Inez Stepman: Silicon Valley's post-human world

This podcast is brought to you by the Albany Public Library, remained branching the generosity of listeners like you. The Ungated Version of the Unsupervised Learning Podcasts. With the Unsupervised Learning Podcasts, I am back with a returning guest at Ashtupman. I think that was on about a year ago. Can you introduce yourself again?

Reintroduction. Sure. I wear a bunch of different hats, which is a very cliché and lame way of saying I have a foot in a bunch of different organizations and issues. But for the purposes of today, I'm a fellow at the Claremont Institute, and then I write for a bunch of publications like the Federalist or First Things or other places on the right. So I'm kind of a freelancer in that regard. Well, do you identify as a writer?

I don't know how to describe my job. My day job is I work at a think tank. That's really what I do. I do use the word writer in parties when I'm not sure what the political affiliation of the person is. It's my little social out. I do write a lot. It's not technically untrue. Unrelated. We're going to be talking about Silicon Valley and how you hate it. But before we get to that, I think it's a funny story about I think it's a little bit of gender dynamics as well.

I got invited randomly to an unspeak easy. I think this thing make it down runs for women that are 100 ox or something. They can like speak freely. It was really funny because a bunch of women were there and they were just very tentative about introducing their views and who they were. I think they would be like, yeah, you know, I'm Catholic and sometimes I read national review and she's that she would be like, I'm a Republican. I'm like, yeah, I'm very right winged to be like, okay.

The whole thing was like, everybody was mostly conservative, I think in some centrist, but you know, they were like very, very tentative. And so I'm not like that at parties. I just like, I don't care. I just like put it out. I was like, yeah, I'm pretty much far right. That's what I told people. And then we have to have a discussion about that again.

A lot of the parties we go to, it's the opposite, you know, the second that you introduce any kind of pro-democratic, small D or broadly liberal view. You're on the outs. No, I actually don't mind sharing my political views, but not with people like who are chatting, you're chatting to a grocery store. I don't want to get into a political. That's true. That's true. Yeah, because I would people ask you, oh, what do you do? Or somebody you meet at a coffee shop, you know, maybe party time.

Well, so actually one thing is not funny is why not funny, but so I you know, I will say I'm a geneticist most of the time. And I think that works for most. Most of the people I interact with, but there's a large fraction of Americans. You know, good hard working Americans that I'm sure you love it as who don't live in Palo Alto who don't know what a geneticist is.

And so then I have to like kind of figure it out. I usually I just say I just say I just work and I work in a health, like health stuff, healthcare. They're like that's close enough, you know, they're saying biologists. They're just like, oh, so do you like study bugs? It's a little interesting how I have to define myself, but I mentioned Palo Alto, I mentioned Silicon Valley. So you grew up in Palo Alto.

You know, we talked about this. I think actually before the first things piece. So there's a piece of first things ambitious nihilism came out February 2024. The links will be in the show notes for everybody, but just I mean, you want to Google it while we're talking. Silicon Valley's tragic arc is Federalist radio our podcast with Emily Ducinski came out came out January, right. So January 29th, that's the date.

If you guys want to look it up, and as talks about her views, which are quite strong. So I knew this because I think we hung out last summer in New York. And you know, you kind of just said that you grew up in Palo Alto. And that's kind of like a like a baseline for what you don't like. I don't know. What you're running away from, you know what I'm saying. It's like that is like the measure, the standard that you have. It's like an inverse ruler or something.

And so there's some people they like where they grew up and they're very like nostalgic did not get that sense from you. So when you wrote this, I was like, OK, that's the tracks. Yeah, I should say at the outset, I mean, I had a wonderful childhood, like mostly due to my family, my parents, I don't have that hatred of family or childhood that I think really is, I mean, I don't want to over generalize, but I do think there's a certain kind of resentment that is the hallmark of leftist thinking.

And if you wanted to be a pop psychologist, you could you can boil it all down to something like that. But no, I just I observed a lot of cultural trends begin in Silicon Valley. I went to high school there in the mid 2000s. And I just saw a lot of trends, cultural trends that identified as even at that age when I wasn't very political was having really negative effects on how people grow up, how they live, how they make decisions in their lives, how really moral formation.

And I just was not impressed with the people there, just fundamentally not impressed, not impressed morally, not even impressed on the basis that you love, or Z, which is on the basis of intelligence, not that they were stupid, they are more intelligent than average, but I just didn't see a lot of lineup between the self conception of Silicon Valley as the outside of the box thinking or really, really creative sort of intelligence.

Sort of intelligent people who are striking it out on their own and working outside of the system, really I think so, come back is very much the product of a system that produces a certain type of above average intelligence midwit type person who is very much guided by being the person who was doing well in school, very much guided by being

the student who always please teacher and always knew what to do to get to the next level of the selective system. I think in my, my piece, I can't remember if they cut this line or not, but at one point I called it. The Chinese sort of imperial system with American characteristics, I think that's very much what it is and I just I was not impressed on any level growing up and maybe it did cure me or.

Depending how you look on it, I would say it cured me of thinking that the American elite is truly elite on the one hand and then if you were in opposition to the way I see the world you might say that. You know it gave me a unhealthy appreciation for the clubs. Yeah, so before we go on, I want to situate what you mean by Silicon Valley for about the half about 50% of the listeners were not going to be American just going by the demographics.

So you know, Silicon Valley it's a term people used, you know, used to be orange, orange orchards and grows and stuff like that. And basically it's just a string of well, I don't want to say suburbs, it's a string of towns, cities, medium sized cities between the South, the San Francisco on the peninsula and you go south along the Bay, all the way to San Jose, which is the end of Silicon Valley.

It's probably the Silicon Valley city in a way, but San Jose is huge and you know, it's not like Palo Alto Palo Alto is like a refined intense distillation of Silicon Valley Palo Alto Mountain View. Cupertito, these are the archetypical Silicon Valley cities, not quite as large as San Jose, not quite as diverse socioeconomically, etc.

Like that. It's what you're talking about. So I don't think you said the Chinese bureaucrats are the Mandarin's in the piece you said you talked about extensively in the Federalist radio hour. So just to, you know, in my own words to reframe, you know, as I'm listening to you articulate this, it's almost like you're saying it's a nation, it's like Korea.

Like in Korea, you know, everyone is doing tests from when they're like three years old and you know, everyone's expected to go to college and all this stuff. And, but you know, Koreans, a lot of Koreans will tell you in these creativity independence out of them and it creates excellent mediocrity. That's one way you can just you can define it in terms of kind of as you said like focusing on, you know, from an engineering perspective, they focus on the specifications.

You know, like so they're focusing right on the list of things that they need to do to like clear their cabbages or whatever and like move on to the next step. Whereas, you know, you're talking like this world shaking Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, what we imagine is like, you know, what do they do to make it better world? Like what's the big question?

You know, that they're trying to answer or like if you want to be more explicit about the business aspect zero to one Peter Tio, which is like, you know, how do we get a monopoly? Right. Those are really, really, really big things to do. And I guess what you're saying is the type of people you grew up with, they actually were not capable of achieving those things because they. The mentality, the creativity, the flexibility was beating out of them. That's what I got from listening to you.

Do you think that that's correct or like do you have any disagreements with that? Yeah, I mean, I think there's there's a more philosophical and moral component to the critique that isn't coming through in the way you're repeating it back to me. Although I agree with everything that you said. I just, I just think Silicon Valley elites fail on both the Western post Christian kind of definitions, meaning the moral dimension, but also on the pagan ones.

