845: Tech is Our New Religion And It Needs Reformation, with Greg Epstein
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This is episode number 845 with Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT. Welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast, the most listened to podcast in the data science industry. Each week, we bring you fun and inspiring people and ideas exploring the cutting edge of machine learning, AI, and related technologies that are transforming our world for the better. I'm your host, John Krohn. Thanks for joining me today. And now, let's make the complex simple.

Welcome back, people, to the Super Data Science Podcast. Buckle your seats for a fantastic episode with the entertaining and fascinating Greg Epstein. Greg serves as humanist chaplain at both Harvard University and MIT. He also wrote the bestselling book, Good Without God, What a Billion Non-Religious People Do Believe.

His latest book, released just a few weeks ago, is Techagnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation.

So I will personally ship five physical copies of Greg Epstein's Tech Agnostic to people who comment or reshare the LinkedIn post that I publish about Greg's episode from my personal LinkedIn account today. Simply mention in your comment or reshare that you'd like the book. I'll hold a draw to select the five book winners next week. So you have until Sunday, December 22nd to get involved with this book contest.

Today's episode focuses largely on Greg's latest book and should be interesting to everyone. In today's episode, Greg details how technology has supplanted traditional religion as society's most powerful belief system, why Silicon Valley's promise of technological salvation parallels religious prophecies, the concerning parallel between AI's singularity and religious end-of-times narratives, and how technology has supplanted traditional religion as society's most powerful belief system.

How we can embrace technological progress while maintaining our humanity. And why building genuine human connections matters more than chasing technological utopias. All right, you ready for this mind-expanding episode? Let's go.

Greg, welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast. It's so interesting to have you on the episode. I've been excited for a couple of months since we booked this. Greg, tell me where you're calling in from. I am at home.

in Somerville, Massachusetts, the little urban suburb right behind Cambridge, where I work at Harvard and MIT. Nice, yeah. I actually just watched, this is a completely random aside that I'll try to move through quickly for the audience's sake, but I just finished watching, immediately before this recording, a film called The Town.

by Ben Affleck. It's from 2010. Yeah. And it's about bank robbers from Charlestown, Massachusetts. Yes. I mean, the whole Massachusetts thing. I'm a New York City person. That's my...

origin story, my, my lifeblood. I'm raising my eight-year-old son as a New Yorker in exile, like in the biblical sense. So, you know, I, I don't often have the greatest commentary on, on Massachusetts. I root against the Red Sox with a passion, but here I am for a job. So what, so I guess you're a Yankees fan. I am. Yeah. There you go.

All right, well, let's dig into the content that the audience came here for. So you serve as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University and at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as you kind of mentioned by your location there. And I guess those are the kinds of institutions that are kind of worth leaving New York for if you've got to go.

I mean, the way I like to say it is I'm a humanist chaplain. So I'm a non-religious religious advisor, sort of a contradiction in terms of walking contradiction, whatever. I've been doing that work for 20 years now.

It's a wonderful career. There's always something problematic going on and something interesting happening. But I like to say that I came here because I found out about humanism after majoring in religion 20 plus years ago and felt that humanism, the positive ethics for the non-religious was the most important.

underrated or underappreciated idea of the 20th century. And I thought, well, why not go to Harvard? That's the most over, well, anyway, I'll leave it right there. Okay. Well, it resonates with me, this idea, because I remember when I started my PhD in England, I wrote an email to the British Humanist Society, I think. I said something like,

I could probably even dig up literally email because I think I just got a Gmail account for the first time. That was like 2007. And so it's probably like one of the first emails I sent with my still current email account. And I sent an email to the British Humanist Society and I said,

Religions have weekly meetings. They have communities like the priesthood, nuns, that allow people to have this sense of community. And as... Actually, you know what? I probably never said this on air, but I'm an atheist. I don't practice any religion. Is that going to get this podcast episode censored? I don't know.

And so I said, you know, I grew up in the Catholic Church and I miss that community. And so I wrote a message saying, you know, is there anything kind of equivalent where

secular people can go and meet and talk about, like you're saying, like kind of religious questions, but approach non-religiously. So just, you know, what, what are we doing here anyway? And what did they say? Did they write back to you? They did. And it was kind of, they kind of brushed me off, but I was surprised that they wrote back. It was, what year was this?

It was, yeah, 2007. 2007. Well, so two, two and a half years later, I was there on my first book tour for my book, Good Without God, What a Billion Non-Religious People Do Believe, which spends a good 60 pages at the end arguing for exactly what you just described.

And I was there to visit them for my book tour. And we talked all about it. And there has been quite a bit more of that sort of activity in the UK since then there had been to that point. So you were a little ahead of your time, John. Just a little. Anyway, so something that, you know, this idea, you know, what you do for a living is

I think it serves a great function and you're kind of the person, you know, I could imagine if I was at Harvard or MIT and grappling with existential issues, you would be obviously the kind of person to be seeking counsel and guidance from. So cool that you're doing what you're doing. Well, I mean, thanks. I guess what I would say is that there is a real need for non-religious people to, you

find meaning and purpose and, and, and connection as well. You know, there, this is a very isolating and often lonely period in history, particularly in, in sort of Western wealthy societies, people are feeling very isolated and, and, and lonely. And it's,

It's fun. It's meaningful to me. It's something that I really love to help people think about how to live a more connected life.

more purposeful life from a completely secular, atheistic, non-religious perspective. So what can people do if we're not at Harvard or MIT and we're just kind of out in the world? I mean, you might, our listenership comes from anywhere in the world, really. We skew, about half of our listeners are in the US. So just kind of, you know, maybe if your answer happens to relate to the US in particular, that's fine. But globally even,

What can somebody do if they want to feel that connection, if they want to be part of something that gives them that connection that you would get if you were part of a religious community, but you don't want to kind of be paying lip service just to get that? Yeah. So first of all, this is, you know, what you're describing is on the one hand, kind of a congregational connection.

process, right? A congregational setting where people would do the sort of formal equivalent of what religions do in a non-religious way. And that is pretty much precisely what I worked on for about a decade.

But I then stopped working on exactly that. And that is the story of how this book, Tech Agnostic, begins, actually. Okay. Because...

So let me introduce that really quickly then. So the reason why we actually booked you and are talking to you is because you just had a book come out called Tech Agnostic, How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. And all of the prepared research that we have for you is related to your book. But I've ended up going off on this tangent a

beforehand. I mean, I like tangents. I'm a tangential speaker. We just had like the walking avatar for tangents elected as our president elect in this country. So, you know, I suppose we have to we have to bow before the altar of the tangent. But anyway. Yeah. So

I was for a decade attempting to do this thing that you, John, apparently went to your local National Humanist Association and asked for in 2007. And I started working on that issue right around then as well. I was already working on my book Good Without God at the time. And after it came out, the book was meant as kind of a positive alternative to books like...

the God delusion, Richard Dawkins and God is not great. Christopher Hitchens and, you know, the end of faith, Sam Harris, et cetera. Right. And, you know, and I think it, it, it did well as that it helped provoke people to think about positive ways of viewing themselves as, as atheists or non-religious people. And it also helped people to think about community. And at the, at the end of that process, I was thinking like, okay, well,

Essentially, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, people like that at that point had become atheist talking heads. And did I want to become a humanist talking head for a living? And I thought, no, that's not really what's going to be the most fulfilling to me. I'd like to...

practice what I'm preaching, so to speak, and, and organize something positive. So I, I went out and, you know, brought a lot of people together. Um, and we together, um, created what became quite a vibrant congregation. It was meeting in Harvard square, um, not just every week, but almost every day, because at the time we were paying more than a hundred thousand dollars a year just to rent our space in Harvard square. Um,

you know, we, we hired a brilliant staff. It was, it was quite an adventure. It was, it was popular. People, you know, would sometimes be seen lined up, uh, you know, out the door, down the stairs and down the block, even to, to get into the events that we were doing. Um, you know, we had, you know, sort of a core of, of young adults and others that, that were coming like a few times a week. Uh, it was a real congregation, you know? Um, but, uh,

At a certain point, and this coincides with the birth of my son, which really kind of shook me up, but in a wonderful way where I realized I didn't want to work 80 hours a week anymore as I had been to pull all that together. It just wasn't the way I wanted to live my life as a parent.

