https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=o468OtytbVQ
just to take one example. Now we have this chat GPT and already students are using it to write their papers and professors are using it to write their lectures, right? So it’s like two machines talking to each other, you know, or for example, you know, there are these programs you can speak into it and then I’ll translate it into Spanish or something like this. So, but every step that we take in that direction, our human capacities, like reading, writing, and so forth, begin to sort of rust and disuse. Yeah, not only do they rust and disuse, but at some point there’ll be a kind of cannibal element. Once they re-o to OpenChat GPT and it starts to now continue to analyze what’s coming in terms of writing and in terms of it’ll start to eat its own children, then it’ll create a cannibalistic monster that will start to devolve because it’s going to be basically cycling back its own output. This is Jonathan Pajot, welcome to the symbolic world. So hello everyone, I am very excited to be back with Jacob Howland. He has been on the podcast before. He is the provost of the University of Austin and he is an expert both on ancient thinking in terms of the ancient Greeks, but also biblical thinking as well and rabbinical thinking. So this is going to be a great conversation. We’re going to talk about the question of technology and all the way leading up to the issues of AI and all of that. So Jacob, this is, you’re exactly the person I want to have this conversation with. Well thanks, I feel the same way. So my big question, my first question for you is, have you thought a bit about the different narratives about technology that we find both in ancient thinking, whether mythological or philosophical, and the way that the Bible portrays the question of technology, let’s say? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that a lot of the issues that we’re confronting today were already identified by both of those traditions. And maybe one way to put it is, if we go back to the Platonic texts, Plato makes a distinction between acquisition and production. As sort of kinds of sciences or arts. And philosophy is categorized under acquisition. What does that mean? The acquisition of knowledge, which is a kind of openness or receptivity to the world, right? So there’s a kind of anthropology behind this. Human beings are these souls that relate fundamentally to reality. And our job, if you will, is to register those realities, and to take them in. Now production is, I mean, the Greek word is poesis, which is, could also be translated poetry, but it just means production. Making. And the thing is that there’s no pure receptivity, I guess I would say. If you’re doing philosophy, for example, you, and this is really the ancient sort of epistemology, you register, right? What is there? And then you articulate it. There’s no philosophy without articulation. But that always has a productive dimension. You’re using the tools that you have generated, for example, language. You’re selecting which of those tools you’re going to employ. I mean, you could represent reality mathematically or poetically or whatever. And so there’s always this kind of productive element you’re adding to what it is that you’ve taken in. Technology, from the Greek perspective, and I think this applies to the Bible as well, is a kind that is obviously productive because we’re making stuff. We’re transforming nature. We’re building. And the danger there is that it can interpose itself between us and reality. And that ultimately, if we sort of follow the line of technological development far enough, and here I would sort of flag AI, we might create a kind of virtual reality, that is to say a humanly produced reality that substitutes for the world to which this philosophical and I would say biblical anthropology suggests that we are fundamentally meant to be open and to order ourselves by. Yeah, I think that one of the things that I read even in college, also because of postmodernist really, is Plato’s Phaedra, where Socrates talks about writing itself as having that problem, which is something that a lot of modern people would be surprised because we actually like beyond writing. It’s like whatever effects writing had on the civilization, we’re way beyond it. But in some ways, it was exactly that problem, which is that we as humans are living spirits. We are breathing living spirits that manifest meaning, that take in meaning, but there’s a kind of organic dance to that. Whereas as soon as you fix something, then on the one hand, it makes it more powerful because you can send your text out, you can send emails out. But on the other hand, it can in fact interpose itself the way you said. It’s a supplement. It’s an adding to language, and then it can become a kind of opacity to what it is that you’re saying. If we’re talking you and I face to face, and you don’t understand what I’m saying, you can ask me and I can answer, and then we can have this kind of back and forth where we’re tuning in and we’re tuning closer to what we want. But if you read a text, that’s it. That’s what you have. On the one hand, it makes it possible for me to access the thoughts of people that I can’t meet, but it also at the same time creates that difficulty, which is that these fixed words are my vision of what it is that’s coming down to me. It’s a means, let’s say, but it can become something of an idol because if you lose its connection to what it originally is, then it somehow has a life of its own, you could say. It’s interesting because a lot of the post-moders, that’s actually what they want to do. They want to liberate the text from the author in some weird way, make it have a kind of life of its own where there’s no thread that goes back to the person, but rather it becomes almost something that you play with just at its own level. Yeah, I think that’s right. The feature is really interesting when there are these interesting kind of contradictions. So this is a written platonic dialogue. Thank goodness it’s written because we have access to the thinking of Plato. But the little story there is two Egyptians, one is the Pharaoh and one’s a god, right, are talking. One of them is displaying the arts that he’s produced and finally gets to writing. And the objection that the other registers is that this will not be a tool of memory, that is to say, when writing is introduced, the idea is we’re not going to forget stuff because we’ve written it down. Increase memory is the argument of the god. And the god is like, he’s almost like a Hephaestus figure, he’s like a kind of dark god of technology. Yes, right. Egyptian version, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Oh, and I mean, as a side note, it’s interesting that this takes place in Egypt because I would suggest that Egypt with its man god, its Pharaoh, its magicians who exercise some kind of technei, right, in causing little miracle, little, you know, strange, like unnatural events to occur and so forth. It’s enormously impressive technological achievements by which I mean, for example, the pyramids or, I mean, I was in Egypt a number of years ago and I have to say I’ve never seen more exquisite jewelry. I mean, just the, you know, when you take sort of the sarcophagi and all these things. But what’s interesting is, so Egypt devoted tremendous social resources to the production of these kinds of items and obelisks and huge things like this. What were they for primarily? They were to honor and be stuffed in the tombs of dead man gods. Okay. I should say incidentally that Egypt was also a kind of symbol in the ancient world. I mean, Plato associates it with death, with a kind of desiccation, a lack of life. Okay. And I would want to connect that as a long discourse perhaps, but with technology as a kind of substitute. Okay. So anyway, the God points out this will actually be a tool of forgetfulness. And the suggestion is, and what he means by there is, or let me put it another way, it will be, it will suppress recollection in a philosophical sense, which I would take to mean something like a living openness to the fundamental things that need metaphysically, religiously, and so forth to be remembered by us to be taken into our souls. So you’re absolutely right. Writing then serves as a kind of mediation, right? And obviously today, where young people and maybe not even that young people have sort of learned to not to answer the phone, but to use texts and so forth, there are