Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson demanded hurricane relief aid, which he did not end up voting for. Of course, we have such a great show for you today. The New Republic editor Mike Tamaski joins us to talk
about the debate and the state of the race. Then we'll talk to Harvard and MIT humanist chaplain Greg Epstein about his new book, tech Agnostic, how technology became the world's most powerful religion and why it desperately needs a reformation.
But first the news and now the news.
So my, there's patterns that occur that some people lie about those patterns. One of those patterns is is that Trump does not say very nice things about our troops.
Yeah, Trump does not for whatever reason, is injured troops. Somehow, even though normal people feel terrible for injured troops or injured people in general, Trump seems to not have the empathy chip, and much to his detriments, So on Tuesday, he referred to brain injuries. These are troops who've had these brain injuries that have ruined or greatly disturbed their lives.
These are the injuries.
They had in the Iranian attack on a base in Iraq.
He called them headaches.
And he made these comments on Tuesday after it was believed that he had said, you'd been tougher on a rand than anyone. And again, this is like Trump's whole strong man thing where he says that he is better, tougher, more presidential, but he usually usually just sort of ignores the truth, and that's what's happening here. But also the cruelty of these troops being injured and then having Donald Trump just consider it to be lost completely a non
issue is really disturbing. And again we see Donald Trump degrading the military. Not surprising, but disturbing. It has not been a great day for Donald Trump,
It.
great week for Donald Trump.
Why is that?
Jesse, Well, there's a thing that the left is very excited about in one of Trump's legal proceedings, which is that there's going to be some unsealed filings a Trump twenty twenty election case.
What are you seeing here, So, Judge chuck In unsealed the Special Councils filing in the Trump twenty twenty election case. Jack Smith had wanted to do this. We had thought that maybe it wouldn't happen because Trump seems to get away with everything. But in fact it has been unsealed. It is one hundred and sixty five page filing with some reactions. But the net of it is Donald Trump encouraged.
It's a lot of stuff we suspected, right. Like Donald Trump encouraged, got excited about the idea that there would be another Brooks Brothers riot. He encouraged a riot. He you know, a lot of the stuff you suspected.
Right.
When a colleague of that undefined campaign, there's a campaign employee tells a person their batch of votes appear to be heavily in favor of Joe Biden. The employee responded, find a reason it isn't give us options to file litigation. When a colleague suggested there would be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers riot in Florida in two thousand, the campaign employee.
Said, make them riot.
Do it.
The motion alleges, and the filing provided numerous examples of how then Vice President Mike Pence allegedly tried to gradually and gently convince Trump to accept his election loss. So you know, it's a lot of stuff we thought, but the proof is extremely important, and in my mind, it's good to see that we're not all crazy and that, but a lot of us suspected what was happening was actually happening. Jesse Cannon, I have a news article that I want to add to our news cycle today.
Tell me all about it.
A pair of billionaire preachers, if that is Oh, yes, I read about this, tidaw. A pair of billionaire preachers built the most powerful political machine in Texas. I know you're going to be shocked to hear this, but they are not Democrats.
You're telling me the people who benefit from a tax loophole the most are not Democrats. I don't believe you.
It's two oil tycoons, Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes, and they have basically pushed the Texas State House to the furthest right of anyone's wildest dreams. They're Christian nationalists, but they also donate a lot of money.
You trump in there.
Is a line about how it's so conservative that the state House is so conservative now that old school Republicans are basically rhinos.
Compared to this.
I mean, what's really interesting about these two is they really want to end public schools with vouchers and create a Christian school world, and that is again because of the desire to make America a Christian nation. It's definitely worth reading. It's in pro publica. It's a kind of really expensive reporting that all of us need to support and super interesting and definitely worth the read.
