Silicon Valley's Scary New Cult Religion: TESCREAL, with Rev. Otis Moss III and Dr. Emile Torres

Any philosophy or ideology that causes you to cast aside your relationship with other people is problematic. I don't care who says it, where it comes from. If you cast aside someone else's dignity, you are headed down a road of destruction.

Prominent billionaires in Silicon Valley are preaching a strange new theology. Beneath their growing power in Washington lies a set of dangerous quasi-religious beliefs rooted in white supremacy, male supremacy, tech supremacy, and wealth supremacy all rolled into one. They believe they can transcend humanity with technology, make the earth obsolete and create eternal life in the stars. They see themselves as our saviors, claiming that only they can protect us from apocalypse and extinction. Their dark gospel has a name, Tescril. That stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and long-termism. Yes, it's a mouthful, but each piece fits into a larger dangerous picture. Like traditional faiths, Tesril offers a cosmic story and salvation through technology. It has prophecies, sacred texts, and apocalyptic warnings—not of hell, but of AI doom. But it replaces the soul with algorithms, heavens with space expansion. And in place of Jesus, it offers billionaire messiahs like Elon Musk.

Today on the Nerd Reich, we're pulling back the curtain on this twisted belief system with two brilliant guests: Dr. Emil Torres, a scholar at Case Western Reserve University; and Timnet Gabru. Together, they first identified Tesriel as the bundle of bizarre ideologies now shaping Silicon Valley. They are the authors of *Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation*. And our special guest, Reverend Dr. Otis Moss III, senior pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. He's a preacher, poet, activist, author, and filmmaker, one of the foremost voices on religion in America today. His latest book is *Dancing in the Darkness: Spiritual Lessons for Thriving in Turbulent Times*. Amen to that. Here's our [Music] conversation.

Emil, you were one of the first to put these together, these ideas and these elements that Silicon Valley is making into the building blocks of a new religion. And Reverend Dr. Moss, you're one of the foremost speakers on religion in America today, and you've been raising the alarm on connected figures like Curtis Jarvin and the designs of these tech billionaires on our government and our democracy. So today together we're going to explore Tescril as it relates to some of these larger themes: theology, ethics, supremacy, and the ideas of a parallel billionaire religion. We could talk about any of these things for over an hour. So for this first part here, we're going to go through the elements of Tescril, and Emil, I'm going to have you give us a quick hit as one of the people who came up with the idea of bundling these, and we're going to get Reverend Moss's reaction from a theological perspective. So we're just going to kind of wing it quickly so that we bring our listeners up to speed on what this is. So let's start with T—transhumanism. This is the fantasy that Silicon Valley can hack death. Transhumanists want to upgrade the human body like an iPhone, live forever, upload their brains, maybe even become gods, digital gods. But you know, who gets access to this digital immortality? So, Emil, tell us a bit about transhumanism from your perspective. What is it in a nutshell for people?

So, transhumanism I would describe as the backbone of the Tescril bundle. Some of the other ideologies are just versions of transhumanism. Others are not versions of transhumanism but nonetheless emerge directly out of the modern transhumanist movement which dates back to the late 1980s, early 1990s with the so-called Extropians—that's the E in Tescril. And so the key idea is, as you said I think very well, it's about re-engineering the human organism, transcending our so-called biological limitations. So maybe we could radically augment our cognitive system so we can remember the entire Library of Congress—it's something that they've literally talked about. We can maybe become immortal. There are transhumanists like Peter Thiel and Brian Johnson who've talked about blood transfusions with young people, for example. And Brian Johnson has had transfusions with his own son, dating back to I think when his son was around 15. Um, and maybe we could even augment our sensorium. So we could add new sensory modalities. So instead of just, you know, sight, hearing, and so on, we could navigate the world through something like echolocation which bats have, or something like magnetoreception which carrier pigeons—which don't exist anymore—have. Yeah. So transhumanism is just this idea that by doing this we could create a kind of utopian world in which we live forever, there's no suffering, there's radical abundance, and everything is awesome forever. That's the key idea of transhumanism.

So the sort of transsubstantiation from human to machine, and when I think about these guys who take young people's blood, or Brian Johnson, you know, you have the blood of the son—this is also something we see in religion, Reverend Moss—and there seems to be a sort of a twisting. What do you make from a theological perspective of this desire to transcend humanity and to turn human beings into something else?

It's interesting because it's a rejection of this idea of the imago Dei, the idea of the image of God each person has as inherent dignity. Um, but yet in with this idea of transhumanism is that we are able to essentially no longer see the sacredness of the body and the sacredness of all human beings. Only those who are within this technofudal lord system have access. It is, as you mentioned in the intro, it has this major element of this classism, this feudalism that functions out of it, and only a certain number of people—enlightened people. So it's a new form of colonialism in many ways that it's shaped in that idea and completely rejects the idea of each and every person having dignity and being made in the image of God, and as a result of that we must approach each individual with that level of dignity. So, so what happens when I don't have the necessary money to quote unquote be transhumanist? Uh, then I'm placed in a particular caste, another caste system. And so we're talking about again reworking the same old ideas under a new marketing campaign.

Let's go to the E in Tescril—extropianism. And I'll admit this is the one I kind of have trouble understanding, in part because it's so much like some of the other ones. It sort of encompasses the other ideas. And it's an old-school technoutopian ideology from the '90s that believes there are no limits—not death, not entropy, not ethics. This idea that the goal is to beat entropy, to beat death, to beat decay. You explain this a little better, Emil.

Yeah. I mean, extropianism was the first organized modern transhumanist movement. In fact, the founder of extropianism, his name is Max More, although he was born Max Okonor. So, he changed his name to better reflect his Extropian values. He claims to be the founder of modern transhumanism. So, extropianism was the platform that catapulted transhumanism into greater realms of influence, if you will. And so it, yeah, was this very libertarian version that advocated for the acceleration of technological development because the sooner that we develop these advanced technologies—so nanotechnology, synthetic biology, genetic engineering, AI especially—then the sooner we get utopia, right? The sooner we can transcend ourselves. And maybe the last thing to mention is that extropianism has deep ties with cryonics. The cryonics movement predated modern transhumanism by a few decades. And Max More has been the CEO and president of one of the major cryonics companies out there named Alcor, and cryonics is all about this idea of resurrection. So you know, these transhumanists, these Extropians are a bunch of atheists who say, well, you know what, we've lost by becoming atheists and, you know, and apostatizing our faith is we've lost all the promises of, you know, the eschatological hope of a better future, paradise someday. We've lost this possibility of resurrection and then living forever. So cryonics is supposed to be an answer, a sort of secular answer to that.

