Pharisaical culture. So where are we headed? I said in 1995, on the air, one of my producers who's still with me, he says he'll never forget because he remembers singing That's Crazy. And I said there's coming a time very soon where you will not be able to believe your eyes or your ears, that you will be able to recreate anybody saying anything, you will swear it is, and you'll be able to do the same thing with video.
Yeah. And here we are. And I think 2020 election is where it's going to really start to hit the fan. You have that ability now in deep fakes. Yeah.
And the the voice, which was the one that was lagging behind, that is getting to the point where you can't tell the difference. Go to. Yeah, I think it's fake Joe Rogan.com and see back and forth. You can't tell the difference.
Right. It's all digitally reproduced. Right.
Remastered. You can just make him say. absolutely anything.
What happens to a society when there is no one you can trust and the ones who say, no, you can trust us. Are the actual, are the most, least trustworthy people. Are the ones that are manipulating things through algorithms. Yes. I mean, that's where we are.
Google's one of them, of course, and this new knowledge group, there's others. And there's an interesting story, just to be symmetrical, okay? It's very curious to me how this Russian bot story kept floating around and going on and on for three years.
Because there was a group that actually helped, a digital corporation that helped Trump win, called Cambridge Analytical. They did do digital manipulation. It wasn't nefarious.
There was nothing illegal. But what they did is they did psychographic profiles of every single American. And then they fed them dark ads.
That means ads that no one else can see on Facebook and steered them into a certain position. So how even the liberal media misses the real story, which actually favors them. Instead it goes with this lunacy script. Why? I don't get it.
So Play this out, Michael. What happens to society like this? I mean, I think it's usually an 80-year cycle, usually, for, you know, you fall into totalitarianism and you climb back out of it in 80 years, usually.
This one, there may not be any climbing out of. Yeah. There's something about digitization that produces collectivism.
In what way? Well, I explore it in this book, and it's complicated in a sense. But it's easy to aggregate data.
And when people are effectively data, it's very easy to aggregate people. And so they start to use Because you're not an individual. You're getting collectivized through algorithms, hashtags, different things like that.
And that's what they're doing. They're creating these I call it digital Maoism. There's a chapter in the book called Digital Maoism, and it might sound crazy, but once you read it, I think you'll think, oh, my. Make the case. Yeah.
Make the case. No? Yeah. Well, it wasn't my term. I borrowed it, and that gives me a little bit of that helps me a bit.
Jaron Lanier is a brilliant guy. He coined the term in an essay in 2006. And he was really talking about Wikipedia and how this hive mind of editors. was, he experienced this in particular with his own website or his own site on Wikipedia.
They were saying all kinds of false things. And he was like, no, I can tell you the truth about me. Right.
Won't you just listen? And they're like, no. Right.
And they've had, you're no authority here. We are. Right. So this hive mind decided on what he was and it wasn't all kind of false stuff. I have, I have the same thing.
I think it might still even be on there that I was arrested for drunk driving. I've never been arrested in my life. Never driven drunk in my life.
And it's on there. And I tried to have it removed, and it couldn't get removed. It's my life. You are not a trustworthy source for yourself. And that's what he found, and he found it to be.
He said, this is craziness. But it's gone further than that since. We've got Twitter mobs, of course, using hashtags and all that.
It's created all these kind of like. Red guard type attack dogs, if you will, that are just insanely virulent and fierce and destructive of people. And if people take these people seriously, people have committed suicide over these people. Oh, yeah. It's tough.
So this is a collectivization that's happening. And the interesting thing is this. The left believes that when they are in a collective. They are being radical. That's their whole definition of politics.
Their definition of politics is this. We have to collectivize in order to have power against the big guys with the money and everything else. If we don't join forces and have solidarity amongst ourselves, we can't combat the powers that be.
So collectivism is their basic premise for all politics. Now... The thing is, they can be fooled into believing they're doing something political just because they're in a collective.
And that's what's going on on the Internet. They think they're being political, but they're actually being used by, I think, our corporate globalist agenda. And so they think, wow, we're really woke.
We're attacking all these people, especially those that are called dangerous by the Google archipelago. We're driving down the evil people. We're tracking them down. We're destroying them, right? But they're not getting the picture that they're actually supporting.
Well, you could say that about, let's just take Google and Facebook for a second. They actually believe they're doing good. Oh, yes. And they actually believe it while they're helping places like China.
And I know that with Project Dragonfly, there were those who stood up and said, no, I can't work with you if you're going to do this. They're back in bed with China, now under a different name, but they're back in bed with China. And I don't, I really don't understand how the workers, the regular person doesn't see this is a really bad idea. We're helping China. scoop up people that want to stand up against their government.
Yeah. Where is that disconnect, Michael? Well, I don't know. I think maybe it's birds of a feather stick together. I think that they share a deeply, a shared deep ideology of authoritarian leftism.
That this is, this is, that it's okay. They're akin to these, this whole idea. Yes. I mean. There's been a number of people that have said China's the model.
Yes. Right? Yeah.
It's the model of the future. It's the model of the future because what? It has both the profit incentive for the massive corporations, plus it has the total control of the population. So that's the model for certain types.
Now, I'm not saying that's capitalism altogether at all. I'm a free market person. I believe in the free market, but that's not a free market.
That's a no and neither are we no we're also so you know the google archipelago i'm saying is ingratiating itself to the state and vice versa and this is giving them state power they're going to you know it's funny anytime you look this up in history anytime companies rush for legislation and to have restrictions and regulation but yes It's because they know they're in trouble. Okay? Usually it's because of collapse.
I need protection from the little guys. What it does is protect them. It makes the cost of entry higher.