We have even more toward dates for you. Did you know the Lincoln projects Rick Wills that have Fast Politics BOLEI jug Fast are heading out on tour to bring you the night of laughs for our dark political landscape. Join us on August twenty sixth at San Francisco at the Swedish American Hall, or in la on August twenty seventh at the Regent Theater. Then we're headed to the Midwest. We'll be at the Bavariam in Milwaukee on the twenty first of September, and on the twenty second we'll be
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Mike Tamaski is the editor of The New Republic and author of The Middle Out The Rise of Progressive Economics. Welcome back to Fast Politics. My friend, my editor, Mike Tamaski. Oh Stukes, my former editor.
Yeah, but my heart, Yeah the best.
Still have visions in your pros in my dreams occasion.
Ah, my pros are not that good. I think your editing is better than my writing. Let's talk about where we are with in the world of politics and insanity.
Yeah, you know, we're in a decent place. I think we all would have liked him. Walls who have done better in that debate and would have liked to see him throw more punches and correct more of those lives. On the other hand, I've seen now three polls after action polls showing that he really won among independents. It's very interesting thing to look at. People like us pundits all agree that Vance won. Advance was more polished. There's
no question about it. If you look at the poles of regular people who watch and ask who won, Yeah, and it's Advance, but margin of error or sometimes it's a dead heat, so there's no clear consensus on who won. But then among independence, I've seen three polls that Wills and Independence favored him handily. So it may be Molly that exactly the thing that people like you and I wanted him to do was just to be partisan, be
a fire breathing partisan. It may well be that the fact that he wasn't that is exactly what went over Independence.
Yeah, I mean, I think it makes sense that Vance, even though Vance was a little nicer last night, that the niceness and the sort of cheerful Midwestern demeanor of Walls is actually more meaningful to voters than being right or scoring points or debunking miss right.
I mean that's the thing.
It's like, I feel like we should have a moment here to talk about vibes and the case four vibes.
Okay, you ready.
On pro vibe fire away.
For example, there's been so much time during the Biden administration when I've talked to people in the admin or around the admin or media people, and you know, you've said, well, they do they're doing this, chips and science, they are doing this, they're doing that. And they've said, you know, when you've you know, all this really good, cool, interesting policy stuff, and then you know the person will say, yeah, but nobody knows, so does it matter if nobody knows?
And then all of a sudden Harris gets in the race and she has really good vibes for whatever reason, the vibes are like it's like the opposite of Biden. People are just they wanted and they're interested in her and they love her and they you know, there's just vibes. And then people are like, you can't run for president of vibes.
O contrere. I mean a lot of people have a lot of people have I mean, you know, obviously the policies and general philosophy has got to be mixed in there.
But yeah, they're Democrats. I mean, they have a lot of policy.
I mean, you know, Ronald Reagan was a vibe kind of candidate. I mean it was clear what he was for, you know, or what he was against government. But he was a vibee kind of candidate with that sunny smile of his and stuff like that.
But wasn't Bill Clinton kind of a vibey candidate.
Clinton's kind of vibey Obama was. I mean, any successful charismatic politician is here's the way to put it. Voters and just human beings. You know, we reason emotionally. Okay, we reason emotionally that which has to say, our first response to a person we see on TV, or you know, a sports team who we obsessed partly on the basis of their color schemes and uniforms. You know, our first reactions are emotional, and they're just instant, and they're either
kind of positive or kind of negative. And then we start building in our brain the logical reasons that support that first emotional instinct. So you're either, in the case of Donald Trump, a case unfathomable to you and me. There are millions of people out there who saw him come down to that escalator and went, that's my guy. And then right, you know, and they just did that emotionally, and then you are constructing the intellectual reasons while you're
for it, But the first reaction is emotional. Without question.
I think there's really a case for vibes here in this moment in political life, and Trump was largely a vibes based candidate.
He was and remains so, and so like she needs to be in her own right, we have a great matchup here because she's very much the opposite.
So now let's talk about what she needs to do right now. I've heard anxiety that she's not on the trail enough, but there was just a major, major hurricane and she's down there in Georgia today doing what she needs to do and not looking partisan, and you know, she is in leadership. There are like three things happening right now that I think are these sort of outside issues. There's a hurricane, there's this doc worker strike, which could be enormous, and then there's the Iran Israel war.
