Silicon Valley's Scary New Religion: TESCREAL
Tech billionaires are building a scary new cult religion — and it's coming for us all.
In Episode 5 of The Nerd Reich podcast, I talk to Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III and Dr. Émile Torres about the bizarre set of beliefs gaining popularity in Silicon Valley today.
From AI gods to digital immortality, this ideological bundle of quasi-religious faiths—which some called TESCREAL—isn’t just fringe theory. It’s shaping tech policy, politics, and our collective future.
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Our Guests
Dr. Émile Torres is a scholar at Case Western Reserve University. Together with Timnit Gebru, They first identified TESCREAL as the bundle of bizarre ideologies now shaping Silicon Valley. They are the author of Human Extinction, A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation.
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 conversation.
Follow Dr. Emile Torres on BlueSky.
Follow Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III on TikTok.
Transcript
Transcripts are auto-generated an may contain errors.
Gil Duran: 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 save us from apocalypse and extinction. Their dark gospel has a name, TESCREAL. That stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singulatarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and long-termism. Yes, it's a mouthful, but each piece fits into a larger, dangerous picture. Like traditional faiths, TESCREAL 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. Emile Torres, a scholar at Case Western Reserve University. Together with Timnit Gebru, They first identified TESCREAL as the bundle of bizarre ideologies now shaping Silicon Valley. They are the author 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 conversation.
Gil Duran: Emile, 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 Yarvin and the designs of these tech billionaires on our government and our democracy.
Today, together, we're going to explore TESCREAL 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. for this first part here, we're going to go through the elements of TESCREAL and, Emile, I'm going to have you give us a quick hit, as one of the people who came up with the idea of the 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 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?
Emile Torres: So transhumanism, I would describe as the backbone of the the TESCREAL 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 TESCREAL.
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. That's something that they've literally talked about. We can maybe become immortal. There are transhumanists like Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson who've talked about blood transfusions with young people. For example, Bryan Johnson has had transfusions with his own son dating back to, I think, when his son was around 15.
And maybe we could even like, 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, 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.
Gil Duran: So this sort of transubstantiation from human to machine. And when I think about these guys who take young people's blood or Bryan Johnson, you have the blood of the son, which is also something we see in religion, Reverend Moss. And there seems to be a sort of a twisting. do you make from a theological perspective of this desire to transcend humanity and to turn human beings into something else?
Rev. Otis Moss III: It's interesting because it's a rejection of this idea of the imago dei, the idea of the image of God, that each person has inherent dignity. But yet 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 techno-feudal 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 what happens when I don't have the necessary money to quote, be transhumanist, 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.
Gil Duran: Let's go to the E in TESCREAL, 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 techno-utopian ideology from the nineties 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, Emile.
Dr. Emile Torres: 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 O'Connor. 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 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 extroverts 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.
Gil Duran: Yeah, eternity brought to you by the freezer. Yes. Reverend Moss, any reaction to extropianism here?
Rev. Otis Moss III: Absolutely, because I feel like I'm hearing a combination of Get Out and Logan's Run. It's absolutely terrifying on several levels. So again, what's interesting is that the Silicon Valley community is repackaging old ideas. So if we take the Berlin Conference, which carved up Africa 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.” This again 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 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.”
Gil Duran: Faith in the freezer. Now it heats up, though, with Singulatarianism, 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, it's going to be a server farm in Utah or Greenland or wherever.
Did I get that right, Emile? Tell us about the singularity and the cult around it and what it really means.
Dr. Emile Torres: Yeah. So yes, you're right. You know, the singularity sometimes called the techno rapture or the rapture of the nerds. is supposed to be this hypothetical future event, which may occur, you know, 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 phantasmagoria 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 super intelligence. The way it ties into transhumanism is that these people see everything as an engineering problem. And Dr. Moss had mentioned like this lack of appreciation for the dignity or the sacredness of the human. mean, the human is just a machine that is hackable and should be hacked. This is the idea of biohacking, know, hacked and re-engineered and modified in various ways to improve it. Right. So once you have super intelligence, you have a super engineer. They literally use the term “paradise engineering.” So once you have a super intelligence, you have a super engineer who can then engineer paradise immediately after that. So that's Singularitarianism, briefly put.
Gil Duran: So they're going directly at it. You know, I want to get the reverend’s response to Singulatarianism, but I will say Bryan Johnson, this guy who claims he's going to live forever, also said we are creating God in the form of super intelligence. 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?
Rev. Otis Moss III: Yeah. 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. She wrote Race After Technology and she talks about that if the basis of the algorithm is caste-based, racist, sexism, 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'll give you an example that she gave as a fascinating example of soap dispensers. These soap dispensers were created to dispense soap. You put your hand around them and it dispenses soap. The problem was 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 are 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 multiplying 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.