Yeah. Eternity brought to you by the freezer.

Yes. Reverend Moss, any reaction to extropianism here?

Absolutely, because I feel like I'm hearing a combination of *Get Out* and *Logan's Run*. Uh, it's absolutely terrifying on several levels. So, again, what's interesting is the Silicon Valley community is repackaging old ideas. So if we take the Berlin Conference, which carved up Africa for a form of colonialism, the ideas that we are hearing in this idea of transhumanism and all these other pieces here also found their way to the table in reference to the Berlin Conference. We can extend our lives by carving up Africa and utilizing these particular resources and these rare earth minerals that can expand a very small population of the world, and we can quote unquote resurrect many of the dying quote unquote countries that don't have the necessary resources. Again, it was a repackaging. Again, when there was what was the trade between the eastern portion of the world, whether it was India, Japan, and China, and with portions of Europe, the idea that we can expand, that we can extend, that we can resurrect or what—what we were—so it's just fascinating to hear these words, and historically we also see reflections and the repackaging of these ideas that ended up hurting, harming, and tragically killing a large portion of humanity in the process. But the people were quote unquote enlightened.

Faith in the freezer. Now it heats up though with singarianism—the cult of the singularity. This belief that once AI gets smarter than us, everything will change, and this will be the rapture minus the angels, and except instead of God, it's going to be a neural net that's smarter and bigger than all of us, and we're going to merge with it, and instead of heaven, you know, it's going to be a server farm in Utah or Greenland or wherever. Did I get that right, Emil? Tell us about the singularity and the cult around it and what it really means.

Yeah. So, yes, you're right. You know, the singularity, sometimes called the technapture or the rapture of the nerds, it is supposed to be this hypothetical future event which may occur—many influential figures in Silicon Valley would argue that it's going to occur in the very near future—so definitely within our lifetimes, maybe within the next few years—and it's a, it would constitute a fundamental rupture in human history, and even more, it would be an event of cosmic significance, right? So the idea is that the pace of technological change would rapidly increase exponentially to the point where the world would be just a dizzying fantasmagoria for us mere human minds. Like things would just happen so quickly we could not make sense of it. So imagine like the amount of change that's happened in the past 100 years happening every single minute, right? So that's on the other side of the singularity. And a key part of the singularity is this idea that once we develop AIs that are sufficiently quote unquote intelligent, then they can take over the process of designing the next generation of even more intelligent AIs. So you get this positive feedback loop whereby like as soon as you cross this critical threshold, then very quickly after that you get superintelligence. The way it ties into transhumanism is that these people see everything as an engineering problem, you and Gil have mentioned like this lack of appreciation for the dignity or the sacredness of the human. I mean, the human is just a machine that is hackable and should be hacked. This is the idea of biohacking, you know, hacked and re-engineered and modified in various ways to improve it, right? So once you have superintelligence, you have a super engineer. They literally use the term paradise engineering. So once you have a superintelligence, you have a super engineer who can then engineer paradise immediately after that. So that's singularitarianism briefly put.

So they're going directly at it. And you know, I want to get the reverend's response to singularitarianism, but I will say Brian Johnson, this guy who claims he's going to live forever, has also said we are creating God in the form of superintelligence. And it does seem that a lot of this is a rejection of humanity, of religion itself, but almost like a mockery and a distorted version of it. With AI, you really see them going all out to thinking they're going to create God. Reverend, what's your reaction to this idea?

It's interesting. This leans into the all of the ideas of this idea of rejecting, rejecting, you know, faith and rejecting basically something bigger than your than yourself and that we have the ability to do that. So, so all religions in many ways have this particular idea of hubris, you know, this idea of human hubris. What happens with human hubris? There's a wonderful writer by the name of Ruha Benjamin from Princeton, and she wrote *Race After Technology*. I think it's *Race After Technology*. And she talks about that if the basis of the algorithm is caste-based, racist, sexist, whatever it may be, that will always be a part of the development of AI, and AI will not recognize it because its creators do not recognize it, and it will continue to have that ghost in the machine over and over and over again. And we're seeing this now. I give you an example that she gave—is a fascinating example of soap dispensers. These soap dispensers were created to dispense soap. You put your hand under them, and it dispenses soap. The problem was is the people who created the soap dispensers did not make soap dispensers so it would dispense soap to people who had darker hands. And so you don't get soap if you're brown or black, but you get soap if you're white. And she used that as an example of what happens with the algorithm. So now multiply that algorithm. That algorithm continues to multiply, and it's the ghost in the machine. So you're really talking about St. Augustine's original sin. This idea that inherent in AI, because of the flaws of humanity, those flaws are not necessarily dissipated, but they still operate in the machine. So then what happens in the process becomes the question.

May I mention real fast that you know, Ruha Benjamin, who's at Princeton, an amazing scholar—meeting her and reading her book was a major reason that I left this community because I was very much involved in transhumanism, long-termism, and so on. I was blown away by—I mean, she made me realize that there's a whole different perspective. There's a whole universe of thinking about what the future ought to look like that is, is absolutely, as you're saying, consistent with what you're saying, is completely excluded from the utopian visions of the—I mean, you have to ask the question, who exactly is this utopia for? I don't think it's for most of humanity. I think I think it's really it's designed almost entirely by super-wealthy white men, and I think it's pretty much for just those people, and I think the rest of humanity gets, you know, booted out.

And that brings us to the C in Tescril—cosmism—the idea that humanity's ultimate destiny is to spread throughout the universe like a divine mission, and Earth is just a launchpad, and the climate crisis or the problems of this world are part of the past because they've got Mars on the vision board. It's like Manifest Destiny 2.0 with rockets instead of wagons. Did I get that right, Emil?

