Transcript: 422: Human Forever with James Poulos

Marty Bent [0:04] What's up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this rip of TFTC. Sat down with James Pullows to talk about his book Human Forever and the spiritual battle we're involved in right now. Are we going towards a transhumanist future or is the human spirit going to wake up and recognize that we need to get closer to our humanity? Spicy rip, but a good one nonetheless. Got to read the top 4 shoutouts from Rip421. Rejecting the Great Reset with Michael Rechtenwald. @LoneStar, 50,000 sats. Sniffing the blood in the water. Lone Star is a shark, it seems. Maybe he's just a fish. Noster Report. Noster Report.

Marty Bent ⋮ Get the man a copy of The Bitcoin Standard. Great rip. @BlockchainBook, 2,000 sats. Noster Report, 5,555 sats. 5s across the board. Palindrome boost. Thank you. Blockchain Book, 2,000 sats. Godspeed. Godspeed to you too. And @Bond, 1,337 sats. Hopefully more of these kind of guys actually look into Bitcoin. They would be pleasantly surprised. Thank you guys for the boost on RIP 421. This RIP is brought to you by our good friends at River. They're crushing it. If you're looking to get into mining, River has a mining team where you can buy an ASIC on River. com/tftc, set up an account. You can buy an ASIC, have it plugged in at a hosting site.

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James Poulos [5:31] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

Marty Bent [5:42] I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

James Poulos [5:52] I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [5:55] If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

James Poulos [5:57] Probably should be. Probably should be.

Marty Bent [5:58] James Polos, how you doing?

James Poulos [6:03] Hey Marty, how are you?

Marty Bent [6:04] Doing well. I was saying right before we hit record, you've been, uh, highly requested by a lot of the individuals who listen to this podcast over the, over the last few months. I think, um, the signal you're putting out there, particularly with your book Human Forever, And the commentary you have on the state of humanity, particularly here in America as we're transitioning into this digital age, is a breath of fresh air during very confusing times.

James Poulos [6:34] Well, they are confusing in some ways, intentionally so. And the most important thing is not to get confused. So I'll do my best to keep that up.

Marty Bent [6:47] No, I appreciate it. We lost you there for a second, but just jumping into it, I mean, from your perspective, where do we stand? What I'm seeing, this is a Bitcoin focus. We focus on Bitcoin as a topic because I think it's an imperative as we move into the digital age. We can either get a completely dystopian CBDC slave coin world, or we can get freedom money. Bitcoin monasteries, as you like to call them, uh, in the future. And then on top of that, we have AI blowing up and really pushing us towards a somewhat transhumanist future. And then we obviously have this oligarchic, kleptocratic political apparatus above us that's really trying to control the narrative and censor people from talking about very important topics.

James Poulos [7:38] Well, yeah, that's right. The subtitle of the book is The Digital Politics of Spiritual War. When it came out, at first there was a little bit of head scratching, and now there's just sort of like sad nodding. It is a spiritual war. Slave coin is about right for the CBDCs. And a slave to what? Not just the regime, whatever that turns out to be, although it's obviously very hungry for the entire planet to planetize control and a servile relationship with that form of control. But it's a slave to the world. It's a slave to the machinery of the world, to the logic of the world.

James Poulos ⋮ And that is a very dark answer indeed to the question of spiritually how we can and must live as human beings. It's dehumanizing. It's post-humanizing. And so people are casting around for shelter, for a place where they can be protected and where they can protect— in the case of America, it's not just America, but America is very important here. If we lose here, we lose everywhere— To protect the things that matter the most to them. their form of government, their very longstanding way of life, despite all the wild changes over the past 200, 300 years, and ultimately their humanity itself. You see that the CBDC people, the Borg as I call them, are quite serious about using the power of centralized data and digital control to enforce a post-human ethic, right down to— United is criminalizing any kind of association or speech that runs afoul of what the priests of this new cyborg order think is a sacrament of this new regime, this new way of a post-human life that they want to, uh, and are busy herding us into, uh, right down from, you know, from, uh, uh, what people insist on calling trans stuff.

James Poulos ⋮ Well, you know, this is transhumanism in action. Uh, it's not everyone becomes a Marvel character. Uh, it's everyone becomes a sort of, you know, I don't know if you saw any of the Hellraiser films, but, you know, the, the Cenobites. I mean, Clive Barker knew what, what he was talking about. And that's what it is, ritual disfigurement to destroy the sacredness of the human body and, of course, the soul within and combine people into a superorganism, a super cyborg organism. So this is alarming stuff. It is dark. It is bad. And even if it is going to fail in the end, it will do and is already doing profound and in some cases irreversible damage to many human beings with no end in sight.

James Poulos ⋮ So where do you find the protection? Where do you find the shelter? We have a digital swarm of invisible little digital entities that fly through our bodies and our buildings and our thoughts. And until a handful of years ago, only angels or demons were considered to be capable of doing that. So that's a pretty big change. And in that medium, that disincarnate and disincarnating medium of digital technology, sanity doesn't work very well the way that it used to. People are rushing toward insanity as a way of coping. And they're rushing toward a centralization of all those insanities as so many institutions collapse, so many symbols fall.

James Poulos ⋮ And so what Bitcoin offers is a way for ordinary people right now to once again lay their hands on their tools, stop worshipping their tools, and start using those tools as defensive weapons, as the defensive weapons that we need and that we have an inherent right to as human beings to protect all those things that we've been given that are sacred and that we need to survive and thrive in this world. Uh, so that's the point of departure for me. Um, of course there are details, uh, but, uh, you know, I think that, uh, it's— the hour is very late, and, uh, if people don't begin there, uh, they're gonna waste a lot of precious time.

Marty Bent [12:25] Agreed. And I think to help contextualize this conversation, I mean, you believe that we're losing our humanity, getting closer to this Borg life. I guess to start, like, how would you define humanity? What makes a human a human? What connections to other individuals, to the, to the Earth, to the world, to nature makes us human? And why is that something to cherish and to fight for?

