A.I. Fabler: The Future As It Happens | The Tyler Wagner Show #1039

All right everyone, welcome back to another episode. Today we have AI Fabler with us, so welcome to the show. Well, hi there, grateful to, to have you on. Um, so if you want to kick us off, just tell us a little bit more about you, what you do, and I know I think it's a newly released book, but I'll let you take it away to start off.

Okay, well, the book that we're going to be talking about is Agenda 2060: The Future as It Happens. And obviously it's futuristic, it's set 40 years forward, and it takes as its, um, its theme, its starting point, the proposition that the the best or the worst of the woke ideals that are currently being pushed in society are actually carried forward as government policy by the world government in 2060, with hilarious consequences. So it's very much, it's a satire, but it is an absurdist satire. Satire, so don't expect any subtlety. I'll tell you the inspiration for it. First of all, let me just explain, I'm talking to you from New Zealand, which is as far away as you can get probably from you at the moment.

Yeah, Miami, yeah, so we're far.

In New Zealand it's midsummer, so outside you hear the sound of lawn mowers and and people running around, although it's a little too hot to run around. So I'm thinking of you guys in the cold. I've been stuck down here for the best part of 2 years because it's, it's the hermit kingdom, it's known as in the COVID world. But my working life has been spread around Europe and the Asia-Pacific region for the last 30 years, with just 3 years in the States. So I had become a little removed from what was happening politically in the States. In 2017, I was at an artist's and academic's retreat in Italy, in northern Italy. In the evenings, we used to sit around the table and discuss what we'd been doing during the day. There were some Californian college professors there, and I was really struggling to have conversation with them. I have to say, every subject seemed to be bristling with the potential for antagonism, and on their part, it was like whatever I said, I was throwing hand grenades at them. I thought, what the hell is this all about? And then I realized that they were speaking from a very scripted point of view on all of the subjects that we touched on. I had been used as a journalist and writer to regard conversation as being open but friendly warfare. The way to really find out about subjects and to stimulate good conversation was to be relatively provocative. But it wasn't because I was being provocative so much, it was just that I was clearly identified as the enemy. I had to think about this because I couldn't keep bringing out examples of what I was writing each day and having them look as though they wanted to have me arrested. Now, what I was writing at the time was a film script which was a comedy set in Spain called Testosterona, The Meaning of Life, and it featured two characters who were aged movie makers, and they'd reached that time in life when they were sifting through the debris of their achievements and their disappointments. And it was very much, you know, an independent movie script. And the wife of one of the Californian academics Her face was completely crumpled in horror and she said to me, "I can't believe that anybody would make a movie about a subject like that." And I said, "Why?" She said, "Well, first of all, these are two men." I said, "Yes." She said, "They're two white men." And I said, "Well, yeah, they're Jewish, they're white." 'Right. Do you realize that what you are doing here is ageist, racist, and sexist?' I said, 'No, I didn't realize that. I thought I was just writing about two aged Hollywood filmmakers.' And she said, 'Well, it's quite appalling. You obviously are not aware of what's going on in society.' I think I got the message from that. The following day, I sat down and I wrote a skit as broadly as I possibly could about a situation where people who were living in a society that rewarded victimhood by giving more social points to them, the more victimhood they could prove. Were paid more from the universal basic wage. And as a result, virtually everyone was competing with everyone else as to their level of victimhood. But I wrote it with such a broad brush that it was absolutely absurd, and they laughed their heads off. And I thought, this is it, I've actually cracked it. I now know how to speak to these people. So I decided, I could turn it into a full-length novel, a novel of the absurd, but one that would make you think about the unintended consequences of some of the things that were being proposed. So that's it, Agenda 2060: The Future as It Happens by AI Fabler.

I love this. Okay. So yeah, you know, I'm at a point with everything where I don't know if I actually think anything is absurd anymore, meaning like it is so beyond absurd. That just nothing is surprising to me anymore. But, uh, I guess first question for you is 2060, are we looking good or are we looking bad? And then after you answer that, let's get into a little more detail on it.