all kinds of further layers of mediation between human beings. So Socrates favored this face-to-face discussion like we’re having now. And I do think that, you know, if we look at, again, artificial intelligence, just consider the levels of mediation that are involved. When I sort of look at my smartphone or something like that, or when I’m relating to, you know, a glowing electronic screen, what’s happening there? Human beings are observing the world. They are representing it in language or mathematics or something. They’re then encoding it into data, zeros and ones, and then that is being presented to us. So there’s a kind of, I mean, we’ve taken writing and kind of amplify, put it on steroids, if you will. So I think this is a really important issue. Definitely. And all the imagery that happens in Phaedrus is related to this. And it’s actually very similar to the one that you find in the Bible, the way that Egypt is represented also in this text, with all of the other symbolisms that are brought about in Phaedrus, it’s similar to the way Egypt is represented in Scripture. Because Phaedrus and Socrates leave the city, they leave their city, and they cross a river. You know, it’s like when you cross a river, you know what that means. Like you’re either going out into the wilderness or you’re coming into your home, you could say. So they cross a river, and then there are all these weird things that Socrates does. Like sometimes he talks, he covers his face and talks through a veil. And there’s all these kind of weird symbolic things that Socrates is doing. And it seems to manifest what I’ve talked about quite a bit in Scripture, which is the garments of skin. I think that the imagery of the garments of skin in Scripture is very much akin to what is happening in this idea of the supplement that Plato is trying to help us see, which is the garments of skin, on the one hand, what they do is that they increase your capacity to live in a world that’s hostile to you. Right. That’s what they do. But at the same time, they are made out of death, first of all. And they’re also a weakening of you at the same time, because you’re always putting yourself in more danger as you’re moving out. And that seems to be what technology does in general. And it has to do with recollection as well. So think about the example I love to use all the time is fire making. So my ancestors could spend a lot of energy, they knew how to make fire, but it would take forever. And they would use a string and a bow or whatever they would use. And even that, they needed the string and the bow, but they could make fire. It’s like, I don’t have to think about that. I just have to flick a lighter and I have fire. So I’m a million times more powerful than my ancestors. But if I don’t have that lighter, I’m going to dive cold in the forest pretty much. And so it’s like, think of technology that way, which is that we’ve increased our power to the extent that we can move out and go into space. And I can live here in Quebec where there’s like eight months of winter. So it makes me more powerful, but it also makes me closer, brings me closer to death and makes me more fragile at the same time. And that seems to be what technology itself does, especially writing and especially what we could call now information technology, which is that I know I have access to more information than all my ancestors together, but I don’t have to hold it inside me in any way. So I can pretend to be smart and be a complete idiot or not a total idiot, but I’m far less integrated than the ancients would have been. But I also have all this access. So it’s that duality of power and weakness or like using death against death maybe is the best way to describe it. Yeah. It strikes me that there’s some sort of optimal relationship between man, nature, and technology. I mean, you know, you’re absolutely right. So Adam and Eve sin, God prepares them clothes out of animal skins. Obviously this then is a fundamental divorce between human beings and these animals with whom they communed in the garden. And also from God, because they use it, when they first put on coverings, it’s to hide themselves from God. Right. So they hide themselves from God and then they buffer themselves from the animal and they create this like buffer between them and between God and the animal. They’re like isolated in the world or alienated is the best word to use maybe. So one of the things that flashed into my mind when you were speaking was Yuval Harari’s book, Sapiens. In the beginning of that book, he makes a rather strong case, I think, that the hunter gathering age of our existence was in some ways maybe the most intellectually stimulating and kind of rich compared to, for example, you know, I’m an accountant and I’m looking at a computer screen all day. Why is that? Because individuals had to possess a range of technical skills. Right. You’ve got to be able to kill animals. You’ve got to be able to skin them. You have to be able to sew these garments. You have to be able to make fire. You’ve got, you know, you have to be able to identify plants to pick things and just sort of respond to the clues of nature. Now, they obviously live much closer to nature. The thing about nature is that it’s hostile. I mean, we know this from the Bible. We know this from the Greeks. It’s not simply hostile, right? It’s also beautiful and splendid and nurturing and so forth. But we have to deal with the hostility element. In fact, I would actually, if you sort of ask me like what’s work, I would categorize work as sorting chaos, right? Just getting sort of figuring things out so you can survive. Yeah, work is a good though in scripture too. It’s weird because it’s like it’s a consequence of the fall, but it ends up being a way to be saved from the fall, both personally in terms of your own soul, but then also just because now you do have to work the earth to make things grow. But right, that’s also how you survive. Yeah. So obviously we’re not hunter-gatherers. We’ve advanced. You know, it’s interesting because people still talk about progress. Yeah. And so what is progress? Well, progress is also regress, right? And now we rely on all sorts of things that we have no idea how they work. I mean, this is something Ortega Igas said writes about in The Revolt of the Masses. It’s something Freud writes about in Civilization and it’s discontent as well. He speaks about technological man as a prosthetic god. We put on all our stuff and you might think of like a, you know, like a mecha in the anime. Or enhanced with an exoskeleton and stuff like this. And technology obviously brings discontents, but what’s interesting then is that we are unable to reproduce the conditions of our own existence. In other words, no single person can do that. A thinker named Rosalind Stokhusi once said that a citizen is a person who if need be can refound civilization. In the modern world, there aren’t any citizens by that definition if you see what I mean. I mean, well, there might be citizens in the sense that there could be people with enough practical wisdom and so forth to sort of refound political life. But if we’re talking about civilization as we now depend on it, and we’re utterly dependent, you’re right. That becomes very difficult. One last thing I would say here is that every technological advance subtracts, and this is obviously implicit in what you were saying, from our own capabilities. I’m going to wave at artificial intelligence again, because just to take one example, now we have this chat GPT. And already students are using it to write their papers, and professors are using it to write their lectures. So it’s like two machines talking to each other. So why do I need, or for example, there are these programs you can speak into it, and then I’ll translate it into Spanish or something like this. But every step that we take in that direction, our human capacities, like reading, writing, and so forth, begin to sort of rust and disuse. Yeah, not only do they rust and disuse, but at some point, there’ll be a kind of cannibal element to the technology. Because, you know, chat GPT, once they re-o to open chat GPT, and it starts to now continue to analyze what’s coming in terms of writing and in terms of, it’ll start to eat its own children. Yeah. And it’ll create a cannibalistic monster that will start to devolve, because it’s going to be basically cycling back its own output. And so it’s like, I don’t see how they’re going to solve that problem in the long term. Because, but