Why Do Tech Bros Have the Worst Ideas?

Man, sorry I've been gone for so long. I took some time off to sort of like contemplate what I want to say. I did a bunch of research. I read a bunch of like opposition research, you could say. The New Atheists, we'll talk about that. Yeah, so hopefully all that time off pays off in the quality of these videos. I have a new series that I'm kicking off with this one, so welcome back. As I like to say on this channel, technology reflects the consciousness of the people creating it. And I am deeply concerned about the people creating our technology, especially artificial intelligence. For a few years now, transhumanists like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Ray Kurzweil have been promising the imminent arrival of artificial superintelligence. But OpenAI's GPT-5 arrived a few weeks ago and doesn't seem any closer to superintelligence than GPT-4. It still can't count the number of Bs in the word blueberry, for example. And industry experts have called GPT-5 overhyped and underwhelming. Sam Altman's breathless promises seem increasingly unfounded. As I explained in my video on AGI, intelligence is mysterious and hard. Meanwhile, everywhere you look in Silicon Valley today, people seem to be losing their minds, grasping desperately for some kind of meaning in the most unexpected of places. Right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who has been a Trump supporter and J.D. Vance mentor, recently talked to Christian New York Times columnist Ross Douthat about how the Antichrist has arrived in the form of Greta Thunberg, the FDA, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I guess for Thiel, the Antichrist is this sort of force that promises peace and safety while creating a stagnant global State? Anyways, you know Peter Thiel. This guy.

Do you think people are trying to raise money by pretending that we're going to become— build a machine god, right? Is it, is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about? You, I think you would, you would prefer the human race to endure, right?

Uh, you're hesitating.

Well, I— yes, I don't know.

I, I would, I would, um— This is a long hesitation. There's so many questions and pluses.

Should the human race survive?

Yes.

Okay.

But I also would— So ridiculous. Like, we are led by the worst people right now. Anyways, this month, Thiel is hosting a 4-part lecture series in San Francisco all about the Antichrist. Speaking of demonic, this week, Nicole Shanahan, ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin and former vice presidential running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., called the annual Burning Man Festival demonic, even though she's been to 7 of the last 10 burns. So I guess she had some kind of awakening and baptism, and she's born again now.

And so part of my journey to my baptism was, was really challenging and painful. There are a lot of things that happened That were shocking. There were things that happened when I was on the campaign trail with RFK that were just unexplainable. My— I developed a relationship with God. I'd always believed in God since I was a little girl.

Yeah.

But my relationship with God evolved at a rate that I think only a U.S. presidential campaign that can evolve in. You know, it's— you, you are getting put through the fire. Mm-hmm.