So talk to me the last one first. That could damage I mean, it depends on how it goes over the next four and a half weeks. Obviously, this is a situation where she can't particularly depart much from her boss, and her boss, unfortunately, is saying do anything you want to do, Bibe. Now, waging a war against Husblela is a different thing than killing a bunch of babies at Kaza.
Everybody understands that. But you know, I don't know. The only thing we can do is just hope that that conflagration doesn't explode before November fifth, because she just can't really separate herself very much from the president while she's the vice president. It's just really hard to do. Hubert Humphrey learned that in nineteen sixty eight. Now with the strike, I worry about that. I have read that it would take like three weeks for the effects to be felt
by the average consumer. So I would certainly hope they can get it settled before then.
Despite the fact that the head of the dock workers is from friend, they have not gotten a raise in a long time, and the business is a good business.
But they endorsed Harris back in July, right, the undid did, Yeah, the union did, but some of that, so there's that. I don't know. The only other thing I would say Mollie, is that Okay, Harris came out of the gate, you know, like a fire ablaze, you know, tons of energy, tons of sizzle, tons of charisma. Walls seemed a great choice. Their first barnstorming tour, great convention, great barnstorming tour, after
the convention, great debate. Great. In the last week or two, a couple of weeks, they've lost a little bit of that is inevitable, that can't be sustained forever. But okay, the question phasing the campaign is they should have known, and I'm sure they did know they were going to lose some of that. So what do you do? How do you keep it going? What's the next phase? I don't think that's really clear yet what the next phase is.
And they there's just a certain sharpness that's missing. I mean, maybe it comes from just being out on the trail. And of course you and I aren't seeing this because we're not in places where you know, it's the States, yeah, and we're not seeing ads, and we're not seeing news accounts of their visits or anything. But I feel that they have lost a little momentum and last night was would have been a chance to get the momentum back and they didn't, so I don't know exactly what they do right now.
So I did talk to them and was like, are you guys on the trail en?
Yeah?
I talked to someone in Biden world, not in Harris world, and he said it would be unseemly right now to be out there with the hurricane.
Yeah. Well, I mean I don't understand those calculations. They're above my pay grade. But I think she needs to introduce some new ideas, introduce some new lines of attack against Trump. I assume they're getting a commercial up about Vance saying last night he said about the election in January sixth and so on. You know, they need to press that. Remember freedom from the Convention and the flag waving and all that stuff. I loved that stuff. Get back to that, and she talks about it in her
stump speeches. I watch her stump speeches sometimes, but there still needs to be a little bit more communication to people of who she is. And you know what the core idea is behind this campaign?
Yeah, exactly.
And I think that's a really important point, is that there's got to be some of that. Talk to me about this moment where at the end of the debate. Vance is unable to say that Donald Trump lost in twenty twenty.
Well, it was the moment of the debate. It's a moment that, potentially, depending on what the Democrats managed to do with it, cancels out all of his fluid and successful answers earlier. It's very clear that Vance said the things he's said, that Timberwall said, he said, and you know he has said, you know what he would do with respect to you know, the next time around. So I think that's something that I wish that had come first Rathertheless, I wish that'd be the first question.
The good news is so many people will see the clips of it. Yeah, that linear doesn't necessarily matter the way it did alone, you know, the way it did
when everyone had cable. The problem is trump Ism is built on a lie, right, It's built on a lie that Trump won the twenty twenty election, which now Trump has stopped saying because I don't either he has some kind of memory issues or he's just decided that he's going to tell the truth about the twenty twenty election finally, But now he says I lost it by a whisker.
You hear that sometimes, So like the.
Lie of trump Ism is really one of the fundamental premises. The thing that made me anxious if we're going to go into Molly free therapy, which I guess we are because no one can stop me, is that. And we have not seen anyone able to do this really. Advance was able to do trumpsm without Trump a couple times during that debate. You know, this sort of sunny midwestern guy.