Yes. This keeps the competition out. Correct.
It's a monopolistic move. Correct. Yeah.
And so this time you have these corporations coming and everybody I don't know what I'm more worried about. about and i think i i think i know i think i would rather have the chinese uh kind of of the government control than this illusion of the government not being in control and it's the it's those huge companies that are in bed with the government that don't have any rules that they can't make up overnight they can change their rules constitution you can't change Yes. But if it's a private company, they can make up any rule they want.
They could change them every day if they wanted. And the other scary thing, the other reason for that, I think, is that when you have a totalitarian state, it's pretty, it's pretty, shall I say, it's pretty natural to oppose it. But when you're when you're talking about a corporate totalitarianism, I think, which is like a state that's being effectively off, you know, passed off to the corporate.
powers that be, and they're running the state, they're effectively amplifying and undertaking state functions, it's much more difficult to point to them and say, this is what they are, because they're masking it through. other things. Give me an example.
Let's take Google and their ranking of websites, you know, when you do a search. This has been proven now to be completely a sham. In fact, if it's not leftist, and stringently they overwrite it and make it leftist so that they disappear, whole websites they blacklist.
Whole websites, they get rid of all kinds of news. And YouTube did this too. One of these congresspersons did a YouTube, oh no, it was a Slate magazine writer. She did a YouTube search for abortion. And to her chagrin, like the top ten searches showed negative stories about abortion.
So she complained to YouTube. And they changed it over the weekend, by Monday, so that the story So that the list was now almost all pro-abortion at the top. So how does that connect?
That's like, that's not exactly governmental, but in a way it is governmental. I mean, it's their prerogative. They have a prerogative to do it. And it's harder to, like you said, every conservative will tell you, I'm not for regulation.
I'm not for breaking companies up. I'm not for, I'm not for. penalizing companies that have succeeded don't punish success this is becoming so clearly every single person that i have ever spoken to in silicon valley that is somebody you know what i mean from from the zuckerbergs down to the main programmers who are looking at the architecture of what's coming they all say the same thing glenn the nation state is the thing of the past yes over And they think they're it.
Right. And they are. And I didn't understand that when they were talking about it, they were saying, you know, so we have to have new rules and a new kind of understanding.
The Constitution won't work. The nation state is over. It's going to be borderless. And I couldn't get past my small thinking of the United States is not going to take a border down. Oh, no, the United States won't have to.
It won't matter anymore. That's right. Because the corporations. will be able to control and move things across borders and track you everywhere and do everything they want to do. And here's the twist.
This is why they are actually leftists. Because their agenda matches the left's prerogatives almost point by point. Yeah.
And it's incredible. This is a very big deception because, first of all, anybody that says... Like the corporate America is embracing leftist ideology as considered a loon because the story goes, oh, of course corporations and capitalism always favors right-wing ideology. It supports their interests, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's no way that they would ever be leftist, right?
But it actually is not the case. It's not always been the case historically. There have been plenty of leftist capitalists and this time and they're always monopolists by the way like Gillette.
King James Gillette, who was a corporate socialist by, you know, avowed. He was an avowed corporate socialist who thought that the corporation would become one, and it would be totalizing, it would include everything, all production, and it would be the state simultaneously. This was envisioned in 1910. Isn't that the difference between national socialism and global?
communism is part of it is that's nation yeah and as opposed to gold a goal um uh global yeah but it is also they don't necessarily take the property they allow these companies to still own you still own the company that's right but we're going to dictate what you're doing not all the times but we can come in and say no you're going to make this i think it's more like in the united states it's more like kind of a deal making. It's like, if you do this, we'll do that. If you do this, if you do this, we'll do that. You know, no antitrust legislation if you do this. This is the third time I thought about this since we were sitting down here.
So let me just say it so it's out of my mind. You know, I've heard people joking, not jokingly, some people are serious about it. You know, I heard it with...
Bill Clinton, you know, Bill Clinton, he's, I bet he's the Antichrist. Stop with this. Yeah, right. That's a little grand osman for him.
He doesn't deserve it. You know, Barack Obama or Donald Trump or the Pope or whatever. Yeah.
First of all, the Antichrist, if there is an Antichrist that's coming. Yeah. He's going to be so damn slick. You're not going to be. He's not coming the way you think he's going to come.
He's not going to look evil. Right. And that's the same thing.
Hugo Boss is the one who designed the Nazi uniforms. It was Hugo Boss. Wow. So when you see those black SS uniforms, we now think they look scary. Come up with the black boots.
No. They were fashion statements. It was a fashion statement.
It looked great when it came. So. everything that is coming now doesn't look like what you expect it to look like.
Exactly. That's the scare. It's coming in ease, in everything that you want. Everything that you want. And it's coming dressed in rhetoric that sounds wonderful.
Right. Equity, diversity, and inclusion. You know, all these high, noble-sounding abstractions, which who could disagree with? Right.
But the problem is, what is really that language being used to paper over? What are they trying to use that language as a scrim to cover for? We were founded on the individual, and our First Amendment really covers that.
I have a right to conscience, okay? I don't have to do, as an individual, I don't have to believe what you tell me to believe, and I can say whatever I believe. We're... built on that everything that's happening now is the exact opposite of that yeah right tell you just a funny story this is just funny story that's recent last night last night i got a i got a hotel room because i went back to connecticut came back and i went to this place in chinatown and they said uh you know it's about three and a half star hotel okay i'll deal with it for now and i go in and they say you'll be in a dormitory with 10 other men and i said no i won't and she said yes you will And I said, no, I don't have to stay here. This isn't China yet.