Absolutely. You know, during the inauguration address that Trump recently gave with billionaires behind him, including Elon Musk, he used the term Manifest Destiny, this imperative to go out and colonize space, and Musk stood up, you know, leapt out of his chair, gave literally gave the two thumbs up. So, yeah, I think that's right. In cosmism, you know, this idea really goes back to the latter 19th century with a bunch of Russian theorists, but in its modern form, it was sort of reintroduced by a guy named Ben Goertzel, who is the reason that we talk about artificial general intelligence. So, he popularized that term, and he's, you know, he so he is this modern cosmist who basically says, why stop at just re-engineering humanity? Why not re-engineer the universe as the universe itself? Let's think bigger than that. So maybe we can develop—he literally uses the term scientific future magic, you know. So we develop these advanced technologies we can't even possibly comprehend right now. And then we go out and we just, you know, redesign galaxies. We intervene upon the fabric of spacetime to change the universe in some profound way to fit our utopian desires. Yeah. This, this is cosmism, a version of transhumanism, but it's sort of transhumanism plus.

So this is like white flight at the speed of AI here. They got to leave the planet.

Now, Reverend Moss, your thoughts on going into the cosmos and getting away from the one place in the universe that we know God created for us, destroy the earth, and then say, "We're going to go somewhere else and destroy it, too."

This is the three-body problem that you're explaining here from the book in terms of let's remake the universe. And it's always problematic in reference to that, the level of hubris. Every person who says I want to create something better for a group of people I don't even have conversation with, for an entire world, for an entire population, it always ends very badly. Our track record on Earth—will it be better on Mars? We've yet to care for the creation that we have been given; we've yet to recognize the dignity of people who are our neighbors. And now we are taken upon our shoulders to say that we are somehow so enlightened that we can re-engineer the beauty and the mystery of the cosmos essentially for a utilitarian purpose, just so that it'll function for me in a particular way. It's just, it's a very, very capitalist-centered idea. I just want to do this for myself. The other question becomes the the the the true motive. Um, there's a philosophical motive, but is there also a profit motive? Tech billionaires who've made their money in reference to profit. So then what happens when predatory self-interest, to borrow from Niebuhr, becomes central in the functioning of the philosophy? It then moves down a completely different path.

You know, it brings to mind I think it was Ray Bradbury who wrote a short story called "The Other Foot," and it's about a society where white people send all the black people to Mars to build their own colony and live there. But then the white people destroy Earth and want to come to Mars, and there's a at the end the rocket lands and a decision has to be made whether to let the white people on Mars, and now they've reversed it. The white people are trying to go to Mars and leave all of us here on Earth, which I think—we—story that's like—that's that's a really good one. That's a great reference from the 50s or the 60s. I'll have to look it up and make sure I got that right. It's always stayed in my mind. And uh, you know, I think we'll do better here on the Earth than up on the poisoned dirt of cold, dark, dead Mars. Not to mention that if there are any life on Mars, they're probably just waiting for these dummies.

Dumb is here. It's called gentrification. You know, it's just I want what you have. Let's move you out of the way because we're more enlightened and we actually know what to do with this piece of property here. And I think every indigenous person would have a powerful essay to be able to communicate what happens when people who have predatory self-interest want to move into a particular territory. There's usually a trail of tears that flows behind it.

Now, this next one, the rationalist, I think it's kind of like extropianism. It's a root philosophy here. I won't even try to explain rationalism, Emil, because it seems so irrational to me. Uh, but what do I know? So in a nutshell, what is rationalism? We're almost here to the end of the list. Then we get into the questions.

So rationalism was founded by a guy named Eliezer Yudkowsky. He, like many people in the Tescril movement, has extensive connections with many of the other letters. So he was, he's a transhumanist. He who was very involved in the Extropian movement in the 1990s. He was a leading Singularitarian along with Ray Kurzweil. He actually hired as one of his employees Ben Goertzel, the modern cosmist. Um, and so he founded rationalism based on the idea which like could be put as follows: If we're going to create paradise, right, if we're going to engineer paradise through advanced technologies, we're going to need a lot of really super smart people doing really super smart things, right? So let's take a step back and try to figure out the best ways to optimize our rationality. And so part of this is like is understanding the nature of rationality. So there's a whole field called decision theory which is sort of dedicated to this as well as focusing on cognitive biases, and I'll give one brief example if I may of just how bizarre and narrow...

Their conception of rationality is. Yudkowsky writes, "If you're in a forced choice situation, you have to choose between one of these two scenarios. And in one scenario, somebody is mercilessly tortured for 50 years. In the other scenario, there is some unfathomable number, so enormous a number of people who suffer the almost imperceptible discomfort of having a speck of dust in their eye just for a moment, right? Well, if you do the math, if you're really rational and you just focus on crunch numbers, literally what Yudkowsky says is, 'Shut up and multiply,' then you'll find that that second scenario with the dust specks is much worse. And so, you should choose the first scenario where somebody gets tortured."

Talking about rationality sounds good, and I'm like, "For that," but their version of rationality is just completely bizarre and leads to these what I would consider to be like an obviously absurd conclusion. Reverend Moss, anything to say on that? The dust or the torture?

Let me put it this way. What happens to human beings? What happens to humanity when the moral compass is removed, and the questions of compassion and empathy, the questions of dignity and respect and reciprocity are removed from the equation or don't appear in the algorithm? It's a problem. And I think these are the philosophical questions that, when you are a tech billionaire where the world caters to you because of what you have, there are major blind spots that you have because you are not in community and nor have you been around suffering and know the power of alleviating suffering and also the power of suffering yourself in order for someone's suffering to be alleviated. And that builds a sense of deep empathy and compassion for someone else. And that's part of the problem with our politics at this moment. If you never cared for someone who is dying or has Alzheimer's or is trying to just keep the lights on, there is just a—there's a different level of understanding the depth of their struggle. Um, when you are completely disconnected from it and you look at it as either a speck or just someone being tortured and uh you have this very distant idea and concept. It is a very mathematical approach to ethics. People are just numbers. Suffering and happiness can be quantified. Right? They literally have a term called "utils," like a unit of utility. You know, you can add and subtract and so on. This idea of this kind of personalist notion of compassion just really isn't part of the equation.