He's not really midwestern, right, but he sort of became kind of you know, he's a cipher, so he became kind of Midwestern when he was with Walls, and you really did see a kind of you know, I'm just a folksy guy who wants to monitor women's periods. And I did feel like that line he has, which I think works really well for him, is that liberals say that if Donald Trump is president, everything is going to
be a nightmare. But Donald Trump was president before and you're all still here, right, And some of those ideas like where he sort of made this case that Trump was saving Obamacare even though it's not true, olt like he was able to put a plausible spin on it.
Well he was, and that's you know, that's where you know, we were disappointed the Walls didn't rebut that particularly that thing about saying at Mountcare that was just insane.
And I mean amazingly demented and insane.
It was. So Vance is going to head back out on the trail. I would presume he's going to go back to talking the way he talked before this debate, right, because that's that's what those audiences want to hear. They don't they don't want to hear mister midwestern nice guy. They don't want to hear a guy who expresses sympathy to Tim Walls at the fact that his son saw somebody get shot. They want somebody who breathes fire.
That was the mainstream pivot, right.
Yeah, they want somebody who breathes fire. And I think he's kind of like returned to being that person in pretty short order.
What scares me is that the mainstream pivot works, and that one of the reasons why Trump is is having so much trouble surviving is because of Trump, and that his policies, if given to someone who is more disciplined, less in saying better pretending to be normal, could ultimately Project twenty twenty five could really end up being a real thing.
Well, yes, but that's a problem for God on the road. You know, right now our problem is Donald Trump. But the pivot to normal can work. But you know, Romney did a similar thing in the first debate in two thousand and eight. He didn't become president. You know, it depends on what the other side does with it. And after that debate, Obama shaped up won the next two debates. And also they've attacked Romney very successfully over baying capital
and they won comfortably. And I think, you know, Harris Harrison, the Democrats can do the same thing. They have more money than God. They can put whatever virtuals they want. You know, there's not enough airtime in Michigan for them to spend all their money. They have so much money.
So as long as they do good ads and good TikTok social media stuff, then you know, I think they still ought to be able to define Trump in a way that you know, Vance's performance last night will be a distant memory by November fifth.
Yeah, that's right. Thank you so much, Mike Tamaski. I hope you wilcome back.
Thank you anytime.
Are you concerned about Project twenty twenty five and how awful Trump's second term could be. Well, so are we, which is why we teamed up with iHeart to make a limited series with the experts on what a disaster Project twenty twenty five would be for America's future. Right now, we have just released the final episode of this five episode series. They're all available by looking up Molly John
Fast Project twenty twenty five on YouTube. And if you are more of a podcast person and not say a YouTuber, you can hit play and put your phone in the lock screen and it will play back just like the podcast. All five episodes are online now.
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Americans on what Trump's second term would or could do to this country, so please watch it and spread the word. Harvard and MIT chaplain Greg Ebstein is the author of tech Agnostic, How Technology became the world's most powerful religion and why it desperately needs a reformation. Welcome Too Fast Politics, Greg, Thank.
You so much. Molly, it's so good to talk to you.
All right, you gotta tell us first of all, tell us what you do.
And then you can tell us what your book is about.
My title is the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT, so I serve those two universities. Chaplain is usually thought of as a religious advisor, community leader, etc. But I'm non religious. I'm an atheist. To the word that I like best is humanists, and I serve the very large, actually non religious communities at those institutions.
So you're a religious advisor for the non religious.
Yeah, And I myself am non religious. It's unusual. When I first have it, got to Harvard to do this work about twenty plus years ago, I was one of the only humanist chaplains in North America, really one of the only ones in the world other than a couple places in Europe. And now I've completely lost track of how many of us there are. It's a growing field because the population of non religious people has just balloon
in the past couple decades. And there's a lot of people who are not religious but want to live deeply meaningful, ethical lives, want to feel that they're part of a community, want to make the world a better place. And humanism is a word that I and a lot of other people use to describe that approach to life.
Now, tell us about this book.