even the fact that we know that it’ll do that, is an image of what it’s also doing to us, which is ultimately a kind of diminishing of the human spirit as it increases in power. Yes, look, this is already happening. I mean, weirdly, Jonathan, I took some solace from the fact that chat GPT is cannibalizing itself in a way. So just to be clear, right, what does chat GPT do? Well, it goes out there and it kind of looks at all this data, right, goes to the internet, right. And which is not a particularly intelligent pool on the average. I mean, you just, you know, which is incidentally why chat GPT makes stuff up, because it obviously it sort of can’t sort out what’s true or what’s false. And so it kind of looks at things and makes these, what it thinks are logical connections, but so that if a student- It just calculates semantic distance. Right. I mean, there was a professor told me about a paper he’d gotten on Romeo and Juliet, you know, and it was like, Romeo, you know, the Capulets and the Montagues and so forth. And then Juliet catches a cab and she goes, you know, and so, I mean, because this is, right. So you kind of take this low pool and you scoop it all up and you connect these things and you spit something out. And then that becomes part of the larger pool, which the next chat GPT iteration, you know, looks at. And so it’s sort of like consuming your own waste. Now, what’s- Actually, they cut chat GPT off from, they stopped training it a few years ago. They’ve actually cut it. It’s only within itself, but they can’t do that forever. Like, I know they probably did it because they know the problem that they’re setting up in the world, but at some point they’re going to have to reopen it because they can’t, if they want chat GPT to keep up with what’s happening, they’ll have to reopen it so that it goes back and starts to recalculate. So I think maybe they’re looking for a solution for it, but at least for now, they have cut it off, which is something Bing hadn’t done for a while. And that’s why Bing was like a psycho. Like Bing would just go into psycho mode and just become like your stocking ex-girlfriend or, you know, turned into, you know, like the passive aggressive or whatever. Like they were at all these personality defaults because it was literally training on the internet. So that’s really interesting. But let’s go back to your cannibalization thing. It certainly reminds me of, you know, a pagan god. I mean, I think maybe in an earlier discussion, I observed that the biblical god feeds us, right? Man in the wilderness or Christ, you know, the communion and so forth. But the pagan gods really, one could argue and I won’t do it right now. They sort of dined on human beings. I mean, you know, think of like the Athena and these various gods, you know, at Troy sort of sitting like vultures, they’re compared to vultures and they’re just so hungry to consume the bad, the blood and so forth. Now, what that means is that again, human beings are relating only to themselves, but now through the mediation of this artificial intelligence, which is why, incidentally, I read somewhere that like thousands of writers were suing open AI because it was training its language on proprietary works by these authors, which you’ve got to do because the movement, like if you just keep training on, you know, the internet, you’re going to get, you’re started at a low point and you’re just kind of going to decline. It’s going to be sort of mediocrity. But what that means is it needs to cannibalize sort of living thinking, right? It needs to, like it needs these human beings generating new stuff. And this is a large problem with our society. I mean, even before these kinds of artificial intelligence advances, Hollywood was cannibalizing itself, right? You know, I don’t know, such and such, iteration seven, right? You know, Rambo 19 or something. But think, here, let me throw something out for you and see what you think about this. So one of the, so if you look at the Matrix movie, so you have a situation where the Matrix is this artificial intelligence and it’s feeding off of our energy, right? So basically, we’re batteries. But what they mean by batteries is something like the electricity we produce. There’s something a little naive about that. The way that the AI actually works now is it’s actually farming intelligence from humans. So AI isn’t intelligent, but what it does is that we provide qualia. We provide quality. We provide judgment to the AI. So the way they actually train the AI, right, is that the AI generates a bunch of junk. And then there are actual people who have to look at that junk and say, yes, no, yes, no, good, bad, good, bad. They’ll use like the CAPTCHAs, for example. You know, like when you’re answering a CAPTCHA and you’re telling it where the lights are, you’re training AI when you’re doing that. Because AI doesn’t know the difference between a traffic light and something else. But if you’ve got a million people, you’re a traffic light and something else. But if you’ve got a million people telling the AI, oh, that’s a traffic light, that’s a traffic light, that’s a traffic light, then the humans, you’re literally farming intelligence from humans. And so this weird thing where humans become like, so now you have these low paid farms of people that are living in horrible offices. And all they do all day is tell the AI, even in terms of social media and stuff, what’s good, what’s bad. So that’s all you do, even for the social media companies too. You have people all day, all they do is watch horrible content. And then all they do is raid it and say, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad. So that Facebook can now catch it automatically, right? So you actually have the idea of this monster, this monster that is eating our attention, our intelligence, like subjugating us to it. But really, like, how can I say this, swallowing our soul, like actually swallowing our soul. And it’s like, it’s happening in front of us. That’s quite amazing. And this brings up another thing, which is, how does a child learn what a cat is? Okay. It encounters a cat. And then someone says, that’s a cat. And it takes a couple of iterations of this. All right. Why can’t AI do it? Because human beings have what the ancients called intuition. What’s intuition? Intuition is direct, unmediated access to reality. Now, let me stop. I can imagine the skeptic listening to this saying, oh, wait a second, of course it’s mediated, right? Your brain, optical nerves, this whole thing is extremely complicated. We can start, but let us say, okay, fine. It’s all relative. But on the scale of relativity, this is the most direct unmediated thing. Which is why, frankly, we have a critique of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, because again, writing is this mediation. And what needs to be preserved is this capability of immediate intuition. Aristotle develops this and talks about gnosis, which is an intellectual intuition. Right? Yeah. In the orthodox tradition, the noose and the idea of noetic capacity is the highest form of knowledge. It’s more than knowledge in the sense of the way that we think of thinking or whatever. It is direct grasping. And in the orthodox kind of mystical theology, the noose is the capacity we have to also be united with God. Because it’s the capacity we have to have, first of all, direct grasping of the things around us. But then ultimately, it’s that which also makes us possible to enter into the embrace of God. Because it’s a type of knowledge that isn’t just intellectual. It really is like the fullness of your being, you know, joining with something. Yes. And look, it’s not simply knowledge of God, but knowledge of human beings. I mean, we don’t do this in English, but you know, we’ve got, say in German, someone might say, Kenanze Jonathan Pagel, which means, are you familiar with Jonathan? No one would say, Wissenze Jonathan Pagel, which means, do I have epistemic knowledge? Do I have a scientific comprehension of Jonathan? Now, I would argue that anything that poses as a scientific comprehension of Jonathan is not the best kind of knowledge of Jonathan. So if I say, oh, he’s a good guy, or he’s smart, or something like this, this is a response that is that I have, that has been elicited from me by my immediate face to face presence with you. And human beings have a kind of inner infinity like God. And that’s something that we cognize sort of directly. So, but going back to AI and this cannibalistic