I guess you could, that would be one way of phrasing it. I don't see them producing the kind of people, or I don't see them as the kind of people who should be remaking the world on the basis of real excellence. I guess is the sure and they claim they claim that power in a very direct way. And there's an obsession metaphysically, there's an obsession and Silicon Valley with what you would call, he said they avoid big questions.

I don't think they avoid big questions. I just think they're very rudimentary in answering them. The best example I can think of is I think it was Brian Johnson, who without any hint of irony or understanding that he was using phrases that have been used before said very uneironically. Oh, it's year zero, right?

And you can make an argument that technological change will be so rapid and not only in the last 10 years, but in the next, whatever next 10 years, next 15 years, next 50 years, that we won't be able, and that's the argument he was making, we essentially won't be able to recognize the human species.

And there's a lot to be said there, but the fact that he can so politely say year zero, not even realizing it really basic history of the 20th century with that phrase shows the the chalowness of people who are making claims to be sort of these permuthean

and the giants who are going to remake the world. Most of them actually aren't, but the technologies that they are wielding and creating are so new and so in many ways dangerous that they they wield this power, but they really haven't done any serious work on

and it's worse than that, they don't believe in human limitation and they don't believe in their own limitations, which would be kind of scary enough, but for the fact that they're obviously limited in some ways, like you can become a billionaire in Silicon Valley and not know that that year zero was used before or you can

they're limited, like they're psychologically fragile, you know, these are people who rely on weekly therapist visits to get through life and micro dose themselves to get 16 hours of productivity and then at the same time they're making claims that it claims to rule

in a way that really irritates me and it always has irritated me, it's just the simultaneous frailty of a lot of people in that culture juxtaposed against the claims that they make both about themselves and about the right to remake the world around them.

It just has all the hallmarks to me of an overemphasis on essentially academics and the idea of intelligence without any sort of wisdom rejecting, obviously they reject religion for the most part in a sort of unthinking way, I myself am not a believer, but in a totally unthinking way, but they also reject the classics and they reject pagan wisdom, they just believe

that it is year zero and they have no humility at all about sort of imposing, they think it's almost obvious and not worth discussing that we are at year zero and in that way they repeat basic mistakes that anyone who thoughtfully considers the history of humanity might at least have some pause about.

I guess I have a question, so you mentioned Brian Johnson, so just for the listeners who for me, I don't think you actually have to explain who Brian Johnson is, I know who Brian Johnson is, he's all over social media, but for Normies he might not be quite as famous, he's kind of a weird looking guy that is trying to de-age himself, he's his mid 40s, he's very pallid,

and he claims that he has 18 year old penis now because whatever stuff he do, look, he's a good entertainer even if he doesn't mean to be, is the way I would say, yes he did make a lot of money, but Johnson himself, I want to drill into who these people are, is it entrepreneurs that become kind of God's own weird famous, or is it the people you grew up with, an Atherton or whatever, these Tony,

and Brian Johnson grew up in Utah as a Mormon, and he was a Mormon until he was 34, and so he's an outsider to this, he's an aspirant to the Aethos, and there's a lot of people like that, when I lived in the Bay Area, I lived in the Bay Area, right after you graduated high school, I lived in the Bay Area from 2007 to 2011, and it was quite common where some guy would fly in from Rochester, Minnesota,

and he had a dream, and he would go to a hacker house, and so a lot of the people that actually created the Dytism, I felt were people from the outside, now yes there are people, obviously who grew up in Palo Alto, and Cupertito, and they do great too,

I think of them as, frankly more often, like, you know, senior engineers or product managers at Google, kind of like the professional class that staffs these FANG companies, you know, but the founders that I would consider is somewhat different, somewhat different class of people,

and they are very strange too, and a lot of them are quite unpolished, and that's what you're seeing about Brian Johnson, sort of saying year zero, like this is not a person with a broad well-rounded education that kind of crystallized and developed organically, he's just like, you know, I'm going to de-age myself, like, okay that's weird, you know, he's just weird, but he's rich, and rich people, once you get to a certain level of wealth, especially men, you know, they never hear the help, how silly and stupid they seem, because everybody around them,

you know, flatters them. I mean, I wish that the billionaire class that we currently have was as weird as you just made them out to be, frankly. There was a guy, I can't remember his name, when I was growing up, who was one of these early Silicon Valley founders, who had made his billions, and he liked to throw a party every year where he would use the tanks he bought after the collapse of the Soviet Union to crush like a little jazz.

Like, a little Japanese cars, like that was his entertainment of what he did with his money. I wish they were more entertaining, honestly, and I'm not saying by any means that the sort of, the people who made themselves, billionaires in Silicon Valley, don't have something, you know, I'm not a communist, right?

I think there's a reason that they made their money. I don't think it's, it's, you know, purely exploitation or something like that, or that they don't deserve the money that they've made. I think I'm making a more of a, I guess a similar argument as Thomas Sol makes an intellectuals in society where he says that academics and intellectuals often vastly overestimate the scope of where they are intelligent and expert.

That they think that they can apply what they do in their narrow fields to the entire world and often end up being some of the, like, make some of the stupidest unwise decisions imaginable. And I think that's very true about this Silicon Valley phenomenon, right?

Like, these are people who are good within a particular sphere, sometimes excellent within a particular sphere, although I completely agree with your distinction about the sort of Mandarin class that are mostly staffing places like Google. My dad is a, was a senior software engineer or whatever you want to call it, but doing research for advanced research for Microsoft, for example.

And that, that was his job and he saw the transformation over time very much as, like, shifting to an outward facing instead of the internal, I don't understand a word of what I'm saying about the actual programming. So take this. But the communication that is more between how to arrange the chip and then the hardware communication of computers, once it got to surface level programming for the user as the dominant output of companies that it just attracted a very different sort of person.

It does become more marketing, you know, more political BS, more, you know, all of that stuff. Yeah, and I think that's that's very true, but I think this is more an argument about scope of expertise and because what Silicon Valley actually produces and what a lot of these people actually work on. Has such sort of societally transforming potential. I find the blind way they deal with it to be the assumptions of power that they have about themselves to be vastly overinflated.

And for every really, I mean, whatever one thinks about Elon Musk in terms of I agree with plenty of his political positions, I disagree with plenty of his political positions, like, whatever one thinks what like you have to say, like, okay, this is a guy who started multiple companies. Like, made them all successful has something. There's a reason that he has the kind of money that he has.

But there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are, let's say, less successful than Elon Musk, but still very successful who have not taken that power at all seriously. I don't think and are ultimately pretty shallow and fragile people. And again, that's not a crime to be shallow and fragile, but it is if you if you want to rule the world.

You can't get through the day without doping yourself up, but you want to rule the world. It's a pretty pathetic proposition to me. And they do have certain actual maybe we'll get into the actual, you know, benefits or whatever. But they have certain assumptions about humanity, about human limitation or the lack of human limitations. I find really dangerous and definitely not something that we should let take over the rest of our society without a broader discussion.

Well, let me, you know, this is more of a thing in your first things piece, you know, your piece was, I think, like set up as partly a response to a book titled Palo Alto History of California Capitalism in the World by Malcolm Harris who graduated from your high school year after you in 2007.