Um, wanted to be very present for him. And so it kind of shook me up there and I was thinking, okay, I love that work, but it's not necessarily what I want to spend the rest of my life doing professionally.

And was trying to think about what I did want to do. And honestly, I was in this transition mode, which I now advise people about when people are in sort of a mode where they don't know what they're going to do with their lives. They have to be doing something at the moment, but they don't really know where they're headed. Um,

I've become something of a specialist in helping people to think about that time period and helping them think that it's a really good thing. It's really constructive. You want to spend some months, maybe even a couple of years in a psychologically neutral zone where you don't know what your life is meant to be all about. And so I was in that phase. And at the time, I was invited to join MIT.

As a chaplain, a humanist chaplain as well, chaplain for the atheists and agnostics and non-religious folks at MIT. I had been doing that role at Harvard for 2018. So almost 14 years by that point. And something grabbed me about MIT. It was like, oh, wait, MIT, the T in MIT technology. And I realized that.

What I'd been trying to do essentially was bring people closer together. But that's not my phrasing. I've just used a phrase from Mark Zuckerberg to describe meta and Facebook because, you know, we had been living by 2018 through a decade of transformation in how people thought about their communities. Like when you asked the British Humanist Association in 2007 to do community,

That was at the very early moments of the social media era in which we came to think, many of us did, of doing community online with our quote unquote friends. And so I realized like, oh, there's been this radical transformation in how most people on a day-to-day level think about connecting with others. And it wasn't necessarily good, right?

It wasn't necessarily always healthy. I was at the beginning of a, you know, 2018. I was just starting to be really critical of some of these technologies. But nonetheless, it had scaled to the point where it was it was sort of too big to fail. And.

So what is one to what was too big to fill the social media, social media as community was at that point too big to fail religion. Religious congregations were at that point often failing. I was seeing a lot of my colleagues and friends who ran sort of liberal to moderate congregations, uh,

running on fumes to the point where if they didn't have a kind of legacy status where they owned their own building and maybe they had for decades, if not centuries, or they had a large endowment for going back decades, if not centuries, then a lot of those congregations like mine did ultimately would have been thinking about shutting down, folding.

because people weren't showing up in the pews nearly as much as they had been in previous generations. And a big part of that was that people were seeking out their community, their sense of human connection in these other very new, very technological ways. And so the thought occurred to me as I was invited to join MIT, which I did now, you know, at both schools that, yeah, that, that, uh,

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For folks interested in data quality, data governance, and data intelligence, I found Data Citizens Dialogues to be a solid complement to this podcast because those aren't topics I tend to dig into on this show. So while data may be shaping our world, Data Citizens Dialogues is shaping the conversation. Follow Data Citizens Dialogues on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, and it's interesting to me because when I think about that email that I wrote in 2007,

it would never seem, it wouldn't have seemed to me then, it still wouldn't seem to me now, almost 20 years later, that what I was seeking could be done digitally. It's interesting that

There's obviously a huge amount of value to some digital things. I mean, this is a digital podcast. I get to be able to record in my home for most of these episodes and tens of thousands of people hear every episode. And there's situations where something like this podcast, people can be listening in their cars or in their homes, and I think it can provide some value. So obviously, I mean, I'm a techno-optimist and I'm

There's lots of value that I think tech provides. But in terms of community, at least, it's interesting how you said that people aren't coming into the pews as much and instead they're finding community online. But it's interesting to me because, and maybe this is something that we can just dig into in a lot of detail and get your points on right now, get your thoughts on right now, but that digital community is

doesn't bring the same kind of satisfaction. I'm sure if you could somehow... No, it doesn't. Yeah. And biochemically, see how does this, you know, relate to oxytocin release or dopamine release? I mean, it probably, it is actually probably like a dopamine thing. Like there's actually, they figured out with these platforms how to get that dopamine hit. And it actually, then it creates like, there's actually, but it becomes, it has this cheap feeling to it. Like, yeah, you get that dopamine hit. You want to see that, that post that you made has gotten another like.

And oh, who did the like? And oh, it was her. You know, like, wow, there's some dopamine. But it doesn't, you know, it doesn't, I don't know if it's oxytocin or something else, but there's something that's lacking and something that's cheap about that digital community where I'm confident that if I, and you actually experienced this, and it sounds like, you know, it was,

You know, with things like your son being born, I don't know how kind of in-person community changed for you. But it seems very obvious to me that if I had a community that every Sunday, let's say, are kind of arbitrarily picking a day that a lot of people have off. And...

If you knew that every Sunday at 10 a.m., there'd be a group of people getting together to sing some secular songs together. We did this, by the way. Everything that you're saying, we did. Absolutely. For years on end. Keep going. Yeah, and just kind of talk about what's going on in current society. Talk about the big important things like

you know, a relative has passed or this friend has passed or, you know, I'm, you know, thinking about these, wrestling with these big things in my life. And there's, it's interesting because it's kind of, I have seen since I moved to New York, I moved to New York 12 years ago, elements of this I have found in things like, like I did a 200 hour yoga teacher training. And sometimes in like a yoga studio, you do end up finding this, you know, there's the yoga classes happen at a set time.

And some people have what they call Dharma talks at the beginning of the yoga, which is kind of like the homily kind of thing that I used to experience as a kid in Catholic church. And I've got to say that like that, the homily was actually because that was where the priest could freewheel. And whereas everything else about the Catholic mass was highly structured.

And I can see some value to that. I'm sure repetition is good, especially historically, if people couldn't read and this was the only place you could come and kind of get some intellectual stimulation, that kind of repetition was probably good. But for me, as you know, you know, in our modern age, growing up the nineties in that situation, for me, the homily was kind of the only really interesting part. Cause I was like, well, this is at least something different is going to happen here. At least I can learn something new. And anyway, so these Dharma talks at the beginning of yoga classes can kind of be like that where

And they might even conclude the yoga practice with something like that as well. You've got a bit of chanting. And I think that that's an interesting thing for me, you know, whether it, and so that was, whether it was in church growing up or in yoga classes, more recently, people singing together, music being played together. There's an interesting, something happens there that is really fulfilling and

And that you're in for. Anyway, I've gone on for a long time. No, no. I mean, it's great. You've set us up very nicely for an extra meaningful conversation. You know, you're getting into some of the stuff that some of the other podcasts that I've done do not. And so what I think I'd like to do, if you want, is first, I'd like to actually get into some detail with you about what this congregation that I used to lead called the Humanist Hub actually did.