So I have a book coming out in about three four weeks now. I've been working on it for five six years. It's a follow up to my book Good Without God, What a billion non religious people do believe. But this book is called tech Agnostic, How technology became the world's most powerful religion and why it desperately needs a reformation. And so it's it's a fun book, but
it's also quite serious. It's a look at the fact that tech, what you might call big tech, what you might call this sort of mythological place of Silicon Valley, has taken on this enormous role in our lives, in our society, in our politics, that is so far beyond now what you could possibly refer to as the thing that most people refer to tech as, which is, you know, an industry, right, Like you say the tech and then
algorithmically you complete that phrase with industry. Right, it just doesn't make any sense anymore, because there's no industry left on the face of the earth that isn't in some way at least significant industry that isn't in some way a tech industry. And so, having spent my life in the world of religion, when I was asked to join MIT as a chaplain, and I had this other role
that they gave me called convener for ethical life. Back in twenty eighteen, I started thinking like yeah at MIT at Mastersts Institute of Technology and Religion and non religious people, and I realized, Oh, this thing that has taken over my life has actually taken over most of our lives, and it really, when you start to think about it, actually can look like a religion.
Yeah.
I mean it reminds me of churches right in the around the period of the Reformation.
Yeah, you've got the symbols, you've got the prayerful rituals, right like most religious people pray once a week, once a day, three times a day, five times a day. We genuflect before our stained glass black mirrors on average a couple hundred times a day now. And it's not a coincidence even that. You know, if you look at somebody doing that, you know, opening their phone, it does kind of look like they're worshiping and on. Like some religions that I could name, because I'm not in any
way anti religious. I'm a chaplain. I work with people who are religious all the time. But this particular religion, you know, has a decent sized chance of causing some kind of apocalypse.
Yeah, No, I think that's a really good point. Jesus Christ. Why have I never put this together before? The technology is the new religion?
Yeah, I mean there's a certain kind of humor to it, right, Like when I talk to people about this, I say, well, you know, am I literally saying that technology has become the world's most powerful religion? Or you know, is this whole book that I've written the most annoying extended metaphor you've ever heard in your entire life? And you know,
the answer is yes, there's some of both meant. But what I'm really getting at here is that not only is this thing that we call tech now playing this just sort of like minute to minute role in our lives, where you know, everything that we do is some kind
of interface with tech. And I used to write about tech addiction, but I stopped even thinking about it that way, because it's it's not an addiction if every single person that you know is doing it all the time equally and you can't even quite turn it off, like there's
no way to opt out. But it's more than just that, Molly, It's big tech, if you want to use that phrase, has become dominated by some really weird ideas ideas that when I look at it through my sort of studies and religion lens look a lot like I mean, you could call the mythology, right. A lot of people have said that Silicon Valley has a kind of mythology to it. But if somebody said, well, you know, Zeus has taken over our culture, I mean, nobody would be particularly worried
about that, right. But if I told you that, like fun to mentalist, Christianity was taking over, and I could give you some evidence for that, you might legitimately have
to be concerned, right. And so that's why I actually think that the ideas that animate a lot of the multi multi billionaires in Silicon Valley look more to me like a kind of theology or a religious doctrine even And you know it's worrisome because if and I'll give you a couple of examples in a minute, obviously, but you know it's worrisome because if most of the people that are listening to this had a worry that their friend or their family, or that they themselves were under
the spell of some kind of really weird sounding theological idea. And again, you know, there are good theological ideas too, plenty of them. But if you if you fell under the spell of some weird ones, you would instinctively, almost you know, intuitively know to question, right, what's the agenda behind this theological claim that you, the pope, the priest,
the Rabbi, the minister, imom whatever are making. But we don't question the ideas that are underlying a lot of big tech nearly enough when I started looking at, you know, the role the tech is playing. I mean, just the fastest example that comes to my mind. There's another book out called AI Snake Oil that's written by two prominent Princeton AI scholars, Sayash Kapoor and i Arvin Neraanan, and you know, in it they talk about what AI can
and can't do. But they have an article on their you know, blog about their book that they put out a couple weeks ago, and it was titled AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products good? And
you know, yeah, that is good, I guess. But if they have to pivot from creating gods, that ought to tell you something, right, this is what what most people would agree, you know, is kind of our world's flagship industry right now, right the most trending human endeavor right now is trying to create AI and so you know they're having to pay it from creating gods. That's a little odd, that's a little scary, right, But it's more
than just that though. You know, I noticed comparisons that I make in the book to you know, other major religious doctrines, even like the ideas of heaven and Hell of chosenness, which shows up obviously in Christian Gudeo Christian history, a ton religious colonialism. It just goes on and on.
