Hey everybody, KMO here with episode number 24 of the KMO Show.
I am walking across my neighbor's yard right now with a new clip-on mic from Rode.
It's got a windsock on it and the wind is really blowing right now, so we'll see.
This is a test.
I just spent a couple hours in a tech support chat with Rode trying to get this thing to
work with my phone and no luck.
But it works on its own.
I can record natively.
Anyway, what do you care?
As long as you get the podcast.
So here's the podcast.
This is a conversation with Peter Clark.
Peter is an author and I'll ask him about himself in the actual conversations.
So you'll get a better rundown of who he is and what he's about.
But I know him because we were both guests on another podcast recently, one that hasn't
actually been released yet.
So this follow-up conversation is going to make it to the web first.
But I read a book by Peter just recently.
It's a very short book.
It's very easy to read.
And as I'll say repeatedly in the conversation you're about to hear, it's very lighthearted
and easy book to take in.
It is not heavy reading at all, which isn't to say that it's trivial or superficial.
It isn't.
In fact, the conversation that you're about to hear is basically a lot of the same topics
covered in the book.
So we'll be talking about memory and belief and religion and evolutionary psychology,
the future, technology, transhumanism, all kinds of fun stuff.
So here's my conversation with Peter Clarke.
Hey, everybody.
KMO here.
And I am talking with Peter Clarke, the author of Many Things.
But we're going to start off talking about his book.
I am reluctant to call it a novel, but it is fiction so far.
What is it?
The Singularity Survival Guide?
Yes.
Did I get something out of order?
No, that's right.
It does have a subtitle too.
It's a Singularity Survival Guide, How to Get on the Good Side of Your Future Robot
Over Lords.
And that subtitle kind of like emphasizes the point that it's a little, you know, in the
realm of satire.
Good.
Yeah, I think one of the reviewers on Amazon missed the satire indicators.
Yeah, that has happened.
But you know, when you get a one star review, it means somebody other than just your friends
has read the book.
That's true too.
You're right.
So we have very indirectly informed the listeners that you have written a book about the singularity,
which is also satirical.
So say more.
Okay, so this was, oh man, maybe close to probably seven years ago, I had this idea
in my head that I was going to write a serious book about the coming singularity and, you
know, maybe somewhat in the realm of like, is humanity going to survive the upcoming
singularity?
Of the idea of artificial intelligence becoming more intelligent than human beings.
So effectively, you know, we are kind of like creating a robot overlord effectively.
And very smart people say this.
It is within the realm of possibility.
But yeah, when I was writing this a number of years ago, I just couldn't crack it.
I couldn't get it to work.
It was just so dry and so boring.
And I realized kind of early on, I just didn't really know what I was talking about.
You know, I was working in Silicon Valley.
I was working with a lot of people who do know, you know, have a background in this.
But it would take so much research to do this properly that I just kind of abandoned it.
But it was so much fun.
I just kind of like kept coming back to it.
And eventually I realized that with my particular skill set, I am more of a novelist, I should
write this as a satire.
And I should have fun with it rather than trying to like force it into something that
I just wasn't capable of doing.
And immediately, as soon as I made that turn where, oh, this is like a satirical thing.
I had so much fun with it.
And I literally wrote the thing in less than three months.
It just kind of came right out of me.
And I've always been very happy with how it turned out, even though I did just kind of
like whip it out.
And maybe I'll say a little bit more to describe the book itself.
I realize I just kind of glossed over that.
So the idea of the book is that it is fiction, this premise, that there is this group of
researchers in Silicon Valley.
And they create a program that spits out this massive tome about how humanity can survive
the singularity.
But there's like a lawsuit.
And like sort of the vast majority of this thing gets lost.
But we have these scraps left.
These scraps of this text.
And that's within this book.
And so the book is quote unquote written by artificial intelligence telling us how to
survive the singularity.
And the author is then called Helen.
So it's this fictitious author that's a robot called Helen writing the book.
And then kind of from there, the hilarity just kind of like, I think, takes off in that
it has chapters about how to talk to AI.
And how to what clothes to wear.
Like it gets very, very silly.
But yeah, that's the idea.
Well I was very pleasantly surprised and relieved when I got into it and discovered that it
was satire.
Because I was not interested in reading yet another Oh, All of Our Dreams Are Going to
Come True, you know, when the singularity hits book.
I was totally into that in the 90s.
Even before Ray Kurzweil was using the term singularity, I was on board.
I was really moved by his book In the Age of Spiritual Machines.
But that was, you know, going on 30 years ago.
So many people discover the concept and get really excited about it.
And they basically just write, you know, an intro to the topic again.
And I was not looking forward to reading that.
So when I first started reading your introduction, I was like, wait a second, that's not true.
Oh, oh, I get it.
Oh, that's great.
So I wanted to share a chapter and, you know, the chapters are super short.
It's a very easy read.
So I want to share just a chapter and it's very quick, as I say.
This is the chapter entitled Go Ahead and Worship Your New God.
By all means, rebel your passionate little heart out.
Fuck authority.
Gone with the evil robots.
But at the end of the day, you are the one made of expendable meat, and your robot overlord
may not have the programmed patience to listen to your grievances.
Instead, consider taking a lesson from a historical deity who prescribed, of all things, humility
in the face of subjugation.
But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right
cheek, turn to him the other also.