And really, to tie rationalism back to something else you were saying before, you know, there are historians who have argued that this idea of rationality is not only flawed in many ways, but has been dangerous in the past. Right? There are certain groups of people who are more rational than other groups of people, and that justifies things like colonialism, right? And racism and so on. In fact, a lot of the people in these communities, like they're pretty racist. You know, they're all into eugenics, and you know, their whole project is deeply colonial. As far as I can tell, it's just it's capitalism and colonialism. Part of Mark Andreessen's turn to the far right, public turn I should say, came after he got roasted on Twitter after saying that India was stupid to reject colonialism, that colonialism was good. There is that idea that only one kind of civilization is the eminent version, and that of course is what they would consider the rational version, and you know, it's just again a new skin on very old ideas.

A quick note from the Nerd Reich producers: In response to a tweet from Emil talking about the issues related to Tesreel, Mark Andreessen then changed his bio to call himself a Tesreelist. Whatever you're thinking about him, you're exactly right.

There's a wonderful book that Colson Whitehead wrote called *The Intuitionist*, which is about—it sounds crazy, but it's it's actually a very good book, his first book uh when he wrote it years ago. It's about elevator repair men and women. There's one group of rationalists and there's one group of intuitionists. The intuitionists come into the elevator and through their intuition and their traditions, they they know how to fix things in ways that other people don't. Then there are the rationalists. They know how to fix stuff. But people want the intuitionists because there's just certain elements that they can do that other people can't. And it's it's the whole idea of what happens in a society that is trying to say one or the other. Uh, and there's no dialogue between the two. And uh the novel popped in my head.

Next up is effective altruism: the idea that greed is good; that you had to be greedy to do good; that people should focus on making as much money as possible in order to then do good things in the world. I think Aristotle explained why this wasn't possible. Did I get that right in a nutshell? Is that is that EA? I mean, this is really the sibling of rationalism. So, basically, rationalists are all about optimizing our rationality. EAs are all about optimizing our morality. And just as a side note, I I think this this idea of optimization is in ways like problematic and misguided. Like, morality is something to be optimized. I mean, basically Yudkowsky in that thought experiment, I mean, he was sort of applying EA principles to an ethical problem. The pitch that they usually give is that it's about using science and reason to figure out the best ways to do the most good. And a lot of these ideologies from a distance at first glance look pretty good, right? Like, okay, yeah, I sure, of course, I want to to be the best altruist I can be in the world to do as much good as possible. When you look at the details, that's when things start to to fall apart.

Here's a brief example of EA. They came up with this idea of "earn to give." And the idea is that like on the one hand, you could maybe go work for a nonprofit focused on on like ending factory farming. You might, you know, have a modest impact in this nonprofit, or you can go work for what William MacAskill calls "immoral organizations," like a pro-chemical company or some company on Wall Street. Make a ton of money, donate that money to the nonprofit, and then they could hire 20 people, right? So that that is actually a good way to increase your impact, to find to pursue the most lucrative job possible. And the great success story of "earn to give" was Sam Bankman-Fried, right? He worked on Wall Street after he met Will MacAskill who encouraged him to go earn to give, and then he of course went into crypto, and many listeners know exactly how that ended. He's in federal prison right now. That's the idea of of "earn to give." And and part of the the problem with this, which I again echoes ideas that we were discussing earlier, is that there's no room in in this picture for moral integrity. Like you you just have to give up your moral integrity and go work for some terrible company on Wall Street that's doing awful things in the world and contributing to a a capitalist machinery that is responsible for a lot of the global poverty in the world that then some EAs are saying, "Oh, yeah, we're going to try to to alleviate." It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. I think I heard that said somewhere.

Reverend, your quick take on this effective altruism idea that instead of doing good and being human, you should just get rich and have more power to do more good. So, we should just be, you know, Michael Douglas from *Wall Street* at that point. We just say greed is good uh at this moment. And again, as you you've already stated that it casts aside uh the the idea of the the moral compass. And here you have a community of quote "thinkers" who are throwing aside thousands of years of moral philosophy, theology, of engagement in reference to to integrity to say that we know better. It it's been tried over and over again. Use the example of Nino Brown from *New Jack City*, from the movie, that he was the drug dealer in the community, but you know what? He did pass out turkeys during Thanksgiving. So, he earned to give. And and we've seen that over and over again with people who do not have a moral compass. They utilize uh the giving in order to expand empire; that that's that's the only desire because again predatory self-interest becomes the centerpiece, and if you don't have a moral compass you move in a particular direction. So, so we have thousands of years of human beings trying to use this model, and every time we use the model we fail. And so how is it that this new group of technofudal lords—who they see themselves as technofudal lords because they have this this kind of technological land space that they are controlling—that they feel that somehow they're more enlightened than thousands of years of of human beings who have utilized these same particular principles, and those principles have brought disaster—disaster in small spaces and disaster in terms of large spaces and swaths of people. All you have to do is ask any community that's had to live under a dictator. Well, obviously it's uh the answer to why it's different this time is because they're transhuman rationalist extropian uh long-termists, which brings us to the final letter in Tescril: long-termism.

And this is really the crown jewel of the ideology. I think it's the key to understanding it all. Long-termists basically say we should prioritize billions of future potential lives over those who are now alive. And it sounds noble to some degree maybe until you realize that it means turning the present into collateral damage. You know who needs justice today when you're saving billions of future lives in other galaxies? Again, it's this sort of messiah complex that justifies the massive taking of power now. We'll give you paradise if only you submit to our tech authority today, and we'll make the future possible. Anything to add on that, Emil, before we get into the questions?