And then, um, and then I'd like to tell you why I, I quit that job and, and went into writing this book for the past five, six years and why the two things are so directly related for me. So, uh, so first of all, what I would love for you to picture and listeners to picture is, um,

We wanted a space that was big enough for what you'd call one Dunbar of people. Dunbar is- It's like 220, right? 240? It's somewhere between 140 and that. Oh, 140. Yeah. The idea is that the Dunbar is like, it's a British sociologist who studied- Robin Dunbar. Robin Dunbar, who studied-

He was at a, I went to Modlin college at Oxford and he was faculty there. Nice. So yeah. So he studied, you know, sort of packs of animals, correct me if I get anything of this wrong and, you know, determined based on the sort of brain size and complexity of animals, what type, what size of herd they would tend to be in, um, essentially what their social cohort was, how many relationships each animal could manage at a time.

And his theory is that the human animal can manage about 140 to somewhere on the outsized, maybe 200-ish members of our intimate community, where beyond that, you're going to need some kind of, I don't know, police force to adjust people's behavior because people can't, you know,

control everything that's going on beyond that kind of realm. Um, so anyway, not that control is the, is the ideal here, but that's just a word that comes to mind, you know, perhaps subconsciously anyway. So, um, so we wanted a space that we could, uh, have for ourselves that we weren't just, you know, renting once a week that would fit about a Dunbar people.

And, you know, so we rent 4000 square feet in the middle of Harvard Square on JFK Street.

And we, we hold, not only do we hold weekly meetings, which, you know, we're centered around what you'd call the sermon in a, in a church or synagogue or mosque or whatever. In the sense that we'd have, you know, every Sunday afternoon, because atheists and agnostics like us did not want to get up early on a Sunday morning. So every Sunday early afternoon, we would have a different speaker. I would do the talk once a month and,

Um, somebody else once a month, it would be somebody who actually was religious. Um, but you know, had something meaningful and interesting to say to a humanist audience like us. I love that. Um, you know, it's very diverse speakers. It was actually a very diverse audience as well. A lot of young people, even gender balance, a fair number of people of color, um, that sort of thing, right? People of different education and, and income levels, et cetera.

So it was a talk, but there would always be music. There would usually be singing.

Um, there was a classroom. What would you guys do like for the music or singing? Like it was like Tom Petty or what? Uh, you know, so there, there would be a lot of different things like that. Um, uh, the, the most fun example would be, um, that this led to when I was national chair of humanists for Biden and Harris in 2020, um,

A better time, I suppose. I called up the band Flaming Lips and asked them to perform for us. And they did because Flaming Lips are a humanist band and their song Do You Realize from the album Yashimi Battles the Pink Robots, I believe it's called, is a humanist anthem.

And so they performed it for us at our humanist for Biden event. But anyway, I digress, I suppose. This is a whole big digression. So we would do the music. We would do poetry. We would have. So we had a.

kids room that had all kinds of kids decorations and that we would, um, you know, do sort of a, a humanist secular atheist Sunday school program in on a weekly basis. And we even named it after, uh, the, uh, famous scientist EO Wilson. It was the, the EO Wilson learning lab, uh, that we, we created. So we did that. Um,

On Monday nights, we would have people come in and sit in a circle, maybe an average of 20 to 30-ish people every week on a Monday night. And people would talk in a very deep way.

um, about the best and worst things that had happened with them, you know, in their lives in the, in the past week, but also about sort of different topics each week that, you know, came down to like, what is the meaning of your life? What are you most struggling with? What are you most hopeful about? You know, how do we interface with the world? And so we, you know, this was, we just go on and on. We would do meditation. I mean, I, you know, I, I'll, I'll leave it there. And

Again, it was it was very hard work. And, you know, one of the biggest reasons, you know, to not do it anymore was just I couldn't figure out a way not to not to have to work 80 hours a week on this. But.

There was something more. I mean, you know, if you want to interject, go for it. If not, I can just sort of tell you that the next phase and how it led to the book. I'll just quickly say that this aligns so much with the kinds of concepts that I've kicked around in my head and I never have time to even get it going. But I'm like, you know, I bet I could get a dozen people together to do this once.

Oh, you could, I mean, you know, you're, you're a charismatic person, you know, uh, you, you've, you, you're very thoughtful. Like you could do way more than a dozen, but I mean, one of the challenges I think you'd face is cause you'd probably pull a big group together is that there's a really huge difference between pulling a big group together and having a true community, huge difference. Um,

Think about all the influencers out there that have crowds. Do we really feel that they have community, that they've actually provided a deep sense of meaning and purpose for their audiences and listeners? I mean, some cases, yes, but in many cases, the connection is more superficial. And what happens with community is

Is, I mean, you know, how would you say it? You know, that there is a real depth to building better relationships with people, right? That it's about understanding that people are in pain and that they're suffering and that there's no way of predicting what they're going to be in pain over or suffering or celebrating.

on a given day and there's no perfect formula for how to solve their problems. It's all about being present with people. And so if you don't have time to devote to those people, then no matter how brilliant you might be, it doesn't work.

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With that deep and meaningful community, people are getting to know you in such a way that they are thinking about your problems and you're thinking about theirs. Yeah, there's a reciprocity. Absolutely. Where, you know, the idea is, for example, I gave...

a talk at one point in our congregation that had a corny title, but it was the most powerful word in the world.

And I didn't tell people in advance what, what word I was, I was talking about, but it's the most powerful word in the world. And we put it out on the blurb. You know, we put it out as a blurb. We put it out on, on our, you know, email list to thousands of, of, of people on email. Like we're going to, I'm going to give a talk about the most powerful word in the world. And the only thing that I gave people as a hint is that the idea for this talk was that when I was training as clergy, you know, I'm trained to be

clergy for the non-religious. So, you know, officiating weddings, funerals, baby naming ceremonies at times, coming of age ceremonies like a bar bat mitzvah or confirmation, all from an atheistic, secular perspective. Right. And so we were taught in the class on weddings that the words I do

are incredibly powerful words because with those two words, you can transform, you know, a person from one status in life to another. So the most powerful word in the world is do it's, it's we, it's we, because, you know, if you can get a group of people to truly believe that they are a week,

and not just a set of isolated individuals, you've profoundly transformed the lives of those people. Um, you know, at the very least in some way and in, in, in certain cases in, in almost all the ways. Um, and so we know Adam Newman out there who I'm sure doesn't listen to my podcast, but if he does, he's like, yeah, we,

We nailed it. We were, you know, we live. Yeah. Shout out to Adam. I mean, I, you know, I, I, I'm, I'm sure he's on the rebound now. He's, you know, he lost his, we work billions. He actually got to keep quite a few of them, right? He's doing fine. People are also somehow people are investing again, like a

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like black. There's no there's there's no limit to what you can do if you look and talk like the soft bank founders version in their minds of what a billionaire prophet Jesus should be. And in fact, Julia Angwin, the New York Times tech policy columnist, said,

uh, surprised me on stage the other day. We were, she was interviewing me about tech agnostic, uh, in New York city for an organization called all tech is human. Great, great org. Uh, I've written about them as the tech ethics congregation, by the way. And, um, and she's on stage interviewing me and she, she surprises me with the question. So if tech is a religion and she said, and she, she believes that it is, uh,

who's Jesus? And I said, well, you know, according to SoftBank, it's Adam Neumann. I mean, he's their avatar, their prototype. Yeah. Because it seems like if I had to, you know, if I had to like pick someone off the cuff,