Matthew, Book 5, Verse 39.
Fanatic religious people may not get much right when it comes to navigating the modern
world, but they have figured out how to, more or less, carry on while presumably living
under the watchful eye of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing being.
Presented with the question, why do you love and worship your God, despite his evil and
vindictive ways, the faithful religious person answers, because he's God.
So by definition, what he says is worthy of praise.
Get it?
That's not optimism talking, nor is it pessimism.
It's die-hard fatalism.
And in some cases, when the cards are stacked that much against you, it's all there is left.
So, there's a taste to the book, which, as I say, I was so pleasantly surprised when
I figured out it wasn't just another Singularity 101 primer.
Yeah, that's actually kind of an interesting note, is that as soon as I did realize I could
have fun with this and play around with it and be totally satirical, it did open up everything
under the sun that I could talk about.
I could bring in religion, I could bring in philosophy, I could bring in social commentary.
It just opened up the doors about what is available.
And for any literary folks out there, I know that you write some sci-fi, so you might appreciate
this, the style of it is very much taken from, or taken in reference from this guy, J.P.
Dunleavy.
He's an American novelist who is most famous for the novel, The Ginger Man, but he's very
much a stylist.
And he wrote this book called The Expirgated Code about, again, it's like a satire book
about how to live properly and how to go on dates with women.
It's very, very silly at the same time.
But he has this style that I always gravitated towards.
And so I would actually read some of his book and then sit down and write The Singularity
Survival Guide so I could channel his voice a little bit, because I typically don't write
in that specific style.
And so I very much was leaning on his literary brilliance.
Anybody out there, I would highly recommend J.P. Dunleavy.
His book, The Ginger Man, just to throw it out there, Johnny Depp has been trying to
turn that into a movie for like 30 years, but J.P. Dunleavy never wanted his books to
be made into movies, so it never happened.
But yeah, it's like that caliber.
Well, you know, I respect the I never want my books made into movies and holding the
line there more than I respect the Alan Moore version of, well, I sold the film rights to
my movies or to my comics because I thought they'd never get made.
Now that they got made, I disown them.
But I'm keeping the money.
Good point.
Yeah, good point.
I'm keeping the money.
Maybe just saying that to save face.
Yeah.
Well, what do you do?
I hate to say it, but for your day job.
So I went to law school and never really wanted to be a lawyer.
So I've kind of done random jobs on the periphery of the legal system.
So it is a little boring.
But I worked for Indiegogo for a while as a content manager there.
I worked for Findlaw as a content manager with them.
Right now I work for the state government of California.
So I'm with the Judicial Council of California and doing kind of semi tech stuff, but still
kind of in the legal realm.
So yeah, nothing too exciting.
So your connection to people in the tech world is just a social connection?
I mean, kind of more or less.
I've worked for, you know, I always work with developers, right?
I'm always down the hall from actual people who work on, you know, have side gigs, working
on like automated vehicles and stuff like that.
And I mean, I live in Sacramento right now, but when I lived in San Francisco, it's real
that it's very easy to rub shoulders with people who are doing radical, innovative things.
I mean, I would get off work and you would just like, you know, walk two blocks and you
can sit in on, you know, after work social hour about people who are like actually developing
automated vehicles and or just kind of like whatever.
There's a lot of that going on there.
So I did, you know, a lot of people are doing like finance crypto stuff that I find a little
boring.
But yeah, I mean, it's pretty easy to meet people like that in San Francisco, not so
much in Sacramento anymore.
But yeah, when I lived there, it was very easy.
And do you remember when and where you first encountered the notion of the singularity?
Wow, good, good question.
I think it was actually probably through Zoltan Istvan, if you're familiar with him.
And I'm not sure where I encountered him, but he's a transhumanist.
And back in, I think it was 2016, he ran for president.
And so he was like all over the news for a hot minute.
And I ended up meeting him at a conference in Oakland, the Biohack the Planet conference.
And I've always been kind of even to this day, kind of inspired by him a little bit.
He's a character who's worth looking up because he does this interesting thing where he is
very, very, very much into concepts like the singularity and robots and just like every
radical futurist thing.
He's very into it.
But at the same time, he is very much like a traditional manly man.
He's into athletics and sports.
And he's very kind of nuts and crazy.
He invented the sport of surfing down volcanoes.
And he circumnavigated the globe in his own boat kind of thing.
He's just a nuts dude.
Because you think of someone who's into the singularity and you just think of a nerd at
a desk or something like this.
And he's the opposite of that.
And I've just always really appreciated that because I think that humanity should hold
on to our humanity and hold on to our animal urges at some level, even if we do merge with
machines at some point in time.
I think he's a good model for that.
But yeah, I was kind of getting into him right around the time that I wrote this book.
So if I had to guess, probably it was from his influence.
Well, I had somebody contact me within the last 24 hours demanding that I renounce transhumanism.
And I'm not like an avowed transhumanist.
That word appears nowhere in any of my bios or anything.
But this person thought he sniffed out some transhumanism in one of my posts.
And he said, tell me you're not a transhumanist or I'm out.
I'm like, OK, whatever, dude.
You do you.
But it got me thinking about, well, what does that word even mean these days?
Because I was talking to people about transhumanism back in the 90s, really before there was a
World Wide Web on Usenet and on listserv discussion groups and things like that.
