I’m tired, fam.
It’s been a long week. Emotionally and professionally.
Still negotiating time with my kids and parental rights and stuff I don’t even want to go into — but suffice to say it eats me alive.
Still trying to get my weekly essay in.
Still doing the show on Wednesday that burns through Tuesday and Thursday as well.
This afternoon, I finished up all the podcast post-production stuff, and I was on my way to the shower when I just decided to lie down on my bed for a minute.
A minute turned into two hours. There’s just no freaking gas in the tank. We all have to deal with drudgery of various kinds, but I continue to believe that only if your life has a worthy organizing principle is it sustainable to keep digging those ditches.
And yet, just for a moment last night, after I finished recording and was completing my edit of the cold open, I felt like I was alive. I was so consumed by doing a thing that feels like it matters, that for a few hours I forgot to think about all the things that drag me down.
You can’t distract yourself forever, it’s true. But I’m glad there are still things I have my hands on that pull me out of my problems and into a flow state.
And Monitoring the Situation is one of those things.
This week’s episode is different. We’re still riffing on the Effective Altruists and the Rationalists and the Longtermists who are running the AI world — and by extension, much of our economy and future — but we dig deeper, into the history of myth and magic and alchemy and science and where they all meet in a weird, unexpected crossover.
There’s something here. Something deeper and darker and older than we moderns tend to realize. We’re so used to everything being able to be subjected to the scientific method, labeled, packaged, put in an appropriate box, and then the next thing comes.
But the world is getting weird again, and the people who are driving the technology that is rocketing the human race in an entirely novel direction are captured by forces they may not even be fully aware of.
That’s what we tackled on this episode. We laugh, we make fun, but we dig things up, too.
Things are stranger than they seem.
From the episode description:
What if the people building the future are not escaping myth, magic, and religion, but writing new versions of them?
Are we doing science or magic or both?
In this episode, Steve and Kale examine the mythic structure beneath supposedly post-mythic technology. How do stories and beliefs shape endeavors and moral permission, and teach people what kind of future they are supposed to build?
The trail begins in our current tech-saturated moment, then runs backward through Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, John Dee's Enochian angels and imperial vision, Isaac Newton's obsession with alchemy, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Jack Parsons' fusion of science fiction, rocketry, and occultism. It looks at Jaron Lanier's warning about technological stories, Leslie Kean's accounts of physical mediumship, the weirdness of Skinwalker Ranch, Eliezer Yudkowsky's Rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction, the limits of reproducibility, and the possibility that the modern West never became as disenchanted as it imagined.
The nerds are running the world now. The stories and beliefs that formed their worldview matter.
As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.
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Heard the program and totally intrigued! Appreciate you guys tackling these topics. I guess to understand the present, we have to look back to the past? Thanks again!