Well, um, I think that the— my personal view is that, um, these changes in society tend to occur every 40 years, and they wax and wane, and then they're overtaken by a new mood in society. So I'm anticipating that by 2060, we will have come to terms with the absolute absurdity of some of these things, but we won't necessarily have abandoned the the high ideals that are behind them. I mean, if you take, for instance, climate change and ecological issues, I think you'd have to say that everybody, whether on left or right, is now pretty much agreed that we need to clean up the planet and we need to keep it clean, and we haven't been doing a good job. So, you know, that's a positive benefit to have come out of the last 20 or 30 years. Despite the fact that the proponents of climate change have indulged in catastrophizing to an absurd degree. We now have a generation of children who believe that the world is going to be a burning cinder within 12 years, and the media does nothing to discourage them from thinking this, which is very sad. But by 2060, I'm I'm assuming that a lot of these things we will have accepted. We will have accepted in the case of people who are marginalized in society, perhaps by their transsexuality, perhaps by their physical or mental handicaps, that we have to do something to ensure that they are welcomed into the brotherhood of the larger society, and that we have sympathy for them. Not that we have to be totally absurd and end up having large men with penises swimming in women's races, and that the only time that they get beaten is when a large woman who claims to be a trans man goes up against them. In the meantime, who's being neglected? Well, females are being neglected. Women's sport is being traumatised by this absurdity. So I mean, that's really what we're talking about, an absurdity. And I think that we have to point that up. Because on the one hand, you have the woke, and they are absolutely petrified of not being woke enough because they'll be thrown out of the university or thrown out of their tribe. On the other hand, you have the anti-woke, who too many people identify with the right, but they're not the right at all. They're merely people who think that being too woke is absurd. In the middle, you have the great mass of dumbfounded people who don't know what the hell they're talking about. There will always be that great mass in the middle, which is saying, "I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean. This is crazy. Is this crazy, or am I going mad?" That's the position we're in at the moment. Now we could talk for hours about why, where it's come from. Obviously it's come through academia, it has a long lineage going back to the postmodernists in France and in Germany and how it crossed the Atlantic and why academia has taken it up so strongly and what it is about the academic environment that makes them so bitchy and nasty and competitive. Then how they've managed to get around the minds of the pupils that we've entrusted into their hands and how those pupils have then gone out into media in particular, and even into the larger corporations in the human resources area and perpetuate it. Now, because we see so much of it, in the media, Tyler, we presume that it is all-pervasive. In fact, I don't believe that. I think that, and I have no proof of this, but I think it really affects probably a tiny minority of the general population, perhaps 10%, perhaps 15% at either end of the scale. But that's leaving an awful lot of just same ordinary people in the middle trying to make a living.

Yeah, you bring up a lot of good points there. It's really interesting. And again, you can go down a lot of rabbit holes with this stuff. Like, I, I always like to listen to like all sides so I can get all perspectives. So, um, there's one guy that I, you know, he's been wrong sometimes, but I think he's been correct a lot of times.

It's—

have you ever heard of Alex Jones of Infowars?

Yes. Yeah.

Okay. So, I mean, a lot of people think he's crazy, and I mean, he said some wild stuff, but at the end of the day, um, he's been correct about a lot of things. So I just think it's, it's interesting to just hear all perspectives. And I remember one thing that I've heard is, uh, I forget where it was from, but apparently when a society, um, is nearing its end or like about to collapse is when these absurdities start to kind of blossom. For instance, like you're talking with the transsexuals, in a sense of that, like I've seen videos from this Steven Crowder YouTuber, and I think it was volleyball, right? So it was a, you know, a man that turned into a woman, and that team just kept absolutely crushing every other team because, you know, It was literally like a 6'4" transsexual woman, you know, was a man turned to a woman and just kept spiking it and just crushing the other team. And it's like, you know, how do we not see that that is an issue? I just don't, I don't understand. It's really fascinating to me. But I guess maybe we do. It's just like, how do you fix it? Rules, you know, not everything's so black and white. Like, it's— the answer isn't, okay, let all transsexuals into, uh, women's sports. Obviously, uh, not. And there's many reasons. If you listen to Joe Rogan, he talks about that. Like, even if you are now a, you know, woman, you know, the fact that you were a man prior, the testosterone— like, there's so many advantages— advantages, excuse me— that would give a born woman like no chance of ever competing with you in a serious way. So Either way, just wanted to bring that up. But as far as other absurdities, I'm curious, like, what other absurdities do you discuss in your book that you see potentially in 2060 actually staying around or potentially growing even more absurd?