stuff, one needs to raise the question of, what do we mean by intelligence? AI has intelligence in a very specific sense. It’s a kind of discursive intelligence. It goes across data, and it arranges it and moves it around. It lacks this intuition. So when we relate to AI generated products, we are relating to something that has lost its connection in some basis, or never had a connection, never had a derivative. It’s derivative information necessary. Which is why, you know, there’s a kind of fundamental stupidity. Your rather harrowing picture of people sitting in a, I imagine, a kind of windowless room, typing in like cat, cat, cat, cat, or whatever, suggests that, you know, like this, it’s like, what does it mean that that is the foundation of artificial intelligence? I had a professor who very cleverly said, I don’t know why everyone’s interested in artificial intelligence. I’m looking for the real thing, right? Real intelligence. That’s hard enough to find in the world already. Yeah, exactly. So there’s a kind of unmooring. And again, if we go back to what I said at the beginning of our discussion, that this kind of biblical and Greek anthropology is the soul is open to reality, both the chaos of reality and the kind of moral and intellectual measures, the, you know, transcendent eternal things. If that’s the case, then relating to AI is a kind of shutting down of that because we don’t even have, like AI simply lacks any fundamental connection or direct connection with reality. Yeah. And I think that this is a good place to talk about how there’s a really a good way to understand AI today is to understand the manner in which idolatry was kind of understood also in scripture, for example. So if you want to take the idea of technification, because you talked about like, what’s the right balance of technology? Like how can technology serve its proper purpose? So you have two images in the Bible. They’re close to each other because, you know, they’re in the same story, which is on the one hand, you have the golden calf, which Aaron builds instead of the revelation. And people end up worshiping the calf itself. You know, it’s in worshiping the work of their hands, you could say. And then the other one is the revelation of the tabernacle, which is a technical thing. Like the tabernacle is like a little city. It is like a microcosm of civilization. It’s a microcosm of technicality. There are the use of metals, of gold, of silver, and of bronze, you know, in a hierarchy. There’s a whole cosmic image in the tabernacle and later in the temple. And that seems to be the highest image of what technology can be, is an ordered supplementarity, but directed towards the transcendence, directed towards the transcendent and not captured within the fascination with itself, you know, and a kind of cannibalistic move where you, the fascination of the technical itself becomes the, or the capacity for power itself becomes the motor which makes us engage with it. Yeah, this is so a bunch of ideas popped into my head as you were just speaking. So the gold that made the golden calf, as you know, was jewelry, earrings, and things like this taken from Egypt. Now it was intended for the adornment of the tabernacle. What’s really interesting there, and this just occurred to me, is that that story could be interpreted as an answer to the question, how do we reorient technology? How do we take it in its really monstrous kind of exemplification in Egypt and reorient it toward, I mean, this is obviously something that probably has occurred to you, but so let’s talk about the golden calf for a minute. So Moses is up there on the mountain communing with God, he doesn’t come back. The Israelites say to Aaron, you know, the guy’s not coming back, make us this God. And there’s this weird ventriloquism that goes on because once Aaron makes the calf, which is definitely a technical thing, right, he has to shape it and all this kind of stuff, the Israelites say, this is the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt. So they plagiarize God. There’s another act of cannibalism, by the way, like in some sense, or I don’t know if that’s exactly right. And what is the calf? Well, there’s a weird connection between the calf and what’s going on today. All right. Why do you say Americans love, you know, digital stuff? Right. Well, I mean, if you ask anybody, you know, what’s the highest traffic on the internet? Porn, right? Technology, by the way, will generate better and better sex robots and things like this. The golden calf was, I mean, after they made the calf, this kind of, well, somehow it stimulated this bacchanalian celebration the next day. So like the calf is connected with the unleashing of these desires, which no doubt were suppressed in Egypt. These people were slaves, but here they are in the desert and they’re like, the master’s gone. We compelled this guy to make the calf. Now we’re going to do our thing, right? Because now we’re going to enjoy all those things that we were never able to enjoy in our enslaved condition. And so we’ve got that. The tabernacle, I think it’s really interesting, because what’s happening there is to try to present in an architectural space, the possibility for the encounter with the infinite, right? So you’ve got this finite construction and this is obviously how icons work and so forth. How do you solve this problem? You know, but it’s a very interesting contrast because there is a proper place for gold and silver and adornments and these technical products. Yeah. So- No, I think your insight is very strong. So you could say, so think about like even in the garments of skin situation, it’s very interesting because God gives Adam and Eve these garments of skin, which by the way, many, at least in the Orthodox tradition, and I’m pretty sure in some rabbinical traditions as well, it’s kind of like it’s basically your biological body. It’s like it’s your biological body of death, right? Not that Adam and Eve didn’t have bodies before the fall, but that their bodies were more subtle, you could say, and that these bodies of death that we’re in, you know, that you eat and that you excrete and all of this and all the desires that come with it, they’re related to the garments of skin. And so there’s a relationship and what it does, it’s an increase in power, right? Body is an increase in power. Just like a guy who is buff and has big muscles has more power. More you have body, more you have power. And so it’s an extension of that logic, which is that if I add more body, I add more power. If I’m strong or if I have a mecca suit on top, like we said, then that mecca suit makes me more powerful. But there’s a connection between that and the animality itself, right? A fall into animality, you could say, which is also an abandonment to our desires and to the more appetite aspect of who we are. And so if you think about it, it all kind of comes together. So we tend to oppose, for example, the world of technology and the world of animality because one is artificial, one is natural. But if you understand it as this idea of increase in body, then the idea of a metallic calf, right? A metallic animal, which is, you know, God told Adam to name the animals and now all of a sudden they take the animal and they put it up as a God. They’re basically doing the opposite of what God told Adam to be, which is to be on top of the animal and name them. And now they become subject to it, subject to the body, subject to these kind of licentious desires. And so all of this stuff kind of goes together. You know, in the book of Revelation, there’s this image of the whore and the beast, right? So there’s a whore sitting on a beast and the beast is civilization. You know, there are different ways to understand that in the text because the beasts are related to the book of Daniel and the perception of the different civilizations, the different animals. And so it’s like these two things go together, right? Technification and increase in power leads to licentiousness and leads to us having more… And you can think about it just like, just very practically, which is that if you, let’s say you have a little fault in your self, right? I don’t know, you look at women or whatever, you have a little thing. Then now I’m going to get… And that’s kind of there. You’re trying to manage it, but you’re struggling. And I’ll give you a million dollars, right? It’s like all of a sudden your increase in power becomes a door for whatever that little thing in you was to increase. And so