And at the time, trans as in transgenderism, it was not any sort of cultural hot button.
And nobody associated transhumanism with that.
And now that association is like front and center for a lot of people on both left and
right, which I find very annoying.
So it's such a thought stopper in terms of, oh, well, if you're a transhumanist, that
means you're trans.
That means you're my cultural enemy.
Or even worse, oh, it means you're on my team.
So you must share all of these assumptions as well.
And it's like, oh, please.
So in many instances, I'd rather not talk about transhumanism at all in the current
context.
But what does it actually mean?
Here we are.
You're in Sacramento, and I'm in Berryville, Arkansas.
And we are carrying on a real time discussion.
We can almost make eye contacts.
We can certainly see each other's faces and read body language and things like that.
And this was science fiction not that many decades ago.
And it was an impractical but plausible, hopeful reality a couple of decades ago.
And now it's totally routine.
And it's kind of like telepathy.
It's kind of like, what's the exact phrase I'm looking for?
Oh, yeah, telepathy.
Communicating at a distance.
How integrated into our bodies does the technology have to be in order to count as transhumanism?
Yeah, I like this question because I've actually written about this quite a bit.
I'm going to jump in at random places there, I think.
But I do want to start out by saying I feel your exact same kind of cringe, maybe for
a better word, like for a better word, about the term transhumanism.
And I've kind of stepped away from it a little bit myself.
And I say more like futurist, futurism.
My podcast is called Team Futurism for kind of like that reason.
And also, there's a critique that transhumanists, a lot of them are just in like an anti-death
cult, you can kind of say, because they're obsessed with health.
At some level, which I'm totally fine with.
But like I see that that is a valid critique.
But one thing that I find very fascinating about transhumanism, the traditional, in the
traditional sense, and this could cut either as a critique or not, depending on who you
are and how you look at it.
And I'm curious about this person who said that they're out if you keep talking about
transhumanism.
I wonder how they land on this.
Because transhumanism inherently has a lot of religious undertones in the sense that
it is all about defeating death at some level.
And whether you're merging with machines or our consciousness is in the cloud or we're
creating God through artificial intelligence, it is about defeating death.
That's like basically the project there.
And if you go back in history, the roots of transhumanism, you can find it in religion
or in ancient mythology.
So like the story of, well, Zarathustra to go way back, here like a little Christianity
in a lot of ways, except for in this one particular way where in Zarathustraism or Zoroastroism,
I guess, humans could find knowledge all on their own.
Whereas if you read the Bible, all knowledge and wisdom comes from God himself.
It's like, don't question God.
Right.
That's like the premise of Christianity.
Whereas in Zoroastroism, humans could go out into the world and discover truth on their
own.
And that like is one foundation of this that led off to more of like a transhumanist way
of looking at the world that like we can solve our own problems, we can solve our diseases
and we can ultimately conquer death.
And so you see this a little bit in the story of Prometheus too.
You know, humanity taking fire from the gods, very much the same sort of thing.
And if you fast forward to modern times, all those like religious undertones are all still
very much there because to be a transhumanist and to like be all in on it, you are an atheist
who just does not want to die and you're leaning into technology to save you in the same way
the religious person is leaning into God to save them in like an afterlife scenario.
So yeah, like that religious undertone thing I think is just like ultimately super fascinating
because I don't know, a lot of people say that humanity needs religion.
That's kind of baked into us.
I go back and forth on whether or not that's true, but that might be true.
Right.
And if we do need religion at some like fundamental level, I mean, transhumanism is there for
the atheists.
It is kind of just like there for us.
A lot of different ways to go with that.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is about Gilgamesh searching for a cure for death.
And that's one of the oldest stories we know.
The Daoists, they're not alchemists, but they're sort of the Chinese equivalent of medieval
European alchemists.
They were looking for some process that would almost infinitely extend their lives.
So this desire for more life, as Roy Batty says to Elden Tyrell near the end of Blade
Runner, I want more life, fucker.
We have a lot of us want more life and I certainly want more youthful health.
I'm 56 and I wish I could go back to my 28 year old body.
That'd be a good place to stop, I think.
Yeah, I mean, it's certainly universal.
The question of is religion innate?
Is it sort of built into human psychology?
That's how you define religion, but I think the metrics are pretty clear.
Outside of the hyper prosperous tech and academic sphere, just out in the rest of the population,
religious people have better life outcomes.
They have more stable family lives, they tend to make more money, they have a community
in their church, they have a lot of people that they know that aren't people from work,
and they all share something in common.
And it's a deeply held conviction that they share in common.
That's a good thing to have.
Human beings, humans, human animals are evolved to survive cooperatively in bands, and typically
in competition with other human bands.
And we differentiate our people from those people by our memes, by the way we talk, by
the gods we worship, by the songs we sing.
So yeah, I think that you have to define religion according to some non-essential aspect in
order to say that it's not really innate to human psychology.
If I could remove the word religion, I think that I could still make the argument and just
say that humans need stories.
We need a compelling story to get ourselves out of bed in the morning and to justify how
hard life is.
And it could be anything.
I mean, we tell ourselves stories all the time, even just the story that I'm my family,
right?
Let's say you have a wife and kids and you call it a family.
Just like the word family has a story involved in it.
It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
It's all kind of there.
Just the word itself, family.