That's not the first person that would come to mind. I mean, who, you know, Steve Jobs, like, you know, he's dead. Yeah. Well, I mean, but he has risen, hasn't he? How has he risen? I mean, he's not risen to the extent that a Ray Kurzweil would would like to be risen. Right. So like so let's, you know, just to to skip ahead for a second here, like a Ray Kurzweil.

you know, the, the, the great iconic figure, great is in scare quotes for me, from my perspective, by the way, but the, the iconic figure of AI is,

who likes to brag about having, what does he have, 60 or 70 years of experience in AI and he's still going strong. He does take his 200 plus pills a day so that he can stay alive long enough to eventually upload himself into the cloud or some sort of new technological body when

the singularity, which he has argued in successive books is either near or nearer, um, comes and, and, and humans meld with machines and the AI God is, is risen. Um, you know, Ray Kurzweil believes that we're going to end death.

Um, and he actually, Blake Lemoine, the, the Google engineer who was fired, um, for releasing the, the, the transcript with his, uh, of his conversation with his coworker, uh, which became AI Google's Gemini, uh, Blake Lemoine told me, uh, when I brought him to MIT that, um,

That he had worked with Kurzweil on what became Gemini and that Kurzweil really led the creation of Gemini in order to recreate his dead father. And that is why I say that is, these are just little examples of why I really do believe that tech has become our most powerful and emphasis on powerful religion. And, um,

So, you know, Steve Jobs, has he risen his his his spirit?

fills our hearts perhaps. But actually, he's kind of old news now. In the tech world, gods get replaced real fast. They don't have a very long shelf life. Gods don't. It's like milk. So Steve Jobs, nobody really talks about Steve Jobs anymore. We've moved on. But yes, I'm surprised. I would have thought if there was one kind of figurehead that

And this isn't me personally speaking as my tech Jesus, but I would have thought that the obvious name that would roll off the tongue here would be Elon Musk.

Oh, Elon Musk. No, um, I would say, so my friend, he is not Jesus. He's not, he will not save us. Um, you know, no, Elon Musk will not save us. Um, that is something I, I can confidently say. I wrote about that in a, in an essay for time recently. Um, isn't that like, isn't he like kind of him, Joe Rogan, Donald Trump, uh,

All wrapped up in a sort of ethical turducken. Yeah, Peterson. Yes. Aren't these all like, they're kind of in, to use some machine learning terminology and like our vector embedding space, do they not have high cosine similarity scores with each other? And Jesus. I mean, you know, Musk, by the way,

My friend and colleague, Chris Hypervisible Gillyard, who's an anti-surveillance technology activist who –

who is a leading figure in chapter five of my, my new book. And he's a, he's a really interesting guy. He's he won't allow his face to be shown publicly or online. And you know, so his, his bio picture is, is him in a, in a helmet and ski goggles and a mask and that sort of thing. Anyway, but Chris is a fascinating person. He, he has he,

He has a book that he has in mind for the future called The Illustrated Guide to Silicon Valley Supervillains. And so, you know, he's comparing the tech demigods more to villains than to to sort of the more hopeful kind of deity. And in his pantheon, Musk is the Joker.

So Musk will tend to get compared to Iron Man, but in fact, in Chris's book and in mine as well, I would have to say Musk is more like the Joker. Yeah.

So, um, so anyway, so Adam Newman is Jesus. So, so what I'll just say, Jewish, Jewish Jesus again, Jewish. Well, yeah. I mean, with the, with the long hair and, and the, and the real estate empire, you know, I mean, what, what does this have a real estate empire? I mean, some would say he still does, you know, that, that, you know, there is see, you know, the, the question is, um,

What kind of Jesus are we talking about? What kind of Christianity are we talking about? Because there, you know, there's a couple billion Christians in the world currently even. And, you know, that that doesn't even speak to past Christians, future Christians, whatever. So there's a couple billion Christians.

And they all have incredibly different or, you know, there are such an incredible, incredible diversity of views about what Christianity actually is and what Christians are really supposed to believe and do and that sort of thing. And so, you know, the question is.

When we say, like, who's Jesus? Well, which Jesus, right? Is it the Jesus from the, you know, the ancient world that's walking around in robes, very humble, you know, saying that a rich person can get into heaven, you know, like a camel can pass through the eye of a needle?

Right. You know, berating people for for being selfish and greedy. That is describing we're talking about Jesus. You know, a lot of people feel would be deported immediately upon Trump's reinauguration.

Or are we talking about, you know, the steak and guns and beer Jesus that, you know, is well known throughout certain corridors of America? And

You know, that's that's the question, right? There's there's different Jesuses for different people. That's part of what has made this religion so powerful is that it can it can morph and reshape itself to be whatever various kinds of people want or need it to be. And so, you know, if you say who's Jesus, again, I would say.

It really depends on what kind of Jesus we're trying to project. And tech is at its greatest. Tech is all things to all people. It seems to be right. The idea is that modern day Silicon Valley tech is.

Because my book is not about all technology, right? It's not technology agnostic. About technology, I'm not agnostic. I'm a believer. You know, I do believe that it's good to create tools to improve human life. I am not...

you know, somehow looking backward and also looking forward to the days of, you know, of wooden ships crossing the Atlantic and, and, you know, having to sail all the way around South America because I don't know, a canal would be too technological for, for somebody, you know? No, I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to warm my food up tonight, you know, in an, in an iron pot by, you know, on, in the, in a fire made, uh,

around, you know, with surrounded by a ring of stones. No. But around Silicon Valley tech, this new phenomenon which emerges in these kind of manger like garages with these mythological figures like Jobs and Gates and Larry and Sergey and others a generation or so ago.

Around that phenomenon, I really am agnostic. I'm not a total atheist about that phenomenon. I use these people's devices all the time. I'm using them right now to interact with you, and I'm happy to be doing that. And I do think that they've done some good in the world. The question is, has it been outbalanced by...

some of the many, many social, political, and ethical problems that these technologies have at best been associated with at worst caused, um, or are causing or will cause. Um, so yeah, you know, the, the, the thought that I have around 2018 that, that leads to writing this book tech agnostic is that, um,

Religion is no longer what I used to think of it as, which is the most powerful social technology in the world, that the tech has now become the most powerful social technology in the world. And that tech is sort of overrun. I was thinking about it at the time. It became clearer and clearer to me as I researched this. It's overrun by weird ideas.

weirdly theological ideas, it turns out. That's exactly the quote that we pulled out. I didn't even get to my first question. So my first question we have as the answer, the answer that we have from your book is many of those ideas are weirdly theological. Yes. That's the quote that we pulled out as the answer to what was going to be my first question, which was, Greg, could you explain how technology's pervasive influence in modern life supplanted the role traditionally played by religion and society? And you've just

We've gotten there. Yeah, we've, we've gotten there. I mean, I, I, you seem like you wanted to riff. So I hope your, your listeners like riffing. Oh, I've loved this. Yeah. So, you know, that, that these weirdly theological ideas had, had kind of taken over and, and

You know, if you think about it, although I didn't realize at the time that some of the ideas that I was studying that I've spent the last six years studying were going to be so influential in something so impactful or consequential, as Joe Biden likes to say, as the 2024 presidential election. But I think that they really have been. I mean, you know.