And, you know, you're talking about metaphysics and worldviews, Malcolm Harris is apparently a Marxist, leftist. And so he kind of presented a caricature, a flattering caricature, but one that, you know, you took issue with a lot of the details, like this idea that Palo Alto was some sort of Reaganite paradise and stuff like that, which, yeah, I mean, I mean, it's interesting because as you say, I knew Malcolm in high school, not well.

I want to sort of speak for him, but Palo Alto tends and this culture, by the way, like leans very far left. There are some critiques of actual radicals, Marxists like Malcolm that are true in the sense that the leftist leanings of Palo Alto and other like tech hubs are in some ways very self serving and superficial. They're obviously engaged in a incredibly ruthless sort of competition, but pretending that that's not so.

And there's a certain valorization because a lot of in the Bay Area, you know, there genuinely a lot of 60s radicals hanging out and organizing in the Bay Area, a history that I actually think Malcolm lays out in much more detail than I would ever want to not holding these people as my heroes, like the black panthers in the 60s and 70s, for example, and Oakland. And cop killers and so on.

But that radicalism did get it still exists in the politics of the region, but it is like ultimately a kind of superficial aesthetic. And I think he's right to criticize that. I mean, there isn't an obvious hypocrisy in the incredibly wealthy tech hubs who got that way through the biggest blessings of capitalism imaginable, right.

And to describe themselves that this kind of faux radicalism in politics is pathetic and un laughable, but I mean he goes too far like just because they're hypocrites doesn't make them somehow pseudo conservatives, right.

And he picks out a couple of dissenters, people like Peter Teal, right. And instead of making him a lone voice, which really what is what he and Elon Musk actually are in the tech world, and I think you can probably back this up, right. People in an out of the tech world all the time. I'm not saying there are no conservatives or no right wingers, but it's probably eight to one nine to one.

That's right. The idea that Silicon Valley represents some kind of like right wing fashion of ideas is completely ridiculous. Actually, one of the things that like sort of personal remembrances I have from growing up there is a lot of the things that only hit the country. Maybe 2013 to 2015 were already full enforce in my high school like the trans thing was already there in 2005 2006 we had a we had a guy who wore coconut bras and skirts and went to the women's bathroom.

I'm not joking about the coconut bras and nobody could say anything about right like it was already full on a lot of the way that we that that people think and talk about race, especially the kind of ideas that went mainstream in the mid teens. And exploded fully in 2020 a lot of that stuff was already happening in Palo Alto and the one example really crystallizes this for me is 9 11 obviously I was in I was in middle school and 9 11 happened I think eighth grade.

And immediately the day after the Palo Alto weekly which is the local paper the day after 9 11 the 12th of September 2001 one of the leading articles was already about fear about backlash towards Muslims.

There had not no backlash had taken place they weren't reporting on it but their their top of mind concern after 3000 Americans were murdered in a terrorist attack was immediately and this sounds like the way we would respond today right whereas the rest of the country I think even in liberal places.

There was this kind of post attack unity that lasted for a certain amount of time I don't remember that really ever happening in Palo Alto it was immediate the return of politics happened the next day. And so a lot of the idea that palo Alto or tech hubs generally are right wing bashing is yeah maybe if you are like an incredibly radical Marxist you're disappointed that people say they agree with you and then don't give away all their money. But that doesn't make them right wing.

Yeah I mean there's a lot. So you know it just to be I just double checked right now Santa Clara County which has like a lot of these cities voted votes well the presidential election it votes about like 70 75% Democrat right so you know that there's there's some Republicans but it's definitely like a majority. Not as liberal San Francisco I think part of the issue with the Bay Area so I will say this is when you compare yourself to Oakland.

I mean the county is the most left wing county in the country as far as yeah all like in terms of registered. Yeah so it's like when you compare yourself to some of these East Bay they don't even have like it's it's it's an article tyranny I mean it's like a lot of a lot of left we radicalism you're talking about the black panthers and other stuff.

You go to SF there's still I mean SF has a lot of tech now but you know it still has more of a at least external like South image of Bohemian a thos it's it's more liberal so the South Bay is where you know in the Bay area context.

I mean let's just ignore more at county in North Bay because the demographically they just like didn't allow themselves to develop so we can like ignore them right now you know that's where like the more conservative but people are but really my experience is you know I do go I do go that part of the country of fair amount and I just want a lot of friends there is very few of the very few of them are like Peter teal who is a serious right wing thinker person most of the conservatives.

Or the people that would be called conservatives are actually centrist and then you know against them are the liberals who are actually just left us you know so it's it's like everything is shifted right is just different differentiating like the narcissism of small differences the Bay is full is extremely left wing.

And I would guess actually that so Santa Clara County still includes some more middle class areas and my guess is that actually within the tech industry and specifically in more elite cities like Palo Alto it's it's not it's not 75% it's probably 85% right but and that places like Santa Clara itself the town are probably more like 60 40 because there's still more

middle class people there and that's the pattern generally in the country by the way like middle class people vote Republican the very poor and the very rich vote Democrat. So none of this is a surprise but but yeah I mean I just I disagreed with the characterization that Malcolm made of nevertheless I think he is right about some fundamental you know the

the ugliness of the hypocrisy of left wing politics within this space is hard to ignore and almost raises because I mean hypocrisy is no new thing I mean the way I phrased it before we're not exactly surprised when people at least people on the right should not be surprised when when people fail to live up to to communist ideals of wealth spreading for example.

But there is something there is something ugly about espousing that kind of radical politics and and doing real things to support it I mean making sure that the education system endorses the most radical form of left

and world view really hating the country that gave you this kind of opportunity to success hating there is something ugly about it and he's right that it's not I mean I understand why a Marxist would an actual Marxist would object to the politics of how although it just it just doesn't make it right wing it is a form of different flavor of leftism.

So I think people in Silicon Valley so this is an issue in American conservatism which is somewhat different than other types in the world where you know it's like liberal conservatism or conservative liberalism whatever you want to call it where there's this free market creative destruction pro capitalist dynamist ethos like you know libertarian ethos and that part of it you could definitely find it you know not trivially you know substantial like most of the people that are giving to the Republicans.

So I just checked out Google in 2020 Google employees 15% gave to Republicans so of those 15% who are they they're not going to they're not like church going Christians they are usually hardcore libertarians and you know when you're talking about patriotism in the United States these are often not conservatives that even believe in the nation state they are you know literal globalists they believe in corporations and capitalism

and in the forces of history driven by innovation technology these are the forces of the right even Peter Tiel who is he has a defensive Christianity which is very obscure sophisticated I don't want to get into that he is he is more he's not obviously a church lady but he is more socially conservative he's not one of these transhumanists as such but he himself has been adjacent to and involved in like quite literally transusements organized.

Like the singularity institute back when it was still around which was based on the San Jose you know so this is the type of right that we're talking about but setting it aside that let's decide like like the political aspect it's not a political aspect it's like it's a cultural critique are you is your critique partly that just you know these people they think that the types of industry they are elite but they don't actually know what it is to be a cultural critique.

So what it is to lead or they don't actually know what it is to have a vision for society beyond say their own shareholder price or whatnot like what do they have and what do they not have like how would you do right that.

I mean what what they don't have is meaning and a vision of what the good life constitutes and it's connected to the materialism of various stripes that you are listing out before yeah you're right the people who are right on the right in these environments are often hyper libertarian.

They are they agree in all important aspects I think with the left in terms of the metaphysics but they either it's radical libertarianism or there is this shading into like certain type of I mean I'm reluctant even to call it a chi and because that's so overused but.