James Poulos [12:51] Sure. Well, um, you know, even, even before the question of, of should we cherish it, is, uh, is it, is it our, is it our lot in life to be human, right? Are we not in a certain profound way stuck being human, warts and all? And do we not have some kind of duty to accept that? And if we deny that, are we not lying to ourselves with a very old and very evil lie which only ends in tears? You can go all the way back to Genesis. And what is, you know, what is that first lie? Oh, you know, you'll, you'll be as gods.

James Poulos ⋮ Surely you will not die. if you eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, it'll be fine. In fact, it'll be better than fine. You will be just like God, maybe even a little bit better. And that's obviously not what happened. How do we know that's not what happened? Well, you know, we're still not gods. Stewart Brand is still wrong. We are not as gods. We are human beings, and we'd better get good at that. Getting good at that means accepting our given humanity, accepting the sacredness, uh, the goodness of the gift of our humanity, physical, uh, in body, in mind, in heart, in soul, in spirit, um, and, uh, and, and using, uh, ourselves, um, singly and together, uh, in, in corporate form, um, In the way that is most consonant with the manner in which we were created to live as it is we can live.

James Poulos ⋮ I know that sounds a little bit abstract, but if you look around for examples of what not to do, I don't know. I mean, it's been some time since we've seen so many examples of of what not to do to yourself and to others as a human being. Yes, less mass murder than in times past. Yes, less firebombing. Okay, that's great. But I don't think there's any question anymore that we're living through a catastrophe. Sperm counts, marriage rates, childbirth rates, prescription drug use, suicides, depression, loneliness, Uh, uh, isolation, um, shut-ins, uh, uh, illegal drug abuse, overdoses, um, addictions, uh, uh, self-harm, uh, self-disfiguring. Um, it's all there.

James Poulos ⋮ Uh, and you can walk around in any major city and just look at the people you see, um, homeless or not. And what you see is a profound, profound spiritual illness, despair, misery, confusion, lost souls, millions and millions of lost souls, young and old, male and female. It's unlike anything that's ever happened to us. And And so in a world with so many examples of how not to be human, how not to treat your humanity as the sacred gift that it is, I think you can kind of practically reason backwards through experience a little bit to understand exactly what it is that we've been given, exactly where it is that we should direct our energies fruitfully.

James Poulos ⋮ You know a tree by its fruits. And this fundamental question of worship, you look around and—

Marty Bent [16:41] Yeah.

James Poulos [16:43] You see just worship of knowledge, worship of idols, of abstract ideas, worship of just about everything with the exception of God, and a stubborn, bitter refusal to hear even just the words of Jesus Christ. I mean, you know, the meme, men will literally blankety-blank rather than go to church. That list is growing very long, and it is kind of funny, but it's also just like terribly sad. If the men find themselves unable to do this and the women find themselves unable to do this, I think it was even Amy Coney Barrett during her confirmation hearings where she said that she tells her children that anything girls can— anything boys can do, girls can do better.

James Poulos ⋮ That lasted for about 5 seconds. Before it was anything Borgs, anything girls can do, Borgs can do better. The future was female for about 5 seconds, and now it's the Borg superorganism. That is so profoundly alien and such a derangement of our given humanity that, again, I think the counterexample is so powerful and so gut-wrenching and horrifying that, you know, that I think it leads people astray in the sense that they start thinking like, wow, there's an evil god now, you know, like Cthulhu is real. It's, you know, Christianity must be wrong because I see this giant evil god looming, like blotting out the sun.

James Poulos ⋮ And, you know, in Christianity there is no evil god. The worst guy is just sort of a rebellious, envious bitter angel who, who wanted to be like God and couldn't be. And after all, you know, the, the aim and goal of our, of our life on earth here is to return to the Father before the Father returns, to achieve reunion with God. So, you know, for people out there who are feeling like, wow, you know, modern, late modern, postmodern life really sucks, I sure wish that I was able to sort of escape the trappings of that nonsense and enter into a sort of divine state of being.

James Poulos ⋮ Like, congratulations. That has been an option from the beginning. And Jesus Christ can tell you all about it and did. So you don't need to worship your tools. You don't need to worship GPUs or scalpels or hormone blockers or even Bitcoin. Simply worship the one true God, and that is your best and surest route to that kind of entry into divine being. But it's hard. It's slow work. It requires patience. It requires discipline. It requires an acceptance of suffering. It requires an acceptance of burdens. And people want shortcuts. They don't want to do the work. They don't want to take up the cross. They just don't want to.

James Poulos ⋮ And that, you know, Recognizing that that is our lot is a tough realization. It oftentimes comes through suffering, through painful, bitter life experience. One of the biggest problems with tech acceleration is not the direct consequences, which is just stuff gets more techy, but the indirect consequence, which is people start thinking that anything which is slow and patient and humble and all of the things that Christians understand love to be and godliness to be. We don't have time for that. We don't have the luxury for that. That's obsolete, and that's a very dangerous illusion, and we got to focus on breaking it.

Marty Bent [20:33] Yeah, I completely agree. It's weird sitting here today because technology, right? The internet, the digital age, our supercomputers, our ability to have this conversation across the country, right now, it does have extreme value in terms of like connection and stuff like that, but it's a double-edged sword where it brings a lot of pain and suffering and disassociation from other individuals on the planet. So it's, it's trying to figure out how to temper that power with the temperance, the low time preference that you just described, uh, and like how much—

James Poulos [21:13] Yeah.

Marty Bent [21:13] of this is being driven by the fact that this technology, particularly the internet and the digital age, was introduced to us and we've never experienced chemically as humans the pace of change that we have in the last 30 to 50 years.