Dr. Emile Torres: May I mention real fast that 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, absolutely, as you're saying, consistent with what you're saying is completely excluded from the utopian visions of the, I you have to ask the question, who exactly is this utopia for?
I don't think it's for most of humanity. think it's really, it's just 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, know, booted out.
Gil Duran: That brings us to the C in TESCREAL. Cosmism, the idea that humanity's ultimate destiny is to spread throughout the universe like a divine mission. And Earth is just a launch pad. 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 get that right, Emile?
Dr. Emile Torres: Absolutely. 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, leapt out of his chair, literally gave the two thumbs up. So yeah, I think that's right. And Cosmism, 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, so he is this modern cosmonaut 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 space-time to change the universe in some profound way to fit our utopian desires. Yeah, this is Cosmism, a version of transhumanism, but it's of transhumanism plus.
Gil Duran: So this is like “white flight” at the speed of AI here. They're going 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.
Rev. Otis Moss III: 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. And the level of hubris, every person who says I want to create something better for a group of people I don't even have a 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 will function for me in a particular way. It's a very, very capitalist-centered idea. I just want to do this for myself. The other question becomes the true motive. 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.
Gil Duran: 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. 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've heard.
It’s 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. 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 was any life on Mars, they're probably just waiting for these dummies to show up.
Rev. Otis Moss III: It's called gentrification. You know, it's doing this, “I want what you have. Let's move you out 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 flow behind it.
Gil Duran: Now this next one, the R, rationalist, I think it's kind of like extropianism. It's a root philosophy here. I won't even try to explain rationalism, Emile, because it seems so irrational to me. 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 to the question.
Dr. Emile Torres: So rationalism was founded by a guy named Eliezer Yudkowski. He, like many people in the test rule movement, has extensive connections with many of the other letters. So he was a transhumanist, he who was very involved in the extropian movement in the 1990s. He was a leading Singulartarian, along with Ray Kurzweil. He actually hired as one of his employees, Ben Goertzel, the modern Cosmist. And so he founded rationalism based on the idea, which like could be put as follows: If we're going to paradise, right, if we're going to engineer paradise through advanced technologies, we're going to need a lot of like 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. Yudkowski 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's some unfathomable number, enormous 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 Yudkowski 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.
Rev. Otis Moss III: 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's major blind spots that you have because you are not in community and nor have you been around suffering, and don’t 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's a different level of understanding the depth of their struggle when you are completely disconnected from it and you look at it as either a speck or just someone being tortured and you have this very distant idea and concept.
Dr. Emile Torres: 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 you can add and subtract and so on. This idea of like, 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 in racism and so on. fact, a lot of 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.
Gil Duran: Marc Andreessen's 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.
Producer announcement: A quick note from the Nerd producers, in response to a tweet from Emil talking about the issues related to TESREAL, Mark Andreessen then changed his bio to call himself a TESCREAList. Whatever you're thinking about him, you're eggsactly right.
Rev. Otis Moss: There's a wonderful book that Colson Whitehead wrote called The Intuitionist, which is about, it sounds crazy, but it's actually a very good book. His first book, 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 know how to fix things in ways that other people don't. Ten there are the rationalists, who know how to fix stuff. But people want the intuitionists because there's a certain elements that they can do that other people and it's the whole idea of what happens in a society that is trying to say one or the other. And there's no dialogue between the two and the novel popped in my head.
Gil Duran: Next up is effective altruism. The idea that greed is good, that you have 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. think Aristotle explained why this wasn't possible. Did I get that right in a nutshell? Is that EA?
Dr. Emile Torres: EA really the sibling of rationalism. basically, rationalists are all about optimizing rationality. EAs are all about optimizing our morality. And just as a side note, I think this this idea of optimization is in ways like problematic and misguided, like morality is something to be optimized. mean, basically, Yudkowski 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, sure, of course, I want 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 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 ending factory farming. You might have a modest impact in this nonprofit, or you can go work for what WilliamMcCaskill calls immoral organizations, like a petrochemical 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. So that is actually a good way to increase your impact, to pursue the most lucrative job possible. And the great success story of Earn to Give was Sam Bankman-Fried. He worked on Wall Street after he met Will McCaskill, 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 earn to give.
And part of the problem with this, which again echoes ideas that we were discussing earlier, is that there is no room in this picture for moral integrity. 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 capitalist machinery that is responsible for a lot of the global poverty in the world that then some EAs are saying, yeah, we're going to try to alleviate.
Gil Duran: 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.
Rev. Otis Moss III: So we should just be, you know, Michael Douglas from Wall Street at that point. should say greed is good at this moment. And again, as you've already stated that it casts aside the idea of 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 integrity to say that we know better. It's been tried over and over again.