And in this case not descriptive exactly but I think that's how they would see themselves and and it's like just to give one one anecdote that illustrates the the lack of consideration to not just religion but to the questions that would naturally rise in the absence of religion.

I didn't know growing up that I don't know if you remember received you remember the the Darwin fish bumper stickers yeah like with the little legs and it says Darwin right I grew up seeing those everywhere I didn't know what they were responding to what they were responding to I didn't know that Christianity symbol was the fish right that's the level of understanding in this supposedly world class education that's available.

In Palo Alto is is if you don't like it's a response that sort of thoughtless and I I think there is a deeper crisis here that it's not an accident that these areas have really high suicide rates and there's there's a constant discussion because it's it's a problem that you know the CDC has recognized repeated suicide clusters in Palo Alto in particular and Silicon Valley as a whole.

It's sort of well known that there are high suicide rates in the tech industry and there's a lot of explanation that I think doesn't get it the heart of what's going on right the usual explanation is well the selective system is too hard right it puts too much pressure on people when they fail to succeed at the next level the selective system when they don't get into Stanford or you know they don't get into they don't get their startup funded or whatever it is.

They that's when they commit suicide all the research we have on suicide by the way shows that hardship in particular doesn't make suicide rates go up I mean suicide rates drop during wars famine pandemics right I confronting real adversity is human beings often does not spike the suicide rate so but maybe there's a form of pressure that does right there's an argument certainly they're high suicide rate rate.

And Asia that might be the same thing that means I don't think it's the the pressure of the system I think it's the absence of everything else yeah right what I was I said the value on anything else and there are to finish the point there are surveys that show and the Silicon Valley is Asian of America and why I wrote about this not just my personal dislike of Silicon Valley people is is that what we see in surveys over time is the adoption of this ethos which is

a ruthless kind of ambition material ambition coupled with essentially a no set in the traditional space that would have provided meaning right family religion national nation connection to nation.

And then in that absence of old traditional sources of meaning if you flunk the selective service you either confront it before or after right either you confront your lack of meaning when you fail or if you're lucky you continue succeeding and then you confront the abyss on the other side when you've actually achieved everything that anyone could ever imagine and there's that aspect of it as well.

It's not capitalism and competition is not the problem with Silicon Valley it's capitalism and competition without anything else no other source of value or meaning in life.

Yeah yeah so what you were saying in the federal is radio or interview is you know what happens so you have you have basically just hurdles you jump the hurdles or the steps you know you send up into the ranks of the band or whatever right what happens if you trip up and you exit out of the path like you're not let me look there are plenty of people go to Stanford you know from these high schools but there's only

so many slots at Stanford a lot of people just not going to be they're going to have to go to Berkeley or something you know like what do you do that how do you tell your parents you know you know so you know historical reference I do have to say like you know the type

of millions of people while tens of millions of people I mean it's trying to say the real numbers it's tens of millions of people died in the mid 19th century and that was actually a guy who failed the examinations multiple times and so his solution he's the son of God

I mean so you know this pressure cooker and I have friends who want to I have a couple of friends who want to much younger than me who had to coop or Tito high school there's two sides there too I this coop or Tito high school is very very Asian very Asian immigrant tech Asian and you know there's just

a lot of pressure to succeed I think what you're saying is there's a lot of things that we know in the broader culture about Silicon Valley and like let's not let's like a numerator like let's like list what's going on like you know 63 unicorns from founders and Silicon Valley you know these like big culture

shaping companies like Facebook slash meta Google alphabet etc etc you know the 20th century we had the Midwestern industrial might you know the 19th century we had the Yankee you know Clipperships you know these these traders well today the 21st century

really really sets America apart a value add as distinctive right now is these technological companies which you know the Chinese have there's there's as well but they're imitating ours right so we supposedly have this innovation and we have on the VC investment in this area of the country that's really good and I think what you're getting at is aside from that everyone's so busy you know racing in this little like a maze towards tech utopia there's nothing else there kind of empty this right

again I don't have an objection to capitalism and competition I think that's the difference between being Malcolm right I don't think the competition itself is the problem but when it's an absence and again you see it in polls asking people for example there's long term Pew surveys that ask 20 year olds you know how important are these various things to what you want out of life like the good life right

and what we've seen is a decline in virtually every value from religion to building a family is very important getting married is very important all of those things are on rapid decline in the last 30 years the only thing that's climbing is I need to make a lot of money and I do think this goes to the critique of conservatism against both the left and of libertarianism which is essentially yeah capitalism is great a great tool it produces enormous wealth

and it provides better what people want than any other system in the world but it can't tell you what you ought to want it doesn't answer those kinds of questions by itself and so I think the the leftist critique of Palo Alto is well capitalism is the problem the wealth is the problem that the comp ruthless competition is the problem right

and I think the other answer coming from the right is you know I would say the non libertarian right the more like the soldier needs to write more than anything else like the critique of both left liberalism and of state communism for example is that the problem isn't material to begin with

capitalism is really good at solving material problems but that's not the only thing that man needs to solve to live a good life and by good life I mean in the most basic sense a life where you don't want to end it and that I mean that is what's going on and to the extent of these problems matter beyond the tech industry it's because America is becoming more and more psychologically and metaphysically

aligned with Palo Alto and Silicon Valley even if they don't work in the tech industry and we see the results I just I don't see I don't see these places or these adults that I grew up around as admirable in any way or or anyone would after watching them in their intimate lives right I don't think that they're a good model for what people should want to live their lives as and fundamentally that's a problem because their values are they're evangelizing

so yeah you grew up you grew up in the 2000 or you know the odds whatever however you want to say it and obviously tech was a big deal then but you know up until 2008 we had finance the real estate and other things going on in our country and after 2008 it kind of tech kind of absorbed a lot of the hopes and dreams of this country I think a lot of the talent that was going into finance actually started moving

into the fang companies you know what was Facebook alphabet that flicks Google etc Amazon which is you know that's the Seattle but in any case you know so that was happening social network that movie came out I think 2011 you know it was a little bit glamorous a little bit sexy so you see by the way that's another one of my actions is a little con valley is singularly unsexy but anyway yeah no that's I think everyone who's been there knows exactly what you're talking about

but it is yeah the anti anti anti-aprodiziac but um so you know I and then like the zero interest rate period the low interest rates and you know tech just started like bulky up on workers became culturally influential etc etc I mean I feel like the high tide of that though is gone in so far you know social media cell phones all of these things it's not seen as the unalloyed good that it was so are you still worried or are you hopeful or are you well let's see

well I think the values are harder to dislodge than the specifics I do think I wrote a wrote a piece for the Washington examiner in 2022 early 2022 right after Elon had taken over Twitter

and fired 70% of people there's a very real question in the tech industry but in in the American economy as a whole and all those other sectors that you listed right how much of our GDP is just fake how many people are drawing very nice six figure salaries for functionally doing nothing that adds to the bottom line

and Twitter was an excellent example of this real on musk I think the more important thing like in terms of the example to the private sector that happened when Elon Musk took over Twitter is not the free speech element but the the fact that 70% of people from a company can be fired without affecting in any major obvious way the actual technological functioning of the website

not that there haven't been some technological problem since but there were technological problems with Twitter before like there were little irritating things before about Twitter too but the fact that you can fire 70% of the company overnight and continue the functioning of the main product I think is really representative of how much frankly bullshit there is in the American economy we have vastly inflated idea of what I mean people are drawing massive salaries