Yeah, so connect this because tech Bros and not just Elon, but Andreas and Horowitzz, they're all in crew. All of these people consider themselves to be and I think they will eventually run for office. They all consider themselves right now they have surrogates like JD. Vance and Bratt Masters, but eventually I think they will get rid of the surrogates and just do it themselves. So explain to me what their ideology he is.
Yeah, I mean it's great because as you know, JD. Vance is the acolyte of Peter til Right, He's really nothing without Peter Tiel, who is this multi billionaire venture capitalists founder who is a kind of right winger libertarian that you know, is in many ways leading the charge of the kinds of weird ideas that I detail in my book and talk about, you know, why we ought
to be concerned by so. Peter Tiel, for example, on his website the founder's fund up until at least now you know, maybe they'll change it at some point, but has talked about how for him, the ideal venture capitalist I mean, or rather the ideal recipient a venture capital, the ideal founder and a founder is a kind of demigod in the Silicon Valley pantheon, right. The ideal founder he you know, he says as a quote, has a kind of near messianic attitude about the company or whatever
that he and it usually is he is founding. And you know, if that's not enough, and you know, by the way, like is that a good thing? Right? Usually if somebody came up to you on the street and told you that they have a near messianic attitude, you know, you would run like the wind right in the other direction,
you know. And I had a guy named Russ Wilcox, who teaches how to be a CEO here at Harvard Business School, who talked to me on the record and said that he agrees with this, and that he too was looking for a kind of messianic complex in his founders. Then you've got somebody like a Mark Andresen, right, you know who you mentioned, who is so zealous that he has a document called the Techno Optimists Manifesto that was really popular when they put it up online, you know
a little while back. It uses the phrase, Molly, we believe. He uses the phrase we believe one hundred and thirty three times in a short document. Okay, And just to give you one of so many quotes I could give you from this this document, which is it's so theological. I often begin my speeches to audiences with this document and I tell them I'm going to quote from scripture. He says, we believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives.
How would that even work? That's so insane.
It's not just insane, it's a very particular type of insanity for somebody like myself, where I've been studying religion my whole life. He says, we believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI, that was prevented from existing is a form of murder. Right. So what he's doing here, First of all, he's taking a line from abortion, right, He's taking the you know that you have to be pro life, rigidly pro life.
He says essentially about bringing the AI into life, and that when somebody tells you that if you don't do something, that you're going to destroy the world, it's a classic form of extremist religious manipulation that basically says, we're going to take advantage of the fact that we know that you, like any other normal, decent human being, you want to be a moral person, you want to be a moral citizen. Again,
most people do. It's just sort of you know, human nature, like we evolve to be selfish at times, but we also really needed to evolve to be cooperative and care about one another. Otherwise human beings don't get here to this day. Right. So, but he's taking advantage of that and saying like, if you don't obey our theology of AI where we want you to invest, or we want you to be part of our social project to invest
trillions of dollars in this thing, then you're murdering. You're killing you know, you're terrible, right, And so that's a sense of how religious this phenomenon actually is.
It's not bizarre, and it makes sense. And if you track like the decline in religion in this country and the assent of technology, it makes a lot of sense what you're saying.
But I just never put it together. So now I'm scared.