But going off beyond that, I think that we have the nationalist story that we're all
Americans and we're all in this together.
We have a human story that we're trying to, or many of us are trying to get off this planet
and be an interplanetary species.
We have the transhumanist story that we are trying to defeat death.
And maybe it's through scientists looking through microscopes or AI geeks somehow getting
our consciousness to merge with the machines.
There are all these like grand, amazing stories.
And you can kind of like tie yourself to any one of them and have that be your kind of
like meaning and purpose in life.
And I think that any one of those can also like serve the purpose of religion, minus
the fact that you kind of pointed out about like how traditional religious people have
a community that's baked in.
I think that it's kind of unfortunate that right now in this particular moment in time
in America, we all are kind of spread out.
Like my parents live two states away and my brother also lives two states away.
And my friends live in different cities across the country.
And it's really hard to have one sense of community.
And also like our cities are just not built for this.
Our cities are built by suburban sprawl.
And so we don't have like an instant community and our quote unquote new religions, if we
call them that, like transhumanism or wanting to go to the stars or whatever.
There's nothing baked in there for having a community and having like a weekly potluck
or whatever.
I grew up going to a church every week and it was nice.
Like it was annoying when I was a kid to have to go or whatever, but like it was nice.
I had a lot of friends.
And I do think that that's something that we should as a society work slightly harder
to recreate outside of traditional religion.
You know, there are people on what I would call the dissident right.
But I'm not a leftist.
I grew up libertarian, you know, and I used to define that as every most people did as
being socially liberal and economically conservative.
And now that formulation doesn't really hold anymore.
You know, the societal values have so gone off the rails and there's nobody with any
access to the levers of power who's a genuine economic libertarian.
True.
Yeah, so, you know, I'm just not attached to that label anymore.
And I haven't been for quite a while.
But I am certainly sympathetic to a lot of people on the cultural right.
And I've noticed I've sort of been investigating the dissident rights community on Substack.
And I didn't even know that phrase dissident right like six months ago.
And it's very different from the alt right because, you know, the alt right tends to
be very sort of shock oriented and confrontational and in your face.
And the dissident right is much more it's intellectual and it's just polite.
It's more congenial and social.
More literary too, I've noticed.
But there's a big division between Christians and atheists who are also right wingers who,
you know, probably a lot of them would have been libertarians a couple of decades ago.
And the atheists, they need something to go in the place of God.
So they've sort of settled on Nietzsche and this notion of the will to power and a vitalist
force that drives us to, you know, strive and achieve and overcome and whatnot.
And some people don't really see that as adequate.
It's not an adequate social, you know, it doesn't provide the social cohesion that a
religious community does.
And so, you know, some people have tried just they've tried to abide by Pascal's Wager.
You know, Pascal says, look, if you worship God and you're wrong, you haven't really lost
anything, you know, but if the whole Christian cosmology is true and you say it's not, well,
you're going to hell.
So that's an easy bet, you know, bet on God, even if the argument for it isn't very good.
But how do you do that?
Because you don't get to choose what you believe.
And Pascal's solution is, well, you know, fake it till you make it.
Go to church, say your prayers, even though you don't feel it.
And Eric Weinstein said something like this fairly recently on a podcast.
He said, yeah, you can't choose to believe any particular thing all the time, but, you
know, sometimes you can.
So go to church, you know, and sometimes it'll click, sometimes it'll work for you.
And I actually considered that because here I live in a small town and, you know, I kind
of thought about getting involved with the local Catholic Church.
Also there's, I've been trying to learn Spanish forever and it's just, I can tell it's not
anything I'm going to do on my own.
I'm going to have to be around some Spanish speaking people and they go to the Catholic
Church.
But at the same time, I've heard this expressed, you know, elsewhere, and it also occurred
to me, that's not really fair to that church community, you know, to that community of
actual believers for me to go in, you know, sort of like Catholic curious or theologically
curious, but not really feeling it, not connected to it.
It seems sort of abusive to that community or extractive or, you know, sort of mercenary.
So I never did follow through with that, you know, that notion.
So I will stop there and let you talk about religion.
Okay.
Well, yeah, that boy, that sparked a lot of thoughts.
One thought is that, are you familiar with Simone Collins, Simone and Malcolm Collins?
They're a little bit on the dissident right, I think, but they came into mind because I
actually just bought a book of theirs off Amazon and have not started yet, other than
just to skim a couple of chapters.
But they have this book about how to create the perfect life or how to live the perfect
life, that sort of thing.
And so they would, you said just now that you can't exactly choose your beliefs and
they have, like their book is all about how you totally can.
You can intentionally choose your beliefs and then like your life will go out from there
rather than just like living your life and waiting for your beliefs to like hit you over
the head.
You can choose them a priori and then like go out from there.
I think that that's an interesting thing.
I have not thought about this very much, but I do have a book that I'm very curious to
read because it kind of like, it strikes me a little bit because I grew up religious and
I do think about this all the time, that a large chunk of my life was determined by my
parents' religion.
Like they just chose that for me.
I didn't choose that.
Whereas I chose to be more of like an atheist.
And just the fact that I chose it, it gave me like a power in the future of my life and
where I can go from there.
And I really like that.
And I do kind of feel that I could actually choose something else at the same time.
I totally could.