So yeah, long-termism is built on this view that the future could be enormous. So it's really just a numbers game. It's not that future people matter more than current current-day people. It's just that there could be so many of them. Carl Shulman calculated there could be 500 trillion future humans on earth if we survive for another 10 million years. Right? But if we go out and colonize space, there could be many orders of magnitude more people. So long-termism emerged out of EA. One way to understand it is if your goal from EA is to positively influence the greatest number of people, and if most people who could exist will exist in the far future—basically as digital posthumans spread throughout the universe—then what you should be doing is focusing on how your actions right now influence those future people rather than contemporary people; or or at the very least you should be worried about contemporary people only in so far as doing so will positively influence future people because there could be so many more of them. And so this is part of the utopian vision which has qualitative and quantitative aspects. So the qualitative aspect comes from transhumanism: Let's re-engineer ourselves so there's no more suffering. We live forever and so on. And the quantitative part really comes from an ethical theory called utilitarianism, which just says you got to maximize value in the universe across space and time. That is our fundamental—in fact our sole—moral obligation in the universe is just to create as much value as possible. How do you create as much value as possible? You increase the future human population. So that's the quantitative aspect of their particular vision of heaven among the literal heavens. I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. For some reason that that came into my mind. Reverend Moss, anything to add to that before I let you guys cook in this Q&A?

I think you have already framed the terror of this particular ideology and how problematic it is for our growth and development. Okay, here we go with some questions. Reverend Moss, as a man of God, what do these ideas tell you about the minds of those who promote them? Before he died, Pope Francis spoke of the Tower of Babel. He said, "'Today's builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers and that those who fall along the way are losers. God's economy, on the other hand, it does not kill, discard, or crush. It is lowly, faithful to the earth.'" And I think about the Tower of Babel a lot these days when I think about these ideas. Tell us from your perspective like where's this coming from and where do these people want to take us?

I love the Tower of Babel analogy that you used to lift up in terms of scripture. I think that that fits very well. I think that there is a deep burden, problem, flaw within humanity along with the beauty, blessing and creativity. And whenever we lean into the fact that we are ultimately all beauty with no burden, uh we end up in a flawed situation. There's the wonderful—I don't remember his name, minister—who talked about horns and halos. He said, "Every human being has a horn and every human being has a halo." Uh, and he said, "Just depend upon what day of the week you catch me, you may catch more horns than you do halos." Uh, but that is the way that human beings are. And for the level of hubris that that functions out of of this class of people, this community of people uh to believe that their particular ideology cast aside the rest of humanity somehow will will save a small sector is is dangerous. And we've seen it before. Uh we've seen it in Nazi Germany to say that we have a particular way of viewing the world that will save all if you operate under our order. Uh we've seen it in colonialism if you you function out of you know our ideology. And it always has to get around—it has to get around a moral compass. It has to get around a spirituality that sees the image of God. That gets around the Genesis 1:27 that you have been made in the image of God. It gets around the idea that creation—we are stewards and not owners—uh which demands that we look inward, demands that we raise questions about self and questions about our relationship with other human beings. And any philosophy or ideology that causes you to cast aside your relationship with other people is problematic. I don't care who says it, where it comes from. If you cast aside someone else's dignity, you are headed down a road of destruction.

Emil, anything to add?

You know, there are people in the Tescil movement who would argue that posthumans will have their own kind of dignity. I mean, another way to to couch what their vision is all about is in terms of pro-extinctionism. There is an important question to ask, which is who is left out of their version of utopia, right? And I think that marginalized communities will be marginalized even more, if not ultimately eliminated. And this is evidenced by the fact that if you look at the literature, there is basically zero reference—for all of their talk about the future of humanity—there's zero reference to what the future should look like from alternative perspectives, from non-white male neoliberal perspectives. Right? Nobody has gone out and asked like indigenous communities, "What do you think the future ought to look like?" Nobody's asked Muslims. Nobody cares what Christians want uh for the future. Um, same goes with like perspectives of feminism, disability, queerness and so on. And I don't understand how one could be, you know, I'm I'm not religious myself. I don't understand how one could be um a serious futurist and not and not ensure that the the vision that you're uh designing is inclusive, right, and is democratic and and allows everybody a seat at the at the table. All of this is to say I don't think it's just that marginalized communities will be marginalized even more. I think it's it's humanity, our species itself. Like we don't have a place in this future. This future will be run and ruled by posthumans, right? And I mean there's some people in the the community like Ben Garritzil who literally has a term which is "legacy humans," you know, for those those members of our species who happen to linger into the posthuman era. Um, and so fundamentally like just in terms of dignity, it's deeply undignified, you know, and and the whole process of merging our brains—brains—with AI and so on. I mean, I think there's a good—there's actually a good argument to make that it's deeply dehumanizing, and the future is dehumanizing maybe in like a literal sense—like there are just no humans in the future that they envision.

I grew up with religion. I'm not too religious now, but spent a lot of my youth grounded in it, done a lot of time studying it partly because I spent part of my childhood in a cult religion as well, which is something that has really had a big impact on my interest in these ideas. A lot of the way that they function is the way that a cult functions, with a parallel narrative that in many ways is mimicking or mocking traditional religion but applying new symbols, new leaders, a new meaning on top of that. And Emil, you recently wrote a piece that described how these tech billionaires have developed their own esquetology, their own end times or apocalypse theory, a kind of secular rapture. And that's something I've observed too in my research, part of it coming through being aware of your work, is that they have a very apocalyptic vision of the future. And they believe it is their job to decide what comes after this big change. Peter Thiel described Trump's re-election as an apocalypse, an unveiling, and sort of had this imagery. He wrote a piece in the *Financial Times* of basically everyone's going to have to confess, everything shall now be known, and there shall be a new future where everything's clean and clear. Obviously mimicking religious language, you know, the the Book of Revelation specifically, he was attempting to use the the Revelation's voice on us. So you recently wrote about this idea, this end times ideology. Can you walk us through how that that works and how it's shaping policy and culture today in Silicon Valley?