for doing in the best case nothing in the worst case a lot of that is political compliance it's it's what you'll Roth did at Twitter right it is knowing gone are the days where I suspect that the people who major in queer studies and some you know 200th ranks university can't expect to find a job there's a very lucrative industry of essentially what in the Soviet Union we would have a lot of that

and essentially what in the Soviet Union we would have no problem calling political compliance and that's you know that's not actually helping us in our competition with China for example right I'm so I don't know do I think that tech itself

should would be better if it were balanced by other sectors of the American economy yeah but that's you know that's kind of beyond my pay grade I'm not an economist and I don't even not sure I even believe that one could could predict with any seriousness what would be necessary in the future and there is no doubt that the work that a lot of these companies are doing will be absolutely necessary not just the economic future of the United States but but of the security future of the United States

again something that's not new in Silicon Valley most of the 50s and 60s are where the when Silicon Valley was first really built as a tech hub an early tech hub it was mostly on government defense graphs right so it was connected to the cold war and defense

so I'm not saying again I'm like none of this stuff the real things that come out of Silicon Valley some of them are dangerous because they require I think more ethical consideration things like you know AI and your field genetics right I think we do need to have a broader ethical discussion about how we should put boundaries on those fields or guidelines on those fields but I'm not against you know I'm not a lot I'm not against like everything the out of the world

I'm not against like everything the output of Silicon Valley I just I think it represents a leading edge of you know in the 19th century the famous thing was God is dead right you have you have you have a Nietzsche and Dosti aske both recognizing being really the own among very few people at least who recognize what it actually means for for God to drop out of the equation

and now in Silicon Valley and even in the 2000s but now spread throughout the whole whole country whether directly through tech or just by the same kind of philosophical developments that happened first in Silicon Valley where both post God and post the death of God and nobody nobody in Silicon Valley or very few people in Silicon Valley even as they create these technologies that ask raise questions like what does it mean to be human

is equipped to answer those questions and nor is the rest of the country right so it's it's not a problem with the actual material output of Silicon Valley it's it's a they they cannot lead us into into the future in the

the brave new world yeah in a deeper sense they don't have the answers and the evidence that they don't have the answers and that you can't ignore the questions is that their own lives are a mess sure yeah yeah that's fair let me let me just like drill down a few issues here that you

so the twitter thing I think I think there needs to be a distinction here between the smaller companies and the big corporations at the smaller companies everybody knows what everyone else is doing at the bigger companies you know there are or charts but nobody you know knows what a lot of people are doing

and also do zero interest rate period when it was basically free money for these tech companies because their valuations they just went a bit of hiring people I will say that I remember really a watch in Wall Street Journal article I think in 2023 or 2022 so they hired all these DEI diversity equity inclusion whatever people

and I mean like I'm not saying that they hired them because they were like minorities all the doubt is why they hired them but officially they were supposed to do DEI work there okay and this one woman was laid off after eight months and she was she was a little frustrated because she said that she actually never did any work

she should never decide to do anything she just would show up at the office and just you know be on the internet and she was outraged like you know what's going on here and I was like a you too dumb to realize that you know honestly you were not hired to do work so they didn't really care you were hired for your identity okay so you know this is you know I'm saying there's a harsh way but it's true you know I can like

put in a flower in your language but you know they were hired to like fill a line in some demographic chart etc. these companies I can tell you which from Twitter I don't think my friend listens to this podcast but whatever I'm not going to miss represent anything so I'll be very careful

I'm afraid he worked at Twitter until he laid him off he actually was happy about being laid off because he didn't really like working there his company had gotten acquired and so he couldn't quit okay so that's the explanation and he would tell me yeah Twitter their goal was just to basically break even

and you know he had people on his team where they weren't performing and he was like I mean should we just fire these people and his appears were like you know unless they commit some sort of like ideological infraction don't we just we don't run the boat

you know they're fine whatever so that was just a culture of that corporation and that's not the only corporation that's like that you know there's some of that and you know like I think I can say this you remember James to more the Google memo guy you know I know I know him here in Austin okay

he's a nice guy he's actually a lib which I'm it's pretty obvious if you talk to him or you read his stuff but anyway so he lives in Austin and you know one thing that frustrates him is he can't you know because he has like a background who's Google engineer you know he can never go back to like having a signature again because a lot of these big corporations if you go to work at Google if you work like a little bit they'll give you the $250,000

here you have to work a lot to actually advance and become one of the big guys for the big girls that you know are like making millions and like have a big career but you can actually be incredibly lazy at these big corporations and collect as you say a pretty good six bigger income and there's a lot of people like that especially during your interest rate period as I was common now but it still exists and so this is what's happening at these

corporations so what do they fill up their time with well you alluded to this but let's be explicit there was a whole lot of activism that was going on between 2019 and 2021 you know like people like leaving leaving work and strikes and all these things Google alphabet has crack back you know clamped out on it but there was a massive hiring

people that want to be activist and bring their whole selves to work I had friends who left Google in the mid teens for this reason because they were getting sick of it because they wanted to create product why are they creating as many products as they used to the Google is still like a search engine they bought YouTube but the reality is they don't have that many cash

cows they just have big ones that subsidize all these supposed products they're working on and you know and you guys out there know that I love tech and I love that sector but like a lot of it is bullshit jobs you know it's you know like there's investors are hopeful that they'll get bigger but you know if you have a company like Facebook which has a social media monopoly for boomers and retired people because I'm basically what it is now they never really

have to innovate you know so they can do like the metaverse and all these other things you know you can say like you know you know that I'm like they don't have the skin of the game Google was and is still a search quasi monopoly it's going to take a really long time for them to actually get scared and so they can just do whatever they want to and

whatever they want to is based on their ideologies their preferences the people that decided to go work at Google which is a very different type of person then who was working at Google in 2002 you know back when you were you know in eighth grade or

whatever you know what back when you were a kid much more entrepreneurial people back then now the people who work at Google are the type of the people maybe who would have wanted to get a job with the CIA or the federal government honestly I'm not going to lie I mean there are the engineers

there's the devs they're like the elite they produce the value but there's all of these employees around them and those people you know we can say a lot of things about that not good so I completely agree with everything that you've said

there's there's a gendered and racial aspects of us for sure in the sense that there are a lot of people who are essentially being given sineacures for their identity 250,000 dollar a year sineacures for identity and because some of them are just content to collect a paycheck a very nice one and others of them are not content to just collect the paycheck and they're conducting the revolution

right just to back up what you said with some some general numbers the out of the fortune 100 companies of the biggest 100 companies in America during and after the summer of 2020 from 2021 2020 to 2021 they 94% of the 300,000 new hires went to people of color

there's no world no there's no merit based world in which that lopsided numbers are possible without direct racial hiring and the left is always going on about disparate impact right I just testified for Congress in front of Congress on the use of disparate impact in title seven in our civil rights law you know when what you can do hint not set racial quotas that's never been legal

but it's very clear that these companies are setting racial quotas and they're just setting aside positions for people based on race and sex and now I mean you can say there is since it's gotten a little tougher in the tech industry I do think some of those positions are on the topping block but there's still an enormous amount and that's when I say when I say like I don't know what percentage of our economy is fake

I really don't I have I have no clue I don't know I don't think anybody knows how how many of these positions at these companies are being propped out by a small percentage of people who are actually producing the value and paying the salaries for in the best case people who do nothing in the worst case you know cultural revolutionary activists

yeah that's that's fair I won't go into details but there were certain sectors at Twitter now X that were so what was happening is there were activist organizations that were doing audits of the diversity statistics places like Google alphabet Netflix etc.