Well, I think the victimhood aspect of identitarianism probably is the one that is going to have the most incentive to stick around for years because there's no doubt at all that it's very much in favor of certain groups to adopt the role of victim. They have the wonderful advantage of moral right on their side. It's extremely hard to speak against them. Have a look, for instance, at the fat agenda. Well, you know, we know and have always known that it's extremely bad for your health to be grossly overweight. I mean, obesity is a killer, and particularly during these times in COVID. So why would we now have very strong political movements, particularly in academia, which are essentially moving the debate away from health and towards an embrace of that particular status. The same thing has happened with autism. Autism is very unfortunate, needs a lot of understanding on people's parts, needs a lot of careful handling. But now we have a situation where the autistic or those on the spectrum have again created political movements that positively promote it to the point where they teach their members how to fake the play of autism in public in order to make people more aware of it. That is to phony fake it, to be exact. As long as people have an incentive to do that, then I think it will stick around. Now, what is the response? My response is, and it's not a unique response at all, but my response is to point out the absolute absurdity because if you laugh at tyrants, and these people are tyrannical, they can't handle that at all. They're certainly not going to debate with you on grounds of reasonable discussion. You know that if you, if you're not reciting their mantra, then you are the enemy and you have to be stopped. You have to be blocked. You are irreversible in whatever your defect happens to be. Like, for instance, you can be If you're a very understanding Black American who has a balanced view of the world, then you are essentially racist. You are a white Black man or a Black white man. That's nonsense. Well, the only thing to do when you come up against that is to point at it and laugh and show the absurdity. I think Peter Ustinov, who was a great actor and playwright, used to say that comedy is just a funny way of being serious. And that's essentially what satire and the satire of the absurd is, and I chose to approach the subject from that point of view. Now, the reaction I've had, you're a person who's extremely interested in the in the process of writing and the experience of authors. And so you'll probably have thought when you first heard about this book, has this guy put himself up to be attacked from all sides? And is that wise? Well, it's certainly true that as an author, you have to take a deep breath before you venture into this territory. And I have had some pretty venomous reactions, particularly from within publishing, which is heavily populated with graduates from the creative arts departments of universities. On the other hand, I've had some surprising people say, yeah, it was a good laugh. I don't agree with you necessarily about all the conclusions, but it was a good laugh because I'm pretty even-handed at the end of the book. I come to the conclusion that there's a lot of good in some of the things that are being promoted and that those things should survive, but that we've got to cull out the excesses, the nonsense. I guess George Orwell came to a much darker conclusion, and you can't blame him. He'd been through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. He'd seen some pretty horrific things, and evidence was just emerging at the time that he was writing 1984 about the horrors of the Gulag system and Stalin's mass murder of his own subjects, let alone what Hitler had done. So he came to a very dark conclusion. And to begin with, it was rejected by people, but then gradually they started to see, particularly when they started to recognize how newspeak, Orwell's newspeak, was starting to invade the media, that it was a slippery slope. It was going down. Now, interestingly enough, Tyler Wagner, you know, when you're marketing a book, you identify readers in particular genres, and you make sure that your advertising and your promotion is targeted at those genres. Of all the genres who have responded very positively to Agenda 2060, it It's 1984 and George Orwell readers. Now that may be because there aren't too many satires, political satires being written these days, that people are finding it all too serious to treat it as funny. And I'm unusual in so much as I decide, yeah, I will treat it as funny. It's not just funny, but bloody absurd.