James Poulos [21:26] Yeah, it's difficult and there's a lot of pressure to not wait around and hope that in the course of your everyday life you encounter people in meatspace who get it and with whom you can work fruitfully and right away. The way that our regime has operated, its mode of rule has been one that has broken up the kinds of face-to-face negotiations that are necessary for a large commercial republic to function. That is the United States of America.

Marty Bent [22:09] Yes.

James Poulos [22:11] We're a nation not really like other nations. We're a republic, not really like any of the small republics of yore. It's just straight out of the Federalists. These guys were aware of what was going on when they were laying down the founding. But you can't have a large commercial republic in a world where, oh, sure, you have some speech. It might not really be free speech. And if you say things that the regime thinks are blasphemous, then there's kind of really no Theoretical limit to how much you can be punished, but you really have no free association. Sorry. How America is supposed to function under those conditions?

James Poulos ⋮ Well, it doesn't work very well, and we're seeing how poorly it works. So for these reasons, you know, it only makes sense that there are all these guys who are suits on Twitter. It makes sense that there are all these guys who are just like hanging out in the Discord. It makes sense that you know that for a lot of like young men, the only place where they can freely associate is in like COD or whatever. Like this is. what's going on. And under those conditions, people end up talking heads in boxes, you know, on their laptops, wearing the cans and talking into the mic.

James Poulos ⋮ And this is— there's a reason why this is happening. And it is important always to remember that these things are not substitutes for what you can and must do in real life. They are supplements. There's always pressure. There's always been pressure. on human beings to say, like, you know, I don't have time for it. I don't have the luxury to do it the slow way. I don't have what it takes to do it God's way before he returns in glory. I want the substitute, and I want it now. So it's got to be, you know, it's got to be a both/and. There are folks in my circles who, you know, very upstanding guys, and their attitude is it's all the devil.

James Poulos ⋮ I never let my child touch a smartphone. This is 1 hour of internet time per week. I want to live in the woods. Okay, definitely, if you want to go off-grid and enter a monastery or whatever, please do so. We need more of that too, but we also need people who are not afraid to assert spiritual authority over foundational fundamental tools, the basic tools of defense and of building. Um, in the 1700s, you had your flintlock rifle and you had your, you know, your, your logs or your adobe bricks or whatever, and you could have your home, you could raise a family, you could protect yourself, you You could build a church, you could have a congregation, et cetera.

James Poulos ⋮ Those things are still good. But if Americans can't be American, if they can't live recognizably human lives, protecting their humanity and building institutions that protect their humanity digitally on the internet, in cyberspace, using the most powerful computational protocols, Then how long is it going to last in the real world of flesh and blood? Not so long. That's what we're seeing. We're seeing a regime dedicated to tying that off and onboarding everyone into a single disincarnate cyborg vivarium and making them say, you know what? Reality sucks. Humanity sucks. Chip me, Daddy. and, uh, and upload me, uh, into the, into the collective consciousness. Um, that's what we're fighting, uh, and the, the time to fight is now.

James Poulos ⋮ We can do that through policies. We can do that through law. Uh, we need digital rights amendments, uh, you know, a Second Amendment for compute, as, uh, as some of my guys like to call it, uh, because these are the fundamental weapons. These are the fundamental tools. And turning away from them out of fear, um, out of, you know, sort of misplaced spiritual pride or snobbery, That's a terrible mistake. And that even goes for the monasteries. Regular ordinary monasteries definitely stood the test of time. Not bashing them. We want more of them. But for all these people, these millions of people who look around at what the life we've been given amounts to, and they recoil from it, and they say, this is meaningless.

James Poulos ⋮ This doesn't matter. This is empty. This is hollow. I want to retreat from the world. I stop the world. I want to get off. Where can I go? Well, you can go into the suicide pod. You can go into the gender conversion clinic. You can just disappear into OnlyFans or whatever. Or you can combine the ascetic spiritual practices and disciplines of a truly cenobitic community, with the kinds of catechetical practices that monks of yore would apply to the written word, to scrolls, preserving the wisdom of the ages, preserving the wisdom of the fathers, and that can be done. through, I think, the OG original Bitcoin protocol is the best way to do it, precisely because it isn't really controllable centrally.

James Poulos ⋮ It can be killed centrally. It can be co-opted centrally. It is basically a world computer. And you know how many of the powers that be would love nothing more than to just spiritually, uh, possess that, uh, that world computer. Um, but if you look at the way it's built, um, it is, it is very elegantly designed, uh, for small devoted communities, uh, to slowly, carefully, thoughtfully, uh, with reverence, um, build, uh, institutions that can last for, for millennia serving our humanity and, and serving the God who put us here in the first Yeah.

Marty Bent [28:46] And it's— so is this the time of peak hubris? You're saying all this, I can't stop thinking about that dude from Braintree who was talking— is the big story this week, him and his blood boy. Then Yuval Harari, who will say openly men are becoming gods and we're going towards this reality where we're gonna reach the singularity combined with machines and become gods of our own world. Like, what would you say to the Yuval Hararis of the world and try to shake them to recognize their own hubris and why that is not possible or something to strive for?

James Poulos [29:25] Um, you know, what kind of gods, right? False gods? evil gods. You can definitely augment human capabilities in ways that make you feel like you are no longer human. But I mean, you know, I always just sort of flash on Britney Spears, like, no longer a girl, not yet a woman, right? Like, no longer human, not yet a god. You don't want to be there, bro. Like, you might think that that's like a cool place to hang out, but like— You know, vampires, I mean, these are very old myths and they speak deeply to the yearning to, you know, people don't really want to be God.

James Poulos ⋮ They just don't want to be human. And so who's in that middle station? Like, well, angels, like rebellious angels, you know, demons. So you just, you look at kind of the logic of it and what they're saying is Uh, you know what, uh, I think it was like Milton's Satan, right, in Paradise Lost, where he was like, well, you know, you can really make a heaven or a hell of anywhere. So, uh, so I, I can make a heaven for myself in hell, and I can be master of hell, and that'll be pretty awesome, you know, rather than having to, to bow and humble myself.