technology does that on steroids, especially something like information technology, right? Which is intelligent technology. So the relationship between internet and porn or internet and all these things, this isn’t something which is completely unavoidable. You couldn’t have it any way else, or at least not easily. It’s not accidental that these things developed the way they did, just as it’s not accidental that they developed towards porn and the military. It’s like increase in power leads to increase in power, increase in desire, increase in desire to dominate, to consume. All these things are related to what technology is and technology does. Yeah, that’s very interesting. One way to think about these things, or at least one way that I think about them is in terms of the categories of work and leisure. So human beings relate to reality. Work is a kind of sorting of chaos. What’s the point of work? Well, let’s go back to the Greeks. So Aristotle says, he’s critiquing the Spartans, war is for the sake of peace. And in peace, we have business and we have leisure. Business is for the sake of leisure. Now, we need a sort of thick conception of leisure. So I think here are productive conceptions of leisure. For Aristotle, what’s leisure for? He critiques the Greeks. So they sit around, they drink and they tell myths and stuff. Although I think he’s underestimating the importance of myths down at the end of the symbolic riches and so forth. But what’s leisure for from the biblical perspective? Let’s take the Jews. Sabbath. And what is that? That’s an opening, again, to the highest things. This is connected with someone like Joseph Pieper, who incidentally, he has got this wonderful book on leisure, the basis of culture. And he sees leisure as a kind of plugging into the life giving forces of the divine, of nature, and so forth. What’s happened? So why do I mention leisure? Now I’m thinking of AI again. Two things. Work and leisure have become confused. So you were talking about the capture stuff, right? You’re actually working for AI when you’re doing capture. But why are you entering capture? Because you want to get to the good stuff because you want entertainment. Or every time I log into this or I’m like, I’m going to have fun, I’m going to watch this TikTok or something, they’re getting information about you. So you’re actually working. But you’re working for somebody else. You don’t even know it, but you’re enjoying leisure. What happens with leisure? Well, this is a very serious problem. I mentioned Joseph Pieper. He’s writing, he gives his talk on leisure, the basis of culture and another one called The Philosophical Act. It’s 1947, 48 after World War II. Europe is being rebuilt. The emphasis in education is on you’ve got to have useful knowledge, right? It’s all for work. And Pieper is worried about a world of total work where we don’t have exposure to leisure. Another person who worried about leisure is John Maynard Keynes, who wrote an article in the early 30s called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. And Keynes, this is very important, Keynes said, this is the beginning of the depression. And he says, basically, obviously paraphrasing, look, readers, you’re not going to believe this, but here’s the good news. In 100 years, we won’t need to work, okay, because our productive capacities will decrease and so forth. And then we’re going to confront the greatest problem in human history. What do we do with our leisure? And the reason that’s a great problem is we don’t educate people for leisure. Go back to Aristotle, he was critiquing the Spartans. They don’t know how to be a leisure. All they know is how to win wars. So what happens with our leisure? Well, in leisure, you, you know, I have a statement around here somewhere, but the some the World Development Organization says something like AI is going to be awesome. It’s going to liberate all these human capacities. We’re going to be at leisure because it’s going to put all these people, we won’t have to work, right? And, you know, we’re going to develop ourselves, we’re going to paint, we’re going to have, you know, learn languages and all this stuff. Well, much more likely, you know, you’re going to have sex robots. That’s right. Most likely. So there’s this kind of, you know, we, this is why I think, I mean, one reason why this is just profoundly destabilizing, but just to go back to your point, okay, so we, we, we, our bodies are bigger, we have more control. It’s a disordering because the, the point of technology was to do the work part. And now the technology is like, oh, we’re going to give you the leisure stuff. But you haven’t ordered like, you’ve lost the order in some way. Yeah. So that all these, oh, man, that image is like, I think your insight is perfect. It helps me understand even more like the idea of the whore and the beast as these two radicals, right? It’s like this, this kind of this work and this leisure that is, that is licentious, licentious and, and loss in terms of purpose, right? It’s just kind of wasteful. And that there is something about the days of the week and Sabbath that the structure of creation itself, which are the proper relationship of all these things to, to all these things. So it’s like, in some ways you could say the whole purpose of the week is to lead to this moment of rest, like rest in, in God. And so it properly aligns things where it’s like the work is there towards, so you can imagine like a ritual, like a ritual in the, in the tabernacle or, or, or liturgy in church, right? So it’s like we, we’re, we’re doing all these things. So that finally we come to the point where, you know, we receive the blood, the, the blood and, and wine, and we kind of enter into this moment, this transcendent moment. And so it’s like that would, that’s, and then we sit together and we eat and we have, we feast. It’s like, that’s the leisure. Like the leisure is, it’s, it’s rightly ordered, right? So then the leisure, instead of being the lowest thing, which it is in our society, it becomes the highest thing actually, becomes like a kind of, it transcends work in that way, like in, in the right way of thinking about that. Yeah. And I, it’s so important. You said we sit together and we feast. Human beings are social and political animals. We re, we crave, even if we don’t know it, the meaning that comes through, through rich connections with other human beings. Technology today is sort of driving us apart. I mean, again, and leisure today and technology and leisure today is actually fragmenting us. Yeah, that’s right. All these forces of atomization, even simply, you know, so I have a colleague and he said, well, let me tell you, my daughter, she’s like 17. She had her iPhone and it was ringing and it was her best friend. And she said to her dad, what do I do? Like, why does she want to call me? And he says, well, you actually have to answer the phone to figure that out. Right. I’m just telling the story because, you know, now it’s like text, right? So, so, but you’re right, entertainment. I mean, what is entertainment? There used to be these things called movie theaters where kind of cool things would happen sometimes, you know, with audiences and the way people are reacting and just the buzz and all this stuff and workplaces are amputating out, people are going to be put out of work. By the way, many people will think this is some kind of amazing blessing. So you were talking about money. I gave you the million bucks. My son had a teacher when he was in eighth grade who was doing a documentary on what happens to lottery winners. Yeah, they all go sour. They go nuts. And this is actually another problem that we can discuss. That’s a great image of what’s coming. Like, if it’s true that AI is going to make us not work, then look at what happens to lottery winners. Oh, exactly. And it also comes down to sort of fundamental questions, sort of moral questions, because if you poll Americans, 60, 70% don’t like their jobs. Okay. Here’s the thing, though. You go to work, you get a paycheck, you come home, you put food on the table, you can buy your kid a bike, you can, you know, there’s dignity. Your life has some meaning. Now I just took that away from me, right? And I took away from you. So the guy who wins the lottery, the first thing he does, he quits his job and he moves. Great. All of that structure, your friends you used to have, the kind of basic architecture of your life is gone. Yeah. Now what are you going to do? Yeah. So, I mean, these