As I like to say on this channel, technology reflects the consciousness of the people creating it, and I am deeply concerned about the people creating our technology, especially artificial intelligence. Let me explain why. Welcome to cosmic intelligence, a Podcast where we explore the intersection of philosophy, cosmology, consciousness and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. If you're new here, I'm Chad, a philosopher, technologist, product manager, yoga teacher and attorney based in Los Angeles. Chad, I, by the way, I'm sorry I've been gone for so long. I was doing a bunch of research. I was thinking about things that was kind of I was contemplating what I'm trying to say on this channel, on this podcast, and thinking about some recent events, Peter Thiel, the Antichrist, techno Christianity, and just trying to think about how I can explain what I think are the root causes of the meta crisis, or the poly crisis or whatnot. And I was trying to come up with a metaphor for it, and I think I landed on one. So we'll see how it works. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. But yeah, so basically, I want to talk today. I want to talk this episode about, like, what is going on with Silicon Valley, and why do the tech bros have the worst ideas? That's kind of what we're talking about today. So yeah, let's get into it for a few years now, transhumanists like Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil have been promising the imminent arrival of artificial super intelligence, but open AI's GPT five arrived a few weeks ago, and it doesn't seem any closer to super intelligence than GPT four. It still can't count the number of bees in the word blueberry. And industry experts call GPT five overhyped and underwhelming. Sam Altman's breathless promises over the past couple of years now seem increasingly unfounded, as I've explained before, intelligence is mysterious and hard. Meanwhile, everywhere you look in Silicon Valley today, people seem to be losing their minds, grasping desperately for some kind of meaning in the most unexpected of places. For example, right wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who has been a Trump supporter and JD Vance mentor, recently talked to Christian New York Times columnist Ross Douthat about how the Antichrist has arrived in the form of Greta Thunberg the FDA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I guess for Thiel, the Antichrist is a force promising peace and safety while creating a stagnant global state. More on that later. You know Peter Thiel, this guy, you would prefer the human race to endure, right? You're hesitant. Well, I Yes, I don't know. I would, I would, this is a long hesitation. There's so many questions, and the human race survive. Yes, okay, but, but I also would, I also would like us to to radically solve these problems and and so, you know, it's always, I don't know, you know, yeah, transhumanism just, just incredible stuff. I mean, I just don't understand why we give so much airtime and space, like media space, to these unhinged billionaires, is it just because they have all the money like, why are the worst ideas being given airtime on mainstream channels like the New York Times? I just don't understand. Anyways, this month, Peter Thiel is hosting a four part lecture series in San Francisco, all about the AntiChrist, and speaking of demonic last week, Nicole Shanahan, the ex wife of Google co founder Sergey Brin, and former vice presidential running mate of Robert F Kennedy Jr, called the annual Burning Man festival demonic, despite having attended seven out of the last 10 times, I think what we're seeing here is the emergence of the Christian accelerationist movement, the perhaps inevitable convergence of techno libertarianism and Christian nationalism. This techno Christian movement is, in turn, a reaction to the rise of transhumanism and the cult of technological salvation, the stuff that I've been talking about on this podcast. But for those unfamiliar, Transhumanism is the belief that we can merge with or become machines through techno science, in other words, nanotechnology, AGI and genetic engineering. But transhumanism and techno Christianity are really two sides of the same coin. Coin. They both seek transcendence through technology and see any slowing of technological progress as a sort of evil or moral wrong. For Thiel, his creepy data analytics company Palantir, is part of the solution to the prevalence of Satan's lies, because Palantir will pinpoint the truth within the massive troves of data collected by business and government, and thereby prevent societal decay and the arrival of the Antichrist Palantir, guided by Thiel and his unhinged CEO and co founder, Alex Karp, will allow us to see the world as it truly is through data analysis for Thiel, technology is a weapon in a grand, cosmic battle between good and evil. Alongside all of this, there is the dark enlightenment or Neo reaction. NRX, a radically