You could say that all of this is the emergence of the Christian accelerationist movement, the perhaps inevitable convergence of techno-libertarianism and Christian nationalism. This techno-Christian movement is, in turn, a reaction to the rise of transhumanism and the cult of technological salvation. For those unfamiliar, transhumanism is the belief that we can merge with or become machines or cyborgs through technoscience. Nanotechnology, AGI, genetic engineering— these are all part of the transhumanist sort of grand plan. But these are really two sides of the same coin. The Christian accelerationists and the transhumanists, they both seek transcendence through technology, and they see any slowing of technological progress as a sort of evil or moral failing. For Thiel, his creepy data analytics company Palantir is part of the solution to the prevalence of Satan's lies, because Palantir will pinpoint the truth within the massive troves of data collected by business and government and thereby prevent societal decay and the arrival of the Antichrist. Palantir, guided by Thiel and his kind of unhinged CEO and co-founder Alex Karp, will allow us to see the world as it truly is through data analysis. For Thiel, technology is a weapon in a grand cosmic battle between good and evil. Alongside all this, there is the Dark Enlightenment, or Neo-Reaction, NRX. This is a radically anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian political philosophy from Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, who also goes by Mencius Moldbug, which is just an example of how All these guys are kind of like walking self-satires. Like, it's, it's just bizarre that we have the most, like, unhinged, like, incel types out there kind of like leading the ideological vanguard. It's totally bizarre. We need a government that is actually good and that actually works, and we don't have one. Anyways, the Dark Enlightenment rejects democracy, embraces authoritarianism and even monarchy. It leans into genetic justifications for social hierarchy and is overall kind of hyper-rational and retrograde. But, you know, Yarvin has the ear of like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel. So this is something we should take seriously because it's influencing what you could call our thought leaders, for lack of a better term. And it's all underscoring for me the point that we live in the strangest times shaped by powerful people with the worst ideas. Like, where are the wise elders? Where are the inspirational leaders, the people you can look up to who are offering some kind of evolved, positive, uplifting message? It's like, what the fuck is going on? Maybe all this is bubbling up now because of the arrival of large language models and the overhyped claims that Sam Altman and Elon Musk and others keep making about superintelligence. Being on the horizon. And maybe all of this is sort of like it's highlighted the longstanding meaning crisis that we have in the West. And suddenly these questions of consciousness, metaphysics, and philosophy are urgently relevant. But the problem is that most people are not steeped in philosophy or spirituality. So instead, they sort of grasp for what's familiar or what's at hand, what's nearby. Despite its longstanding secular rhetoric, I think the United States is still in large part a very Christian country. So I think that's part of why you see this happening. That's another reason I think is that you see this with writers like Yuval Noah Harari. It's almost like we only are presented with this false choice between secular rationalism on the one hand and sort of Abrahamic faiths on the other, you know. So it's either atheism or Christianity, Islam, Judaism, you know. There's no sort of like consideration of any other viewpoint, any other ideology or philosophy, you know, totally ignoring Buddhism, Hinduism, other mystic traditions and Eastern traditions and all that. Anyways, I think all of this ideological derangement in Silicon Valley and increasingly in the US government, is the result of what philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche identified as an imbalance in Western culture, an overemphasis and overreliance on the Apollonian within us: reason, abstraction, a tendency to see parts rather than wholes, and favoring utility over value and meaning. Black and white thinking, in other words. And what we've lost is the Dionysian, this kind of embodied, intuitive, holistic, and contextual orientation towards nature and towards the world. When we lose a facility with the Dionysian, we kind of flail about, reaching for frameworks that served us in the past, again, like Christianity. Or we double down on the denial of the existence of the Dionysian and become new atheists. Furthermore, none of these radical ideologues, whether accelerationist, transhumanist, or neo-reactionary, are embodied or have any deep connection with the non-human natural world. So I want to come back to that in a later video as well. But today I want to talk about the roots of what I and others see as a global pandemic of Apollonian thinking. Then in later videos, I want to explore the ways that this Apollonian pandemic has led to the techno-capital machine of progress, commoditized spirituality, and how all of that makes this intelligence age A sort of metaphysical crossroads requiring radical, liberating spiritual intervention in order to usher in a, hopefully, a wisdom age instead. To really underscore and illustrate the predicament that we're in, I want to offer a parable. Imagine if Enlightenment Europeans decided 300 years ago that the senses of smell and taste weren't real. Instead, loudly confident European men declared that the sense of smell and taste were superstitious remnants of an irrational religious worldview, overly subjective and prone to emotional manipulation, primitive, unreliable, a useless vestige of our antiquated animalistic past. From a scientific standpoint, they would say food is merely fuel and any enjoyment of flavor is an indulgent illusion of primitive peoples. So in this imagined world, public spaces are scrubbed by odorless purifiers, and natural odors are considered a form of olfactory pollution. Because this denial of smell and taste became accepted as fact over the centuries, it's now taught in schools and parroted by governments and the media. Food has now become odorless, flavorless pastes and pills. Perfumes and incense are now passé, something encountered only like in among indigenous tribes or among the low and uneducated or spiritual sensitives. Flowers are bred by industry only for visual enjoyment, thereby losing their natural fragrance. Smell and taste have begun to atrophy, although some people refuse to succumb. There are now these kind of renegade epicureans, aromancers, fermenters, and perfumeurs. Still cooking with spice, aging cheeses, and burning incense. But they are laughed at by the mainstream. These archivists of lost sensation run scent libraries full of old books, essential oils, and cedar chests. The Epicureans preach a gospel of pleasure and host lavish feasts in foodie speakeasies known as burpees, where chefs smuggle in real lemons, cardamom, and black pepper through underground networks. Rebellious aromancers cultivate sacred rituals full of burning incense and essential oils, operating hidden rooftop greenhouses full of aromatic jasmine, lavender, and rose. And fermenter anarchists smuggle sourdough starters, kombucha mothers, and various yeast cultures to create stink bombs for the sanitized public sphere, planting durian fruit and Limburger cheese in government buildings and injecting spice into the nutrient paste factories. In this odorless, flavorless world, those who want to be accepted by the mainstream and get good jobs ignore their sense of smell and taste and pretend that it doesn't exist. People who rant and rave about the smell of a rose or the life-changing taste of a juicy peach or a fresh cup of coffee are ridiculed as woo-woo or superstitious. After all, everyone knows that sight, sound, and touch are the only real senses. Only ancient primitives believed all that smell and taste nonsense. Food is merely fuel, not a source of pleasure. Smells are odious and reminiscent of decaying flesh. Sounds pretty awful, right? Well, in some sense, this is what we have done by living entirely in the left hemisphere of the brain, starting with the European Renaissance, or perhaps even Socrates in ancient Greece, and then accelerating with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. As Iain McGilchrist has explained so well, the left hemisphere is logic, abstraction, control. It's literal, detached, machine-like. We moderns have collectively denied the existence of right hemisphere thinking.