James Poulos ⋮ Um, but you look at these guys and it's like, does anyone really believe that, um, that the most spiritually powerful people on earth are going to be fathers who consume their own children's blood? Or, you know, like a, like a, a post-Jewish gay atheist who has to like meditate 2 hours a day in order to remain sane or whatever and thinks that Buddhism is science and I mean, just you look at the guy and you're like, you know, if, if these are our new gods, then, you know, then this is where I get off. These are not figures who look like gods in the making.

James Poulos ⋮ They look like classic villains and monsters of, of the past thousands of years. We've seen this story before. None of this stuff is new. If you take the accounts of the early Christians seriously, Sorcery isn't new, right? Like crazy guys levitating around doing magic, freaking people out, claiming they have divine powers. As novel as digital technology is and as much as it does offer ways of altering and controlling our given human being that we haven't seen before, we should not get it twisted. It is not fundamentally novel. It is just the latest and greatest way that human beings have tried to leap out of their own skin and create themselves into something that they think is better.

James Poulos ⋮ We've always tried to do this. It's always gone wrong. And the cost can be very high, eternally high. But if you look around in the world, just think of the new Soviet man of 100 years ago. I won't torture people by trying to say it in my bad Russian. But you read like Trotsky, 1924, I think it was, Literature and Revolution. He basically, you know, he says like, look, the communist man will become a superman, extend his will into the, you know, the wires of our being. Totally sounding like one of these posthumanist guys who, you know, says that it's inevitable that we're going to hack our way into divinity.

James Poulos ⋮ Communism did not deliver on that promise. Bizarrely, maybe depending on your perspective, the United States of America has done a better job of pushing people in that direction than the Soviets were able to do. That's something that should give us pause when thinking about how and why it is that America went off the rails. But in general, you look at these guys who are saying, like, humanity sucks, we're done. At the same time, though, we're somehow, you know, this horrible humanity is somehow going to turn into gods. The logic is shaky, but, you know, the evidence that you see with your own two eyes looking at these guys, looking at their demeanor, looking at, you know, I mean, these guys are not radiating divine light.

James Poulos ⋮ They do not have a look of holy peace and joy on their faces. They do not carry that in their bodies. It's something much darker and more hollow and more inviting of dark forces to come flow in and occupy that hollowness.

Marty Bent [34:22] Yeah, it is very creepy. The pictures of the Braintree guy going around this week, it's like, whoa, you, you sort of look like a cyborg. You might be a robot. And I guess that's like, again, going back to we most definitely do have to fight this battle in the digital world. 'Cause if everybody goes into their monastery and goes off-grid, the people who think that we can become gods are gonna continue unperturbed doing what they're doing, getting more people into the Borg. So in terms of what we can do, whether it be Bitcoin or something else in the digital world realm to protect our humanity beyond Bitcoin, what else do you, do you think we should be doing?

James Poulos [35:08] Yeah, well, I, you know, just, we, we need compute. I mean, Bitcoin's great, but if no one has any GPUs, you're sort of like a little bit stuck. So, uh, you know, fundamental digital technologies. We, we, you look at the First Amendment, you look at the Second Amendment, you got freedom of association, uh, in the First, and you've got, uh, you got a right to keep and bear arms in the Second. Uh, right there, one and two, implicit in those things You get these— I mean, every, every technology now is dual-use technology. Oh, scary, you might use these as weapons. Guess what? They've been used on us as weapons for now a couple generations.

James Poulos ⋮ Um, and it's, you know, it's time to return the favor a little bit. Uh, you know, we, um, we need these things, uh, in order to have a fighting chance. Um, and, uh, we should not be too precious or too timid about it. Uh, so that's, you know, uh, high-powered GPUs, that's right to mine and use Bitcoin to actually build institutions on these things, businesses, create algorithmic markets, freely exchange currency, digital currency that is not centralized, that is not handed down to us by a regime that is hostile to our way of life and to human life. And as far as the spiritual practices go, there's this big question of like, well, if it's not the global Borg or whatever that is big enough and authoritative enough to get its arms around the digital swarm, this is a— Well, maybe I don't like the global Borg.

James Poulos ⋮ Maybe I don't like everyone becoming a sort of different kind of queer blob that is incorporated into this Borg. But gosh, what choice do we have? Otherwise, we're just gonna— you know, the gray goo is gonna eat us all. All these invisible machines are gonna just like take over our lives. Humanity is gonna be obsolete. We're gonna be washed away. Where else do we have to turn? You know, we don't have time to wait around for 500 years for the monasteries to whatever. Well, okay, fair enough. But here's the answer. The answer is The body of Christ, which is the church, especially, you know, the unified church, which is a place where I think we should all want to go.

James Poulos ⋮ But in the body of Christ, you know, you have an institution where people can be priests, people can be bishops, people can be monks, people can be priest monks, people can be just, you know, just sort of lay congregants. Many different roles for men and for women, very consistent with Paul on the charisms. Everyone has their own gifts by grace, and that richness of real diversity of spiritual authority and power and vitality that is included and incorporated with and fuels and is fueled by the body of Christ. That is a divine institution, which is incarnate, and which has the authority and can scale without losing its richness in a way that can stand up to the digital swarm and can lay hands on it and can prevent it from gobbling us up.

Marty Bent [38:38] Yeah. And so do you have hope that we can change the tide here?

James Poulos [38:44] Yes. I mean, it's not really a choice. You do not get to choose whether or not to have hope. You must have it. And I think the more that you accept the duty of spiritual discipline, the more that you pray, the more that you get out of your sort of ego enclosure that it's so tempting to disappear into, And the more that you encounter in real life people who get it and are— not just get it, but also as part of getting it, understand that, you know, sin is inescapable, and every day we must start again, and we are beginners at every moment. That humility, if you manage to do that, I think that you will see hope.

Marty Bent [39:44] Yeah.