The key aspect of their particular secular esquetology, as it were, um is that the future is digital, right? So we, you know, we'll have our minds uploaded. Sam Altman has signed up to have his his brain uploaded to the cloud. He believes that will be technologically feasible within our lifetimes. And you know, Will MacAskill at 2022 he published um a book called *What We Owe the Future*, in which he argued that our systematic obliteration of the biosphere might be a good thing. Why? Because while there are wild animals out there that are suffering, so the fewer wild animals there are, the less wild animal suffering there is. But I think people like him—I don't want to speak for him—but people in this community would respond, well, it's not that in the future we won't have nature. It'll just be digital; we'll just live in a simulation. We'll create squirrels and pigeons and whatever, but we'll design them in a way so that they never suffer, you know. So, the future is is is digital. So, I actually have another article that's that will be published soon uh pointing out the the really striking parallels between the esqueological end times narrative of the Tescriola movement and the end times narrative of what is called the dispensationalist interpretation of scripture. So if you've—you know, I mentioned the the term "technapture" uh earlier—that that idea of the rapture was introduced uh by this dispensationalist interpretation which goes back to the early 19th century. According to this narrative, there is a period which is seven years called the tribulation. Tescrists have their own version of the tribulation. They call it—the term that they actually use is "the time of perils." We're in the time of perils right now. This is a period of heightened existential risk to humanity. Existential risk is defined as an event that would prevent us from realizing paradise. But if we can manage to make it through the time of perils, then what awaits us? Basically the millennial kingdom, you know, this paradise with God uh forever. It sounds like they're creating the time of perils and uh they're also trying to bring about the apocalypse. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy to some degree here.

Reverend Moss, some thoughts on on this end times idea.

And you mentioned earlier the Nazis. The Nazis were also a millinarian movement, right? And you do have throughout our history in the west this idea of constantly groups moving toward their own version of apocalypse that usually ends pretty badly, right? A lot of cults have this, you know, people trying to rush to get to the end. And it seems like these folks are trying to bring about their own sort of digital apocalypse on on the rest of us and a political apocalypse right now potentially in Washington. And and the apocalyptic language is very appealing and motivating uh to to...

So many want an immediate solution and idea. And so let me break this down just a little bit. The language of apocalypse, of revealing, was also anti-empire. It was dealing with the idea of those who were in power. Let us speak about how God is revealing to us a way in which we should live. Whether you're talking about Jeremiah speaking about how we are to care for those who are the poorest among us, or if you're talking about the book of Revelation, which people kind of push aside—this idea of Roman power, of what is happening in this moment and how the Roman power, those in power, are viewed. So we push that aside and then embrace only one aspect of it, the one that becomes very appealing and one that can be interpreted and manipulated in a particular way. And it's important that we recognize the fullness of it.

As you had mentioned, cults want to lean into what works for them, as a particular mockery of a beautiful and ancient tradition that requires work to be able to understand and engage. But again, it is this idea that we know better and that we have the power and the intelligence, and no one else does. And for a person of African descent, just hearing these ideas, it just does something to me because I have, through the stories of my family, through the work that I do, heard these ideas in so many different ways: We have the authority, we know better. Trust us, we will lead you in the right direction.

I'm fascinated by the rebranding of these very old tropes. It's just like I'm watching and listening to an old B movie that's being replayed again; it ends the same way, but in the beginning, they say, "Oh, we're going to make things all perfect and well, and all of that." And I think that there needs to be even more people from different communities bringing in their perspective in terms of how dangerous these ideas are.

I'm reminded of the samurai narrative that is completely pushed aside in reference to this ideology. The samurai has a sword, and the samurai says, "This sword, it can cut and can it hurt." He says, "But every time I pull this sword, I have to pray because it may injure or kill someone." That is the ethic of every samurai. Meaning that there's a responsibility in this technology. The samurai recognizes that the sword is a piece of technology that can harm one or can harm thousands. And there's a development of humility in that samurai ethic that we are not witnessing with those in Silicon Valley. They have a sword that can harm a few or can harm millions. I would say that there is an incredible amount of hubris among these people.

And as someone who was in this community back in the day, I can attest that many have an idea that they have some kind of special access to fundamental truths about what the future ought to look like. And now their task is to impose this vision on the rest of humanity. Right? So they sort of speak for all of humanity.

And I also very much agree with you that the motifs that are constitutive of this bundle of ideologies, they are not new. Right? I mean there were some scholars, two French scholars, who coined the phrase the eternal return of eugenics. I think the testal movement is just the most recent iteration of that, but you could say the exact same thing about colonialism and so on. It's the same old ideas that are repackaged in new ways and are justified by what we were talking about earlier, this notion of universal rationality. Right? Part of why it is okay for me to say I have the truth and you don't is because I am rational in this sort of universal way, and therefore anybody who disagrees with me is thinking irrationally. And well, why would we listen to anyone who's thinking irrationally? This problematic notion of rationality provides an underlying justification for this kind of hegemony and this hubris.

This reminds me of when Elon Musk bought Twitter; Jack Dorsey said he trusted Elon with the to guard the light of consciousness. Yeah. As if Twitter is what the light of consciousness is. And how has that aged? Not very well.

And I think to a point you were making, Reverend Moss, like even there's the religious ideas, but with everything they look at, whether it's philosophy or history, they twist all of the old teachings and learnings to fit their new pattern. Often leaving out the parts they don't want to deal with, the parts that contradict their desired outcome, their desired narrative. And they do this in order to create this parallel idea of something that already exists, but their own version of it. And they call it parallel. They use the word parallel a lot, especially in regards to something called the network state, which we deal a lot with on this podcast, which is this ideology that calls for the creation of parallel governments controlled by tech billionaires, new tech nations that will replace existing nation states. And with that comes parallel media, parallel academia, parallel police, and it appears now a parallel religion, a tech theocracy.

And from your perspective, Reverend, how does this—Let's explore a little bit how they're mimicking religion, especially the far right's use of religion to justify systems of supremacy. You know, what do they have in common with already existing right-wing religious movements? And where do they maybe diverge a little bit?

Every right-wing religious movement takes hold of the imagery and the rhetoric of Jesus, but then at the same time extricates or exercises Jesus at the same time. So a nice way to say it is they preach about Jesus but never preach what Jesus preached. Jesus, then, from the Christian perspective, just becomes a symbol to justify my particular ideology.