I 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 we've seen that over and over again with people who do not have a moral compass. They utilize the giving in order to expand empire. 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 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 techno feudal lords, who they see themselves as techno feudal lords because they have this kind of technological land space that they are controlling, that they feel that somehow they're more enlightened than thousands of years 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.
Gil Duran: Obviously, the answer to why it's different this time is because they're transhumanist, rationalist, extropian, long-termists … which brings us to the final letter in TESCREAL, long-termism. This is really the crown jewel of the ideology. I think it's the key to understanding it all. Longtermists basically say we should prioritize billions of future potential lives over those who are now alive. It sounds noble to some degree, maybe. Until you realize that it means turning the present into collateral damage. You who needs justice today when you're saving billions of future lives and 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, we'll make the future possible. Anything to add on that, Emile, before we get into the questions?
Dr. Emile Torres: 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 day people. It's just that there could be so many of them. Carl Sagan 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 you're 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 post humans 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 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.
Gil Duran: “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” For some reason that came into my mind. Reverend Moss, anything to add to that before I let you guys cook in this Q &A?
Rev. Otis Moss III: We have already framed the terror of this particular ideology and how problematic it is for our growth and development.
Gil Duran: 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?
Rev. Otis Moss III: The Tower of Babel analogy that you used to lift up in terms of scripture, I think 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, we end up in a flawed situation.
There's a wonderful, I do not 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. And he said, just depend upon what day of the week you catch me, you may catch more horns than you do halos. But that is the way that human beings are. And for the level of hubris that functions out of this class of people, this community of people, to believe that their particular ideology cast aside the rest of humanity somehow will save a small sector is dangerous. And we've seen it before. 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. We've seen it in colonialism, if you function out of our ideology. And it always has to get around a moral compass, 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, 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, it's 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
Gil Duran: Emile, anything to add?
Dr. Emile Torres: There are people in the TESCREAL movement who would argue that post-humans will have their own kind of dignity. I mean, another way 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 for the future. 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 not religious myself — I don't understand how one could be a serious futurist and not ensure that the vision that you're designing is inclusive, right? And is democratic and allows everybody a seat 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 post-humans. Right. And there's some people in the community, like Ben Goertzel, who literally has a term, which is a “legacy humans,” you know, for those, those members of our species who happen to linger into the post human era. And so, fundamentally, like just in terms of dignity, it's deeply undignified, you know, and the whole process of merging our brains, brains with AI and so on. mean, I think there's actually a good argument to make that it's deeply dehumanizing. And the future is dehumanizing, maybe in a literal sense. There are just no humans in the future that they envision.
Gil Duran: I grew up with religion. I'm not too religious now, but I spent a lot of my youth grounded in religion and have 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 Emile, you recently wrote a piece that described how these tech billionaires have developed their own eschatology, 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 reelection 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 book of Revelation specifically, he was attempting to use the Revelations voice on us. So you recently wrote about this idea of this end times ideology. Can you walk us through how that works and how it's shaping policy and culture today in Silicon Valley?
Dr. Emile Torres: The key aspect of their particular secular eschatology, as it were, is that the future is digital. So we, you know, we'll have our minds uploaded. Sam Altman has signed up to have his brain uploaded to the cloud. He believes that will be technologically feasible within our lifetimes. you know, Will McCaskill at 2022, he published 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 there wild animals out there that are suffering, so the fewer wild animals there are, the less wild animals 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. So the future is digital.
So I actually have another article that will be published soon pointing out the really striking parallels between the eschatological end times narrative of the TESCREAL movement and the end times narrative of what is called the “dispensationalist” interpretation of scripture. So if you've, you know, I mentioned the term techno rapture earlier, that idea of the rapture was introduced 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.
TESCREALists have their own version of the Tribulation. 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, paradise with God, live forever.
Gil Duran: It sounds like they're creating the Time of Perils and 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 this end times idea. And you mentioned earlier the Nazis, the Nazis were also a millenarian 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 the rest of us and a political apocalypse right now, potentially in Washington.
Rev. Otis Moss III: And the apocalyptic language is very appealing and motivating to so many who want to have 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 and 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. But 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 to be able to engage.
But again, it is this idea that we know better and that we have the power and that we have the intelligence and no one else does. And for a person of African descent, mean, 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, have heard these ideas in so many different ways of we have the authority, we know better. Trust us. We will lead you in the right direction.
And I'm fascinated, they 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. And it ends the same way, but in the beginning, you say, we're 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 it can hurt. 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.
Dr. Emile Torres: 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. 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 TESCREAL movement is just the most recent iteration of that.