If you look at, for example, the New York Times writer, Tressie McMillan Cotton, wonderful writer, just wrote a piece recently about how essentially Trump was able to take advantage of online.

spaces, echo chambers or whatever you want to call them, that are kind of like a secular religion, she says. You know, you've got influencers that are essentially teaching you, teaching their online churches, which really do look very much like churches in many ways. They're teaching their followers, their listeners, how to...

you know, sort of worship certain products, um, worship certain ideals. It might be thinness. It might be being a trad wife, a traditional wife who supports her husband and gets to live this sort of like work-free, uh, lifestyle. Um, it might be, uh, you know, a sort of, uh, a, a, a bro podcaster tech bro podcaster who served the flip side, the, the traditional masculinity, um, and,

And the, you know, the products that he might be hawking. But, you know, Tressie, Dr. Tressie, as I might affectionately call her an amazing writer again, really does point out that these have become kind of secular religions, even marked by the term that people like to call themselves free thinkers, right?

which is a term that was written about first in back in 2005 by a woman named Susan Jacoby trying to reclaim that word from the 19th century as a word that would define this sort of secular non-religious cohort in society, which has grown quite large, you know, and Trump himself is known to not necessarily be the most pious guy.

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free thinkers, that is the same as the tech bro podcasts, the trad women. Is that? Well, a lot of these folks like to call themselves free thinkers is what I'm saying. Okay. Um, which is, it's sort of strange, I suppose that, that, that is a thing, but, um, but what I would say is that the, the idea of a free thinker

um, is a person who, you know, is proud of being able to, you know, have unconventional ideas on the one hand. Um, and those ideas end up being, you know, things that, that people on the alt right can get excited about. But on the other hand, there's another definition of free thinker, um, which is this sort of, um,

secularist ideal of, you know, a term for people who are proud of themselves as atheists and agnostics. And they're saying like, there's a, there's a large cohort of people who are now non-religious and these are their, this, this is, this is who that person is. It's a free thinker. So there's this like,

two types of being a free thinker. And it's interesting because that second group you described, you described the first group of free thinkers as far right. And that second group, it seems like that would correlate with typically more left leaning. More left. Yeah, exactly. But I guess the problem is, you know, as I see it as a problem, certainly, that the free thinker, the person who might want to define him or herself as a free thinker

But is really sort of an alt-right personality, you know, a new kind of rightist, somebody that, again, is looking for a sort of confident masculinity. I would even say a toxic masculinity in a very uncertain world where people are afraid. You know, people are afraid because there's a lot to be afraid of. Right. Climate is changing the world very quickly.

Technology is changing the world very quickly, according to a Ray Kurzweil. You know, within something like 10, 20 years from now, our whole society is going to be completely unrecognizable. Our values are changing what we believe, what we believe about religion, what we believe about gender, what we believe about sexuality, what we believe about, you know, child rearing. Everything's changing. Right. And so people are very, very, very shook and uncertain. And so.

One of the things that that that is comforting to some people in uncertain times is a kind of strong, masculine, you know, I will only I can know the way and only I will save us and only I can do it. Kind of, you know, Trump is a confident figure. At least that's how he comes across. Right. And so.

What I'm I guess what I'm saying about the term free thinker is that like these people are not they're not the sort of conservative Christians of old where they were content to say, you know, we're going to follow everything the Bible says. Like that is some of Trump's constituency. But one of the the genius elements of his rise to power, evil genius to me probably. But but, you know, is that he had this ability to meld.

That like Bible thumping, we're going to follow everything the Bible says core of conservative voters with this other emerging group of people where they're not traditional. They, you know, they want to co-opt a term like free thinker.

to signal to people that they've got their own way of doing things. You know, they don't need vaccines like the rest of us. You know, they don't need to be data driven like the rest of us. They go with their gut and their gut is strong. You know, it's filled with whatever RFK Jr. wants it to be filled with. Free gutting. Yes. And so, you know, there's this new kind of

confident movement that emerges that, um, is, does really, really well online, right? That, you know, if you look at traditional media, um, the kinds of legacy media that are really struggling right now, um, you know, a world dominated by that kind of media and by sort of the, the early foundations of the internet, um,

You know, it's not a world, you know, it's you're not surprised that Francis Fukuyama could look at that world and say, oh, history's ending because we're progressing towards liberal democratic ideals. Everybody's going to be on board. Everybody's getting educated and informed. But actually, this new media that emerges in this sort of splintered, you know, fractal Internet Times, right?

um, it, it conservatives do really well on it because there's just this sort of, there's, there's misinformation, disinformation everywhere. There's uncertainty everywhere. And, um,

Into a void of uncertainty where a lot of liberals are trying very, very hard to master every bit of information they can muster. You know, they're trying to know everything and be experts on everything. And, you know, when you're trying to know everything and be an expert on everything, you can end up coming across to people as kind of an egghead because it's hard to know everything. It's just really freaking hard.

And so, you know, you can sometimes lose touch with the gut, with the emotions, and those are also important parts of being human. And so, yeah, I'll stop there, perhaps.

Yes, now I can have an easy segue into... Yeah, I mean, that was fascinating. We covered a lot of topics there. I guess maybe I'll use this opportunity to go back to a couple questions that I... No, actually, you know what? I'm not going to do that. I'm going to save the couple questions that I opened with. I'm actually going to save those to the end and kind of get as your final thoughts. I want to dig into your book more now while we still have time to do that. So...

I'm sure a lot of the things you've been discussing are related to it, but I want to kind of dig into some specific topics. So yeah, so your book, Tech Agnostic, in it, you describe technology use as a ritual that offers both relief and entrapment. And this is interesting to me, and it does relate to something that you talked about earlier in the episode where

You talked about in 2018, social media taking off and that kind of providing community. What came to mind for me is not so much that that social media experience is community like it's purported to be, but it is more like entrapment. It's product designers at big tech companies have figured out ways to make these tools or what could be tools,

as addictive as possible. So you see as many ads as possible, typically.

And so, yeah, so you described technology as a ritual that offers both relief and entrapment. How so? Given this dual nature, how should individuals and societies cultivate awareness and set boundaries to prevent tech from overwhelming our mental and emotional health? So how can we get the benefits of tech without these negative side effects like entrapment? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, you know, again, I'll come back to my central argument in order to answer this. The central argument is that, um,

technology has become the world's most powerful religion and it desperately needs a reformation. And so one of the, you know, so I spend the first third of the book talking about people's beliefs, you know, that, that, that there's a kind of theology and doctrine to the tech religion as there are in traditional religions. But then I say in the middle of the book,

that we also really need to look at practices because a religion is not a religion if all it has is beliefs. Religions have practices. That's how they're shaped. That's how they take form and expression. And so therefore, with the idea of ritual,

Um, it's important to note that rituals are sort of two sided coins, that there is a way in which as, as, uh, Durkheim, the father of the sociology of religion would have reminded us, um,

ritual brings people together in a sense of community. It bonds them to each other and it bonds them to a shared sense of meaning and purpose. And that's, that's a very important part of what ritual is. But it can do so in positive and negative ways, constructive and unconstructive ways. Like,