Goodbye. Anyway, so just to say, you know, just this idea that I would have to do it, you know. But that's where we're headed. Yeah. And I don't, and just because it's a corporation, if the government is. backed by this corporation or the government backs the corporation there's no but there's no police to run to no they're they're they have between them they're in you know some sort of hand in glove sort of situation in between them there's there's no way to get to pry them apart and there's no outside there's nothing outside of them that can intervene so can you take can you take the average person and say okay you know what your life is like today but five years, ten years, however long it takes for this to come.
And I think it comes sooner rather than later. But we could be wrong on the timing. But if we don't wake up, I don't think we're wrong on what's coming.
So how does the average person's life change? How are they affected? Well, I mean, if... There seems to be a race between American or U.S. and Chinese AI implementation, right?
And as you were talking about recently, I think it was a day or so, or maybe yesterday, about if 5G, whoever really develops 5G first and connects it with their AI potential, they're going to win this race. Okay, explain. Explain 5G for people who don't understand 5G.
It's just going to be a massively, incredibly fast, almost instantaneous internet. With a gigantic pipe. Tons of gargantuan bytes, you know. And instant data transfer, like, it's like, you know.
There's no latency. Nothing. And it'll be...
The reason why we don't have self-driving cars right now is because we don't have 5G. That's right. There's not enough bandwidth to handle it.
Right, because to have a self-driving car, we think of self-driving cars as having these cameras and these sensors. But when it's connected to 5G, and this is where it really gets scary, when it's connected to 5G, it will know who's in, literally, who is in the car next to you. Oh, yeah. and all around you, and it's constantly calculating. It's taking that information packet of how that driver even drives.
Yes. And if you're going to be in an accident, which one should I go mow down the person on the sidewalk, or should I mow down this person over here? That dilemma, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's going to have that kind of information with no latency, and it's constantly going to be calculating. Right, and so— Basically, the way I put it is that we go on the internet now, right? It's going to be a very quaint anachronism very soon.
You'll be in the internet, of course. So what's the difference between that and the matrix? Nothing. Except that your body's not underground serving as a battery to fuel it. You're actually here walking around, but your data and you're digitalized.
You're in the matrix, but you're physically here in the matrix, you know. So, I mean, this means that basically we're going to be in ambient cyberspace. Cyberspace will be all space.
I mean, you know, you could go to the Grand Canyon and you'll still be in cyberspace. It will be very rarely places that escape this kind of... complete surrounding cyber space.
So, I mean, it'd be like being bathed in it, in effect. So you're in it, you're not going into it. So explain to me the difference of, like right now, I'm in a studio, your phone's working, my phone's working. We have internet, we're in it. It's all around us.
It is. So what's the difference? The difference is that there'll be CTV cameras, there'll be many more devices for... gathering information and sending it to different authorities or depending on what the data is, obviously collecting it, connecting it to you, and then, of course, connecting algorithms to you to predict your behaviors so that, in fact, you could be followed because they have decided that based on a certain pattern, you're going to do something illegal at any minute.
And as long as until the point to where we have. augmented reality as part of everyday life and our glasses, et cetera, et cetera. When that happens, you will then be easily nudged visually like we are now when we're using our apps, you know, and we're looking for a place to eat. We go to Yelp and we find it and it shows us how to get there.
We can be nudged. And also, Google Glass was supposed to give you information about everything you looked at, right? This will be happening.
It will be just way more information. And who knows really what kind of information it's going to be. It's interesting. Being somewhat famous, the disadvantage is. People think they know me.
And I don't know them at all. But they think they know me. I've heard that from people.
Like Bob Dylan said that about being famous. Yeah, it's weird. It's really weird.
But they don't really know you. Now, we're all kind of going through this with Facebook. You're not really showing who you really are on Facebook. You're getting this snapshot. And even if it's an accurate snapshot, it's only one snapshot.
And so... you know, the information that will be coming in front of your eyes will be that same information that could be skewed one way or another. You'll have a living kind of Wikipedia that's feeding your glasses or your eyes. That's right. This is who this man is.
Right. And we know now that these, you know, like Google itself is not a neutral information source. It has an agenda. So Why would we imagine that agenda wouldn't be spread into the entire cyberspace when it's now everywhere?
And so being in the internet means that it means a lot of things. It means that everything we do, almost everything, even things inside residences will be known. Everybody will be pretty much a known quantity in effect, data-wise.
And the surveillance, it's like I talk about this, you know, and I'll throw this out there for the leftists. Michelle Fung. Foucault, who was a postmodern theorist, wrote this book called Discipline and Punish in 1975, and he talked about this thing called panopticism, which I talk about in my first chapter. Panopticons. The panopticon was invented by Bentham, Jeremy Bentham, the 19th century philosophical radical.
He was actually a leftist. But Foucault took his idea of this prison system in which there's a central tower, and you're in these cells surrounding it. You can't look into the tower to see if the guard is in there. But they can look in to see if you're in the cell. Right.
Every single cell, it's like a chimney with all of, a round chimney with all of the cells on the outside. Right. And then in the center is the eye. Yes. Now, the thing is about this is that you don't know if you're being observed or not.
But because of the possibility of being observed at all times, you become your own surveiller. You become your own. Well, he puts it, you become the principle of your own subjection.
It used to be. It used to be God. That's right. Used to be God. Used to be God.
That's where the conscience comes from. You know, like I read a paper about Milton's Paradise Lost and talked about how God was the panoptic guard, and then because we thought he could see, because he can't see, and I believe he can't see into our minds, that we do basically act accordingly or not, and that conscience comes from that. Well, this is a kind of reinstalled, technologically, you know, God produced God.