anti democratic and anti egalitarian political philosophy from Nick land and Curtis yarvin, who also goes by Mencius mold bug. I feel like these are like fictional characters in a sort of like fan fiction novel. It's It's so ridiculous. Anyways, the dark enlightenment rejects democracy. It sort of praises authoritarianism and even monarchy. It leans into so called genetic justification for social hierarchy. It's just very hyper rational but also retrograde at the same time. But the problem is that, courtesy Arvin, has the ear of people like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel. So these these ideas are permeating Silicon Valley, and as a result, they're permeating Washington. You know, Silicon Valley has a direct line to Trump, the Trump administration now, so it's it's troubling, it's confusing, it's weird, and I want to talk about it. I mean, we live in the strangest times, shaped by powerful people with the worst ideas. Where the hell are the wise elders? That's what I want to know. I mean, maybe all this is bubbling up now because the arrival of large language models, coupled with the overhyped claims that people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk keep making about super intelligence, have cast our longstanding meaning crisis into kind of a sharp relief, like suddenly questions of consciousness, metaphysics and philosophy are urgently relevant, but most people are not steeped in philosophy or spirituality. So instead, they grasp for what's familiar, and I think in America, that kind of means Christianity, in a lot of cases. I mean, despite its long standing secular rhetoric, the United States still is in large part a Christian country. And I think all this ideological derangement in Silicon Valley and increasingly in the US government is the result of what philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche identified as an imbalance in Western culture and overemphasis and over reliance on what he called the Apollonian, which is basically reason abstraction, this tendency to see parts rather than wholes, favoring utility over value and meaning and black and white thinking. This is the Apollonian kind of mind, right? This is, these are the properties of Apollo, basically. And so what we have lost in this, in this process of overemphasizing the Apollonian is the Dionysian, this kind of embodied, intuitive, holistic and contextual orientation towards nature and the world. When we lose facility with the Dionysian, we flail about reaching for frameworks that served us in the past, like Christianity, or we double down on the denial of the existence of the Dionysian and become new atheists. None of these radical ideologues, whether accelerationists, transhumanists or Neo reactionaries, are embodied or have any deep connection with the non human natural world. So I want to come back to that in another episode as well, but today, again, I want to talk about the roots of what I and others see as a global pandemic of Apollonian thinking. Then in later episodes, I will explore the ways that this Apollonian pandemic has led to the techno capital, machine of progress, commoditized spirituality, and how all of that makes this intelligence age a metaphysical crossroads that I think requires a radical, liberating spiritual intervention in order to usher In a wisdom age. Instead, to illustrate our predicament, I'd like to offer an embodied parable. Imagine if three centuries ago, enlightenment Europeans decided that the senses of smell and taste weren't real. Instead, these loudly confident European men declared that. The sense of smell and taste were superstitious remnants of an irrational religious worldview, overly subjective and prone to emotional manipulation, primitive, unreliable, a useless vestige of our UN antiquated animalistic past. From a scientific standpoint, they would say food is merely fuel, and any enjoyment of flavor is an indulgent illusion of primitive peoples. In this imagined world, public spaces would be scrubbed by odorless Purifiers, and natural odors are considered a form of olfactory pollution, because this denial of smell and taste became accepted as fact. It was taught in schools and parroted by governments and the media for centuries. And so now, food has become odorless, flavorless. Pastes and pills, perfumes and incense are now sort of passe, something encountered only in indigenous tribes or among the low and uneducated or spiritual sensitives, flowers are bred by industry only for visual enjoyment, thereby losing their natural fragrance. Smell and taste have begun to atrophy, although some people refuse to succumb. There are now renegade Epicureans, aromancers, fermenters and perfume meals still cooking with spice, aging cheeses and burning incense. Yes, they are laughed at by the mainstream, but they truly are enjoying their life. These archivists of lost sensation run scent libraries full of old books, essential oils and cedar chests, the Epicureans preach a gospel