are really, really fundamental problems. Yeah. And it’s interesting. I was, I actually, it’s so funny because we’re talking about this. I just came back from Greece. I went on this trip with Ralston College, and we kind of visited all the ancient sites and we also went to Mount Athos together. And, you know, you look at the life of the monks and they probably have more leisure than any of us, you know. It’s bounded with a lot of work. So they have like a certain amount of hours of work. And then they also have all this, you know, they kind of have this leisurely life, but their leisure is really directed in that direction. Like it’s directed towards, you know, self-transcendence, really like, you know, worshiping God and moving towards that which is the good, the true and the beautiful, you know. And so, yeah. So there’s an image, you know, in the book of Revelation, I talked about the whore and the beast, right? There’s another image in the book of Revelation, which is the heavenly city, right? The heavenly Jerusalem. And the heavenly Jerusalem is also a technical image, just like the tabernacle or the temple. It’s a city now, but it also has that order, you could say, where it’s like everything is directed towards God. And so it says all the nations bring their glory into the city, right? All the kings give up their crowns basically to that which is high. And so it’s like civilization, technology, but directed towards that which is good, basically serving it and therefore making what they have meaningful, right? And so there’s a sense in which, you know, I want to be careful with people. Like I’m not anti-technology myself, and I’m sure you’re not as well, that technology could be amazing. Like, of course, if we were oriented properly, it could be an amazing thing full of glory. But the difficulty we have is that we approach technology like the ancient Israelites approached the golden calf or, you know, like something to, or even how Adam and Eve approached the apple, it’s like something to take. It’s like it’s mine. I’m going to make myself more powerful. I’m going to make myself more. And in doing that already, like you said, the problem is that that very mechanism makes it impossible for us to approach the rest properly because like, it’s like we’re trained to make more money now, right? It’s like our whole education is to become more powerful, make more money, develop technology. Everything is focused on that, but nobody asks what it’s for. Like nobody really is asking the question like, what could this really be for? Yeah, look, of course I agree with you. I mean, I’m not anti-technology. I, whether I were anti-technology or not would be completely irrelevant because it’s here to stay. We have to live with it. It does make many wonderful things possible, this conversation right here, where we’re talking to each other in real time and others can listen to us. I think it’s really wonderful. But here, so maybe one way to put this is in terms of the thought of Henry Adams. So I, within the last year or two, I read the education of Henry Adams and it was quite, it’s really an amazing book. So Henry Adams is born in 1838 and he’s the grandson and great grandson of two American presidents. And so he’s like high up there and they live in Boston and he says, and he has this kind of moral and religious education. And as a boy, he says, Boston had solved the universe, right? Like look at these Unitarian clergymen, the wonderful civic, everything is wonderful. Fast forward to 1900, right? You’ve got like, it mentioned electric lights, telegraphs, telephones, right? Steam engines, railways, finally airplanes. You’ve got Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism. You have radioactive decay of the atomic nuclei had been discovered and so forth. And science is saying, oh, order is an accidental product. It’s not natural and human beings are like vibrating balls of motion and stuff like this. And what Henry Adams says is in this period, what he symbolizes as the Virgin had been eclipsed by what he symbolizes as the dynamo. Okay. And he ran into, they had these big dynamos at like the Chicago World’s Fair and stuff and he saw these things. Amazing. So he has this theory of history, which is human beings, and this is really relates to the ancient anthropology. We sort of are what we pay attention to and direct our energies to. And for millennia, it was Christianity, right? It was biblical religion and it produced, you know, crusades and cathedrals and music and all these wonderful things. Now it’s the dynamo. So the Virgin appeals, works through the heart and the mind through love and appeals to this higher element. The dynamo is something completely different. It promises material salvation in this life, not salvation in the afterlife. And it’s dynamic. It keeps changing. And I guess I would say the problem is that we relate to this moving thing, and then Adams has what’s famously known as the Adams curve, which is he calculates, he’s doing coal production from 1800 on every decade, the power available to human beings technologically doubles. Now, so the rate of acceleration is the same, but the curve at some point becomes super steep. Yeah. And so the problem is we don’t really know how to deal with it because it’s too fast. It kind of explodes our life. Yeah. So I don’t know, it seems like that can’t go on forever. I don’t know, because also just for the, for human capacity to deal with it, because at some point we also go insane because the, also because we don’t, it seems like that curve, there also seems to be a trade off that humans make, which is that, like you said, we are what we care about. And so we also can’t care about this dynamo at the same level as we care about and care about wisdom at the same time. Like it’s either, the hierarchy, as soon as it’s inverted, it’s real. So as this technological stuff improves, our capacity for wisdom, our capacity to discern, becomes less and less because the technological process makes it so, right? A chip that increases the power of a computer doesn’t care where it’s used, right? It doesn’t, it can be used to power video games or it can be used to power a missile or a weapon, it doesn’t matter. Well, and look, you mentioned the computer chip. So doubling every decade, well, since 1970, the capacities and memory storage and stuff like this and speed of processors has doubled every year or two. And now we add artificial intelligence whose curve or progression is literally unmeasurable by human beings because we don’t actually understand how it works. We don’t even know what’s going on. It’s like a black box. Right. So Henry Adams actually says, look, at some point, the human mind might just crack up like a meteor bouncing into the Earth’s atmosphere. Right. Now, when you add in, I’m just going to throw this out, when you add in how technology is used today, social media and all these other things, well, a rapid increase in mental illness, the crackup is already happening. And because you also have cyber bullying and all these other phenomena and so forth, and incidentally, AI is also being used. The Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation are developing increased tools of manipulation and surveillance and propaganda and all these things. So- Yeah, whatever’s happening in public, you know there’s 10 times more things happening outside of our perception, let’s say. So if we add in the ideological component of it too, which is you have your own thinking and you get shot down, so you put your head down, I think it actually encourages the development of two kinds of human beings. And let’s use the image of hitting the atmosphere, the hard, dense aerodynamic soul that’s going to just blow up. And some of my examples, homo sovieticus, you know, the tremendous pressures of communism and these are the commissaries, you know. But much more common today is, hey, I don’t want to crack up on the atmosphere. I am going to be weightless. I’m going to be empty. I’m going to throw over all my convictions. I’m just going to, because wherever the wind is blowing, that’s cool. And so we see these kind of psychological reactions with this incredibly steep curve of technology, with all the pressures that come with it. Yeah. It’s definitely going to be interesting. You know, one of the images, again, sorry to keep coming back to the book of Revelation. Yeah, sure. It’s just because it’s one of the best images. Because one of the images that comes about, there’s two actually. One is, of