Yeah, no, you know, I think Look, I think comedic relief is, uh, is necessary. I, I, uh, for— I watch a lot of Joe Rogan, and he talks about, like, um, I forget, there was somebody he had on too, was discussing, like, you can, you can almost— they said anything, like, you can make anything funny, right?

Yeah.

Um, and not that, you know, there's some things that, you know, just are not funny, but you can spin it and make it funny. But I do think what is most important is what we're doing right now. And I think we're in an interesting situation because like the left and the right, from what I can gather, it just seems like a lot of the media on both sides, what they do is just kind of say how the other side is ignorant rather than having an open dialogue and coming to conclusions, which is why I like watching like Joe Rogan style and why I do my show in this fashion. It's just an open dialogue, like whether I agree or disagree with somebody's political views or whatever it is, my mind always first goes to curiosity, right? Like, I'm like, I'm not like, oh, you know, I disagree with you. Like, I'm done with you. Like, you're out of my life. Like, my mind goes, oh, we actually think literally the opposite things. I am like unbelievably curious to learn why I think that the sky is blue and you think it's red. Like, let's talk about that. That's interesting, you know what I mean? Like, why do you think— um, so, uh, you know, and there's a lot of different rabbit holes we could go down. Um, for sake of time, what I'd like to do, uh, now is just kind of leave the floor to you. Um, you know, tell people where they can get the book, um, your social medias, where they can stay in touch. Um, and I think this was— this interview is kind of like a nice little teaser for people. I know I'm going to pick up a copy. I love the concept and I think you, you took on a fun project, so it's really cool.

Yeah, so it's Agenda 2060, which is agenda2060.com. That's the website, and it's available on all the Amazon book sites around the world, in Germany and India and Australia and Canada and the UK, obviously the, the US, in both paperback and ebook format. Um, I, I really strongly recommend that people, uh, purchase paperbacks because I think it's a— it is a book that you can, you can read it fairly quickly because a lot of the, a lot of the chapters of vignettes, you know, having been a screenwriter I like to paint a picture and come out of that scene making you want to go to the next scene. And so you can read it quite quickly, but then I think you may want to pick it up and go back and see what's actually being said about that particular subject. And there's quite a lot of stuff in there about artificial intelligence and where that's heading, and about the prospect of space travel and why. And how that could by 2060 be something that we just go ho-hum, yeah, off on another trip to Mars. So, try and get a hold of the paperback. It's not terribly expensive. And we authors like to think that the book is lying around and you're picking it up and passing it on to friends. There is a sequel, and the sequel is two-thirds The There and the sequel is something that I very much hope I'll be able to talk to you about during the course of this year because it opens up to what the future may look like beyond this period. See, I think there's a big hole in people's spiritual life that has that has occurred because so many of the institutions, including family, have broken down in the last 20 or 30 years. Religion, particularly Christianity, is being made a mockery of by the media. And people just feel hollowed out, you know, they don't really know where they stand in the world. And so I think there's going to be a resurgence of a desire, not necessarily for organized religion, but for some form of spirituality. And where will that come from? And will that bring people closer together? Because, you know, I lived through the Martin Luther King period, the Vietnam War, Kent State University, all of those monumental periods in the relatively modern history of the United States. And at that time, I would have to say we had a sense of community. We certainly had a sense of nationhood, and that's a much better way to feel about life. It's a much more reassuring way in which to approach strangers as being part of a larger community. And at the moment, the thing that is really the worst aspect of all of this woke and anti-woke charade that's taking place is that people have got metaphorically face masks on and are hiding themselves from each other. They're scared to speak about subjects. I mean, it's terrible.

Yeah, because they can get canceled. Yeah, I agree. And what we'll do for the next interview, we'll do a longer one. Love to have you back on when you're ready for the next book. But yeah, again, I thank you for coming on. I'm really excited to read this one. So we will definitely have you back on.

Well, thank you, Tyler, and I'm glad that you're feeling better. And get stronger.