of pleasure, and they host lavish feasts in foodie speakeasies known as burpees, where chefs smuggle real lemons, cardamom and black pepper through underground networks. Rebellious aromancers cultivate sacred rituals full of burning incense and essential oils, operating hidden roof topped greenhouses full of aromatic Jasmine, lavender and Rose and fermenter anarchists smuggle sourdough starters, kombucha mothers and various yeast cultures to create stink bombs for the sanitized public sphere, planting durian fruit and Limburger cheese in government buildings and injecting spice into the nutrient paste factories. In this odorless, flavorless world, those who want to be accepted by the mainstream and get good jobs ignore their sense of smell and taste and pretend it doesn't exist, people who rant and rave about the smell of a rose or the life changing taste of a juicy peach or a fresh cup of coffee are ridiculed as woo, woo or superstitious. After all, everyone knows that sight, sound and touch are the only real senses. Only ancient primitives believed all that smell and taste nonsense, food is merely fuel, not a source of pleasure. Smells are odious and reminiscent of decaying flesh. Sounds pretty awful, right? Well, I think in some sense, this is what we have done by living entirely in the left hemisphere of the brain, starting with the European Renaissance, or perhaps even Socrates in ancient Greece, and accelerating with the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, as Ian McGilchrist explains so well in his books, the left hemisphere is abalone. As I was saying before, it's logic, it's abstraction, control, it's literal, detached machine like and we moderns have collectively denied the existence of any right hemisphere thinking, intuition, imagination, holistic thinking and all that. The right hemisphere of the brain sees nature and life in terms of process and flow, rather than purposeless utility, whereas the left hemisphere, which only thinks in terms of parts and utility, has kind of become the master of our world, of our, of ourselves, of our, of our nature of everything, and we've denied the existence of anything but meaningless, purposeless, material reality as a result, not because transcendent reality was disproven scientifically. I mean, it wasn't, but because those confident European men 300 years ago declared it to be so. The machinery of reason is an insatiable, formidable force that can justify colonizing half the world, treating nature like a mere resource to be pillaged, and reducing the sacred to a mere commodity. And so as we collectively moved as a society into the left hemisphere, exclusively, the prevailing worldview necessarily became more reductionist, draining nature of all transcendental meaning, slicing nature up into ever smaller pieces and using her as a resource merely to be exploited. In short, the whole reason we think that the cosmos is made only of purposeless and meaningless matter or energy, despite a failure to explain the emergence of life. Life or consciousness is because of our move into the left hemisphere this Apollonian mind. For many people, the Apollonian worldview is depressing and disenchanted, leaving them feeling isolated, irrelevant, fearful and empty, yet overstimulated too. People are so desperate for meaning, wisdom and guidance that they now turn to AI chat bots as therapists, counselors, friends, lovers and even gods, because this left hemisphere thinking undergirds so much intellectual discourse and informs the ethos driving both technology innovation and politics today, I want to find a way to approach it that is simple and illuminating without losing its multivalent properties. So inspired by the work of Ian McGilchrist and drawing from pre Socratic Greece and the work of Frederick Nietzsche, I am calling this left hemisphere tendency the Apollonian mind. After all, Apollo was the Greek god of light, truth, reason, form, structure, law and order and individuality. Of course, he was also associated with poetry and music. So it's not a perfect metaphor, but it's good enough for our purposes. Now I'm not saying that this kind of left hemisphere, Apollonian orientation is a bad thing, just that it's out of balance that we have forgotten the Dionysian within us, the wildness, instinct, emotion and unity with nature that is such a core part of our being, if we don't reject it, as I mentioned briefly above, one way the Apollonian mind manifests is the belief that technology is the solution to all of our problems as a humanity, and even a path to immortality and some kind of divine salvation, in a way Don't worry about large language models voraciously devouring increasing amounts of energy and water and accelerating the climate crisis. The apollonians say AI will solve that. Don't worry about increasing socio economic inequality. AI will usher in a new utopia for all. But the current approach to simply scaling machine learning is a shot in the dark, a gamble. Nobody