There's a there's a sect of technology people in Silicon Valley who I'm not sure if they're serious or they're just trying to make a point. But they have built a church for the the AI God because they say. A SI, super intelligence, is going to be so godlike that we will worship it.
Kurzweil, who might have been taken for a total crank for a while, but he wasn't. Oh no. I know. Now he's, of course, a chief senior engineer at Google. His envision was that God didn't make the universe.
The universe will make God vis-a-vis human technology. so that the universe will he calls it all the dumb matter of the universe will be saturated with knowledge and it'll wake up and it'll be omniscient because though it'll know everything that there is to know that makes it omniscient right so it'll be god we'll and so instead of god creating the universe the universe creates god and this is the singularity now i don't think it's going to be such a religious wonderful mystical experience as that No, I don't think that way. I don't think that's the way it's going to go. God is still programmed, at least initially, by flawed humans.
Flawed and driven, interested and biased. The worst thing I've heard Mark Zuckerberg or any of these guys say is that we have a responsibility to make the world a better place. No, you don't.
No, you don't. Not as a corporation with that kind of power. Yeah, that's right. You have a responsibility to produce your product that people want.
Right. The minute you start to say, and you know what? This could change the world because we can help shape it. You're in very evil, dangerous territory.
You're in a totally different register. Totally different. And this is what I talk about this in the book in this first chapter. It's called woke. capitalism and what is going on with this you know this this woke corporate um mentality or you gave me a totally different view of of what was going on explain woke capitalism okay well it is you know we've seen many instances of it you know like the advertisements you know for example the gillette ad speaking of gillette where the toxic masculinity was you know uh derided and you know these guys are looking into the mirror not to shave but to to rue and try to excise from their psyche this horrible toxic masculinity, you know.
And then there's these scenes going on in which all these men are doing these terrible things. Predation on women, you know, mansplaining, you know, which means, you know, actually talking. Guy talking when a woman is in a room that's mansplaining. Things like that. And it just was this whole, you know, this whole moral...
Rhetoric and this whole moral story they were trying to purvey about how men should be, right? They even say, do the right thing, say the right thing. The right thing.
And so this, you know, and then the cap... Say the right thing. Think of that.
The right thing. Not our right thing. The. So that's very explicit. And then, of course, the Kaepernick ad, and then you have all of these corporations that are just chiming in to prove how virtuous they are, right?
Nike and the Betsy Ross sneakers. Yeah. So, I mean, my question was what is going on here? Okay, so first of all, it's corporations embracing contemporary leftism.
Now, anybody that knows the history of left and corporate America knows that it's been one of nothing but contention. So why are they now in a love embrace? Okay, this is what tortured me, not tortured, but it taunted me a bit.
I thought I had to figure this out. This was a puzzle. And so going deeply into it, looking at it and really trying to analyze it, I think that it's very clear that it's not just a marketing ploy.
It is not just a way to assuage their customer base, to be, you know, placate diverse peoples. It is part of their real agenda. And it suits their aims perfectly. And Gillette, I mean, I've studied the history of Gillette now, going all the way back to the beginning. They had an ad in 1905 that had a baby boy shaving himself.
to say to the public that you shouldn't be shaved by someone else because that's a form of putting them into slavery for you. In 1905? Yes.
Oh, I have to see that ad. That's crazy. It's in the book.
Crazy. 1905, a Gillette ad. It said, I forget what the byline is on the ad, but it's basically start immediately shaving yourself. And it seems kind of crazy to put it a razor blade in the hands of an infant but i mean i said what are they trying to kill the kid or are they suggesting they should like slots cut their throats but no they were saying that they want to train you early not to depend on others you know use people used to go to the barber to get a shave right the idea was now be self-sufficient not only because it's self-reliance and all that no it's so that you're not putting anyone else at your service he's already starting kind of social justice moralizing from the start and of course he wrote a book called world corporation in that in 1910 in which he talked about the corporation that expands and subsumes all other corporations and finally becomes the singular monopoly of the entire globe and the government at once seems like google yes that's what i'm trying to hint at you know but and it only really could work with this kind of technology.
It takes the digital world to make that possible. It takes digitalization and high-speed Internet to create a world corporation or a world system. You know, it's amazing to me that... All of the things, I grew up Catholic, I went to a Catholic school.
Me too. Did you? Yes. I went to a seminary.
Wow. Yes. I lived in a monastery. So you had to have learned about Book of Revelation. Oh, yes.
And all of that stuff seemed like that's never going to happen. There's no way. No currency. Everybody's got a number that you won't be able to buy certain goods without the mark. I tell you, isn't that incredible?
It's incredible. That's incredible. I mean, to me, well, you know what I think.
Yeah. To me, that just says, you know, there's no way a human being could have known that. Yeah.
Right? So, I mean, this is divine inspiration. Yeah, and it's...
And there's not a wasted word. No, and it's... There's no way any of that could have happened. Not then.
Not then. And I don't know of any other time that that could have happened even. You know, this is, you know, Hitler had the IBM punch cards.
That's right. You know, and so IBM was right there going, we can help you sort people. Yes, they were.
But that technology is, when we get rid of currency, which I could have. I would have said 30 years ago, we're not going to get rid of currency. Well, we're there. I haven't carried a dollar in my wallet in I don't know how long.
You know what I mean? I only do it for tips, but yeah. Yeah, yeah.
So you're sitting here. You're not using currency at all already. You can get rid of currency quite easily. Easily.
And once you do, the thing that people have not talked about... Yeah. is what New York State, what the governor of New York is doing to get around the Second Amendment. He's saying to the banks, you know, we have to do an audit of you every year. We have to send in our federal regulators to just do an audit.