James Poulos [39:45] Um, manifest, um, in your heart, uh, but also in your life around you. Um, hope is like any of these other sort of spiritual muscles. Like, you have to, you have to exercise them. You have to work them in order for them to work. Uh, you gotta water the plant in order for it to bear fruit. Um, and if the plant is good and the plant is strong, then you water it and it'll bear good fruit. At the same time, you know, like, let's not have any illusions about this. The parable of the wheat and the tares, of the wheat and the weeds, is that, you know, no matter how much good wheat there is to harvest, it's going to be intermixed with the bad stuff, with the weeds.

James Poulos ⋮ And it's just not for us to try to harvest the wheat while picking out the weeds. Uh, they're gonna grow together, um, until the end. Uh, and so, you know, the, the hope is always there. It's got to be there. Uh, but it is, it is kept, um, it is kept from becoming just another fantasy or just another illusion or delusion, uh, by humility. That humility's always got to be there as well.

Marty Bent [40:57] Yeah. Do you think there's a quote-unquote awakening going on right now. It seems like there's a lot of backlash. We have a few boycotts going on in the country, whether it be Bud Light, Target, Miller Lite even. And obviously the presidential election here in the United States is beginning to pick up, and you have a bunch of new candidates beginning to put their flags in the ground, say, hey, here's my— here's the stance I'm willing to make, which seems to be vehemently against the incumbent status quo uniparty for some of the candidates that exist? Do you think people are beginning to wake up? There's that silent majority that has had that uneasy feeling that things have gone a bit awry and they're beginning to act out against that.

James Poulos [41:50] I do think so. The evidence is there. It's late. It needs to be much stronger. It needs to be much better coordinated. You're right about the candidates. I know RFK has sort of come out with a pretty muscular pro-Bitcoin, anti-CBDC posture. I think that you will see that among Republicans, including candidates going forward, at least some of them. I think people are waking up. I think the generational dynamics here are difficult. Boomers, God love them, it's— they've been through a lot already and they really don't want it to be true what's happening. They just don't want to have to stare that monster in the face and accept what time it is.

James Poulos ⋮ They want to, you know, have the cheeseburger in paradise. They want to, you know, they wanted to— can we be done now, please? At the same time, you know, a guy like RFK steps up and If there's one thing that can sort of rouse the boomers for a last stand, it's a Kennedy. That kind of mystique is still there, even if it's in somewhat diluted or exhausted form. And so the boomers face a moment of truth here. The Xers, not a lot of them. They've kind of been frozen out of power. Not a lot of guys in their 40s who are filling the kinds of roles in social leadership that would have been expected really in almost any time and place on the globe since the beginning of time.

James Poulos ⋮ So that's weird. Not as many Xers as there are Boomers and Millennials. The Millennials, bad news, guys, you hit puberty during peak social media. So that that's painful. And, you know, the Zoomers, I mean, if, you know, if you want to hang out on TikTok all day and consume extremely based Christian content, you can do that. And, and what a mercy given what some of the options are, you know. But again, to go back to some of what we hit on earlier, if you just sit on the couch all day and just like Fave the based, you know, Deus Low Volt TikToks, then you are probably not going to win.

James Poulos ⋮ Might be a nice gateway, not going to seal the deal. There's a, I guess it's a sort of baby meme at this point of like catechizing the bots. What does that mean? Some people would like it to mean like what the Wokies think catechizing the bots means. It's like, well, we'll just get the right programmers to have all the power and they'll be the sort of priestly caste and they'll just prompt, computer, be woke now. Right. And do all the sort of the busy work on the backend that makes that happen. And I think there's a longing among a lot of folks on the other side for, oh, if only we could just get our guys in there and say, computer, be integralist now, or like, be Christian nationalist now, or be based now.

James Poulos ⋮ Or, I mean, even Elon is out there like, no, we just need like TruthGPT. You just like get the right guys in the room and they'll press the right keys and sort of do solve the right math problems, and, and it'll tell the, the computer to be truth now. And, uh, you know, we'll find this perfect language that will allow us to perfectly, uh, deterministically tell the machines what to do and what to say and how to treat us, and nothing will go wrong and they'll perfectly execute our instructions. No, this is not catechizing the bots. I get it. I get the longing. To some extent, that's going to be going on regardless of what anyone thinks should happen.

James Poulos ⋮ It's natural that that kind of thing would go on, but it's a shortcut. It's a substitute. It's not the real deal. You want to catechize the bots. What you got to do is you have to get the medium to be working for us, for our sake, and ultimately for the sake of our creator. That's why Bitcoin is so important, because you're not just sitting around trying to perfect this mathematical language that gets the robots to behave right. Yes, there's a mathematical language. Yes, it allows people to trust transactions at arm's length or even on the other side of the planet or whatever. But this is different because on the protocol, you can use the protocol as a firm foundation to build spiritual institutions and to build commercial and cultural institutions that are suffused with the life of the spirit.

James Poulos ⋮ That takes more work. It takes more courage. It takes more discernment. It takes more heart. And it takes people willing to risk a little bit to work with each other. If we lose trust in one another, if we refuse to risk depending on one another spiritually in our hearts, then this whole enterprise is going to fall apart regardless of what we do. So I think catechizing the bots, Bitcoin is the way to do it for the reasons that I described. And it's a path. It's a path. that they're going to try to close off. They're already working to do it. But we still have, you know, I think we still have pretty good odds.

James Poulos ⋮ And even if the odds were pretty bad, it's still, you know, you got to get out there and do it.

Marty Bent [47:48] Yeah, it's still worth it. You mentioned courage there. You think there's enough courage out there?