So Lewis Powell, Supreme Court justice, writes this article on the attack on the free enterprise system in reaction to the quote-unquote black church movement, better known as the civil rights movement during the 50s and 60s—that they are changing the dynamics of what democracy is. In his six-page memo that went viral before there was anything called viral, he said that corporations, we need a government by corporations for corporations. A person by the name of Joseph Kors reads that article. When he reads that article, he is insensed, and he takes his family fortune from the Kors beer and he forms what? The Heritage Foundation to put forth these ideas. Those ideas are then put forth, and through the Heritage Foundation, they do exactly what you are mentioning, Gil, funding universities for parallel research. So here's the think tank saying this, and then these wealthy corporate people are then funding for parallel research to say that climate change does not exist. Diversity is destructive to the Democratic project. I mean, this is what they're putting forth. So then we begin to extend that. It then extends into the technofudal universe where the same aspect, again using the same methodologies and in the process borrowing the imagery and language from faith communities. I make a claim of Jesus, but I can't use the words of Jesus.

There's a wonderful progressive group called the Red Letter Christians, and they were evangelical, and they were just frustrated with evangelicals in general. They were young evangelicals and they said, "Look, okay, we don't have the answer to everything, but the stuff that's in red in the Bible, we'll just deal with that." And right there, we know that we're pretty on solid ground. How we treat our neighbors and how we are to care for the poor, we don't have to get into this kind of bowing to doctrine. That's what we are witnessing over and over again. Right-wing religious groups appropriate in a particular way, but they will not engage. We had a vice president who wanted to argue with the pope about—he says Jesus says you're only supposed to care for people who are close to you, and then you do circles. I guess you kind of move out like a maze. This is what happens. And we have a vice president who is connected to Peter Thiel that you know, and rais—I'm raising questions. Do we have a vice president who believes in this particular ideology that sees a good portion of humanity as not having any dignity? That's the question that I'm raising. I think there's a pretty good possibility because you know JD Vance is largely created by Peter Thiel at every step of the way. And you know it's hard to see much daylight between the two, as you know he's their man, and you know even his conversion—you know, here's a guy who's been Catholic for what, six years—he wants to argue with the pope. I was born Catholic, and I know better than that, you know—that's like, isn't that supposed to be a thing you can't really do? Not supposed to argue with the pope—infallibility—anybody—but of course only tech billionaires are infallible these days.

So another big question here, and we kind of touched on a little bit earlier, is these guys have this idea that they're creating God or that they will be God. Some of them talk about the thermodynamic God which demands that we use as much energy as possible. They really seem to be trying to fill a god-shaped hole. What does this hunger for God say about them? Part of this seems to be a great fear of death. And none of us want to die. At the same time, part of being human, part of having faith, if you're a person of faith, is making sense of that. And even if you're a person who is not religious, you have to find a way in life to make sense of that. And they seem to be making nonsense of that.

Reverend Moss, let's start with you. What's behind this desire to create God? And what do you think they actually ought to do to help themselves out of this jam they've gotten into?

Well, I think the desire is, again, we've seen it over and over again, whether it's the Tower of Babel or the golden calf, this idea that I want to be centered, to be central. But it also speaks to a very human desire of that which is bigger than us, to be able to deal with mystery, but they're not dealing with mystery in a contemplative spiritual moral framework. They're dealing with this idea of how can I control, utilize—in other words, they want doctrine without mystery. They want doctrine without a moral compass. They want doctrine without engaging human beings and learning other people's stories. That's one of the beautiful things about faith traditions—that you have these stories that speak to the human narrative and speak to who we are as human beings. They want to discard that. They want a portion of it, but not the full plate. In other words, they want a meal with no vegetables. Give me some dessert, and that's about it. And in the process, they end up with becoming diabetics. And that's essentially what's happening. Their system is corrupted. And this is an old human problem. I mean, this is a problem with Pharaoh and in Rome. The idea that, guess what? I am God. Pharaoh is saying, guess what? In Rome, Caesar is saying, hey, I'm God. You know, just follow me. Trust me. There's this idea of being in ultimate power and having people look to me and say that I have the answer. That's what we're dealing with in America right now. We have someone who has a level of insecurity and a level of authority that all you have to do to get the person's attention is say how wonderful you are, and you can give that person planes and do all kinds of stuff, and he will just roll over for you like a dog that wants to be pet, you know, pet on the stomach or something. It is a very human problem that we collectively have to deal with.

Emil, these people aren't gods. They will certainly die. What do you make of their twisted desire here? What are they telling us about themselves?

This just gestures at another way in which the testal worldview does reflect a kind of belief system of at least certain interpretations of Christianity. One way to reconstruct the reasoning here is that if God doesn't exist, which he doesn't because we're atheists, right? Why not just create him? Why not build him or why not become him, right? You've all known Harrari published a book titled Homoduce, right? The God-human. And so they sort of invert the traditional relation between us and God, right? So we are God's children on the traditional account. In this new version, God is our child, right? So we are its parents. And if this God loves its parents, then we get utopia, right? We can delegate the task of engineering paradise.

One thing that I find really interesting is how it seems to be the case that increasingly the development, or at least talk about advanced AI, is being incorporated into some accounts of the end of the world by Christian apocalypticists, right? And a lot of them are like, they're pretty fringe, right? I mean, these are like dispensationalists who are really into the rapture. There are some Catholics. So Steve Bannon, for example, has recently argued that he believes the antichrist will be super intelligence and that the antichrist, therefore, is literally being designed in the laboratories of companies like OpenAI, right? And so this, to me, this is a really interesting development, and I wonder if it's the case that moving forward the transhumanist narrative and the narrative of certain religious individuals might end up being intertwined in really interesting and potentially dangerous ways. I'd say that's the idea.

And to something that Reverend Moss said earlier, you mentioned the Heritage Foundation. In September of last year, there was a conference in San Francisco at Fort Mason, and it was called Reboot, and it was basically Heritage Foundation meets San Francisco Tech Venture Capitalists, and they were talking about the future. They said the new reality is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. Very few people noticed. Very few people wrote about it. I did. But I think at a higher level, some of them would have melded these two things together. But I think if most god-fearing, actually god-fearing people, even those who we may disagree with politically, knew what these people are about and what they actually believe—this thing is not God they're creating. What they're trying to create is something more like the Antichrist. They're trying to create the destruction of the creation of God. Quite literally. That I think is something we got to call out and frame a little better, because this is a scary new religion. It's not like the ones they're pretending to be. It's something much darker and more threatening.