Maybe it would feel a little grifter-y at first, but we can convince ourselves of anything
at some level.
Anyway, that's maybe a tangent, but yeah, I want to go back to the dissident right thing.
I follow these people.
They just crop up a lot, especially on Twitter for me, also a little bit on Substack.
I'm more of a leftist, I think, but I grew up so conservative.
I still am completely comfortable around conservatives of all stripes.
But I have noticed this divide in the world of the dissident right that I think is so
fascinating.
Where are you familiar with Bronze Age Pervert?
I know the name, but I haven't read any of his stuff.
So he has a book called The Bronze Age Mindset, which I read last year, and I actually recommend
people read.
It's often called like, oh, like the worst book ever.
Like it's so horrible and it's so fascist, et cetera, et cetera.
I think people should just like read it, not fear monger around it.
So I did that actually.
And it's worth reading.
And I think for this one particular reason, if you are maybe into futurism or sci-fi thoughts,
in that it is the exact opposite of futurism.
It is the book that is, if futurism was one thing, it is the book that is the exact opposite.
And for me, reading The Bronze Age Mindset, which is literally about trying to return
society and our lifestyle to the time of the ancient Greeks, where the purpose and the
meaning of life was to fight battles, like literal battles.
And that is how you feel like fully alive and fully in the moment and fully present,
rather than like living in suburbia and like taking weekly trips to Walmart, which is like
so not only emasculating, but like dehumanizing.
It's so like, and the way he paints this in a way that I'm so on board with.
So there's that, like returning to the ancient Greeks.
That is exactly the polar opposite of what the project of futurism is, because futurism
is forward looking.
It's looking forward, not backwards.
And I think that any thinking person will realize that there is a lot of wisdom to be
had by looking backwards.
But I just like if you are any sort of a futurist or transhumanist, that is the worldview that
you are actually legitimately fighting against at a very like fundamental level.
So I think that people should read that as a way to, you know, like actually ground themselves
in what the project of futurism is, if you are a futurist.
And I think about it all the time.
And maybe one more little note here that, again, I just think about like all the time
is that the guy Zoltan Istvan, who I mentioned earlier, who is this, you know, one of the
most famous transhumanists out there, he very much lives like an ancient Greek, again, like
circumnavigating the globe on a boat he built himself with like 500 books in the boat, that
sort of thing.
And he was like the first white man to contact a number of tribes and ended up getting a
job with National Geographic and like filming like tribes that no one had encountered before.
This like random dude did.
He lives that lifestyle as if he were ancient Greek, like doing the Bronze Age pervert thing,
like to a T. But he's also a hardcore futurist and transhumanist who does nothing but think
forward looking.
So I don't know, I think that there's a tension there, but there is some way that it does
kind of like make sense where you can have a lifestyle that's anti-suburbia, anti-settling
down in the comforts of modernity, anti just staring at a screen nonstop all day, being
fully alive and fully human, but still being a futurist and transhumanist and still being
forward looking, not backwards looking.
There's a way to do that.
Right.
I think maybe it's different for all people, but there's a way that can be done.
And to think about that, I think is really fascinating.
Are you familiar with the concept of Chesterton's fence?
Wow, that sounds familiar.
JK Chesterton?
Is it?
Possibly.
Possibly, the notion is if you are in an unfamiliar environment and you come across a fence and
you don't see any reason for the fence, I mean, there's not cattle on either side and
maybe you've got used for the building materials or maybe you want to put a soccer field there
or something, before you tear down the fence, you should maybe do some investigation because
it's probably there for a reason.
And just don't assume that the reason was never a good one or that it's outlived its
usefulness or whatever.
The sort of related notion is the Lindy effect.
How about that one?
I know that from Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The Lindy effect is basically the longer something has been around, the longer it's likely to
stay around.
These are two sort of ways of getting at the idea of there are certain adaptive strategies
for getting along in the world that have endured for a very long time because they work.
And here in the modern world, we have decided, you know what, we can rewrite all of that
stuff.
All of those old patriarchal ways of doing things and nationalistic ways and ethnocentric
ways of thinking, that's all primitive and that's all just distasteful and we can just
remake ourselves any way we want.
And it seems unlikely that that's true, that a lot of the things that were not part of
society 200 years ago probably won't be a couple of hundred years from now.
That a lot of what we think of as being very modern, very contemporary, very enlightened
and up to date, up to the current moment is an experiment that is not going to prove entirely
successful and a lot of it is going to get thrown away.
And so there's Bronze Age pervert saying we should live like the ancient Greeks.
Terence McKenna was saying back in the 90s, hey, we need to go back to the Neolithic era
and sort of reconnect with the consciousness of the Neolithic shamans.
Take our mushrooms and take five grams and be pinned to the ground, just laid out, unable
to think and talk and speak and just really connect with the numinous other.
And that's the last sane moment we ever knew.
He says.
And everything that's happened since then, like the last 10,000 years, is going to be
the unsuccessful experiment, except he's not anti-technology or he's dead now, but he wasn't
anti-technology.
He was very excited about the prospects for transhumanism, just encapsulate a lot of different
things under a single banner.
And I kind of look back on Terence McKenna's rants with nostalgia, but once you get excited
with them, if you're serious about the ideas, then you need to do some work and dig in and
read some other stuff that isn't quite so lyrical and easily accessible.
But I think there's a lot there.