And I'm paraphrasing. We can do this the hard way. We can do this the easy way. We feel that any of these corporations or any of these groups that are Building or selling guns, that will kick you into a more extensive audit. So we would just suggest that you don't do business.
And you're seeing these giant banks say, I'm not going to do business anymore. That's right. And it'll go to the individual too.
Right. An individual makes a Facebook post in support of the Second Amendment. And, you know, the bank sees it.
Which they can, obviously, and that's it. You're already having people that are speaking out. I mean, people that used to advise presidents about Islam and know the difference between a Muslim and an Islamist.
Yeah. Those people have already been not only deplatformed, their voices silenced, but they also can't use certain banking systems, they can't use credit cards, they can't use certain banks, because the banks won't accept it, because they've been marked. Yes, it's a terrifying prospect.
I mean, you know, I'm not talking just about myself, I'm talking about anybody. I mean, you know, just to see, you know, like, for example, you talked about homeless people. How will they eat? I mean, you know, you can't even give them money.
If everything's digital, there's no way to even help people like that. it's a very curious problem. I want to go back to something we touched on earlier, but I want to hear you talk more about the concept of nudge, which we've gone through, but talk about it in a way of the philosophical argument on free will. Yeah, I mean, it's really, well, you know, this is a big issue already, a problem in philosophy, of course, and, you know, determinism is of... You know, determinism is really the ruling belief amongst most philosophers today.
There's no such thing as will. It's just an illusion. We get this idea that we decide on things, but it's really deterministic like anything else in nature.
There's always a cause for every action, right? So we're just billiard balls on the table. if you will, and we're getting knocked around. We think we're doing it out of our own volition, but no. That's basically the philosophical line, you know, for the most part, in the dominance.
And when you see companies like the I can't remember his name. He's a professor up at Harvard, well-respected guy, Hillary Clinton voter, who is ringing the bell so hard saying Google is manipulating the elections. They did it in 16. He said they're much worse in 18. And he said in 2020, it could be a total skewing of this election because they're so good and no one even will recognize that they're being manipulated. They won't know because they're going to be, you said nudging.
They're going to have, everybody has predilections and beliefs. And these are going to be read. They're going to be read like an open book now.
And so using those predilections and those desires or tendencies and so forth, let me just get you a little bit closer with another little dark ad that says da-da-da-da-da. You know, Hillary Clinton is this or Trump is that. It's just a little bit closer to the side and on and on.
And it's not going to go towards Trump, okay? It's going to go towards the Democratic side and they're going to disappear stories that are positive. I had one of my researchers, I actually, I looked for something.
I was looking for a picture. I saw Trump's first... campaign rally for his second term. And I remember the first campaign rally of Barack Obama on his second term. It was an empty stadium.
Wow. And they had to shoot it differently. And because I worked at Fox that was willing to turn the camera around, I saw a very different picture. And I know there were pictures of this everywhere.
Wow. So I wanted to do something on The passion behind the Donald Trump people in his second term, which no president has had, like Trump has, even Obama. And I wanted to show those pictures.
I looked for two hours on Google. I tried everything I could to get those pictures in. It took my, my, the deepest mole that I have, a guy who knows the Internet inside and out and just is a mole.
Yeah. I called him at nine o'clock at night and said, can you find. can you find these pictures?
And he's like, oh, I know exactly. I remember seeing them. I know exactly.
3 a.m., he finally got them. Oh, yeah? 3 a.m.
Did he call you? That's it? Yeah.
He called me at 5 a.m. because I got the update. Yeah. But it is, it's, that's how hard, most people would say, I guess it didn't exist.
It's, you're going to have to deep, you know, dark web, VPN, all that, I think, basically where these things are going to be hidden. to keep it out of Google's purvey, because otherwise they're purvey, otherwise can totally control it. So I don't like the dark web, and I don't want to be part of it.
I don't like... I don't either. I don't want to go in the... I don't like to travel in the dirt. And so I don't do it.
But I think that's where the stuff, those kind of pieces of information will be found. It's a black market. Yeah.
And it's... Black markets are always caused by governments or institutions that are out of touch with either human nature or society in general. I just read a story about New Zealand and their gun ban. And that thing was passed so fast, only one representative in their parliament stood against it.
Only one. It's like 99 to 1 or 100 and something to 1. Do you know how many guns have been collected? 1.5 million guns they said they had. How many guns have been collected since that was passed months ago? They said they had 1.5 million.
1.5 million in the country. The country. I would guess that there were actually 5 to 10 million. That's my guess.
Yeah, okay. But how many have they collected since they passed that? I don't know.
They are with the people. The people who have the guns are like, I'm not turning that in. Right.
Oh, yeah, of course. I'm not turning that in. Right.
So what they've effectively done is they've made everyone a criminal. And now they're talking about, you have to come in and register your gun. You know, or it'll be a felony.
Well, now, wait a minute. So, wait. I didn't turn in my gun.
And so I have to come to you to admit that I didn't turn in my gun to register my gun. And if I don't, it's a felony. You're just piling up criminal charges.
Let me just give you a little historical context for this. Lenin, after, you know, the revolution and by 1918, was already saying, kill all those kulaks. Hang them and burn them and tell their families and publicize it in the paper. I mean, he was a...
He was the monster. A butcher. A monster.
And then he said, confiscate all guns. All guns. So, I mean, this is just, it's just par for the course.
Every dictator says that. Yeah. Every dictator says that. Yeah.
Which should tell you something about our founders that we're saying never. Confiscate guns. Never confiscate guns.
Right. Never give up your gun. And I'm not some gun freak.