and so the company started feeling pressure obviously once you have these pie charts they want to shift the pie charts so they were hiring a lot of people to change the pie charts and they put them into certain certain divisions that were not they were not like economically productive but they were excellent for the marketing and the PR

and one of the reasons that I think Elon Musk Elon Musk is obviously now on the right but one of the reasons he got a lot of trouble is like you know when he fired all of those people he fired all the fat he fired all of those people there are certain departments that I know that were hired they were just stocked with you know people that were hired on quotas I'm not going to say specifically because I don't want my friends to get in trouble but in the case those people are all gone

if you look at the photo of Elon with the engineers yeah that's Twitter now and that's that's not that's not making people happy you know but that's what the value is like let's keep it real so you know yeah there's a lot there's a lot of BS so Convali is like you know there's the good there's a bad you know so you know Patrick call

a sin he funds the stop provocol the arc Institute which is doing biomedical stuff and they just published a really I mean you're probably not super happy about this but well actually you will be happy about some things they published a really new cool way to do genetic engineering right so I mean that's good call a sin also funds an imprint for publishing books and other things and then also you have people like let's just you know

how jobs I mean her and because he pays us who's like that's not so kind of value but it's adjacent like they basically like really helicopter like like big bags of money from helicopters that not profits all you know all sorts of nonprofits and a lot of them we were probably both of us would say is our socially destructive right yeah I mean I think that Jeff Azer says divorce is probably extremely destructive for the country in terms of

handing over no dollars to I have multiple I had like three or four of my friends who work in a you know I was like effective out to Elizabeth Jason stuff in a progress studies and they they were like this is going to be like a big big

big thing for the next generation even if it's you know not spoken of but go on yeah I mean look I don't know if we're going to have time in this podcast but that we have a big division every time that you tell me more about how genetics is progressing the more I think that we need a level of seriousness around the ethics conversation with with regard to it I mean again you're talking about questions that cannot be

answered merely with the development of of you know new technologies or the materialist success of those technologies are the people who created them you're talking about questions that require require reaching outside of the materialist paradigm to consider let alone answer like what is the duty of one generation to the next

generation what what are the appropriate ties between them I mean the kind of technologies that you talk about receive they cut the links they both like create incredible control of one generation over another right because the the traits that will be selected for will no longer be selected by nature or by random you know for by external forces of

evolution but by the particular traits that this generation chooses to have in their children so on the one hand this generation will have the most extraordinary amount of control over the the fate of the next one that any generation in history has ever had not seems like something worth talking

about and then on the other hand if we get to the point where you know your your actual genetic contribution to your children is a mere starting point for gene editing and and you know merely the the background canvas for the the sort of genetic landscape of your child we are cutting the genetic link between each generation and the next and what that does I mean we've already seen what what happens when we separate sex and procreation

and again I'm not a not a Catholic I'm not against birth control right but what we've actually seen is not hedonism and everybody enjoying sex to the utmost what we've seen is like the collapse of sex right or there are no really things for sex anymore through a combination of technology and culture so we're seeing like the rise of the 40 year old virgin right sure sure and like these are all things that that affect the most

fundamental questions of who we are I'm not comfortable with Brian Johnson being the ethics committee on this is I guess my final like summation of silicon valley I'm not comfortable with with guys who you know frankly their biggest qualifications are that they were either able to jump through the levels of the selective system and are moderately intelligent or that they have like you know one great idea and legitimately like have the business

business acumen to pull it off neither one of those things are qualify you more than anybody else in the country to answer the kind of questions I just laid out and I object to silicon valley because of the power that they've garnered through money and invention

and I'm not necessarily having a monopoly on answering those questions because they seem pretty important for the future of humanity and I have no confidence in the quality of the silicon valley elite in leading us in a good direction on those questions

yeah so I will say like let's let's let's quote the new King James version for God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be open and you will be like God knowing good and evil so in that there is actually both parts which is the technological aspect

and then also the ethical aspect right and so you know I would say the technology is that the valley and also you know places like Boston's route 128 with the biotech hubs you know these are the other technique right technology their tools or instruments

the ethical stuff is just not something you know technologists actually think about I would say and you were talking about you know stuff that was happening when you were in high school is now nation wide so like let's like that's that's 15 years right let's see you're 15 15 yeah 15 to 20 years

okay so it's like you know almost a generation okay well you know some of the stuff that you know is happening in the valley so you're talking about reproduction you know pioneers of that so surrogacy silicon valley tech guys tech guys and girls are very very very bullish on surrogacy a lot of them are doing it and you know various stuff various things related to a genetic screening genetic editing not so much at least in public that stuff is happening

and so it's interesting to me because I do predict that as the convali is doing right now at least at the highest levels it's going to be much more common in the next generation so that's not changing in terms of like the ethical aspect I think part of it not part of it I think the reality of it is that once people start using something for their own individual benefit

they will stop talking about the ethics of it so for example there's very very very little discussion I mean almost no discussion outside of extreme pro life circles of non-invasive predate old diagnosis which actually was pioneered around 2014 and became very common after 2015 and so a lot of women in this country who are very

very well a lot of women in this country who are pregnant basically all women above 35 are recommended to do it a lot of women under 35 right now doing it as well I think when they get pregnant and probably the number of Down syndrome Down syndrome, you know, infants born, for example, is 15. It's half to like a third what it quote should be, right? So we know this is happening. There's no discussion of this. There's no discussion of this.

And there's no discussion of this because Americans are doing it. And you know, I'm making this as just an observation of what I've noticed. Once Americans start doing things, there's no discussion of how scary things are because once they do it, it's normalized, right? Like that's the new normal. That's what I would say.

Well, and it's incredibly difficult to tell people, you know, you can't do this, this thing now, especially when it becomes a matter of advanced, you're right to say that like basically, for example, these questions in IVF are basically not discussed except by an extreme minority of pro-lifers, even the majority of pro-lifers in polls say they're okay with IVF. Well, why is that?

Uh, one I, I think honestly people don't know what is happening in IVF, the vast majority of people, they don't understand that it often includes selective, um, eugenics, right? And people are not, so it's not just the concern about early fetal life, like bracket that. That's the entire like abortion discussion. You know, what is the status of an embryo? It's a moral status of a human embryo, right?

Um, but even if, if you bracket that discussion, I mean, there are ethical considerations with the way that, and you're, you're right to say they don't start with IVF, they don't start with the current technologies. I mean, I was pushed into doing that exact screening that you're talking about as the standard of care. And I like, I really wish I had never done it.

Um, but my, my question to the doctor was, well, if we don't plan to abort, no matter what this screening shows, like what the hell is the point of this? Right? Um, but I mean, so I agree that these things are, are connected. Um, and not new, but like, we should have a discussion about whether or not we want to live in Gatica, right? Whether or not we want to live in a world where the genetic traits of our children are selected.

And you're right that it's not an easy question because the line between eradicating free again, bracketing the consideration of abortion. Let's say we're able to simply design an embryo that can never have Down syndrome, right? I think very few people will ultimately say we shouldn't do that, right? We shouldn't, if we could eliminate Down syndrome at the, uh, now some people argue that we shouldn't even do that. But like, you know, as a consideration before conception, right?