But you could say the exact same thing about like colonialism and, you know, and so on. It's the same old ideas that are repackaged in new ways and are sort of justified by what we were talking about earlier, this notion of universal rationality. Part of why it is okay for me to say, 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 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.
Gil Duran: That reminds me of when Elon Musk bought Twitter, Jack Dorsey said he trusted Elon to guard the "light of consciousness." 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. what do they have in common with already existing right wing religious movements and where do they maybe diverge a little bit?
Rev. Otis Moss III: 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 becomes, from the Christian perspective, just becomes a symbol to justify my particular ideology.
Lewis Powell, Supreme Court Justice, writes this article on the attack on the free enterprise system in reaction to, quote unquote, the Black Church movement, better known as the civil rights 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 Coors reads that article. When he reads that article, he is incensed and he takes his family fortune from Coors 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 techno feudal 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 and 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. 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.
Gil Duran: I think there's a pretty good possibility because JD Vance is largely created by Peter Thiel at every step of the way. It's hard to see much daylight between the two. He's their man. even his conversion, 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. Isn't that supposed to be a thing you can't really do?
Rev. Otis Moss III: Argue with the Pope?
Gil Duran: 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?
Rev. Otis Moss III: Well, I think the desire is again, we've seen it over and over again whether it's a Tower of Babel or the Golden Calf, this this idea that I want to be centered, to be central, but it also it 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 moral compass. They want doctrine without engaging human beings and learning other people's stories.
That's what one of the beautiful things about faith traditions is that you have these stories that speak of 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 there. Their system is corrupted and this is an old human problem. I mean, it's the problem with Pharaoh and in Rome, the idea that, guess what? “I am God,” Pharaoh is saying. Guess what in Rome? Caesar saying hey, I'm God, know, just follow me, rust me.”
There's this idea and 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 in 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 you know, to pet on the stomach or something. It is a very human problem that we collectively have to deal with.
Gil Duran: Emile, 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?
Dr. Emile Torres: This just gestures at another way in which the TESCREAL worldview does reflect 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 atheist, right? Why not just create him? Why not build him or why not become him? Right. You've all know [Yuval] Harari published a book titled Homo Deus, 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 it 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 apocalypse. And a lot of them are like, they're pretty fringe. I think these are like dispensationalists who are really into the rapture. are some Catholics. So Steve Bannon, for example, has recently argued that he believes the Anti-Christ will be super intelligence and that the Anti-Christ therefore is literally being designed in the laboratories of companies like opening eye. Right. And so this, to me, this is a really interesting development. And I wonder if it's the case that moving forward, the sort of transhumanist narrative and the narrative of certain religious individuals might end up being intertwined in really interesting and potentially dangerous ways.
Gil Duran: I'd say that's the idea. It's 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 want to meld 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.
Rev. Otis Moss III: The 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. Just trust the guy down the street who's on YouTube to, really 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, it should be treated as such or met 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 techno-feudal lords to move in this particular direction. And it is truly scary. It really is.
Gil Duran: When the snake is telling you to eat an apple, run!
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 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 had 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, 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, Emile.
Dr. Emile Torres: 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. Her response was, there is an alternative vision which is fundamentally founded on an affirmation of life on this planet, right?
And that is the alternative because like I said before, these ideologies are either like at their core or at least in practice, they are pro extinctionists. Like it's not about preserving our species. And even more than that, think they're, they're like 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. You know, 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, this extraordinary oasis that is unlike anything else we know about, right? And it's, 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 want to go, go to Mars. Yeah. The alternative that I would encourage people to accept is affirming life as we know it on this planet.
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 Monika Bielskyte, and she has this lovely phrase, 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 act 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.
Gil Duran: Rev. Moss, words of encouragement as we go through this age of perils? This time of perils where we got these crazy billionaires creating their religion and trying to be God….
Rev. Otis Moss III: 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, all faiths, have rooted themselves in, that philosophers — even when they're as ornery 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. 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 is the jazz ethic, what people of African descent brought to this country in terms of creating a musical narrative that was not a part of any particular one tradition, but a part of a variety of tradition. Born in New Orleans, the sounds of French and Spanish and indigenous communities along with 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 French classical. And when you play the drum, you're supposed to do it in 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 their hands. The saxophone was designed specifically for a marching band, not to be played 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, when 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.
Gil Duran: Thank you both for joining me today on the Nerd Reich Podcast. And I hope we get to do this again some other time.
Producer Announcement: The Nerd Reich is produced by R.R. Robbins. It's written and hosted by Gil Duran. You can sign up for the newsletter at thenerdright.com. Also, it really helps if you write us a podcast with you on either Spotify or Apple podcasts. And please subscribe on YouTube. In the words of Thomas Pynchon, if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.