Right.

Intuition, imagination, and holistic orientation towards the world. The right hemisphere of the brain sees nature and life in terms of process and flow rather than purposeless utility. You know, it's supposed to be— the right hemisphere is supposed to be sort of like the dominant one, but it's not, you know? And we have the left hemisphere now that just thinks in parts and parts and utility. And we've denied the existence of anything but meaningless, purposeless material reality. Not because transcendent reality was disproven scientifically— it wasn't— but because those confident European men declared it so. The machinery of reason is an insatiable, formidable force that can justify colonizing half the world, treating nature like a mere resource to be pillaged, and reducing the sacred to a mere commodity. As we collectively moved into the left hemisphere view of the world, the prevailing worldview necessarily became more reductionist. Draining nature of all transcendental meaning, slicing nature up into ever smaller pieces, and using her as a resource merely to be exploited. In short, the whole reason we think that the cosmos is made only of purposeless and meaningless matter and energy, despite a failure to explain the emergence of life or consciousness, is because of our move into the left hemisphere. For many people, this Apollonian worldview is depressing and disenchanted. And it leaves them feeling isolated, irrelevant, fearful, and empty, but overstimulated. People are so desperate for meaning, wisdom, and guidance that they turn to now AI chatbots as counselors, friends, lovers, and even gods. Because this left hemisphere thinking undergirds so much intellectual discourse and informs the ethos driving both technology innovation and politics today, I want to find a new way to approach it that is simple and illuminating, without losing its multivalent properties. Inspired by the work of Iain McGilchrist and drawing from pre-Socratic Greece and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, I'm calling this left hemisphere tendency the Apollonian mind or Apollonian intelligence. After all, Apollo was the Greek god of light, truth, reason, form, structure, law, and order. And of course, he was also associated with poetry and music. So maybe it's not a perfect metaphor, but I think it's good enough for our purposes. Now, I'm not saying that this kind of left hemisphere Apollonian orientation is a bad thing. I think we need reason, we need logic, we need linear thinking. All that stuff has its place, but it's just out of balance. And we've forgotten the Dionysian. and the wildness, the instinct, the emotion, and unity with nature that comes from that orientation towards the world. Although I began the sensory parable above with the Enlightenment, the West's love affair with reason goes back to at least Plato and through Socrates to Apollo and the Oracle at Delphi. As cryptic, irrational, and intuitive as the Delphic Oracle was, I think it's fitting that Apollo, is connected to the oracle, and we have now created a new machine oracle in these large language models. As I mentioned, one way the Apollonian mind manifests is the belief that technology is the solution to all of our problems as a humanity, and even a path to immortality for the transhumanists. Don't worry about large language models voraciously devouring increasing amounts of energy and water and accelerating the climate crisis, the Apollonians say. AI will solve that. Don't worry about increasing socioeconomic inequality. AI will usher in a new utopia for all. But the current approach to simply scaling machine learning is a shot in the dark. It's a gamble. Nobody knows if it's going to lead to AGI or superintelligence or whatever. Nobody even understands intelligence in the first place. Technology is viewed as a panacea to the Apollonian mind because the Dionysian is long dead and forgotten. To the left hemisphere of the brain, the right hemisphere and its antiquated, squishy qualities are silly, superstitious, hippie-dippy, and kind of woo. For the Apollonians, nature is merely a machine, so why not make more machines as a solution to all of our problems? You know, we're admonished by these Apollonians to embrace the algorithmic matrix that flows out of our iPhones, ChatGPT, Instagram, TikTok, and the mouths of supremely confident Apollonian But remember, technology reflects the consciousness of the people creating it, and this thereby shapes our own consciousness. So this really matters. This is so important. That's why I'm concerned that a majority of technology leaders in Silicon Valley are transhumanists or techno-Christians. And Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen, they're all part of this kind of cult of technological salvation. And Peter Thiel, he kind of falls somewhere between transhumanist and sort of cyborg Jesus freak or something, right? These techno-utopian billionaires have their own in-house philosophers too. Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, William MacAskill, Toby Ord, Max Tegmark, Max Moore, and even Yuval Noah Harari.