What I am talking about is just, it's about rights. It's about like the rights we were endowed and the rights that we need to protect our rights that we were endowed. And one of them is that, I think.
So can I ask for your... philosophic and ethical viewpoint on this. Yeah. I've interviewed Ray Kurzweil several times.
That's curious. I love him. He's smart. And I am terrified by him. It took me seven years to get my first interview with him.
I started in the mid-90s trying to get an interview with him after I read The Age of Spiritual Machines. I read that. Okay.
And that is... eye-opening. And at the time, everybody said, he's crazy, it'll never happen.
Oh, I believed it from the minute I started reading that. And that's what we're headed towards. The age where a machine is going to say, don't, I'm lonely.
And it's going to change our relationship. They're talking now about, and I will have a point to this, but I want to take you on this journey here with me and get your... your thoughts as we go.
We have these people now saying, you know, sex robots, better than sex workers, sex bots, blah, blah, blah. I heard one psychiatrist on, I think it was Joe Rogan, that was talking about how pedophiles, it might be good to give pedophiles these children robots to molest, so they yada, yada, yada. And I'm... I'm listening to this in my car and I'm shouting, no, the minute those things and it's going to happen, claim consciousness. Are we not slave owners?
Well, that's, there's a very big question there. The question is if they're, if they are in doubt, if they do have consciousness, funny, funny thing is as we're going to be considered having no will, they are going to be considered as having a will. Right.
You know, I mean, I forget the guy who wrote The Shallows, a great book, about how what's happening is we're becoming artificial intelligence and machines are becoming more human. Yes. So we're going opposite directions. Opposite directions.
Machines becoming sentient, human beings becoming robotic. Right. So what defines life? What, how are we going to, nobody's even talking about that and I think we could be ten years away from that. Yeah.
Well. What defines life? Ray Kurzweil says just a pattern of, you know, of your brain.
That's all you are, is just a pattern of how you think. I can reproduce that. I can store that.
I can download it into a machine. His exact quote to me is, no one will ever die. And I'm like, no, that's not life.
Okay. But if you don't believe in a spirit, if you don't believe in a divine spark, What's life? I think it is this. To do something that is not rational, that is not self-interested, that doesn't make sense, that follows no algorithms, that has no purpose in terms of the worldly value system, and defies the world.
it that will prove you're not a robot that'll prove you're a living thing a sentient being with who is endowed with a will and a spirit because you will resist this whole shebang and And this is what I get into in the conclusion of the book. I'm not talking about revolution, take over Google. We must storm, you know, Google.
We must overcome and we take over the information means of production. That'll be a worse nightmare because then we'll have totalitarians that want to kill people instead of just people that want to control. They want to kill the controllers.
And it'll be a new set of oligarchs anyway. So it's a spiritual situation. in my opinion it's a spiritual situation it's a situation in which they're going to be purveying narratives to greater and greater extents with more data to back them up which means they're going to be harder to harder to resist harder to deny you know and harder to um overcome harder to have a prerogative different from that and so i think the battle is the soul i know i think it's actually in the soul uh call me a crank if you will i don't care because that's where i think it's the only thing that's the only thing is the is they're going to be telling you who you are what you are what you're going to do all these things and predicting it and and one is going to have to draw from some other source that isn't theirs that isn't their narrative my father said The two most powerful words in any language is I am. That's what God said to Moses, I am that I am.
You should always say send me, I am that I am. And he warned me, he said, if you don't intentionally fill the blank in after the words I am, the world is full of people that will fill it in for you. Yes. And when you look at what Common Core, what Bill Gates said, that his vision is for Common Core, and we're close to this now, not necessarily in Common Core, but the actual scanning of the eye.
Once they can look into your eyes, they can predict almost anything. They will know more about you that way than any other way. And his point was, we're going to have those cameras right on the screens so it can look into the kids, so we can then sort them. and show them exactly what business line they should be trained for.
It's basically training robots to go out into the world and feed business. But we'll be able to show them where they need to go. Well, that's the company or an algorithm filling in the blank of idea. Yeah, I mean, this was already in 2010, there was a conference at NYU, and it was called Your Brain on Google. And the idea was you're not going to have to go searching on some computer or phone or anything like that.
You're just going to be connected to Google. It'll be an implant in your brain, and you'll be on the web. You know, picking up different. And so the thing is, every server or every servent, as they call it in computer technology, there's servents with the ENT, and there's servers. Every servent is also a server.
That means. that everybody's brain if it is in fact on the web will be open information it'll be it'll be some if there's a way to translate it into into collective into a language it's a hive yeah but they'll have to have a way to translate the thinking or consciousness into a language that is readable by the machine and then translatable to the human but that's very it's i mean so i say that i think consciousness is going to be not only that we're going to be the internet we're not going to be just bathed in it. It's going to be in our heads and it's going to be able to tap into our... It's transhumanism.
Yeah, transhumanism. Anybody who thinks that's crazy, that was the first chapter in, I don't remember which book from Al Gore, but one of his big, you know, one of his big books. It was all about transhumanism. People don't understand.
That's why Stephen Hawking said at the end of his life, I don't think humans will exist by 2050. He didn't mean that we would die out. He meant that we would be augmented. That's right.
Supplanted by a successor species. So what happens to, again, this comes to the life part of it. You're augmented.
You're augmented. You've already been shaped by somebody telling you who you're supposed to be. Then you're augmented.
When I asked Ray Kurzweil, what if I just wanted to be human? He looked at me like I was from another planet. Why would you want that?
That's exactly what he said. Why would you want that? And I said, I don't know, because I like the mistakes.
He said, well, mistakes. I learn from those. I grow from those.