You know, if you see people come in together in rituals to celebrate important times of the year or important times of life, that's good by and large. You know, my mom would often say to me as a kid, you know, we're not really big believers in all these holidays, but think about it. If we didn't believe in the holidays at all.

then we probably wouldn't get together and see our extended family nearly as often as we do. And we wouldn't feel a sense of specialness when we did. And so that's a positive example of ritual. But

So in, for example, Orthodox Judaism, there is a set of prayers that men are meant to say every morning as they get out of bed before they do just about anything else. And that set of prayers involves thanking God for not making them a woman. Or another thing that people don't realize about, for example, Orthodox Jewish prayer is that the central...

prayer that people are making to God that Orthodox Jews do three times every single day and four times on the Sabbath. It's asking for a resurrection of the dead.

you know, it's, it's really, you know, at least if we take it for the words that they're face value, it is asking God to resurrect the dead. It's not like some liberal hippie dippy concept. It's like, no, those people are dead. They're buried there in the ground, raise them up, take them to heaven, et cetera. Um, or praying for people to be sent to hell, you know, there's stuff like that too. And so the point is that

Rituals can be great for people. They can be not so great. People can do rituals good and healthy numbers of times or they can overdo it. And that is very much true in what I would call the tech religion. You know, I mean, I'm I'm I have not cast my smartphone into the sea.

Yet, but you know, I mean, a lot of this book was spent reflecting on the fact that that is what we do. We take this stained glass black mirror and we genuflect before it in a prayerful posture, bowing to its altar, sometimes 200 times a day. When I have a bad day, I mean, I'm on this thing all the time, right?

And it's a mess. It's a real mess. Well said. I see the iconography there with the phone. I guess I am worshiping it. I mean, you're not alone. You're not alone. I'll move on to my next topic area, which still is related to your book. So again, that's Tech Agnostic is the book that we're talking about here.

And so in 2003, the famous technologist and author Jaron Lanier wrote that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system instead of a technology. AI still hasn't delivered on kind of sci-fi promises of autonomous robots with intelligence indistinguishable from ours. But in the last two years, for me, the watershed moment was GPT-4's release in March of last year.

that blew my mind and made me think okay this might happen in our lifetime and some people think it's going to happen too you assume very soon you mentioned how ray kurzweil uh said it's near the singularity is near now it's nearer he predicts that we'll have artificial general intelligence before 2029 sam altman open ai ceo thinks next year 2025. yep um

So your book, Tech Agnostic, delves into the implications of portraying tech as a messianic force like this. Could you elaborate on these kinds of narratives, especially regarding the singularity as being this kind of religious event that's coming soon? I guess it's kind of like, what's that? What is it in? It's like the end of days. Yeah, it is. I mean, it is very much like the end of days, you know, in the revelation, right?

which is the English word for the Greek word apocalypse. I didn't know that. Yeah. Revelation means apocalypse. Yeah. Yeah. Or apocalypse means revelation, you know, that the new world will be revealed. And for some, that's a good, that, you know, that's going to be fun and pleasurable. And for others, that's going to be utter doom and disaster, right? So given, yeah, what you've just said and

How this, you know, singularity, you know, AGI coming can be perceived as this kind of end of days. Why do these, why do these narratives exist? Why do we choose to believe them? And actually, I've got to say that that kind of thing for me, like, I don't know if we're going to have AGI next year, like Sam Altman thinks or in 2029.

like Ray Kurzweil thinks. But since GPT-4 came out, I think it's probably likely in my lifetime. And I also do believe that whenever it arrives, and it isn't like one event, because that's also like, that's like, I think like an oversimplistic thing to say that it's like one event. But gradually over time, over the coming years, or maybe over the coming decades, it's

AI systems seem like they could become so much more intelligent than us that we might start to just trust them to run off with their own processes because we're like, well, you know what? They should just be governing because they're doing it like we've run all these simulations and they do it way better than us. We run these small pilots, they do it way better than us. And then AGI systems go off and maybe very rapidly create artificial super intelligences that are far beyond AI.

They could theoretically have a kind of intelligence that is far beyond what could be explained to us. In the same way that I can't explain, no matter how much time I spend trying to explain partial derivative calculus to a chimpanzee, a chimpanzee is almost as smart as us. But I have no chance of explaining partial derivative calculus. And in that same way, the artificial superintelligence that could come very hot on the heels of artificial general intelligence may have ways of understanding the world better

That just don't make sense to us. And, but so for me, even, I guess I, without really realizing it until we had this conversation today, I suppose in my mind, I am kind of thinking of the singularity as kind of a religious event because it's so difficult to predict what's going to come past it.

And I'm just kind of hopeful, I guess, as an optimistic person that it's going to be good for most people on the planet, if not maybe even everyone. Let's just take a look at what you've just described and analyze it as though we were sort of breaking down the content and the structure of what you just laid out in a divinity school. What you've laid out sounds...

very much like the structure of a kind of new religious vision for society. You're talking about, you know, my words now I'm, I'm paraphrasing you very loosely because I'm, you know, I'm trying to make a point. Um, but it sounds to me like a kind of slow moving multi-stage rapture.

where, um, you know, the, the people who are good, who, who should benefit from this new, all powerful technology, this force greater than us, than any of us and all of us even, um, will rise in some literal or metaphorical way to, to benefit from such a thing. Um, anybody that does not, I

I suppose, deserve to be benefiting from such a thing, maybe because their behavior is bad. They're mean, they're, they're naughty. Um, they're maybe they're not the right race or gender. I don't know, you know, that, that, that, that they're going to be, you know, in other words, the, the,

all seeing all knowing technology will, will meet out justice. Will it not? I mean, if not, right. Like there's two choices. There's two choices here, you know, either the thing has to be completely capricious and, and really, um, really nasty, you know, or, um, it, it has to be, you know, positive and healthy and, and right. Like it's, it's,

There's sort of two choices for that, right? And so, you know, I guess the point that I want to make here is people have always wanted and needed, you know, a system of thinking about and interacting with the world, you know, so as to cope with the fact that the world is so uncertain, right?

I mean, it really, you know, we, we don't know what is going to happen in the long-term future. Um, we can, we can tell ourselves, we see trend lines and, and we might, you know, but we don't have any proof of what the world is going to look like in 10 or 20 years. Um, and so to a certain extent we need, you know, if we want to say that we do like that's a faith proposition.

Like, I believe that the world is going to look this way based on evidence, but it's still a belief. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I guess. Am I tech agnostic if I am not confident about what tech will bring about? And also, I guess if I, you know, my instinct would be that just like tech today ends up being.

positive and helpful to some people and unhelpful and negative to other people, that it will probably continue to do that in the future. It's not like we've reached some definitive utopia or dystopia. It's just that we kind of like the world today. There's some people that are benefiting a bit in some ways and benefiting less in other ways from change.

Does that make me tech agnostic? Well, I mean, certainly I, I am advocating for people to be more tech agnostic. Um, and I think some of what you're saying, you know, is, is in that category, you know, it's, it's this idea that, uh, we're not sure how things are going to go and we can, you know, but, but I, what I really want to emphasize is,

about why I think tech agnosticism is an important concept in this day and age is, I was describing earlier this sort of confidence or this sort of strong faith that certain kinds of leaders like a Trump will have in this day and age where he's a great example of this because he's a 34-time convicted felon.

whose own former chief of staff, who, by the way, was a general in the Marine Corps, John Kelly, said, you know, he compared him to fascism and fascists. And yet we voted for him and elected him to the highest office in the world because in large part, he comes across as really confident.