James Poulos [47:53] Not right now. Is there ever? Is there ever enough courage? You know, it's like the things are really only clear to us Um, when it's too late, you know? What is repentance? What is forgiveness? How do these things work spiritually? Uh, you have that moment where you're like, wow, like, I am a monster. Like, I blew it, and I can't fix it. I can't compensate for it. I can't propitiate the, the false god of justice, you know? Like, the jury awarded me $600 million. And it's like, that's not— it doesn't change it. That moment of humiliation where you accept the profundity of your powerlessness and your errancy, that is when— that is the moment that occasions repentance, the turning away, the metanoia, the changing of heart.

James Poulos ⋮ That is when courage becomes possible. That is when humility and forgiveness and redemption can become possible. So yeah, it's, you know, the awakening proceeds apace as the scourging proceeds apace. And the more that people understand that this is what it is, it's not just like craziness. Oh, this craziness, this trans stuff, stuff. What is the stuff, guys? It's not just craziness. It's not just like, wow, people really seem to have forgotten the teachings of John Stuart Mill. Like, oh, like the idea that you just sort of talk about competing positions and then the truth emerges. They just seem to have forgotten. We just need more rationality.

James Poulos ⋮ No, that's— this is how we got here, is by worshiping those things as false gods. The source of courage, the source of awareness. You got to understand that we are reaping what we have sown. We are being scourged by our own hand. We are punching ourselves in the face. You know, our God is loving and merciful and long-suffering. And just the parable of the prodigal son, you know, you can go out and just squander your life on the rankest and most fleeting of hedonistic pleasures and foolishness. And, you know, if you come crawling back, There is a party waiting for you, a spiritual celebration. And sometimes it takes really blowing it in order to understand how precious that gift really is.

Marty Bent [50:29] Yeah. No, building on that, it is encouraging. I mean, within Bitcoin, you see this subculture of people really pushing for strong, big families, get married early, have a good life. And then you see that in Gen Z too, in some subsets. Of that generation as well. It seems like there's these people longing for a return, if you will, to traditional family values, because that's truly— as somebody with 2 sons, that's really what brings the most joy and the most fulfillment and most happiness in my life, is being able to see them like, wow, that was low time preference. I created that. And molding or helping to mold, um, these 2 humans.

Marty Bent ⋮ Hopefully more in the future. But again, like, I'm a millennial, 31. I feel fortunate that I'm in this position. But yeah, like you mentioned, there was a lot of us who grew up at the beginnings of the social media age. We were fed this lie like, hey, you have to go be a careerist, particularly women. And a lot of people in my generation are waking up like, holy shit, what the hell did I just do? Is it too late?

James Poulos [51:36] Well, it's later than you think, but it's never too late. That's how I like to sum it up. And young guys, young guys, you know, if you're a teenager right now, you are aware that there are 2 choices. You got 2 doors. And door number one is the monster squad. You know, you can be as obese and have as many colors of hair and Wear as many, like, weird sort of, like, uh, sexual prostheses as you want, um, but your, your soul belongs to the board. Um, or door number 2 is, um, is this the straight and narrow way, um, is, uh, is, is, uh, is the way of the body of Christ.

James Poulos ⋮ Um, am I oversimplifying? A little bit. You know, you got these, these like Muslim bros, I guess, and some other folks. Uh, but, um, I'm, you know, I've, I've sort of— I can, I can trot out the proof of work, I guess, at this point. Um, the drama that is unfolding is a drama concerning, uh, what, what the West has gone through since the beginning.

Marty Bent [52:57] Yeah.

James Poulos [52:58] almost, uh, which is, you know, which is, uh, will we continue to try to expel Christ from our life? Uh, it's such a, such a humble, um, simple teaching, a very exoteric teaching. You don't need to be a PhD or a blue check or an elite or an expert or anything in order to hear and understand that message, that gospel, that teaching. Um, and despite this fact, or perhaps because of it, uh, it scares people. They do not want to even see about it. Um, and I think that's, you know, that's another reason why, uh, sometimes you really do have to like Punch yourself in the face for so long that you just, you just kind of can't anymore.

James Poulos ⋮ Uh, and at that moment of surrender, um, the simple, the quiet, the humble, the voice that speaks in silence, the thing that you can really— that you couldn't hear before and now you can hear, that you couldn't see and now you can see, that you couldn't believe and now you can believe— suddenly that door opens up in earnest. Uh, not just in the sense of Well, I'm running away from the Queerborg, but in the sense of being drawn to something, to someone in love.

Marty Bent [54:28] Yeah. Did you have to hit yourself in the face a bunch of times before coming to this realization?

James Poulos [54:34] Well, I mean, who hasn't? It's part of life. Obviously, you don't want that for your kids. And if you can raise your children well in that sense, you've done a very blessed thing. But living in this world is not easy. And seeing yourself as God sees you is something that many people are not really raised to do or to understand.

Marty Bent [55:09] Yeah.

James Poulos [55:10] And some who are— it can be difficult to raise a child right in that way on your own, certainly, especially in a country like the United States of America where, let's face it, you know, this is a cult factory. This is a place where, you know, you can roll into town with the craziest of heresies and get yourself a following pretty fast.

Marty Bent [55:36] Yeah.

James Poulos [55:38] you just look at sort of like what the norm is in Silicon Valley. And one of the, one of the filtering mechanisms for, for investment is, you know, well, is the guy like a pretty good cult leader? And if the answer is yes, then it's like, all right, like, I'll make a bet on this guy. Let's see what he can do, you know, uh, in, in sort of the same way that like the intelligence community has operated for a long time, right? You sort of like stir some people up, you dose some people on LSD without them knowing, You just kind of like poke the swarm a little bit and see what happens, see who bubbles up.

James Poulos ⋮ And sometimes it's going to be like a Sam Altman, and sometimes it's going to be like a Charles Manson. That's terrible, of course, but it's also sort of like a perverse illustration of, uh, of the truth that, um, that suffering is the road. And, uh, and the suffering that is involved in discovering, uh, the foolishness in trying to be master of yourself, you know, that's, that's a big part of it.