And he said... Well, no one will do that because, first of all, you won't be able to survive. You won't be able to compete. And you will actually, as I thought about this more and more, you'll actually be a danger to other people because you'll be so slow. Incompetent, yeah.
You'll be like a real bad driver on the highway at 30 miles an hour on a speedway. Exactly right. You will be so slow that you will be an obstacle. The society will have to remove you.
and either force you to upgrade or force you to live over here. Does that seem reasonable to you, logical? I mean, no, I'm just talking logical on the pathways that we're on.
Yeah, that sounds right. And if he was a nut, if it was all crazy, and I read The Singularity is Near, and I was reading all this stuff while I was working in the Robotics Institute, I asked these programmers, what do you think of Kurzweil? Ah, he's a crank. Don't even think about it. Don't worry about it.
That's not what we're dealing with. They said, you know... AI was just going to be distributed intelligence, little pieces of software passing along information to other little pieces and all that. Distributed intelligence is what it was called. Agents.
Agents. Technology. But then Google hired the guy.
And it's investing. Who knows how many millions into singularity technology. Now, you don't just do that unless there's something there. You know, I mean, this is not craziness. This is real stuff.
They're doing it. And I think most scientists believe that it may be on the horizon. They just think that he's too optimistic now. Yeah, well, he moves his goalposts back.
But he's also consistently right on a lot of things. A lot of things. Yeah.
A lot of things. He predicted a lot of things. There's no question. He's done some incredible technologies. For example, OCR technology is his.
You know, being able to scan that thing and then turn it back into words from the picture. I mean, he's a guy that's brilliant. I mean, he's brilliant. So it doesn't mean his directionality is proper or right.
Yeah. So let me go back to it's the spirit. Yeah. Okay. Two things on this.
I think I have evidence that that is true. Because do you remember the... The... Microsoft, I think it was Microsoft program, that could tweet for you. You would feed in all of the tweets, and then it would know you, and then it would start tweeting.
And on day number one, people were amazed because it was exactly what they would have said. Wow. Okay?
Yeah. By day five, they had to shut it down because it was so nasty. Yeah.
Okay? Yeah. And I thought to myself, that's what... super intelligence just may be because it is the it's the god governor usually it's the conscience that makes you say i don't want to be that way i don't i shouldn't go down this road and it corrects so you'll learn you'll do something that'll make you feel bad or it gives you bad consequences and you correct but if if you don't have that certain something that Brings you say you shouldn't be doing this.
You're just gonna go over the cliff. I mean, you know, I know of a particular sociopath Who confessed to me that he has never felt three of these three emotions fear guilt or shame Okay, and Justifies it because he's a genius Okay, that's what they said to me which proved to me that this person is entirely dangerous and get the hell away from them okay that was the scariest thing i've ever heard i mean from a person admitting it point blank in writing so that That's the problem. You have there is a type of mentality and it's in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The character I forget his name. Anyway, the character, the main character thinks he's super moral.
He's a superman and he has the right to decide whether this woman, this pawnbroker can live or die. So he decides that she's worthless and actually evil and so he kills her. And that is his choice and there's something about genius that allows complete, you know, a supervention of morality.
And this is the issue I think you're getting at here is that supreme intelligence like this will think that it knows whether or not it can do anything at all. And it's no reason to obey any morality of anybody who's underneath it intelligence-wise. We're not obeying the morality of flies.
That's correct. You know what I mean? Right. I don't even know, nor do I care about their morality. Kurzweil told me, Glenn, you got to keep yourself healthy until 2030. Yeah, he's a vitamin freak and he's, you know.
Right. And by 2030, there will be no death. Yeah. Now, if we can't decide right now what... Life is when life begins.
Let me take you to a world where you're diagnosed with cancer. And we haven't cured cancer for some unknown reason. But let's just say it's cancer or something like that in the future that is just so expensive. Right.
and you have this disease, why even look for the cure for that disease or spend any money on that disease if I can say, oh, well, I'm just going to download you. So you're going to live forever anyway. Your body's got cancer.
Don't worry about it. We're going to ship you over here. Right.
Life means nothing. Yeah. When I said that to Ray, he said, ah, well, that'll never happen. And I said, why?
And he said, because it'll never happen. People won't be like that. What exactly will never happen?
They won't put them on the super? We won't just look at dollars and cents and we won't just have some algorithm that says, you know what, it's cheaper to keep you alive in the silicon. Oh, yeah, I see, yeah.
It'll be your, yeah, they talk about, but... You know, there's liberal eugenics now, you know. Right.
This is kind of like a liberal euthanasia, in effect. Right. With a computer alternative, right? Yeah, that's very frightening. And with the determinations not being made by human agents, perhaps.
So is the... Oh, absolutely not. Yeah.
Absolutely not. So will the... Is the answer here... Much of the West currently, it seems, runs on wealth of nations, Adam Smith, and not moral sentiments. Theory of moral sentiments.
I was just mentioning that, that you're one of the very few people who knows that book outside of a university in an 18th century class. That's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy.
Everybody should know that. Everybody should know it. Every single person.
I'm told the number one problem at... Wharton School of Business now is, you know, they'll lay out a case study and they'll say, OK, was this right or wrong? And there's no basis for determining it.
And they the number one question from the whole class is, did it make money? And he's like, I'm not asking you that. Yeah, I'm asking, is this right or wrong?
There is no moral sentiment. There is no governor. There is no reason. There's no way to determine right or wrong because there is no right or wrong. But the thing is that Adam Smith was pointing out is it cannot be a supervenient state.
It has to be implanted in the self. And that's where it comes from. It comes from you.