And in a very, very fundamentally uncertain world, that confidence has a lot of value to some people. And so what I'm advocating for is an alternative model where we recognize that there's a beauty and a dignity and an honorableness in not knowing, in not being certain.

about what the future holds and not being certain that we have to invest $7 trillion immediately, as Sam Altman is begging us to do. You know, he says, because we've got to do all we can to bring about

you know, the tech and AI rapture, the coming of the AI God, the miraculous abundant world. Those are, you know, I'm quoting words like miraculous and abundance that he himself uses biblical sounding terms.

I think he needs the $7 trillion because OpenAI is absolutely burning cash right now. And if he doesn't get that kind of investment, his baby, his company might legitimately go belly up because it has no way whatsoever to make a profit right now. So just push that timeline infinitely into the future with this investment that will make it too big to fail.

Right. That's why the soft bank folks actually say, you know, that we need nine trillion, don't they? You know, in in in investment. But anyway, or is it the Bitcoin people that say the nine trillion? I lose track. Somebody's calling for nine trillion anyway. So in that world, you know, where Eric Schmidt.

is saying that we're falling desperately behind the Chinese in the AI arms race. And yet AI robots are running around. Um, how do we say this? The AI robots, um, are running around, uh, um,

what are they doing? The AI robots? The Chinese AI robots are now rebelling against their, one robot actually convinced the other robots to run away from their rulers. This is an actual story out of Chinese AI of late. And so if that is what you get by moving quickly,

Maybe there's some real benefit to moving slowly. Maybe there's some real benefit to losing the arms race.

and gaining ourselves in the process. Because maybe the ultimate goal of being human is not victory and conquering and colonizing the stars. Maybe it's looking at one another and at ourselves and appreciating humanness.

appreciating the small, everyday, slow process of loving one another, caring about one another, forming a more compassionate society so that when we eventually project our digital consciousness into the far corners of the universe, you know, trillions of us AI robots out in space powered by unseen stars and what have you.

That when we eventually do that, maybe what we don't want to project is the jerks that we are now to one another all too often out there. Maybe we want to take the time to learn how to treat one another better here on Earth so that when we eventually project something out into space, that it's actually our best versions of ourselves and not glitchy, weird, selfish things

uncertain to actually work, maybe going to ask you to glue the cheese from your pizza onto the crust kind of AI. Okay. And so...

I guess you've kind of given us some picture here, but what does it mean? Can you define succinctly what a tech agnostic is? Yeah, I mean, I think a tech agnostic is somebody who sees technology as a tool, not as the end of itself to human life. A tech agnostic is somebody who

where we don't know if all of the technologies that we're using or anticipating are going to be good for humanity or not. But we take what Leslie Hazleton, a great writer of a book called Agnostic, A Spirited Manifesto, who appears in the conclusion of my book, calls a spirited delight in not knowing that there's a real...

pride and honor in admitting what we don't know because there's all too much certainty in our world. A tech agnostic is somebody who recognizes that the Silicon Valley world that we know today is one of the most hierarchical religions in the world, and we want to flatten those hierarchies.

A tech agnostic is somebody who prioritizes human connection and humanness above pretty much all else that we recognize that at the end of the day, we evolved for connection.

And we, we want a sense of real purpose in our life and, and, um, in a universe as vast as this, as, as Carl Sagan might've said, um, the purpose that's most worthwhile is, is love is, is caring about one another. Um, and so, you know, that we're, we're agnostic about anything that distracts us from the, the actual work of building a society that's more caring, more just, more equitable. Um,

More human. And then so that also at the end there, when you're talking about love and being more human, humanness, does that mean that a tech agnostic is also a tech humanist? Yeah. I mean, I think that the world of humanism that I've spent my professional life in these last 20, 25 years has a lot to offer to the world of tech because...

The world of tech, I've noticed having traveled all around the world speaking to religious and non-religious audiences. The world of tech is the most secular sort of demographic group I've ever seen. I mean, you know, if you go to

Arts and culture spaces, political spaces, you know, different industries, whatever. I've done that. And, you know, there are some secular non-religious people there. It's now, you know, 20 to 30 percent of society in America, at least. But.

In tech spaces, there are extraordinary numbers of non-religious people. Yeah, you kind of just assume, you know, like this is simple-minded of me to say, but you're kind of your default assumption when you meet someone else who works in the tech industry is that they're non-religious.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So related to this idea of humanism, in the last few years, we've witnessed the rise of something called transhumanism, which maybe you could define for us, because I don't know if I do justice. But transhumanism, effective altruism, techno-libertarian movements, and so tech elites, particularly concentrated around the Bay Area,

with these kinds of worldviews hope to influence or impose on society or the economy with their worldview. And some of these things are not helpful. So it's like a Ponzi scheme under the pretense of helping others or building a privately owned techno-libertarian colony in Honduras or a tech bro-run city in Solana County, California. There's a cultishness there.

to these movements to some extent. And so, yeah, I mean, I guess if you could define some of these movements for us, why they're cultish and what the risks of these movements are. Yeah. So I walk readers through in the early chapters of the book, uh, a number of these different movements and, and,

ways of approaching technology. And, you know, I'll let people read most of that, but I'll just say that one of the groups that I look at is the effective altruists. And effective altruists are almost entirely a secular group of people. I once back in my congregational days had the leadership of the Harvard effective altruists in my office and, you know, just ask them, like,

What are your beliefs? And there was not more than maybe one person that had some sort of traditional religious belief. There was it was a collection of atheist agnostics and such. But it really does strike me as a kind of modern faith. The movement does in the idea of data.

as being able to tell us exactly how we should live, exactly how we should donate. And even more than that, you know, there's a vision in the effective altruist movement, at least as it was expressed as I was writing the book, the movement has gone through a

a major rebranding effort. Yeah. It was Sam Bankman freed with Sam Bankman freed in prison with, with P Diddy, you know, you got to rebrand, right? Because he was the prophet, a Jesus figure, in fact, uh, of that movement. And, and I mean, except imagine if Jesus was also the biggest funder of your movement, like imagine Jesus being, you know, having $27 billion and pledging to donate it all to Paul. Um,

That's what Bankman freed was. Uh, well, at least, you know, he was going to give some to the Roman empire. You know, he was going to give some to the Mesopotamians, but mostly he was going to give it to Paul. Um, and Paul of course was, was William McCaskill. And, you know, I'm sure Toby Ord would get some as well and they'd buy a castle and everything would be great. Um, but, uh,

buy a castle they bought a castle did they oh no the effective altruist absolutely bought a castle i believe it's in scotland um i think they paid 17 million dollars for it they also paid reportedly 10 million dollars for william mccaskill's latest book tour um to talk about the effective altruist movement and the long-term movement including um

Many believe this belief in the fact that what effective altruism was ultimately aiming for was Nick Bostrom's vision of trillions of digital beings in the long-term future, that it was our duty to bring about... And that kind of ties to the transhumanism point, right? So transhumanism is...

a belief that the human race can evolve beyond its current and physical limitations. So that's also ties back to kind of the Kurzweil, Ray Kurzweil thing you were talking about, about like, you know, uploading your mind, being able to live forever. So where humanism is saying, you know, humans and humanity should kind of be our, our North star, uh, you know, being loving, being kind to humans. Transhumanism is saying, uh,

Well, humans are kind of outdated, you know, and we should be looking beyond that. I believe that there really needs to be a kind of tech humanism in all of this as well, where to me, humanism is an alternative to traditional religion that is sort of running parallel to traditional religion, where we say,

look, we are going to believe things based on reason and evidence and as well as following our compassion and our caring for one another. That's going to be our North Star. We're not, you know, we believe that the gods were created by human beings. There's no chosen people. We're all in this together. That's, to me, the best of what humanism has to offer.