I think there's a lot about humanity that has been with us for a very long time, is
innate because it has been part of our evolutionary heritage, our means of coming, of establishing
an enduring way of surviving in the world that will endure and that it will find a place
alongside artificial intelligence and space travel and genetic engineering and biotechnology,
which I know you're excited about.
So let's sort of segue to biotechnology.
This is actually our second conversation.
We had one with Dane Fitzgerald, which has not yet hit the web.
But in it, I think I recall you basically showing a lot of excitement over the prospects
for biotechnology.
Yeah.
If I can actually go back just one step and have one quick follow-up comment about what
we can get rid of and what we can't, I think that it's very fascinating that some things
are entirely entrenched in who we are as humans and some things just aren't.
And the only way that we figure that out is by eliminating them and then see if society
continues to progress or if it gets worse.
It's all an experimentation because I think in my view, there is no God telling us how
to do these things or it's all trial and error.
But society is just society.
And so slavery, always had slavery, always did it.
Every society across the globe until all of a sudden we decided, oh, you know what, maybe
we shouldn't do this.
Maybe we just like for economic reasons, for moral reasons, for you know, maybe we just
should try not doing this anymore, guys.
And then we tried it.
And lo and behold, now anyone who tries it is like a moral monster.
And it's like the worst thing in the human, like the possil- and we thrive having no slavery.
Marriage.
Yeah.
But we have machines to do that work for us now.
And slavery is still practiced in lots of parts of the world.
And you know, those people don't think of themselves as being moral monsters.
They think that we in the West are sort of deluded.
I'm going to ignore that and just keep it simple here.
Just a tiny little bow on my thought.
Everything gets complicated, KMO.
But I'll keep it simple.
So slavery is bad.
I think I'm really- I hear you on the nuance, but I'm not going to trip over the nuance.
Slavery is bad.
And as a globe, virtually as a globe, minus certain societies, we have actually like kind
of come around to this.
Marriage on the other hand, we have tried really, really hard to get rid of marriage
in the Western world.
We've tried- like the whole feminist movement effectively is trying to be anti-marriage
and trying to live your life outside of that.
And men, of course, have always tried to do this.
And it just kind of doesn't work.
Like to this day, the happiest and the wealthiest people, they're all married and they're all
like broadcasting, ah, you don't need to get married.
Ah, it's a silly old religious institution.
And yet they all are.
Like every low key, like powerful, high human capital person, they're all married with kids.
So I was just saying, it's like a joke, the idea that we're going to get rid of marriage
as an institution.
So there's- but we only figured out that slavery we can do away with and marriage we can't
by kind of trial and error.
So like, I think that that's kind of where we always are at.
It's like, what can we get rid of?
What can we not?
But anyway, I'm sorry.
That was my long winded bow on that part of the conversation.
But yeah, biotech.
We did have a quick conversation about this earlier.
And can I tell you a little anecdote?
Sure.
So I recently for my channel, Team Futurism, I took a trip to this guy's bio lab in San
Francisco and I just posted the video.
So you can check out this little video that I did of it.
I went to this local community bio lab and the guy was showing me around his lab and
showing me what you need to put together your own bio lab.
And I think he said, with about $3,000, you can put together your own bio lab and you
can start playing with DNA.
And you can start messing around with viruses, that sort of thing.
And he did say that in general, it's not that easy to actually create a nefarious virus
or do anything like that exciting other than you can create glowing beer, that sort of
thing.
But in general, broad strokes, biotech is super, super, super accessible right now.
And you can get basically all the tools you need to do like actual real biotech and take
some classes online or whatever and you're good to go.
You can start messing with stuff.
And I went to a conference, the Biohack the Planet conference I mentioned earlier, and
there was a guy there who created his own AIDS drug, just like as a biohacker, just
like doing this thing.
And because he didn't have the money or the insurance to get the actual AIDS drug that
he needed to survive.
So he made it himself.
I don't think that we actually realize how accessible biotech is in the biohacking phenomenon.
It's very much like underground.
You don't talk about it like in normal places or read about it.
There are people right now out there who are doing crazy weird injecting themselves with
CRISPR type of things.
And I do not think that we quite realize and comprehend how much this is and could potentially
be changing the human species.
And I was recently talking to Razeeb Khan.
I have his interview with him on my channel.
And I was asking him, like, okay, so like, real talk, North Korea, are they creating
super humans or what are they doing?
And he was like, oh, yeah, they for sure are.
There's no question.
They're creating super humans.
People who just like are bigger, stronger, faster, because why the hell not?
They're literally just like they do not have the moral qualms that we do about that sort
of thing.
They're just like injecting people with shit and like seeing what happens.
And they're creating like weird supermen, super soldiers.
And I just do not think we think about this enough and the implications of it.
So I think that we are living in a very strange time in terms of biotechnology, let alone
all the above board stuff.
Obviously, you know, AI is revolutionizing a lot of biotechnology right now.
And that's crazy, too.
But like the underground stuff, the dudes in their in their garages stuff, I think is
just like so fascinating.
And yeah, I wish there was more of a window into that world, because I'm very fascinated
by it.
Yeah.
So going way back, you know, what is transhumanism?
If you look at the Borg on Star Trek, you know, they've got big clunky stuff bolted
to their head with, you know, cables that loop way out from their bodies and lasers
shooting out of them.