The thing that I would also want people to take away from this is that when I'm making these criticisms in the book and with you, like, I'm not anti technology, I wouldn't even know how to try to make an argument or to write a book that's anti technology, right, Like, I get it. You know, I'm not saying that, you know, we all need to go back to the days of
you know, hovering around the fire. Right. What I am saying is that we've gone a little too far in our uncritical faith in any and every technology that comes along, and we've forgotten to ask ourselves, you know, at times, what agenda might be underlying, like our every day, every hour, every minute reliance on this stuff. And so that what I'm asking for is not like elimination of tech. It's a reformation. You know, we need to improve our way of thinking and acting around this stuff to.
Have some amount of guile to not take this as necessarily all God.
Yeah, I mean, so I'm a chaplain, right, I've spent twenty plus years working alongside religious people of all kinds. Right, there's fifty of us Harvard chaplains. There's about thirty of us, and I t chaplains. I've been in leadership roles, elected and appointed in both settings. You know, I regularly work
with all kinds of religious people. I'm part of a fellowship right now by a big interfaith organization called Interfaith America called the Vote is Sacred fellowship where we're like it's religious leaders and myself working from across the country on how to strengthen and protect democracy. So there's great people in these religious communities, and I learn from them all the time that you know, my religious friends and colleagues make me a better person sometimes with you know,
the ways that they interact with their families and their communities. Right. But what I like is reformed religion, self critical religion. I like Christians who know that Christianity isn't perfect, and they know that it desperately needs to be critiqued. Sometimes. I like Jews who are maybe religious or passionate about their Judaism but they can recognize that Judaism isn't perfect.
They're not perfect. They need to be self critical. Israel isn't perfect, We need to be critical of it sometimes, et cetera, et cetera. Right, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, the same thing, even humanists, right like I tend to get into fights with you know, my fellow atheists, people like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris or the late Christopher Hitchins if I felt like they're being too anti religious, trying to act
like humanism. What I do is all perfect, all good. No. And so it's a recognition that the more that this Silicon Valley world becomes a kind of quasi religious institution, the more we need to be critical of it. The more we need to look at each new sort of value and values proposition and say, like, is that real? Can we really trust you, Sam Altman to be doing
open AI for the good of the world. Sam Altman is going around now hat in hand, asking from some of the worst people on earth, honestly, for literally millions of dollars to build these data centers across America, each of which is as powerful as several nuclear power plants. Right, and like open Ai is a company that of course famously started as a nonprofit and they just this past
week announced oh just kidding. All of the investment that made us a multi multi billion dollar company was made into a certain kind of company, but we were never actually going to be that kind of company after all. So you know, if you invested in us, or if you trusted us, screw you. We're now for profit and we want your trillion thank you, And so we need to learn how to be more critical of people like Altman in advances.
Right. No, it's a really good point. It's a really really good point. Greg. I hope you will come back.
Oh, it's a pleasure, Molly. You know, we first sort of interacted at the beginning of the pandemic when I was kind of doing online chaplaincy for some of my students on Twitter and LinkedIn because there was no way to reach them in person, and you kind of gave that a bit of a boost. You know. Something that I'd said to one of the students, I guess was moving to you. And it was so moving to me to get to engage with you back then. And I'm a huge fan. Thank you for what you do.
Oh, well, thank you for coming on and really so interesting.
I appreciate you.
Yeah, I hope to see again sometime. No moment.
Jesse Cannon, Mai Jung Fast.
I have to tell you, one of the things I feel like is one of the most just we'll look back as one of the more gross parts of our society was having our safety net be GoFundMe. And because it's one of the more gross parts of society, guess you just waded into it.
Well, you know, the guy who wants to end federal disaster relief and many of the things that the federal government does just started a disaster relief go fund me page for people who have been affected by this monster hurricane. It's tacky, but it's also like, the federal government exists.
We pay taxes so that we can help these people. Certainly, raising extra money is good, but I think it's worth realizing that Donald Trump could easily make a donation to this area or purchase something to give to people like paper Tels just kidding, not paper Tells, But he instead decided to raise money from his people. Again, Donald Trump has taken a lot of money from his people. So the fact that he's trying to take more is really disgusting, and that is our moment of fucker. That's it for
this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.