Uh, before you create the embryo and sidestep the question of where life begins, very few people will say, like, oh, we shouldn't do that, right? We should, we should essentially, um, being able to prevent it. We should allow children to be born with crippling diseases, right? Um, in the suffering that'll cause, but there's no clear line between what's a disease and what's an enhancement, right?

The line between dwarfism and just being very short is not in fact like a, a clear pathological, you know, line. This is, this is a disease and is, uh, genetically pathological. This is merely a disadvantage. You're on the spectrum of normal. I mean, and as the spectrum of normal shifts, like we become a, a, a different, different kind of being potentially, and there are questions about even even about like the great suffering that people inherit. Does that make us human in some way?

Does the possibility of suffering do we like lose the ability, for example, to have compassion for suffering of people when suffering essentially becomes the, the tiny, tiny, tiny minority of accidents, right? When suffering is not, when you don't have that sense of thereby the grace of God, go, I, when you see somebody who is born with something, uh, you know, that is a heavy burden for them to bear the rest of their life, right? Like what does that do to how we treat each other?

Um, I don't know. Like these all seem like very relevant questions. And I remember all the way back in 2001 or whatever 2000, the question about, um, fetal stem cell research, right? And there was a bioethics commission convened by the president, right? Uh, there was a national debate over, you know, what, what should we, what should we be able to do with regard to research on early fetal life, right? There's no debate. You're right. There's no debate.

There's nobody bringing up the fact, oh, like actually, these are very serious ethical questions. It's being treated as a completely fringe idea. Um, but we, anyway, I'm, I know that it's your field, Reseab, and, um, it's, it's, uh, not only your bread and butter, I don't mean it in the crossway, but, but also like what you're interested in, and the advancement of human knowledge and we, we are learning so much about ourselves.

And there will probably be so much good that comes from that knowledge, but we are wholly unprepared as a society for even the starting point of discussing what the consequences will be when we start to mess with the most fundamental connections between generations of our species. Well, so as you're talking, like I was thinking, because we were talking about Brian Johnson a lot. And if you guys, uh, I'm not going to put it up. Representative, you said he's from Utah.

Yeah, but JFK is the representative of wasp culture, even though he was a Catholic, right? When you think of wasp culture, you think JFK on the sale of, yeah, yeah. What's I, you know, what he's doing with his body, with his health, you know, in some ways, he's actually emblematic of what I think, uh, you know, and like, again, this is probably going to freak you out, but we've already talked to you. Uh, that's what people are going to do with their children.

Like they're going to optimize, right? They're going to try to improve and get the best, uh, you know, figure out the angles. Uh, you know, we're already doing this in like little ways, you know, but basically eliminating, you know, a lot down syndrome, a lot of the other other things. But, uh, you know, Brian Johnson, in a way is that's the future. Uh, I'm not saying this again. I'm not saying this is good or bad.

I'm just like put that out there that if I had to predict the stuff that he's doing, like, yeah, it's weird, but that's psychology. Like let's take me and let's figure out how to make me, quote, the best with all sorts of weird self experimentation and stuff like that. Uh, I think that that is, I think that is a window into where we're going. Partly, it's just that the technology is getting more decentralized, cheaper, more powerful, more effective.

And so, uh, it allows more people to do different things. The American ethos, uh, also, you know, we need to talk about this because it's like been talked about to death, but the trans stuff, one reason the United States probably is actually more advanced than other Western countries on trans stuff is our decentralization and kind of our consumer driven ethos about medicine.

Cause once you once Americans get it in their mind, that they need something or something is healthy, they're going to get it. Whereas in other countries, there's more of like a top down or a communitarian consensus, right? And so, but this is, I think true in general of this sort of technology.

And this does come from this is looping back to the Silicon Valley aspect, a kind of a libertarian individualistic, consumptive, utility maximization, you know, like this sort of like just, uh, let's like, let's hit all the metrics, let's hit all the specifications. You know, we want a baby that fits these parameters. Okay. Like this is our target. Here's our stretch goal. Uh, you know, I mean, like you could just like go on.

Uh, I think what is going to happen in the near future in the professional managerial class. Now, the positive aspect, maybe, uh, from your perspective, is I would say, I think a lot of Americans though, probably half or so, uh, they're going to be, you know, it's just they're not going to, they're not going to join, you know, in Silicon Valley, not going to be the whole America. It would be a lot more of America, but it'll never be the whole of America.

I think there's a lot of people who are not on board with this high, because what it is is like hyper rationalization, hyper optimization. Yeah. I mean, when you were talking, I was thinking about the scene in foulest, right? Where they create a man where the devil essentially and, and Wagner, the character create the man in the test tube, right? Um, and, and I was looking get up as you were, as you were talking, right?

And, uh, says we now, because I don't need to, I don't need to exaggerate to scare people. I don't need to exaggerate to scare people. The reality, you're describing the situation. The question is what we do about it, right? Where Wagner says we now, you know, we now divest, I'm trying to find my place here. We now divest of all that dignity, though, the creature still enjoy it. We as men with all our greater gifts begin to have as we should a nobler origin.

This is not like a new idea, the technology to do it in this particular way is new. But this is, this does cycle back to what I said about Brian Johnson, not knowing what year zero represents, right? Like the mind, body problem and the question of, of the soul, this is not, these are not new questions to thousands of years of, of human philosophy, right?

But we're not even, we're not even having the discussion about whether or not we want to divest ourselves of that dignity of being human and the suffering of being human. It's just going to become, as you say, like this consumerist technology that's available on a menu. And by the way, what does it mean to optimize? Right? And how and by what criteria and that's kind of what I was getting at with the control over the next generation, right?

If, if let's say in 20 years, 50% of the children are born using these new technologies that optimize for certain qualities that, what is it, Scalia in one of his most famous descents called the fashionable dogmas of our age or the fashionable shibbolits of our age, you know,

what, what if people decide that what they're optimizing for in a particular generation, they're doing not just their children, but all of the future generations to what people in 2030 thought were the most important qualities for a human being to have, right? Like our decisions affect the entirety of the species for the next endless number of generations, right?

The parameters that we are fashionable dogmas of our age impose on the next generation will echo, I mean, it's an unfathomable amount of power. And we're dealing with like a kid in a candy shop. Yeah, you know, just like brass tax, like just to be concrete, like I recently gave a talk. And well, there was a conference about forecasting in the Bay area, but people were asking about like this sort of screening and these sorts of technologies.

And I think what really is going to be big, probably by the 2030. So, you know, five and a half years, but you know, I'm giving you guys a sense. Autism and schizophrenia are highly heritable, which means that they're highly genetic under a lot of genetic control, even on the individual level. So the heritable estimates like 80% in the population scale.

And so I think what's really going to happen is people who have who have autism or schizophrenia and their family, they will, you know, just routinely start screening. And, you know, we need to get it to the details, but you know, there is correlations between schizophrenia and creativity. Some autistic people have been known to be very exceptional in certain ways because they're not quote, neuro-typical.

And so what you're going to see, I think, is among the certain classes that we were talking about earlier, you are going to see more neuro-typicality, actually. And then you had it the past. And I will leave it to the audience to say whether that's good or bad. But I think these are going to be individual decisions that people are going to make that will have collective social outcomes. Right. I think this is what we're actually like circling.

And the course of screening out for madness, we're going to screen out genius. There is the, I mean, it's not like anecdotally people have always said that, but there's there's pretty strong evidence actually in the literature. And I've asked around whether it's a good finding and most people think it is. And I don't know if you're not an expert in your field, you can just observe it. Look at, look at great painters.