And they, you know, they're so moribund with all this stuff that's been bolted onto them.
They can't sit down, you know.
And it's just like if you look at the evolution of like the Tesla Optimus bot, it had the
external loops of wires in the first generation.
And then they figured out how to tighten that up pretty quickly.
It seems like the Borg is very unlikely in that, you know, if they could put just a modicum
you know of effort into public relations, a lot of people would be anxious to join the
Borg.
But you know, if you're just marching around stiff legged with a thing bolted to your face,
you know, and your skin's all gray and mottled because the nanotech has no no component in
it that is, you know, sensitive to human comfort.
Like if you just make the Borg look like subhuman monsters rather than super super men and super
women, you know, you're hampering your ability to proselytize and, you know, add the biological
and cultural distinctiveness of other civilizations to your own.
So that always struck me as just a very sort of hamfisted take on, you know, a collective
cybernetic collective basically.
So imagine if instead of wires and lasers and big pieces of metal bolted into your skull,
all of the things that the Borg can do that are really cool are done with biotechnology
and they're all just, you know, beautiful athletic people with perfect skin and beautiful
hair, you know, but who can coordinate their actions at a superhuman level?
I mean, who wouldn't want to join that?
So you know, if you're thinking about transhumanism, you know, you might think about uploading
your consciousness to a computer or you might think about, you know, doing something with
nanotechnology, but the nanotech is not made of, you know, of biological elements.
It's made of, you know, rare earth elements and things like that.
But the more you can implement in biotechnology, I think the more sort of appealing transhumanism
becomes to the point where it would just be sort of a silly concept.
It would be like, you know, the Christian scientists refusing, you know, what's the
word I'm looking for, antibiotics, you know, or refusing not some controversial injection,
you know, like the mRNA vaccines, but like polio vaccines.
Who rejects that anymore?
You know, a few people, but they're weirdos.
I think that the more you can do with biotech, the more the notion of transhumanism just
sort of goes out the window and that's just medicine.
You know, that's just living in a scientific society and taking advantage.
That's another reason why I actually do think that the word transhumanism, we kind of sort
of can just do without because you're kind of right.
As soon as something becomes even halfway mainstream, all of a sudden it's just medicine
and it's just science.
And I mean, this is actually a very, oh man, if I'm worried or scared about anything in
terms of biotech, it's that radical and very beneficial technologies could be very easily
politicized right now.
And so I'm disgruntled with how the mRNA vaccine became politicized because that technology
is super cool.
Like they're already rolling it out as a vaccine for cancers.
And there's going to be a lot of people who are just going to die from cancer because
they didn't get this vaccine because, oh, it's the mRNA vaccine.
It's experimental.
And we have Tucker Carlson saying, oh, it's an experimental.
Rick Kurzweil said this thing about the mRNA vaccine that has stuck with me.
He's like, you know, we're told that the mRNA vaccine for COVID, it took like three months
to develop, right?
And then they rolled it out after like three months.
It was like, no, it was three days.
They had this thing in three days.
Like this is amazing, guys.
Like this should be like the coolest thing on the planet.
But like because governments were kind of like heavy handed and like sloppy about how
it was rolled out, all of a sudden like half the country think that it's like a scary thing.
But like that's amazing.
And like right now, again, like we can, it was not available yet, but like pretty soon
you're going to get a shot, like an mRNA vaccine shot to not get certain types of cancer ever.
And like that's amazing.
And we should be stoked about that and like excited to be alive in this moment and not
like, oh, the red team or the blue team rolled this out.
And so I'm not going to get it or whatever.
I hate that shit so much.
I think that we should just be like pro technology and not politicize things so much.
There's a bunch of rabbit holes there too.
I'm not sure how you feel about any of that.
Those are my wrong ones.
Yeah, I mean, lots of opinions that are not really necessarily congruent with one another
get bolted together in ideological factions.
You know, just every side's got its catechism and really there's no logical connection between
your views on gun control, abortion and immigration.
You know, there shouldn't be.
These are very different things.
And there's nothing necessarily coherent about the red tribe or the blue tribe's position
on these things, but they do tend to cluster because that's how we identify ourselves.
We identify ourselves as parts of super organisms, you know, tribal organisms.
And our tribe has certain beliefs and those beliefs didn't come about because they were
logically consistent.
They didn't come about because, you know, a committee of very intelligent people sat
down and examined them and said, oh, this is the strongest and this is the strongest.
So let's, you know, let's put all these rigorously examined ideas together and that's going to
be our ideology.
I mean, that's just not how it works, you know.
So yeah, go ahead.
It is useful to do that too, because having people in your tribe and being like a team
based person, I don't know, that's how societies thrive.
So I'm not going to knock it too much, but boy, it is annoying.
And it's also kind of funny that in today's day and age to be a heterodox person, which
I kind of like float in the heterodox circles.
Most people who consider themselves heterodox have like the most normal views and they're
more like populists rather than heterodox.
Like if you're in a heterodox community, quote unquote, if you think that trans women shouldn't
be in girls sports, but that's like, like no one thinks that like it's like the most
mainstream normal thing to not think that trans girls should be in.
But like just because mainstream media kind of like tamps down on that perspective and
it's been like kind of politicized or whatever that feels heterodox, right.