And I believe that that's something that's very important to look at for people who have become fairly religious about their tech. We need a North Star.

And it's not traditional religion for many. You know, if you're listening to this and you're a deeply faithful Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, et cetera, and you believe that, you know, your God or gods and your religious teachers will show you the way I respect that. And I'm not as critical of that in any way as you might think I would be. Um,

Because there's a lot of good people who believe that sort of thing. But for those who don't, for those who do not, we need to really spend more time asking ourselves in this world of change, what is our North Star? Why are we doing the things that we do? Is it all just about progress? Is it all just about profit? What's the point? And to me...

Rather, if you believe in a society where, as was reported in the New York Times recently, you're going to have AI avatars doing your dating for you, then ultimately you're just going to be people who don't know how to connect with one another, don't know how to love one another, don't know how to be intimate with one another without AI intervention. And so what kind of people are we even going to be? What kind of humans?

Are we envisioning if that's the society we think we want to build? I suggest we need to dial it way back on a lot of stuff like that, even ban some of it maybe, but certainly disinvest in some of that and reinvest in one another.

Nice. I like that. That was a really good final soundbite. Nice conclusion, drawing a line under everything. I have two questions which I hope are really quick, which are just related to, I said that I was going to come back to questions that I started off at the very beginning with. You just provided us with some really good sense there on, I buy what you're saying. I think that being all in on technology in every aspect is

is problematic and that we need to dial some of that back, maybe disinvest some of that, at least in terms of our time and attention, maybe literally financially. So that's all great. But also going back to one of the questions that I asked you right at the beginning of this episode, is there some way that people can find some kind of local experience if they are secular, like the humanist hub that you created? Is there some way for people to find something like that locally?

There may not be. I've become convinced that secular people are going to be secular and we don't need a traditional congregation. What I would suggest for people to do is get involved with the causes, the people, the

And the experiences that they find meaningful. So go out and get involved in political organizations, in civic organizations, in arts organizations. Do things to care for your neighbors, to care for your loved ones. Take the time for that. It's not going to scale.

But if more and more of us do it, then it it does scale. Actually, it creates a more compassionate world. You don't need if you're listening to me and you're intrigued by what I have to say, you don't need a traditional structure for it.

You're, you know, you are beyond that. Uh, at times you'll wish you had it and that's fine. That's normal. You know, it's like, I wish I could dunk, but I can't, um, you know, but I don't need to dunk. And all we really need to do is care for one another, care for our local communities and use that to build a better world. Nice. Another really great soundbite. Thank you. Yeah.

Awesome. All right, so I'm going to let you go. But before I let my guests go, I always ask if they have a book recommendation for us. So do you have anything other than your own book? Which, yeah, again, the full title, Tech Agnostic, How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation, available online.

around the world now. And we'll, of course, have a link to that in the show notes. But beyond that book, beyond Tech Agnostic, obviously the focus of our conversation today, do you have any recommendations for us?

For sure. There's so many books I could recommend. Anything by Ruha Benjamin, the wonderful scholar of both technology and African-American studies at Princeton University is worth reading. Her latest books are phenomenal. I'll also say in each chapter of the book,

I center this comparison that I'm making of a different aspect of religion to a different aspect of technology with the story of somebody who embodies that relationship between religion and tech. And so in my humanism...

section of the book where I'm talking about the positive alternatives to the tech religion, I tell the story of this wonderful character. Her name is Kate O'Neill. If you're watching this, you can see her book behind me, Tech Humanist. So I'm the tech humanist in the sense that I'm the humanist who's now doing tech. Kate is the tech humanist in the sense that she is a technologist who got really fascinated with humanism.

And her new book that's coming out relatively soon, you can pre-order it, is What Matters Next. What Matters Next by Kate O'Neill, the tech humanist. Go pick that up. Go pick up Rupa Benjamin's work. And thank you for listening. I love that. Thank you. And if people want to follow you outside of this episode, where's the best way to do that? LinkedIn and Blue Sky now.

Uh, I'm, I'm loving blue sky. Would love to connect with people there. And, and of course, uh, LinkedIn is a great way to, to, to follow people's professional work and including mine. Nice. There's a decent chance that by the time this episode comes out, I will have migrated from Twitter to blue sky. Oh, come on over. Come on over. It's it's the skies are bluer over there. They really are. Nice. Uh,

Uh, Greg, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation in case that wasn't obvious. Thank you, John. It was a pleasure. We've also really a thorough conversation and, and, uh, in, in many wonderful ways. Yeah. And you were very generous with your time. We've gone half an hour over the time, the slot that we booked with you. So I, you know, I felt like there was momentum in this conversation and I hope I didn't just like ruin the rest of your day. If you feel that your audience will benefit from it, I trust you. So I love it. And, uh, hope to talk to you again someday.

Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Greg. We'll have to, yeah, next book comes out. We'd love to have you back on. Thanks very much. I love filming today's episode while in it. Greg Epstein covered how technology has become our new religion, complete with prophets, tech leaders, rituals like checking devices, and promises of salvation, like the singularity brought about by AI.

He also talked about how the tech industry, particularly in Silicon Valley, operates with religious-like certainty and hierarchical structures that need reformation. How movements like transhumanism and effective altruism function similarly to religious cults promising technological transcendence.

How being a tech agnostic means viewing technology as a tool rather than an end in itself, maintaining healthy skepticism about technological promises. He also talked about how the path forward involves prioritizing human connection and compassion over blind faith in technological progress, and how rather than creating separate secular communities, we should focus on building meaningful connections through existing civic and cultural organizations.

Thanks, of course, to everyone on the Super Data Science podcast team, our podcast manager, Sonia Bryovich, media editor, Mario Pombo, partnerships manager, Natalie Zheisky, researcher, Serge Massis, our podcast manager, Sonia Bryovich,

our writers, Dr. Zahra Karshe and Sylvia Ogwang, and of course, our founder, Kirill Aramango. Thanks to all of them for producing another mind-expanding episode for us today, for enabling that super team to create this free podcast for you. We are deeply grateful to our sponsors. You can support this show by checking out our sponsors' links, which are in the show notes. And if you yourself are interested in sponsoring an episode, you can get the details on how to do that by making your way to johncrohn.com slash podcast.

Yeah. And you can also help out by sharing this episode with people who might like it. You could review the episode on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen, on YouTube. You could subscribe, obviously, if you're not a subscriber already. Above all, the most important thing is that you just keep on tuning in. That's what I'm hoping for. I'm so grateful to have you listening. And I hope I can continue to make episodes you love for years and years to come. Till

Till next time, keep on rocketing out there and I'm looking forward to enjoying another round of the Super Data Science Podcast with you very soon.