course, the beast, the beast that speaks, right? The image of the beast that speaks. And that’s what seduces everybody. It’s very fascinating. But the other one is that at some point, the beast kills the whore. Right? In the story. So the idea is that this whore is riding this beast. And it’s like everybody is putting all their seed into the whore. Like everybody’s just like, just chaos and mixture and, you know, whatever, all the possibilities. But at some point, the beast kills the whore. And it’s like, because, like you said, at some point, the control aspect of the technology and the surveillance aspect, all of this stuff is going to ramp up to a point where the very mechanisms that brought about the licentiousness are going to turn into hard steel, right? And you’re just going to control everything. Because as things fray and as things break apart and as people’s mental health breaks apart, there’s no other solution except to create top-down structures that will hold things together. Because obviously, you know, whoever holds the reins of these technologies, there’s no advantage for them for like anarchy to break out and things to kind of become chaotic. And so it seems like the vision of AI as becoming more and more just a use of tyrannical control seems like it is an inevitable. And this is like, you think if you game theory it out, you see that it plays out. There’s almost no way around it, which is because I’ve been talking to a lot of AI developers, I think, because I’m thinking about this. And there are these like cowboy AI developers, right? Some of them that are saying, like kind of Elon Musk attitude where it’s like, well, this is inevitable. It’s going to happen. So let’s make us as powerful as possible. Let’s put the AI in your pocket, right? Let’s make your phone powerful enough that you can have open AI independently in your phone and you are as powerful as any other AI. And it’s like, I get it, but that’s not going to work. So either the powers that be that hold the reins of our societies are going to use AI to control us, or either we’re going to be cowboy AI people and it means that the terrorist is going to have it in his pocket too. And it means that the punk rocker is going to have in his pocket too, which means that the reaction will be the same. There’s no other way. There’s just no other way that it can play out. It has to transform into surveillance and control. I don’t see it. If you have another way to see it playing out, I don’t see it. It doesn’t seem possible. No, I don’t. I mean, I hate to say it, but I think you’re absolutely right. And there are so many forces that exacerbate this. There’s this kind of feedback loop because the less we, or the more atomized we become, the less we even remember what it’s like to be in a kind of local community. The more we look at others through this lens of abstraction. It’s like Plato’s cave image. He’s got this image of people sitting around prisoners in the cave looking at shadows. The difference between my being able to turn my neck, which apparently you can’t do in the cave image, and look at the other prisoner versus getting all my information about the guy who’s sitting next to me from the shadow on the wall. We’re not doing that face-to-face stuff. This is a wonderful moment. Somebody comes down and un-chains the prisoner and makes him stand up and turn around. It’s like the first contact with a human being. What’s going on? We have to somehow be able to do that, but I don’t see how that’s going to work. Top-down solutions. Well, actually, even, let me go back. I said top-down solutions. The word solution, I almost want to excise it from the political vocabulary because politics is a living ongoing thing. It’s a constant renegotiation. It’s a constant putting new and fresh energy into the system. You got to paint your house. You got to take care of things. Yeah. It’s a living organism, really. It has a kind of opponent processing aspect to it where it’s like you push it a little harder this way, this way, like… Right. So who talks about solutions? Well, it’s a technical notion. It’s almost like a mathematical thing. I kind of repeat this phrase. It seems to me that all political solutions, like real solutions, are final solutions. That is to say, it’s death in some way. Incidentally, Jonathan, I’ve been thinking about the 34th canto of the Inferno, which actually begins with the line, it’s quoted in Latin, the royal, the banners of the king of hell advance. So it kind of identifies Satan as the king. And we have this image of Satan and remember that he’s like stuck in the ice. It’s all frozen. None of the condemned can speak to Dante. They’re frozen in these things. Then you have Satan and one of the translators has calculated that he’s sticking up a thousand feet from the ice, like Tower of Babel or something like this. And in his mouth are Judas and Cassius and Brutus. And as the same translator, John Sinclair mentions, these are the guys who served Satan best. They’re the guys who serve, but the revolution eats its own in a way. I mean, this rebellious angel falls down and crashes into the earth. And so, I don’t know, it’s a very rich image. But it’s rich in relation to what we’re saying, which is that the image of Aaron making the golden calf, there is a relationship between that and the basic Promethean image of revolution. And you see that the idea of taking that, we think that we’re used to actually think of the Promethean story as something positive. It’s like Prometheus goes up there, those horrible gods, he takes the fire, takes the technology, takes civilization, brings it down to the humans. And then interestingly enough, Prometheus’ punishment is that his liver is eaten every day. My understanding is that for the ancients, the liver was an image of emotion or desire, the desiring part of the human. And so, it’s actually an image of this whore and this beast. Again, it’s like he brings technology to the service of man and then falls into a cycle of desire. His own desire being eaten and returning and being eaten and returning, the hunger of insatiability, you could say, it’s a weird image of that. And so, there is a relationship between, so once again, it’s not that the fire is evil, right? Even in the story, the fire is at first given by Zeus, if I remember, and then taken away because people aren’t offering proper sacrifice, then the fire is kind of taken away. And then Prometheus takes the fire. And so, think about that. That’s what the story of Cain is. The story of Cain is so similar. It’s like because of an improper sacrifice, Cain has to steal, that’s a make civilization. He’s alienated from God, then he creates the first city out of this like, I’m going to do this for myself to protect myself from others, to protect myself. And then in the story of the Bible, what happens is that God saves that. You could say it’s like God redeems that through stories. He takes what Cain develops and then transforms it into the tabernacle, transforms it into the temple basically. But this idea of and the frozenness is perfect for that, right? Because that’s what technology is. It’s a fixing, right? It’s like, let’s fix these walls around our city. Let’s make these limits. Let’s make these artificial limits around things. And so, your intuition is absolutely right that there’s a relationship between all of these things. Yeah, and actually, it’s a small detail, but in Dante, he compares Lucifer or Satan to, so he’s got these bat wings basically, which are blowing and the wings are freezing the ice and all this water. So, it’s like frozen chaos. He compares them to the wings to sails on a windmill, okay? And then when he talks about Lucifer’s teeth eating these guys, because he’s constantly eating them, which is also, by the way, an image of insatiability. He compares it to what he called, what’s a hackle, which is some kind of agricultural tool, okay? So, this is kind of a mechanistic thing. Prometheus, it’s actually very interesting. Zeus finally gets back at the human beings by creating Pandora, okay? And Pandora, it’s very interesting. So, this is where we get a mixture of erotic desire with technology. Why? Because what happens is Athena makes this beautiful garment for her, okay? It’s this lovely thing. And Hephaestus gives her a crown, an intricately worked, and of course, Hephaestus is the craftsman god, intricately worked crown on which all the animals are represented. So, it’s like a whole cosmos on that. A little microcosm, yeah. Right. And so, here’s