Marty Bent [56:53] Yeah, yeah, it's very discombobulating, right? Because you mentioned you brought in like the intelligence apparatus, the Borg, as you define it, it's like very hard to focus attention on one part of the Borg. Like, you sort of don't know where you're getting attacked from. That's very discombobulating for a lot of people. It's hard to focus, like, all right, here's what I should do to combat this. It's widespread.

James Poulos [57:26] Yeah, it's decentered in its own way. You know, I like to joke that these things are the real 5 I's. They're like innumerable, invisible, instantaneously interoperable information entities. 5 I's. Until recently, it was only angels and demons that could do that, and we envy them. You know, we are envy factories. We see these things, or not see them, but experience them, and we go like, why can't I be like that? You know, they don't seem to experience awkwardness. They don't seem to experience despair. They're not like trapped in a body that they didn't choose. And they can go where they want and do what they want and carry, you know, there's sort of like a—

Marty Bent [58:18] Yeah.

James Poulos [58:19] Uh, uh, the Girardians out there can talk about sort of mimetic rivalry and stuff. Um, but yeah, this, this envy, this, this, uh, longing to have that kind of angelic state of being. Um, it's very tempting, uh, if you, you know, if you weren't sort of spiritually raised, uh, to understand, um, that actually, you know, being human is better than being an angel, uh, that, you know, that Satan is jealous of human beings, um, that we have a special and privileged and unique relationship with God. Uh, I think it's in 2 Corinthians where, where Paul is like, do you not understand that we will be like judges of angels and so forth?

James Poulos ⋮ Like, you know, it's, uh, uh, uh, the, the mother of God is, um, is held up for veneration above, you know, even the cherubim and the seraphim. And there are many examples. Uh, and one of the, the real tragedies, one of the real miseries of wandering away from these teachings is that the teachings concerning how precious and powerful and authoritative we are as, uh, as human beings created human Taking that away, you know, it hits us right where we're most vulnerable in the face of these information entities.

Marty Bent [59:49] Yeah. Yeah, I like being human. That's been like the weird thing the last few years as the transhumanist singularity crew has been beating the drum like this is inevitability. Like, I like being human. I like— obviously like the digital world too, and the internet has provided a lot of value to me. Social media as well. It's probably also corrupted my mind a bit, but again, going back to try to balance and temper that power with some humility. Um, it's been a— that's why I'm happy we're having this conversation, because I've been trying to view both sides of the argument. Like, it's like, oh, this is pretty cool stuff we can do with all this technology, but it is also very corrosive, if not wield it in the correct way or fashion.

James Poulos [1:00:38] Yeah, I mean, it's, it's really remarkable, you know, you get so many of these guys who, whether on the, the tech side or the woke side or, you know, or, or both and, um, people who are, are just like, we suck, we suck, we suck, and they don't spend any time on like, do I suck, you know, like Maybe before just focusing all my energy on what's wrong with us humans, what if you began with like, well, what's wrong with me personally? Where am I falling down? What's my laundry list of failures? And people are very reluctant to do that. There's a couple of reasons for that. Some people are obsessed with justice, like, well, no, if you only focus on yourself, then there's going to be injustice.

Marty Bent [1:01:29] Right.

James Poulos [1:01:30] We know that if there's injustice anywhere, there's injustice everywhere, sort of one of the great diabolical lies of our time. Some people are obsessed or are worshipful toward money. Well, if everyone just focuses on themselves first and looks inward first and assesses their spiritual condition first before they start banging on humanity, well, then that's going to slow down the wheels of commerce. That's going to It's going to lower the amount of frenzied transactions in the marketplace. That's not very good. Standards of living will go down. It's like, how would you measure the standard of living right now today? Oh, well, GDP and numbers and charts and whatever.

James Poulos ⋮ And just look at the faces of the people you walk by on the street every day. Go to downtown Los Angeles, go to downtown Chicago, go to any of these cities, go to the Walmart towns out there in the in the quote-unquote heartland, just immiseration. Standards of living are in freefall. People don't want to live. People are looking for a way out. People are choosing violence against themselves because, in a desperate attempt to reckon with what they should have reckoned with from the beginning, which is, how do I suck? Where have I gone wrong? How have I fallen short? Who have I betrayed?

Marty Bent [1:02:50] Right.

James Poulos [1:02:50] Who have I failed to meet my obligations toward? Where have I shirked my responsibilities? Where have I sort of judged others before I judging myself? That doesn't mean that you know you guys just stand there like a mute when you see diabolical systematic assault on our humanity. That's not what what judge yourself and not others means. But if you are not beginning in your own heart, then how do you? How do you expect to have any integrity or authority when you start looking outward, especially when you dare to judge the whole human race? Please.

Marty Bent [1:03:24] Yeah. Yeah. You got to— and it's funny. I came to Bitcoin from an Austrian economics perspective, big fan of Thomas Sowell. And that's one of the tenets of human action is individual human action collectively. drive society forward. Um, it's weird that we've gotten to this point in time where people want to allocate blame for their strife externally. Um, it's the government, it's the lack of government intervention, it's that rich guy over there. So no, I want you to look inward and think about this and what you could be doing better.

James Poulos [1:04:04] Courage. You know, where does the word courage come from? It comes from the, the French word for heart. It's It's hard. Courage is hard. There's always kind of like a running debate over what the worst or most fundamental sin is. Usually pride gets the dubious distinction. But, you know, there's, I think, a closer relationship than people sometimes think between pride and sloth, sort of indolence, like prideful refusal to exercise your own will. will, uh, to exercise any discipline over your will, to humble your will. It's needed. You have to like get up. You can't— you cannot, uh, just lay back and wait for God or for anything else to just like wait on you, to serve you like you're some sort of, you know, like spoiled princess.