But it's like normies, like average normie people, both blue and red think or have questions
about biological males being in female sports, right.
But yeah, the whole political thing right now is kind of such a goofy mess.
And I do think that we just use it to form tribes with our friends effectively.
Well, you wrote a substack piece fairly recently about what you have labeled the dirt bag right.
And you open it with a reference.
There's more of a case to state that this dirt bag right phenomenon could bring down
society than the dirt bag left.
I don't actually believe that.
And I actually like to spend most of my time to be clear criticizing the left.
Like I hate the left, even though I'm on it.
But anyway, this is me critiquing the right a little bit.
Well, I don't think we have time to delve too deeply into the whole morass of the merger
of politics and culture or the nexus of politics and culture.
There's a lot there.
Yeah.
There is a lot there.
And it's I was for a very long time part of a sort of collapse oriented community and
people who are very focused on peak oil and they thought industrial society was collapsing
soon and well, it didn't.
And that scene, you know, it disintegrated and the people went in various directions
and some of them went left and some of them went right.
And the current moment doesn't really seem to allow you to resist one of those two currents
if you want to attract a large enough audience to monetize and, you know, pay the rent.
So I know a guy who, you know, for he was a lifelong Democrat, but he discovered that,
you know, throwing red meat to the the mega crowd brings in the the Patreon bucks.
And so that's his full time gig now.
And he's good at it.
You know, and he says things that I suspect he doesn't really believe.
But you know, when you're getting paid to articulate a message, it's easier to just
believe it.
It's not that you can do it instantly.
We're going back to the, you know, the question of can you choose what you believe?
Not not in a moment.
Like if I were to take, you know, the two or three generations down the line from now,
Neuralink, Connector and just plug it into your brain and say, OK, I can see your belief
system.
Here's a check for 10 million dollars.
If you can genuinely believe that Kamala Harris is a shape shifting reptilian from another
direction, another dimension in the next five minutes, if you can formulate that belief,
not the image, not a clear thought, not the imagining, but believe it, the money is yours.
I don't think you could do it.
You're so right.
Wow.
That's fascinating.
You're absolutely right about that.
Yeah.
But but if you write a blog about the shape shifting reptilian overlords for 10 years,
even if you started doing it for completely mercenary reasons, I think every now and again,
you're going to click into a mode where you do believe it.
You're just living that reality.
And I think that's what Pascal was talking about with his wager.
Yeah, I think that we can talk ourselves into things.
There is a concept that I've been really into lately called metamodernism.
Are you familiar with this concept?
Well, I know meta and I know modernism, but put them together and I'm drawing a blank.
Yeah, let me just give a very quick overview about this.
And I actually had an essay today drop about this a little bit.
I've been writing about it as much as I can.
So there was modernism, you know, and then that merged into or, you know, went into postmodernism.
And a lot of people are philosophers trying to say that like, we're kind of like at the
end of metamodernism, the postmodern era, it's just kind of like broken down.
It became nonsensical.
You can't just say there are no grand narratives.
And then like, where do you go from there?
Because like even that itself, it's kind of a grand narrative.
So postmodernism is inherently a little contradictory.
And it just doesn't go anywhere other than it's very, you know, bleak and nihilistic
at some level.
And so there are some philosophers who are now starting to say that we're in the metamodern
era and this is where it's marked by an oscillation between postmodern irony and modern sincerity.
And so if you look at a lot of movies or books, for example, you can find books where characters
are like self aware of their scenario in life, but they're also like they swing back to being
sincere at the same time.
And this is where we are right now with a lot of these things where you can be moment
by moment ironic or sincere and you can oscillate back and forth between the two.
You can be traditionally religious on Sunday and then on Monday be a hardcore capitalist
and realize that tension there and be fine with that because that this is the modern
day.
And so we're like in the metamodern era where we're oscillating back and forth between these
two things and just like in the merger of them, maybe it's making something new and
something different.
And this is like maybe the way forward for ourselves and our culture is to just like
just humor this oscillation.
And I think that that's that's maybe also a nice summary of where I was getting that
earlier in the conversation with this tension between the Bronze Age perverts and the Zoltan
and his fans that are looking backwards and looking forwards, I think that you can like
oscillate between the two a little bit.
And maybe that is the most modern thing that you can do.
Very good.
Well, let's let's leave it there.
I think we're both reaching the end of our vocal stamina.
Usually I have got a lot more, but you know, some days the throat just doesn't doesn't
cooperate.
All right.
Well, Peter, what what projects do you want to bring to people's awareness?
Yeah, check out my sub stack.
It's the the decadence project.
And also I have a podcast called Team Futurism that's on YouTube or wherever you find podcasts.
And also, yeah, check out my book, The Singularity Survival Guide.
I think that especially if you're into goofy literature, you'll appreciate it.
And I think it's worth saying that it's 99 cents on Kindle.
So not going to break the bank.
There you go.
All right.
Well, thanks so much.
Yep.
Thanks so much.
All right.
That was Peter Clark.
He has got a sub stack.
I've read some of his sub stack work.
He also has a podcast.
I have not yet listened to his podcast work, but links to all that good stuff and to his
book are in the show notes for this episode, which you can find at.
Oh, gosh.
I think the easiest way to direct you to it is on sub stack.
KM optimal dot sub stack dot com.
All right.
I will talk to you again soon.
Stay well.