man looking at Pandora, who’s going to be a source of ill and trouble. And what’s the attitude? The attitude is beautiful, attractive woman, sexually attractive, and check out her crown. The ability to create your own cosmos. There’s a technological desire there too, right? Hephaestus is interesting, by the way, because well, in the Iliad, there’s a scene where Achilles’ mother goes to him to make armor for Achilles, and he makes this incredible shield. But Hephaestus has these robots, the first robots in history, the little maidens, lifelike maidens running around helping him and stuff. So, he’s already associated fundamentally with the kind of technology we’re developing today, but he is the most humane and decent of the gods. He has been thrown out of heaven, he’s crippled, he’s all this kind of stuff. But when Thetis, who’s Achilles’ mother, shows up, he’s so welcoming to her because she saved him when he was thrown out of heaven by her mother, or maybe her father, because they both attacked him. I think it was her mother, his mother. And she and another nymph or something saved him, and nurtured him, and he made beautiful jewelry for them and so forth. So, there’s a suggestion there of what it would look like to maintain one’s, I know he’s a god, right, but like maintain his humanity and use technology. Yeah, and I think it’s really important for people to always understand when we talk about these stories, to be careful of absolute moral judgment, because all of these stories all have a flip side to them. You always have to be able to see both sides at the same time, which is exactly what you said. For example, medicine is a good example, which is that medicine is technology, it really is. But there’s a sense in which medicine can be the type of technology, which is the proper supplement, the type of supplementarity and technicity which is there to help humans. And I think that the idea that you could represent Hephaestus as this incestuous freak that gets thrown out, and now because of that he’s the one who makes all the toys, he’s kind of like the guy in his basement, the tech freak in his basement because he can’t fit into society. That’s a proper image of him for sure, but there’s a sense of what it would look like if you make a crutch for someone, you make it because you want to help them. And so there’s a powerful image. We have to always remember that Jesus was a tecton. Jesus was the son of a tecton. Jesus was the son of a technical person, and it’s not a carpenter per se, it really is a craftsman. And so I think that’s a good example of what it’s like to be a tech freak. So when I was on vacation this summer I read Paradise Lost, which I hadn’t read before, and it’s quite amazing. In the very first book of Paradise Lost, we’re looking at Satan, he’s down in hell, and Milton says something like, you know, you guys, you human beings, you take pride in things like Babel, he actually mentions Babel, and you know, he’s like, you know, he’s like, you human beings, you take pride in things like Babel, he actually mentions Babel, and you know, mining and all this construction, he says, you should see what they built in hell. Like that is, you know, there’s no comparison between the technological capability of these fallen angels and spirits and human beings, and it’s really quite remarkable, right? Like they excel at that in this hell where there’s heat but no light, you know, it’s like this. So that’s a really interesting warning, and yeah, I mean, look, what has to happen today is that the dynamo has got to be informed, like we have to relate to the Virgin as well as the dynamo, just to put it very broadly, and I’m not making a religious statement here, I’m just saying there’s got to be transcendence in some way, and only then can we control it, and the reason I want to say that is you mentioned medicine. Well, you know, if you come in and you’ve got blood poisoning or something, and I can give you antibiotics or whatever it is, right, and I fix you, great, but now medicine is being used for, you know, anything, sex change, augmentation, whatever, it’s because we’ve got the dynamo, but we don’t have the Virgin, so to speak, that is, we don’t have, we’re not guided by some kind of moral or spiritual measures that we could attune ourselves to. Yeah, no, I think that’s the right, I think that’s the right, I mean, we saw during the time, during COVID as well, we saw medicine become a political tool and, you know, become a strange tool for control, and so all of these supplements always have this duality to it, and you’re right, that in some ways, I mean, the only thing we can do, and this is, you know, because it’s like we’re just painting this monstrous portrait of where we are in the future, but I think that the thing we can do, which is actually the way to anchor the dynamo, is to, you know, is to go to church, is to go to participate with your family, is to re-engage at the human scale, because that will reverberate, it’s the only thing that can really reverberate, you know, it’s like, become a better person, become a loving father, become a friend, like, I know it sounds, it almost sounds kitschy to say that, but I don’t see what else is possible. No, look, what you’re saying is we have to engage in the practices, and, you know, like, set the thinking aside, engage in the practices, and the practice is a source of understanding, and that’s what we’ve gotten away from it, but here’s the thing, we have to be very deliberate about it. Yeah, that’s right. We have to say, look, you know. In some ways, that which was the most natural for humans, you know, a thousand years ago, is now has to be the most deliberate behavior that we can muster. That’s exactly right, and that means that with regard to all of our institutions, say schools, they should be in person, they should be in a classroom, they should be with a living, breathing human being, they should be, you know, and as great as Zoom is. The difficulty is that, you know, you and I came of age before the smartphone and all this stuff, so we actually have this anchor that we can remember, you know, what happens when that’s not there, right? Then we actually, and I’m just thinking of the future here, because, you know, you painted this unfortunately rather plausible scenario about totalitarianism and so forth, so how do we prevent that, right? Well, we have to educate for the future and we have to, but so it’s, look, I mean, we each have to do what we can do, you know? I mean, I know it’s a sort of cliche, but it’s not for us to finish the work. We all have to do what we can and set an example for others and devote ourselves to trying to resist. I mean, I, you know, I don’t know, I mean, you can also run away and try to get off the grid and so forth, and I think that’s fine. Well, some will do that, and I think we also have also our place, you know? You could say, I think that there are people that are going to break off and form communities off the grid and are going to create little, you know, Rod Dreher-inspired communities. That’s for sure, I think that is almost inevitable and it probably should happen, but I think some people still have to stay in the fray and continue to, you know, and it’s hard to know who should do what. It’s in some ways that’s between, you know, that’s our own, each of our own story, but of course, we also need to have, at least I feel like I still need to have one foot in the matrix, and I often ask myself the question, when does it go too far? Like, when should you just step out? I’m not sure I have that answer yet. At least for now, I feel like it’s important to stay connected to the machine to some extent. Absolutely. I would be very unhappy if you or people like you decided, you know, I’m not going to do the symbolic world, I’m not going to do anything, I’m not going to lecture, I’m going to go to Alaska and, you know, make my own, you know, yurt or something like that. And that, God bless you, right, but that would be a withdrawal of your best energies and intelligence from the public space. And what we need to do is enter back into the public space as living, thoughtful, creative, active individuals and give what we can. Yeah. So, Jacob, thanks for this wonderful conversations and thanks for your time and also all the work that you’re doing to, yeah, to build some, to sow the seed, you know, to kind of gather together the right minds towards the future. Thanks for your work as well on that front. Thank you very much, Jonathan. It’s been a pleasure.