The idea that I call it the substrate independence thesis, that you could in principle have conscious experiences implemented on different substrates. It doesn't have to be carbon atoms, as is the case with the human brain. It could be silicon atoms.

Mm-hmm.

That what creates conscious experiences is some kind of structural feature of the computation that is being performed, rather than the material that is used to underpin it. So in that case, you could have a simulation with detailed simulations of brains in it, where maybe every neuron and synapses simulated, and then those brains would be conscious.

And that's possibility number 2?

Well, no. So possibility number 2 is that these posthumans just are not at all interested in doing it. And not just that some of them don't do it, but like of all these civilizations that reach technological maturity, they kind of pretty uniformly just don't do that.

And what's number 3?

That we are in a simulation. The simulation hypothesis.

For these transhumanists, accelerationists, and techno-utopians, technology is an inexorable force A natural extension of machine-like biological evolution. And so as a result, it's going to usher in an age of prosperity, abundance, bliss, techno-divinity, and immortality. This is what Yuval Noah Harari talks about in his book Homo Deus. And in this ideology, intelligence is primary, and the well-being of future humans, possibly living entirely in a simulation, is more important than the well-being of present-day humans. It's an ideology founded upon scientism, physicalism, and the application of the machine metaphor to every aspect of reality. In other words, it is highly Apollonian. You could even describe transhumanism as a new sort of secular religion, with its own eschatology— Kurzweil's machine singularity, for example— its own path to salvation— this technological progress— and its own prophets, This is a deeply personal series for me because my own journey was one of living entirely in the rational and then discovering other parts of myself, including the intuitive, emotional, and embodied. I was a computer engineering major in college and a math minor, and then I was an AI researcher before I became a lawyer and then a philosopher and a yoga teacher. So I understand the tendency to cling to the rational, the Apollonian left hemisphere orientation towards the world. And I understand the reason that we think Apollonian intelligence is going to become not only a solution for everything, but almost a god. Again, I think the ideologies driving technology innovation in Silicon Valley today, the techno-utopian cults of technological salvation, the neo-reactionaries, and the techno-Christians are firmly within this Western Apollonian tradition.

Yeah.

of hyper-rationality. I'll say it again, because technology reflects the consciousness of its creator, these ideologies are shaping our technologies, not to mention our government policy, in ways that further perpetuate this Apollonian mind, this imbalance that we've been living with for the past 300 or 400 or 500 years. If we as a society were to move to a more balanced orientation toward the world, between the left and right hemispheres, between Apollo and Dionysus. This would result in a shift in values from separation, control, and mere utility toward wisdom, interconnectedness, and a sense of community. Instead of an information age or an intelligence age focused on analysis of data, we would shift to a wisdom age where the world would become alive once again with archetypal meaning, Okay, so next time I want to examine the New Atheists, people like Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari, who have perfected this Apollonian mode. Their worldview has an outsized influence on the zeitgeist today, I think, with Harris dominating the podcast charts, especially with tech bros, and Harari writing books that consistently become bestsellers and have elevated him to sort of ideological prophet of Silicon Valley. In addition, Harris and Harari are both Buddhists who like Buddhism because it is so easily stripped of its metaphysics and its cosmology to provide a utilitarian set of practices and benefits that are devoid of any deeper meaning or anything deeper than a negation of the self and a denial of free will. After that, I want to dive more deeply into the techno-capital machine, the rise of dataism, Techno-Christianity. I'm fascinated by that. And then I want to try to offer some ensouled alternatives to all of this. In the meantime, I invite you to get in touch with the Dionysus within you somehow, any way— dancing, play, making art. Just be wild. Go wild. And I'll see you next time.

Bye.