You see another person suffering and that causes you to behave differently. It is not about an overseer, right? So that's what's beautiful about the theory of moral sentiments. It is a co- It's a co-recognition of each other's rights and each other's needs and each other's relate you know relationships to each other like how we're how we're connected and all that so and it's done it's done through visuality I mean he talks about you know it's a lot of visual recognition right the eyesight is a big part of I don't mean necessarily physical eyesight, but it is the acknowledgement of others. It's seeing the homeless person, not walking by them.
Right. Actually acknowledging and seeing and feeling something in connection with that. Percy Shelley wrote a very similar thing in the defense of poetry in which he said that without sympathy or without imagination, you can't have sympathy. Without sympathy, you cannot have morality. So.
You have to be able to imagine what it's like to be in someone else's shoes in order to be moral toward them. But the thing that I want to emphasize here, and it's a great book to bring up, is that it's done on the individual level and it's not superimposed by anybody. It's done on the individual level, and the secret here is that because we are a collection of individuals, that will create the invisible hand. So if we're good people as individuals, we are going to create good things.
Yeah, the invisible hand will be spanking us or strangling us. Right, or giving us heroin. Right.
It will give you. It's the Internet. It's neither good nor bad.
It's who we are, you know, better people would use this for discovery and learning. That's right. All of this.
We're using it for porn. I said the same thing I said in the book. It's not so much the state of the art as it is the state of the world. And because the state of the art doesn't necessarily determine. You know, there are technological determinists out there and they're very rife now.
There's a ton of them that think. They think that actually we have no control of technology at all. It's almost autonomously developing itself in effect, parallel to our existence, and that we can't really change it.
There's no way around it. There's this kind of inevitability idea that there's no way to stop this progress or whatever you want to call it of technology. It's almost self-motivating, autonomous, and so forth. But I don't buy it. And also I don't buy that it's a...
that it has to be pernicious in its use. You shared your book with me. I want to share, not my book, I want to share something with you that I asked you about and you said you had not heard of it, nobody has.
And you are going to be one of the few people that I've ever shared this with that will go, oh my gosh. Thank you, I feel privileged. Rudyard Kipling, he saw World War I come, he heard all the arguments, he said, this is insanity, the world is going insane, and he visited graveyards for the rest of his life and serviced people's graves for the rest of his life.
He wrote a poem after World War I, and it's all been but erased. And he wrote it as a warning to future generations. Listen to this. It's called The Gods of the Copybook Headings. Copybook headings are those things that were used in school where it said, you know, water will wet or God is good, and it was in cursive, and you would copy that.
I see, yeah. So everything at the top were truths. I see, truisms that you copied and then learned how to emulate.
Right, okay. Okay, great. As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the gods of the marketplace.
Peering through reverent fingers, I watch them flourish and fall. And the gods of the copybook headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in the trees when they met us.
They showed us, each in turn, that water would certainly wet us, as fire would certainly burn. But... We found them lacking in uplift, vision, and breadth of mind.
So we left them to teach the gorillas while we followed the march of mankind. As we moved, we moved as the spirit listed. They never altered their pace, being neither cloud nor wind-born like the gods of the marketplace. But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come that a tribe had been wiped off its ice field or the lights had gone out in Rome. With the hopes that our world is built on that they were utterly out of touch.
After all, they denied the moon was Stilton. They denied she was even Dutch. They denied that wishes were horses. They denied that pigs had wings.
So we worship the gods of the market who promised us all these beautiful things. When the Cambrian shores were forming, they promised us perpetual peace. They swore if we just gave them our weapons. The wars of the tribes would cease, but when we disarmed, they sold us and delivered us bound to our foe. And the gods of the copybook heading said, stick to the devil you know.
On the first feminine sandstones, we were promised a fuller life, which started out by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife. Till all of our women had no more children. and our men lost reason and faith. And the gods of the copybook headings said, The wages of sin is death.
In the Carboniferous epic, we were promised abundance for all by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul. But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy. And the gods of the copybook heading said, If you do not work, you shall die.
Then the gods of the market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew. And the hearts of the meanest were humbled. and began to believe it were true, that all is not gold that glitters, and two and two do make four, and the gods of the copybook headings limped up to explain it once more, as it will be in the future.
It was the birth of man. There are only four things certain since social progress began, that the dog returns to his vomit and the sow returns to her mire and the burnt fool's bandaged finger. goes wobbling back to the fire.
And after all of this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins, when all men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins, as surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn, the gods of the copybook headings, with terror and slaughter, return. Wow. Wow. Wow.
Is that one of the greatest things? It's incredible. That's incredible. Incredible. I mean, the prophecy of it.
The prophecy. And he was, all he was doing was writing down, this is what they're going to do. Right.
This is what they're going to do. And I keep, I think of this all of the time. And after this is accomplished and the brave new world begins, it's going to reset itself.
It has truth. We have no truth. Truth will restore itself.
God help us. Because there's got to be, this is like, to me, it's the etching in the stone. I mean, this is because otherwise we have nothing.
But here's the thing that makes me really sad about this. Knowing this piece of work and knowing that Rudyard Kipling has been utterly excised from all reading lists in every. Every place on earth for one thing.
Yeah. For the comment about, for writing about the white man's burden. Yeah. He is a goner.
And yet George Bernard Shaw is held as a genius. Right. The guy who came up with there's got to be a way to just put them in some sort of a gas chamber. I mean, you know, I mean. Oh, horrible.
People that were monsters have been. sanctified and then this guy who's who's brilliant and obviously soul-filled yes just completely erased may you never be erased thank you so much i hope that doesn't happen god bless