James Poulos ⋮ This is The Marie Antoinette mindset is not gonna get it done for you. Um, and, you know, the, the, the maybe not so shocking thing as, uh, as the, the disgrace of Pride Month descends upon America is, you know, the— Obviously, the, the visceral sexual character of the festivities is foregrounded. But one reason why it's foregrounded is to obscure what's going on below, what's going on in the heart. And what is going on in the heart a lot of the time is that spoiled princess, that bitch with a tiara, going like, you're gonna paint my nails and you're gonna wave the fan and you're gonna feed me grapes and I'm just gonna be little princess piggy of the universe.

James Poulos ⋮ That sort of like marriage of pride and sloth in the heart. is, you know, it's, it's not just, um, uh, a sin in the heart of someone who can point to a stripe on the, the ever more prismatic pride flag and say, that's me, that's mine. This is, this is humanity. This is the human race. This is the human condition. Uh, we all have that little bitch inside of us, um, that pretender, uh, who just wants to feed us on a diet of lies until we're just the fattest little piggy making the, the most obscene demands of, uh, of everyone around us and becoming extremely pissed off if we are not served in that way.

James Poulos ⋮ Um, you know, the, the, the gays and the queers and everyone else, they have a lot to answer for, but so do the straights, you know? So does everyone. Uh, and it all begins with just Uh-oh. I was really taken up within your soul. If you can't start there, it's, you know, it's just going to be a miserable road.

Marty Bent [1:07:06] Yeah, the technology makes it easy to be slothful.

James Poulos [1:07:12] Oh yeah, oh yeah. You're not slothful. You're doing all kinds of things in the, in the In the invisible world, you know, I liked hundreds of tweets today. I had like tons of conversations, super productive. You know, I'm changing the discourse. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm getting micropayments. I'm, uh, I'm doing fan service, uh, so many things, um, all while you're just kind of, you know, you may as well be a head in a jar. You may as well be sort of like Baron Harkonnen, like sitting in this like pink vat of like Nutrient sludge or whatever. Job of the hot, you know, choose your sort of sci-fi sort of blob blob person.

James Poulos ⋮ May as well be that person. You know, the the amount of physical contact that we maintain with our phones throughout the day, like yeah, kind of already are cyborgs, you know. And if if you can't see that, then you're not gonna see what's coming. One of the most striking things that Christ said, um, was, you know, that one or more of the apostles basically said, like, uh, can you, can you perform some more miracles so that people believe? And he was like, well, you know, if they don't believe Moses, then they're not going to believe miracles. If, if they don't believe, uh, if they don't believe me, they're not going to believe what I do.

James Poulos ⋮ That's, you know, just like pulling another rabbit out of the hat isn't Oh, okay, okay, now, now I take your teaching seriously. And I think, you know, I think that, that, that dynamic, that pattern of— that psychological pattern of faith, this is something that is present in our relationship with our technology where, you know, we don't, we don't really want to just be honest about our relationship with our technology now. And it's not about, you know, hours, like, oh, I kept it down to 3 hours today. I'm better than the person who kept it down to 4 hours. One of my favorite anecdotes from a monastery, from the monastic life, there was a monk who was known to be a drunk.

James Poulos ⋮ He was just, you know, he was an alcoholic. He was clearly— would clearly show up drunk to various monk things that the monks were doing. And eventually, you know, some of them started grumbling, and they went to the, uh, to the head, uh, priest monk, and they said, you know, Brother So-and-so, um, is a disgrace. I mean, look at the guy, you know, this is an open secret. He's just always drunk. Um, you know, how can you allow this? How can you tolerate this? Uh, and, uh, and the response was like, well, what you don't know is that, um, that 5 years ago he was consuming 30 drinks a day, and over the past 5 years, through God's grace, he's managed to get it down to 3 drinks a day.

James Poulos ⋮ And so, you know, and you, like, what have you managed to get a grip on in that kind of way? And, you know, you don't know what's going on in this guy's heart. You don't know what's going on in his life. So it's not just— you can't assess your spiritual condition with regard to technology simply by numbers. It's not that simple. And you got to go deeper than that. And you got to look to, you know, how am I using these tools? Am I using these tools to enable sinful, self-abusive, lazy, prideful, gross, disgusting behavior? You know?

Marty Bent [1:11:00] Yeah.

James Poulos [1:11:02] Am I using it to try to find shortcuts and substitutes for spiritual goods, for my duties, for my responsibilities to those I claim to love? And if the answer is yes, it doesn't matter if you are just looking at your phone like an hour a day or 10 hours a day or 5 minutes a day. If that spiritual illness is present, it's just going to flow into and through your relationship with tech just as much as it does, uh, and, and clearly has for so many people, uh, in their relationship with television, with the radio, uh, with books, um, with magazines, uh, and on and on.

Marty Bent [1:11:44] Yeah, powerful things to think about. Look inward, freaks. Do a little— I want to say self-calculation, but a little Accounting. Take stock. Yeah, yeah, take stock. James, thank you. It's been a fascinating conversation. It's one, again, thinking about like both sides of the world we live in right now. It does feel like we're at this inflection point where we do need to take back some ground from the transhumanists who want us to live in this Borg. and really get back to our humanity, which again, despite every economic indicator and wealth indicator that the, uh, the powers that be feed us, I agree. I do think there is a mass desperation, a mass sort of disillusionment out there in the world. We do need to get back to our humanity, get more closer with our humanity.

James Poulos [1:12:48] Amen, brother.

Marty Bent [1:12:51] All right, where can we find the book?

James Poulos [1:12:54] The book, Human Forever, it's on canonic.xyz. Canonic, where you too, now that they are, they are, they're in beta now, so that means that you too can upload your publication to Canonic and have it published on-chain and put it up for sale in Bitcoin. We've got I think at this point, 3 flavors, BTC, BCH, and BSV. So you can, you know, pick your poison there. And, and that's where you can find it, Canonical, canonical.xyz. The book is Human Forever: The Digital Politics of Spiritual War.

Marty Bent [1:13:32] Well, go check it out, freaks. James, thank you for your time today. It's a fascinating conversation. God bless.