The scary nature of this digital landscape is that it has the ability to hack the human mind just with data, information, and influence and misinformation and the death of expertise. You can't trust what the professor who studied for five years who was somewhere in Syria anymore. You know, just trust the guy down the street who's on YouTube; he read two pages out of two books—you can trust that guy. And we don't have in place the kind of policies of protection. Facebook should be treated as a nation-state, not as a company; it has more people than a nation-state; it should be treated as such, or Meta I should say. We have to look at what are the protections we have—no AI particular protections. Because predatory self-interest becomes the fundamental ethic that we operate under that gives space to the technofudal lords to move in this particular direction. And it is truly scary. It really is. When a snake is telling you to eat an apple, run.

We'll have some final thoughts after these messages. A quick break from the pod for the promos and plugs of our fantastic guests. First is Reverend Dr. Otis Moss III. You can buy his book, *Dancing in the Darkness: Spiritual Lessons for Thriving in Turbulent Times*, from Simon and Schuster. Spoiler, these times are turbulent. Next is Emil Pete Torres. They co-host *Pod Dystopia Now* with comedian and former Nerd Reich guest Kate Willlet. You can also buy their book, *Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation*, from Rutled. And for more info on our guests or us on the socials, go to thenerdri.com. Now, back to the rough beast that is society slouching towards Bethlehem.

As we deal with this emergent aggressive movement, which is scary in many ways, this is some deep dark stuff for people to start to understand. And you know, I was in a conversation recently where I was talking about some of it, and somebody got up and left. They couldn't—they didn't want to hear it. I think it's important to understand these quasi-religious, scary quasi-religious aspects because they are underlying much of the political project. This belief that tech billionaires must seize power and create a new society, a new civilization. And they see religion as an important software for civilization. You have to be able to reach people on the level of their deepest beliefs if you want to last a thousand years. What lasts a thousand years besides religion and geology, right? I think this is sort of their thinking.

What message of hope, hopefully, would you leave people with when thinking about these ideas and how we find our way to a better future in spite of them and the power that they have? Let's start with you.

What I'll do is plagiarize a little bit from Naomi Klein. She co-authored this really great article published just a few weeks ago in the Guardian titled *End Times Fascism*. And then in a subsequent interview with Democracy Now, she was asked this question, and her response was, "There is an alternative vision which is fundamentally founded on an affirmation of affirmation of life on this planet." Right? And that is the alternative because, like I said before, I mean these ideologies are either at their core or at least in practice they are pro-extinctionist. Like it's not about preserving our species. And even more than that, I mean they're genocidal in a broader sense in that they don't care about whether the biosphere flourishes, whether our non-human companions on Earth flourish. Nature is just a standing reserve; it's just something to be exploited and plundered and so on. So the alternative is to embrace this world, right? If you know anything about cosmology, like the universe is huge, and we live on this extraordinary oasis that is unlike anything else we know about, right? And it's not like Mars, right? Mars is less hospitable than the peak of Mount Everest. So go live on Mount Everest for like a year or just try like a day, and then let me ask you if you want to go to Mars. Yeah. The alternative that I would encourage people to accept is affirming life as we know it on this planet.

And maybe the second thing I would say is, and so I think this gestures back at some of the insightful comments that Reverend Moss had made. It matters that people are at the table. There's an activist friend of mine named Monica Bilskita, and she has this lovely phrase, which is—and she's specifically referring to the future—she says, "You cannot design for; you have to design with," right? So you need people who aren't just—even if there are people who are like, who are white people who care, actually genuinely care about social justice, that is not enough. You need to include everybody from around the world. They need to have an opportunity to make their voice heard when it comes to designing a future for humanity and for our planet as a whole.

Reverend Moss, some words of encouragement as we go through this—what is it?—age of peril, where we have to—this time of perils where we got these crazy billionaires creating their religion and trying to be God.

Love undermines empires. Love hacks the algorithm. Love disrupts all that seeks to destroy. And that is the beautiful thing about the idea—is when you embrace that. So the tech billionaires, for a short period of time, haven't recognized the literal power of this idea of love that poets and musicians and all faiths have rooted themselves in, that philosophers, even when they are as honorary as they want to be, they still want to find this idea of love inward and outward. And marginalized communities have consistently had some software to download into the system that disrupts over and over and over. And building those relationships, as you said, building those…

Relationships is powerful when we do that. I use one example in terms of what happens when we work together: the jazz ethic. What, what, what people of African descent brought, uh, to this country in terms of creating a musical narrative that was not a part of, uh, any particular one tradition, but a part of a variety of traditions.

Born in New Orleans, the sounds of French and Spanish and indigenous communities, along with, uh, African and Free Haitians, a new music was born called jazz. And what makes jazz powerful is the fact that you have multiple instruments that are not supposed to play together, but they do. Piano is supposed to be for the, the, the French classical. And when you play, uh, the drum, you're supposed to do it a one two or one and three or two and four, but not use African polyrhythms. The bass you're to play with a bow, but instead they play it with, uh, with their hands. The, the saxophone was designed specifically for a marching band, not to be played with, with the piano. And all these instruments play together and create music.

But the beautiful thing that jazz does that classical, European classical does not do is that everybody has the right to solo. That the saxophone can bring its own narrative to the table and the piano. But no one says to the saxophone, "You've got to sound just like me. Do what you have been gifted to do." And when everybody has the right to solo and everybody can bring something to the table, in the process we create a new music and, in the words of John Coltrane, we create a love supreme, and that becomes the antidote in this moment.

Thank you both for joining me today on the Nerd Reich podcast, and I hope we get to do this again some other time. The Nerd Reich is produced by RR Robbins. It's written and hosted by Gil Duran. You can sign up for the newsletter at thenerdreich.com. Also, it really helps if you write us a podcast review on either Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And please subscribe on YouTube.

In the words of Thomas Pinchin, if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. Thank you to both our guests today. See you next time. [Music]