knows if it will lead to AGI or super intelligence. I mean, nobody even understands intelligence in the first place. In Silicon Valley, technology is viewed as a panacea. It's a panacea because of the Apollonian mind, which sees the Dionysian as long dead and forgotten. To the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere and its antiquated, squishy qualities are silly, superstitious, hippy dippy and woo for the apollonians. Nature is a machine. So more machines are the answer. We are admonished to embrace the algorithmic matrix flowing out of iPhones, Chad, GBT, Instagram, Tiktok and the mouths of supremely confident Apollonian men. But remember, technology reflects the consciousness of the people creating it, and this thereby shapes our own consciousness. So this is why it's so important that we pay attention to these men who are creating our technology. This is why I'm so concerned that a majority of technology leaders in Silicon Valley are transhumanists in the cult of technological salvation. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen and these techno utopian billionaires, they have their own sort of in house philosophers, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, William McCaskill, Toby Orr, Max, Tegmark, Max Moore and Yuval. Noah Harari, I want to talk about some of these guys and some of their some of their ideas in future episodes as well. For the transhumanists, accelerationists and technical utopians, technology is this kind of inexorable force, a natural extension of biological evolution, one that will usher in an age of prosperity, abundance, bliss, techno divinity and immortality. This is how they talk. You know, within this ideology, intelligence is primary, and the well being of future humans, possibly living entirely in a simulation is more important than the well being of present day humans. So it's an ideology founded upon scientism, physicalism, and the application of the machine metaphor to every aspect of reality. In short, it's highly Apollonian. Listen, this is a deeply personal series for me, because my own journey kind of reflects the arc of what I want to talk about. I went, I went from living entirely in the rational in my Apollonian mind through a process, a long, a lengthy process that I can talk about sometime, of discovering the other parts of myself, including the intuitive, emotional and embodied. I started off as a computer engineering major, a math minor and an AI researcher before becoming a lawyer and a philosopher, not to mention a yoga teacher and all that. So I understand this tendency to cling to the rational, to the Apollonian left hemisphere, orientation toward the world, and I understand why we think that Apollonian intelligence is going to become godly. Essentially, again, I think the ideologies driving Silicon Valley Technology Innovation today, these techno utopian cults of technological salvation, the Neo reactionaries and the techno Christians are firmly within this western Apollonian tradition of hyper rationality, transhumanists, rationalists and effective altruists ignore an entire half of the human and the world while they desperately attempt to find some kind of transcendent meaning and even salvation through techno science and pure rationality, because technology reflects the consciousness of its creator, these ideologies are shaping Our technologies, not to mention government policy, in ways that further perpetuate this imbalance. If we as a society were to move to a more balanced orientation toward the world, between the left and right hemispheres, between Apollo and Dionysus, this would result in a shift in values from separation, control and mere utility, toward wisdom, interconnectedness and a sense of community. Instead of an information age focused on analysis of data, we would shift to a wisdom age where the world would become alive, once again, with archetypal meaning and even mystery. So next time, I want to examine these New Atheists, people like Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari, who have perfected the Apollonian mode. Harris's and harare's worldview has an outsized influence on the zeitgeist today, with Harris dominating the podcast charts and Harare writing books that consistently become bestsellers and then elevate him to the sort of ideological profit of Silicon Valley. In addition, Harris and Harari are both Buddhists who like Buddhism because it's so easily stripped of its metaphysics and its cosmology in order to provide utilitarian practices and benefits that are devoid of anything deeper than a negation of the self and a denial of free will. And then in subsequent episodes, I want to dive more deeply into this techno capital machine, the rise of data, ism, techno, Christianity and alternatives to all this stuff. Until next time, I invite you to get in touch with the Dionysus within you, dance, play, write, poetry, wander through the forest under the full moon and be wild. I'll talk to you next time you.