For example, what percentage of them went insane? Yeah. So I mean, we might, okay, this is like a negative way to render it. But we might be seeing a future that's blender more antiseptic. And you know, kind of like everything's like the rough edges are shaved off, you know, but it's kind of a, you know, eternal on we, I don't know what to say. But yeah, you know, these are these are not questions that are often spoken of.

And obviously like fertility specialist are not going to speak of it. I don't really know if we're actually going to have a social discussion of it in America at least. And I think that countries take different courses, but in America, I feel like individual consumer optimization, you know, I think that's, that's, if I had to predict that's how it's going to go.

Nothing, nothing like will prepare us for these decisions, like the consumer choice and consumer optimization have done so well in making sure that like what I think about the, the, the things that make us human and the most indispensable contributions of humanity, they've always been in the deodorant aisle for all of the, like, consumer choices that we get. I'm not knocking capitalism or consumer choice, but the idea that that should be the sole load star.

Let's call it the proctored globalization of the human race. Yeah, I'm so glad like that that bear and Pfizer are going to determine what qualities. Well, I mean, you know, as we're like, you know, close the out here, but this is where like, you know, you're, you know, cognizant adjacent people like Malcolm Harris and, you know, religious conservatives or trans would agree, right?

Where it's like, this is a nightmare's future to imagine, you know, and I think so for different reasons, but you do see that, of course you affect a critique of, critique of, I don't know, it really and exactly in this moment, it feels like we are living at the, they close actually of almost half a century of materialism and, and hyper rationalism, right? And they're both, I mean, and if you look at the most recent developments in physics, leaving genetics for a second, right?

And the discoveries in physics, there are good reasons to question whether a materialist analysis of the world actually reflects one, the reality of the world around us and two, whether that's the materialist analysis actually provides us with what we need to live good,

virtuous, flourishing lives that make, you know, life have any kind of meaning, these are like, it seems to me that we're actually at the close of materialism being the quote unquote, obvious answer, the ever more obvious answer or a kind of scientist is, you look at the popularity of the rationalists versus, you know, 2010 to today, for example, or you look at, you know, Richard Dawkins, who's like sort of hanging on the, the new, the new atheist left, right?

What's actually happened in the new atheist left is they've converted, some of them have converted back to Christianity, like Ion Hirsioli, and the other half of them are more majority have converted to what is essentially a new religion in the, the fashionable politics of the age, like apparently man cannot live without certain metaphysical commitments and, and with the bear bones of a sort of, sort of materialist analysis of the world.

So it's funny to me that as we're confronting these great questions because of technological advancement, it's clearer than it ever has been maybe since the enlightenment that it's not sufficient.

Like the, the current materialist analysis of what a man is and what life is and what the world is is not enough, those, it's not enough, not enough for people and yeah, yeah, so what I would say, what I would say, this is, let me just like distilling some of the last, you know, the type of engineer mindset that you see in Silicon Valley, these optimal size, what a man is, what the world is, what life is, these are just not questions.

These are just not questions that are on the radar, right? Like people like, they exist in the world, they subsist in the world, and they're optimizing their subsistence in the world, right?

So I think again, like this is, I don't think, I mean, I don't want to get like too speculative, but you know, connecting back to like, dewey's pragmatism with the American tradition of a practicality of ingenuity and engineering, as opposed to these, like, you know, this, you know, I'm getting a lot of heightiger here on being, and you know what I'm trying to say, it's like, these are like not the big questions are not going to be asked by these type of people.

So I guess the issue here is like, other people need to step in and make their voice heard, right now they're not, right now they're not like, you know, people are just.

That is a political question, right? It's a political question, not only in the more basic sense of, you know, who is going to make these decisions, but also in, look, the political system, whether people like it or not, the political system in this country has demanded a lot from the average citizen, and I would argue that Americans have lived up to those demands for more than any nation on earth.

But I don't know that as a people were up to making or answering these questions anymore, even when I think about the decline in my own lifetime from the discussion of bioethics around around stem cell research versus the way that we accept IVF, and I'm not by any means saying like, oh, we should ban IVF tomorrow saying like the nature of those discussions and the public square is so degraded to the point and it does remind me to maybe finish out on this point.

It does remind me of the way those questions are considered or were considered in Silicon Valley versus the rest of the country, right? The rest of the country had a discussion about stem cell research in Silicon Valley, there was the Darwin fish that nobody even knew what it was satirizing because those questions are considered closed.

And that's, we are on the cusp of the necessity of reopening those questions, and I don't see any evidence that people are either in the elite or like the average American is in a place to thoughtfully reopen any of those questions, but it seems to me to be like so, so necessary in contrast the way that we're just accepting these truly revolutionary technologies and how they're going to govern the world. How they're going to govern who we are and who our children are.

We're not even like the polls don't show that anybody is really interested in having a conversation about that. Yeah, I will say, you know, I did enjoy this conversation with you partly because you know, we're talking about the future in a real way like future is a concrete thing.

I think a lot of our public and political discussions, you know, I was like, ask for recording right now, you know, maga is still a thing, you know, maybe some of the listeners podcast five years from now, do not know what maga is, but make America great again, but that whole idea, make it great again, you know, Trump is a creature of the 1980s, like this is a very backward looking, you know, looking back to the 20th century when we were great, you know, you talk about the left with with Black Lives Matter and all these.

Well, you're just basically rewarmed 60s radicalism in a lot of ways, you know, there isn't really any new ideas, a new vision for the future of how we organize human life in the United States and how we should.

That's, you know, advanced beyond the second half of the 20th century, and I think that's a problem because our technology has advanced way beyond the second half of the 20th century and that destruction, you know, human life will be reorganized for us if we don't start participating in those decisions.

Sure, exactly, exactly, it's not going to be up to us if we just keep, this sounds apocalyptic, but it's probably true, it's not going to be up to us if we, you know, don't keep our eyes on the ball here.

Like the ball is going to go out of sight and it's going to have its own logic and, you know, that's my cheery ending to this conversation, but I'm keeping it real. I mean, it's pretty obvious. Like if we don't pay attention, like weird stuff is going to happen and the next thing, you know, we're like in a box that we can't get back out of, right?

Let's keep out of the box. That's my final box. I have a more typically conservative limited vision, which is, I at least like to discuss the parameters of the box and to know that we're going into the box. I'm trapped in a box that I like going with the box metaphor, the issue is like, I feel like people are walking into a box, but they don't know that the box exists.

Right. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, they're like, wait a second, how am I going to buy it on? I'm just like, well, you know, the HMO decided and there was a law passed in 2012. You know, it's like, there's nobody who's actually like stepping back. And I think what you're alluding to is like the big picture analysis of ethics philosophy and history that our elites are lacking as opposed to engineering focus on the particulars.

People are not looking at the big picture and not giving big picture answers and asking big picture questions. And so we're like converging on these outcomes where everyone can be quite unhappy in the aggregate with choices that they individually made. As they're preferred outcome, right? Yeah, it turns out that human beings still desire and want things that are bad for us. Yeah, yeah, I should I should go get some ice cream right now.

All right, that was great talking to you. It was great to talk to you, I'm ready. Even if you and your partner are healthy, there's still a chance your child can develop a serious genetic disease. This is because every embryo has new changes not present in either parent. Most of the time, these are benign, but sometimes they can be catastrophic. Or it's a whole genome embryo reports directly screened the embryo and analyzed these denovo genetic mutations.

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